The two calls wage war in my head. The shrieking demand for her destruction, and the gentle hum that I protect her, with my own life if necessary. Everything else fades to a blur around me as my mind battles not to shatter and split into jagged shards from the competing mandates.
In a numb daze, I move with the squad out into the street. Strange clothes hang on me, my face is caked in makeup and swathed in a scarf. All around us the citizens of the Capitol surge through the streets, we're swallowed in the current of confused, frightened humanity as it bears us along. My feet follow, my mind reels.
Stumbling up to a dingy shop window, I stare blankly at the stiffly posed mannequins inside, clothed in improbably furry underwear. I begin to shudder as images of the table viewed from behind the glass swoop into my memory. I can feel the restraints tying me to the chair, feel the sucking horror start in my belly when the day's victim was revealed to me. The whisper rises.
Behind the glass the small girl meets my eye. No, she's reflected, behind me. Her dark hair in looping braids, she clutches the hand of the tall man who hurries her along and they vanish from sight. The hum swells. Screaming defiantly, the whisper rages, but the hum is an undeniable tide. Like spring sunlight coaxes buds from crooked twigs, the hum calls, it wakes me from my stony confusion and the whisper retreats. It isn't gone, it's never gone, but it loses ground. Sounds begin to penetrate the muffled ringing in my ears, and I realize we've traveled into the heart of the city. I look up, taking in my surroundings for the first time, my eyes searching automatically for Katniss. I try not to think about the tug in my chest when I see her.
We're in a dirty side street in front of a shop and Cressida is pushing firmly through the door, the squad following uncertainly after her. The interior of the shop smells musty, but warm, reminding me of the attic of Carney's house. The hum throbs at the memory of hours spent there, sunlight dappling our faces through the tiny window and flying dust motes. A memory of myself when I was whole, when I was me. I watch Katniss' back, straight and strong, head tilted up. Gale stands next to her, silent but solid, and the hum buzzes, pleased.
My gaze drifts to the person they're talking to and I flinch back. But it isn't a vision, she's had surgery. What must have been repeated surgeries until she's more feline than human in her appearance. I hear Cressida call her Tigris and the name rings with Portia's voice. She'd mentioned a stylist, brilliant, but haunted by the deaths of her tributes, who had lost herself in her grief until she had tried to leave humanity behind her altogether. I watch her as she negotiates with Katniss and Cressida. Another broken soul Snow can answer for.
She leads us to a hidden panel that reveals a narrow, steep stairway leading down into the blackness. Of course. I shudder as I peer down the stone steps into the black pit calling to swallow us up in its clutching darkness. A short hesitation, and Katniss starts down. My teeth clenching over a groan, the hum urges me to follow. The cold, stone cellar is dank and dimly lit, with piles of ratty furs and ominous looking bundles scattered over the floor. The panel slides back into place, sealing us here, and I stand at the base of the steps, tearing my skin against the manacles and shaking violently while the whisper ascends.
Pollux comes to stand next to me, one gentle hand on my shoulder. He shares my dread of being buried deep in the earth. The dim light shadows his face, but it can't hide the grief etched there and my chest eases a bit of its tightness at this kindness. My lungs are able to pull air a little more easily and I can unclench my fists, the knuckles gleaming white and knobby under my skin. I nod shakily and reach to squeeze his arm. Nodding back, he stands with me as we watch Katniss tend to the wound gaping on Gale's neck.
She works with quick efficiency, hands swift and sure and the hum rises gently again. My hand drifts to my thigh, the memory of the gash that would have finished me in the first arena if not for her. If not for her skilled hands, if not for her fierce determination that she not let me die. If not for her. The whisper shrieks against my skull, but the hum smooths its edges and blunts its force. I can see the cave before me, dark and stone, just like now. Katniss fighting to heal, just like now. She could have, should have, left me there and taken to the trees. She had food, weapons, strength. But instead she stayed with me. Protecting me, while putting herself directly in danger. Holed up with an invalid, offering herself to crazed Cato on a platter should he happen to find us. I stare blindly at her quick, bloody hands.
With a start, I realize she's standing right in front of me. Pollux moves to help Cressida fashion furry nests from the pelts and Katniss guides me under the single light bulb, clucking fretfully over my wrists. I can't quite line up my thoughts, her hands on my skin and the buzz of the whisper battling the hum making it hard for me to concentrate. She's lecturing about keeping the wounds clean.
"I know what blood poisoning is, Katniss," I tell her, my lips forming the words without me really knowing they're doing it. "Even if my mother isn't a healer." The cave is all around me, and with it, the heady swirl of joy and dread that she was there with me. The echo of the guilt and desire battling in my head, knowing what I should do, aching for what I want to do.
"You said that same thing to me in the first Hunger Games. Real or not real?" Her voice is low, but the tremor can't be hidden.
"Real," I tell her, and her hands shake slightly as they cradle my damaged wrists. She won't meet my eyes. "And you risked your life getting the medicine that saved me?" I can still only barely believe it.
"Real," she confirms. "You were the reason I was alive to do it."
"Was I?" This startles me, shakes my tentative grasp on control. I'd forgotten. My ruined mind, my shattered body, my crushed will, they've made me forget. She kept me safe. But I kept her safe, too. In the Games, and after. All those nights, all the times she needed the protection of my arms around her to face the demons in the dark. The whisper screams that she took from me, uncaring that it broke my heart. But the hum murmurs of my elation that I could help, the contentment of her looking to me for comfort. Knowing she needed me. She needed me. She needs me. The whisper's howl shatters my skull.
"I'm so tired, Katniss."
"Go to sleep," she urges. She helps shackle the cuffs to one of the supports on the stairs, I'm terrified the call of the mutts will overpower me in my sleep, and sits back wearily, head tipped back against the cold wall behind her. I watch her as my eyelids droop closed, watch her as the darkness pulls me softly under, watch her as I drift to sleep, watch her watching over me.
When I wake she's awake, too. Cressida brings me a drink of water from the rattling spigot at the back of the cellar, holding it to my lips.
Katniss is agitated and pacing the small space. It's more than our dangerous situation, I'm sure of it. She has the expression I'm so familiar with. She's feeling responsible for other people, blaming herself for things completely out of her control. When everyone is awake, she blurts her story, stalking back and forth and wringing her hands. I'm surprised by what she says, but not by how the others take it. She confesses that when Boggs was killed, she lied, telling the others that Coin had assigned her a secret mission to kill Snow so they wouldn't drag her back to Thirteen. She feels wretched that the soldiers followed her, to their deaths.
Gale and Cressida try to reason with her, Pollux nodding his agreement, but they don't understand her. They try to tell her it's not her fault. They try to tell her she's wrong to feel guilty. But they don't know the weight she carries. They don't know she will never hold herself blameless for what she thinks is failing to protect someone.
She turns to me, her gray eyes shining with hurt and shame. "What do you think, Peeta?"
She doesn't know either. She doesn't know how she radiates resolve, how she burns with purpose. How other people want to be warmed by that flame, want to be part of her heat. It's always been this way, I remember suddenly.
"I think…you still have no idea. The effect you can have." The familiar words are oddly sweet on my tongue, calling a vision of her striding through the town square, swinging a bulging game bag and intent on the best trade she can get to keep her family strong. I pull myself up straight and hold her gaze steadily. "None of the people we lost were idiots," I tell her firmly. "They knew what they were doing. They followed you because they believed you really could kill Snow."
I watch her digest this, see her accept its truth. I see the pain drain from her eyes as she nods slowly, and I see her understand what I'm saying. She owes them this. They gave their lives for this promise she made them, and she can't give up now. She pulls her map from her pocket and spreads it out on the floor, Gale and Cressida coming to hunch over it with her, planning and preparing.
I lean back against the stair support, the whisper buzzing hatefully in the back of my mind. But the hum is a soft warmth on my skin, a fizz of hope in my blood. The long forgotten tug of the connection stretching between us pulls gently through my chest, dizzying me with how true it feels. I force my attention to the plans they are making, focus on the map, determinedly ignore the zip of giddiness that swings my vision constantly back to the dark braid bent over it.
"What we need is to get him out in the open," Gale is saying. "Then one of us could pick him off."
"Does he ever appear in public anymore?" I ask, thinking of the rebel squadrons drilling in the practice grounds in Thirteen. Then my heart drops as Katniss makes her suggestion.
"I bet he'd come out for me," she says. The rest of her words are lost in a foggy haze as I shake my head emphatically.
"No," I say adamantly. "There are too many alternative endings to that plan. Snow might decide to keep you and torture information out of you." I swallow the spiky knot that chokes my throat at the thought. "Or have you executed publicly without being present. Or kill you inside the mansion and display your body out front." Each scenario gouges at my chest and my hands begin to shake.
Gale won't agree right away either and I'm relieved when Tigris ends the conversation by calling us up to eat. While we pick at the meager offering we watch the Capitol news warning citizens that we are roaming the streets, dangerous and bloodthirsty. Katniss asks if the rebels have made a statement, and Tigris tells her they haven't.
"I doubt Coin knows what do to with me now that I'm still alive," she says, bemused.
"No one knows what to do with you, girlie," Tigris chortles, with more truth than she knows. My gaze flashes to Gale and he's staring back at me, his gray Seam eyes holding all the twisted uncertainty I feel boiling in my own belly.
Back in the cellar, the conversation is a circuitous tangle about how to continue the mission. It's a hopeless mess and the best that comes from it is the agreement that we can't travel in a group, and Katniss agrees not to present herself as bait before trying another plan first. Though the simmering flame in her eyes convinces me she is only agreeing to end the conversation. I'll need to keep a close eye on her.
Everyone settles in to sleep and eventually the only sound in the cold cellar is the deep breathing and muttered fears of troubled dreams. I lie awake, bundled in the furs, eyes staring blindly into the dimness. The whisper hisses and moans its hateful monologue and the insistent hum thrums against it, driving me into twitchy anxiety. But that isn't why I'm unable to sleep. I'm kept awake by the pull in my chest. The tug at a tether that doesn't exist, stretching across the dark room, so even with my back turned I'm aware of precisely where in the room she lies, wrapped in a nest of pelts. I'm aware of an empty feeling in my arms, a wrongness that she is separate from me, rather than held tightly against my heart in the dark. I stare blankly at the sputtering bulb dangling from the ceiling. I'm an idiot.
From the pile of furs covering Gale a choking moan is cut off and he jerks upright with a gasping curse. His eyes fly to Katniss and he stares at her with his fists clenched in knots until his breathing slows, convinced she hasn't crept away in the night. A burn of shame boils in my throat. I have no right to even think these things. Gale is strong and whole and, most importantly, not a danger to her. If I really care that she is safe, that she is happy, I have no right to even be thinking these things.
He heaves himself onto his side and lies back down, his eyes on the pile covering her. I can see the flicker of light caught in his gray gaze as he stares at her, one hand stretched toward her on the stony floor. My breath catches at the depth of longing in his unguarded expression.
"Would you mind bringing me a drink?" I ask softly. He starts guiltily and turns his head quickly to me. I try to look sleepy, like I'm just waking, but I don't know if he's buying it.
He rises and picks his way over to the faucet, letting the water run a minute until it's clear and cold, coming back with it held carefully so it doesn't spill. He stands over me silently for a moment, then crouches and holds the cup to my lips. I swallow the drink gratefully, and he still says nothing, moving back to his spot and sitting down facing me, eyes guarded.
"Thanks for the water," I say quietly, suddenly finding it darkly funny that we are locked in this silent conversation, both of us knowing what the other is thinking, but unwilling to put words to it.
"No problem," he shrugs. "I wake up ten times a night anyway."
"To make sure Katniss is still here?" I ask pointedly.
He shrugs again, but he meets my eyes. "Something like that."
I wait for him to say what he's thinking. But Gale would never voice such uncertainty. He'll let it eat him from inside first.
"That was funny, what Tigris said," I offer. "About no one knowing what to do with her."
"Well, we never have," he grunts, and we both laugh at the painful truth of it.
He doesn't deserve this. "She loves you, you know," I tell him softly, surprising myself with the burning ache the words stir in my chest. "She as good as told me after they whipped you."
"Don't believe it," he answers wretchedly. He looks at me steadily and I see the ache echoed in his own eyes. "The way she kissed you in the Quarter Quell...well, she never kissed me like that."
I do. I need you. I push the memory aside. I have no right.
I shake my head, forcing my voice not to waver over the fierce desire that pulls at my heart. "It was just part of the show."
"No, you won her over." He doesn't sound angry, he sounds resigned. I have no right. "Gave up everything for her," he continues. "Maybe that's the only way to convince her you love her." He sounds despairing, as if arriving at the answer to a riddle much too late. "I should have volunteered to take your place in the first Games. Protected her then."
He loves her. With all his honest heart. But he doesn't understand her. If he is going to keep her safe after all this, he'll need to understand how she sees the world. "You couldn't," I tell him. "She'd never have forgiven you. You had to take care of her family. They matter more to her than her life."
He nods his agreement, but it ends in a shrug. "Well, it won't be an issue much longer. I think it's unlikely all three of us will be alive at the end of the war. And if we are, I guess it's Katniss' problem. Who to choose." He yawns hugely. "We should get some sleep."
As he settles himself in to wait out the night, I'm aware of the stillness from the pile of furs where Katniss is buried. She's awake.
"Yeah." I slide lower down the post, my hands stretched overhead because I can't risk not being tied up in my sleep. Because at any moment I can become a raging lunatic bent on destroying everyone near me. "I wonder how she'll make up her mind," I snort ironically.
"Oh, that I do know," he responds. His voice carries a lilt of sadness that is striking in its misery. "Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can't survive without."
I lie staring into the darkness as his breathing grows slow and regular. Eventually, Katniss joins him, her deep, steady breaths filling the space between us. I stare into the darkness under the stairwell, my arms aching to wrap around her, to close the distance between us. The whisper taunts and cackles at this ridiculous train of thought. But the gentle hum responds with a glowing buzz. I do, I need you. You gave up everything for her. I do. I need you.