Interlude: Peeta
Now
No one other than me would ever think to call Katniss beautiful; there is something too stubborn about the tilt of her nose, something too wary about the glint of her eyes. She measures people with a gaze that denounces little hope; her mouth does not smile easily or well. She moves like a jungle cat, her lithe body all edge and calculation with no room for second chances.
But I never get tired of looking at her. There is something about the surprised way she laughs that precedes me into my dreams; there is something about the way her eyes glow when she is with me that provokes a double-tap rhythm of my heart.
When her fingers are holding tightly on to mine, the panicked grip of a child who is pretending to be brave; when she wakes up from a nightmare with her hair soaked with sweat and a shriek ripping through her throat; when those strange silver eyes catch mine and she collapses on my chest like I am her lifeboat; those are the moments when I cannot think of a thing I have seen in my life that is more gorgeous, more worth every single scar that mars my body like I am the poster child in a Capitol ad for their surgeries, the one on the side that screams "Before."
She doesn't know when she lets her guard down. I think that as far as she is concerned, she is post-war Katniss in her every fiber: her trust is hard-won, her smiles are expensive, her sweetness is the kind that's laced with saccharine. She doesn't know she doesn't always come across as the girl whose heart has burned itself into cinders.
There are the times when I catch her looking out the window at Haymitch's house, a tiny grin playing on her lips as she watches him out in his yard beating wash on the thin cord that serves as his clothesline. Times when I catch her humming the song that she snared me with when we were five; times when I catch her with one of the primroses held up to her nose and her eyes closed, her lips moving silently as if she is talking to her sister with nothing more than the scent to act as a conduit.
She doesn't know she doesn't always.
I remember seeing her for the first time through the glass in District Thirteen, and the way my entire existence felt like it was being ripped in two. For a moment it was only confusion: "I love her. Don't I love her? I thought I loved her." And then it was like I was looking through a screen of static. I remember seeing her wreathed in smiles, her red-rimmed eyes glowing hesitantly, remember seeing Haymitch behind her, beaming like a father who has just watched his child take her first steps.
That was when my life was divided neatly in two: everything that came after, and trying to figure out what really happened before.
I remember the acid taste that squirted in my mouth like juice from a lemon, and then being enveloped with a cold mechanical determination: Make it stop. You can be free, you know. It's so easy.
Kill her.
Kill her.
Everything was shiny, so shiny, like my vision was cut through a veil of stars, and when I looked at her I saw my mother; saw every dirty knee she'd ever berated me for, saw every bruise her hand left on my arm, saw the corner she would make me stand in, my nose pressed against the wall, until I could learn to conduct myself with dignity.
The only thing worse was realizing which memories they didn't touch, didn't have to touch, because they were testaments to her half-truths and flat-out lies all by themselves.
The constant merry-go-round I still have to live with when she turns her head a certain way, or her arm flexes like she is drawing back her bow, or when I see her with a handful of summer berries:
She doesn't know
Always
Kill her
She will never know what it cost me to sit so close to her in the beginning of this strange second half of my life, to smell the scent of her hair that burned me with a fire a thousand times greater than the flame they would use on the tips of my fingers to get my scream up to the exact right pitch; she will never know the embarrassment of having to ask her about the way she used to pretend to love me, and if any of it was real.
She will never know exactly what I remember: the first time I sat beside her in a class, watched those gray eyes gleam like molten lead when they landed on me and then immediately bounced off; the first time I saw her with him, leaving just the right amount of distance in between their bodies to give me hope until I saw the smile she shared with him and no one else, the way she looked at him in the way he only gradually came to look at her; the morning I came in to her kitchen to find them with his hand clutched in between hers and her lips just inches away from his, close enough for them to trade breaths back and forth in their sleep.
She doesn't know that I hold on to those thoughts like they are priceless, to be protected and brought out only on special occasions; that there are nights when I have to lock myself in the room where I paint and sit hunched over with my head clenched in between my hands. On those nights I bite down on those memories even though they ache like I am chewing foil. It grounds me to remember that emthey/em are the bitter truths I must love her in spite of, not the falsities planted by minds much cleverer than mine.
She clings to me at night, and during the day she is still learning how to navigate. She has lost her identity. She's no longer the struggling provider, the symbol of a revolution, the martyred lover. She is learning herself, and it is a harsh lesson.
Finally, I can empathize.
I watch her while our baby grows inside of that tiny, graceful, cautious body, and I watch the way she learns her center of balance all over again.
She is so beautiful.
I should not love her. There are so many things that should have separated us years ago: Effie should have drawn someone else, my heartbeat should have stopped cold, she should have burned alive, I should only remember her through that blurry haze that shaded everything the silver color of a coin. It is a miracle that I love her. We are like the flip sides of that coin and you can never see both sides at once; they are endlessly unrequited.
She doesn't know that at night, when she is sleeping with her dark hair spread across her pillow like the tide, when her hand is hot against my chest, when her eyelashes flutter endlessly on her cheeks like the wings of a moth; she doesn't know that she smiles when she says my name, she doesn't know that she never says his.
She doesn't know she doesn't always look at me with that half-guarded look; she doesn't know that sometimes she looks at me like I am the remedy for every wrong she's ever faced.
She doesn't know she doesn't-
-always-
-but I know.
And that is enough.