Chapter Two

The first snow falls early, heralding a rough winter ahead. It's only just November when it falls - like most early snowfall, it's a dusting, really; flakes like fine ash, softly descending.

The big houses do not hold heat efficiently - or maybe I'm just managing the vents wrong; I don't know. I've got the stove working, fairly consistently, but the upstairs is never not cold. Most nights, I crash in the living room or the study. And I'll usually just cocoon myself in my quilt while the morning passes - nothing to do, nowhere to go. No one to see. But on the morning of the first snow, I have a rare early appointment.

By seven, I'm bundled up in a brand new coat, gloves and boots and make my way carefully down the slick steps of the porch - to be on the safe side, I clutch the railing. I still never know when the left leg is going to decide to take a wide angle on stairs. The knack of placing the thing - the nerveless footstep and the squeezing sensation that my knee still doesn't know how to interpret - has not yet come to me. There are things I'm supposed to be practicing, in order to get better at this. I just don't want to. I get around OK.

I walk past Haymitch's house, the empty house next door and, finally Katniss' house - then pause at the gate when I hear a door open and close behind me. From Katniss' house, Primrose Everdeen emerges, all bundled up herself in new winter clothes.

"Heya, Peeta!" she calls over to me. I can hear the surprise in her voice.

I wait for her to catch up to me, then I ask, "Heading to school?"

"Yes. You're up early this morning."

I shrug.

Prim is twelve - or possibly thirteen now. Four months ago, when her name was called at the Reaping, she was a tiny thing. Underfed, for one, despite all the effort her sister put into it. But also - just a small girl, prepubescent - a tiny, yellow-haired girl who could have been ten years old, at the time. But she's hit her stride. I think she must have six more inches on her since then - I very well could be underestimating - and she's just the slightest bit stouter. Now she looks as well-fed and cared for as any Townie girl.

Our paths lie together until we reach town, but we don't speak until it is time to part - I head straight in and she bears east, toward the school. I give her a "bye" and she a more fulsome "see you around, Peeta." She's a friendly girl - always has been.

I head to the bakery, approaching it from the storefront, which is right on the town square, instead of going around the back like I used to do when I lived here. I check out the cakes in the window - they're OK - then enter the store, setting off the little bells.

My father comes in from around the back, wiping his hands on his apron so that flour dust is flying around him in a cloud. "Thought you'd changed your mind," he says.

I stare at him. Like my mother, he suddenly looks older to me than he did last spring. His pale hair is a little thinner, I guess - the lines on his face a little more pronounced. He's of average height, a little stout - muscular in his youth, he's now just losing ground to gravity. He's always been very quiet, very gentle - but lately I have been nearly as resentful of him as I have my mother - reasonably or not. His quiet capitulation to my mother's temper strikes me very differently, now, post-Arena; not to mention his - along with everyone else's - overall collusion with the rest of Panem in allowing the Games to continue. Look - what could he do about it? I don't know. But he let me go - to my death. Not one peep in protest. Just some tears and hugs at the parting. Defiance shouldn't be that hard if you love someone - - if you actually do love someone. And I know that firsthand, now. I shouldn't be back home - alive - to resent it. But, unfortunately, I am.

"Not used to getting up this early," I respond, coolly.

"I'm glad that you decided to bake at home - it's good to have a useful hobby. But your mother will be down at any time."

I roll my eyes. "So, I'm not supposed to even be here, now? Because I won't give handouts to the brother she has said - all my life - would be better off dead?"

"She says you threatened him."

I look down at my hands. That makes it sounds so … that makes it sound …. "I guess so, from a certain point of view. Like I would actually turn anyone in to the Capitol … anyway, you all may have convinced yourselves that it's fine for people to hit their own kids, but -."

"Shhh!" He glances nervously back toward the kitchen. "I'm not saying that you're wrong, Peeta. But - I will say it doesn't sound like you."

I laugh. I don't care if she hears me. I'd rather like her to, in fact. "Just - who do you think I am? Do you think I'm the same kid that went to the Games?"

He shakes his head. "It's just so hard - to understand."

"Well - whatever I am, you can at least all let yourselves off the hook. Blame the Capitol and just ignore me, if that makes you feel better. I just no longer have the luxury of ignoring life's unpleasant little truths."

"Peeta -." He interrupts me as I've turned to give a grand, self-righteous exit. And I don't care - I just don't care. I'm too tired to feel anything. Even anger: it is cold, not hot - it numbs me, inside and out. "We miss you."

I close my eyes. This means nothing.

In the end, I accept the flour and sugar from him and carry them back to my house, two large sacks over my shoulders. I may have lost a substantial amount of weight and muscle-tone during the Games, but my shoulders can still bear large burdens, no problem. It's my fucking false foot that is the trouble - I have to watch every step on the slippery ground, and it makes me hobble, slowly, like an old man - through the town square and the surrounding streets, down through the open fields and back to Victor's Village.

As I approach the gates, I hear the crunching sound of footsteps behind me in the snow, and I pause to let whoever it is - hopefully Haymitch, please god let it be Haymitch - pass me.

On the surface, she is unchanged. It could very well be a year ago and I'm watching out the kitchen window as she comes up to the bakery to trade with my father. Her frayed jeans and the cracked old leather jacket - boy, that brings up memories - her long, dark hair in its single braid. The worn leather boots. The game bag flung over her shoulder.

But I can't - for long - ignore the subtle differences. All the things that I noted separately before - the glimmer in her gray eyes, the lift to her chin - that have now coalesced into a painfully attractive whole. And the sadness to her - the exhaustion. There are dark circles under her eyes, indicating she, too, suffers from a lack of sleep - and also there is an expression on her face when she looks at me: frustration, exasperation. Not a dozen words have passed between us since we both moved into Victor's Village. It's just easier to avoid her than to figure out what on earth to say.

"Hey," she says, looking down at the ground after, very briefly, meeting my eyes. She's always been a girl of few words. And I never, ever spoke to her before we got on the train to the Capitol last summer. For the purposes of conversation, there is virtually nothing to draw on besides the Games.

"Go ahead," I grunt.

Am I waiting for her to eventually get the dialogue going? After all, I was the one with the last unanswered question: how much is left, here at home, of the relationship that flourished in the arena? If so, I'm disappointed, again. She nods her head and passes me, on light feet, and heads up to her house.

She's still hunting - I knew this, already. I've been the beneficiary of some of this - it's not like she needs to do it, anymore, so I'll get some of the excess (generally via Haymitch or Prim delivering a squirrel or a hunk of venison). Two possible reasons for this. One - she wants to. It's her way of filling up the days that she would otherwise spend, like me, with nothing to do. Two - and far more likely - she goes to spend time with Gale Hawthorne, who has been her hunting partner and friend (and probably more) for years. He has graduated from school now, and works in the coal mines - but miners live on near-starvation wages, and I'm sure he's still hunting to feed his family and supplement his income.

None of my business. I mean - on a purely objective note, it's technically quite a risk to take. Leaving the District to go out to the woods is illegal. To be caught with weapons probably would mean capital punishment. If it was just about the income … but I know it is not. It's about who she is, and about Gale and about all the complicated things you try to cling to when your identity has been violently disrupted.

I know this.

I put the ingredients in the kitchen, but any taste for baking has left me. The morning has been exhausting, already. I could go back to bed, bury myself in blankets and wait for the dreams to come. But I force myself into the study, breathe in the delicious chemical smell of the paints and turpentine. I've got five canvasses going, with paintings in various stages of completion. Portia - the one person from the Capitol I really trust - sent me some of her old textbooks on painting and drawing and these have been useful when I've run into issues with mixing colors and creating texture. The rest comes naturally. From swirls of chaotic colors have come, eventually, shapes and figures. The first painting - the framing bones of trees in the darkness surrounding the central burst of light - is nearly done. And a very strange thing has happened as it has neared completion - the dream itself, of approaching the fire in the woods, where I will see the wounded girl, where I will sit with her until she dies; the dream itself has started to recede. It is no longer a regular among the recurring committee of my nightmares; and when it comes it does not hold the same terror. I guess I have put it, successfully at last, somewhere outside my brain, and this has lessened its power.

Time can slip by so quickly when I paint, so, when the doorbell rings, I am surprised to realize that the day has wheeled away and I am standing in a dim room, clutching a paintbrush in front of one of the canvasses. My hands and clothes are covered in smears of paints in a variety of shades of brown and I stare at the picture. Opposing sensations - I have captured her murderous expression; she glances down at me from her perch in the tree, and her eyes are filled with the disgust at my betrayal. I almost feel actual shame at her look. On the other hand … this is it, I've actually done it. The angle is perfect, she herself is so realistic.

The bell rings again and I shuffle wearily through the house to answer it. It's my father … I lean against the door jamb, just completely exhausted. I have no energy for him.

"Come in," I say. "Er - I'm a bit of a mess."

He walks in and we stand in the front room, just staring at each other for a moment. Then, I gesture for him to sit. I am almost asleep on my feet.

"I wanted to say - I'm sorry," he says, quickly and quietly. "When I say I don't understand … I guess, I mean that I should try. You are - clearly - suffering."

Part of me wants - and wants badly - to respond in kind. But it's so embarrassing; I don't know what to say. Maybe it's too late to have this kind of relationship with him. Unless ... "There's been something - I needed - to apologize to you for," I say, haltingly. "In the arena … when I talked about you and - about you and Mrs. Everdeen. I know that must have been …."

He looks at me disbelievingly. "That's really nothing you …."

"It's just that," I press on. I feel the need to explain myself. "It's just that - Haymitch said, make everything as personal as possible, as honest, and the people will respond."

I look at him for a reaction and he just - looks - at me. I can see in his face that he has no idea how to respond.

"And I needed her to understand - that she could trust me, that I was telling the truth. If I had made something up …."

"It doesn't matter, son. It really doesn't."

"But it does," I insist. "You say you want to understand, so try to understand. In the very smallest of ways, as well as the large ones, they make you hurt other people in order to preserve your own life. And that - I mean, you have to kill a part of yourself to make that happen. Even if you didn't do it for yourself. Even then."

He nods. "I see. I think I see. I can't do anything about that, now. All I can do is … you can't live like this - bitter and alone and - and - without purpose."

"I think I can, actually."

"Peeta - I was hoping that you would see your way to - helping out at the bakery again."

I squint at him. "I don't think it's allowed. Anyway - I'm not really up to schedules. Or - to be honest - spending a lot of time with mom."

"I know - I know. I thought maybe if you could just come over, once a week, to frost the cakes. Just a little thing. But it would be helpful to us. None of us can do it as well as you can, and the window display helps business."

"Dad, I -." But I stop the refusal that is on my tongue. Why not? Why automatically reject the idea? Somewhere, beyond the haze of my sleep-deprived consciousness, I know that it's a good one. "I'll think about it," I tell him.

After he leaves, I go back to the study, but inspiration has seeped away. There's sleep, I think - there's sleep. But I can't bring myself to mount the stairs. Instead, I shrug a jacket over my paint-stained clothes and go outside to walk myself into even further levels of exhaustion.

Haymitch's lights are all on. I wonder if he's sober enough to talk tonight. I could ask him, in general, if the Capitol would frown upon my doing some part-time cake frosting. As I knock on his door, I wonder why I'm suddenly so anxious for company. Prim, Katniss, my dad - this is more human interaction than I usually have on a regular day, as it is.

When I get no answer, I carefully open the door and let myself in, bracing myself against the reek of the place I know is coming - a smell that combines all possible flavors of waste - mildew and rot, urine and vomit, old food and dirty clothes. Let alone the fumes of white liquor.

The inside of Haymitch's house shows the twenty-five years of neglect he's put into the place since he won his Hunger Games. It's dusty and dirty, and piles abound - filthy laundry, old bottles, generic refuse. It's a wonder he hasn't died of some infection or food poisoning. It might be just for his annual trek to the Capitol, as a mentor in the Games, that he takes regular showers. Drunk … broken … a man who has almost completely given up. Yet - I feel a closeness to him, bordering on affection, that I don't feel for my own father. Whatever I was meant to be, this is what I am now: a dysfunctional member of the dysfunctional family of Victors.

He's passed out at his table, the remnants of a bottle dripping slowly off the side. It's cold - he's let the fire die out. Reckless. But I understand.

I drag him over to the living room and lie him on his couch, covering him with the least-odoriferous blanket I can find. Then I stoke the coals in his fire and sit there with him, letting the wet, uneven snores remind me that I'm not completely alone.