Chapter Four
I gasp awake into darkness and a familiar panic settles on me. The cave is exact in the reproduction - the wrinkled texture of the granite walls, the uneven ceiling, the smooth, cold floor. I sit up and I realize that I am alone in the darkness. I lift up my hands and see they are covered in blood.
"Katniss!" My hiss echoes in my ears. "Katniss! Katniss!"
She's gone again. And the panic presses down on my chest. It tightens around my throat, until I can no longer speak, not even to call out for her. She's gone.
I blink awake, my heart pounding hard over those seconds before I realize that I am no longer in a dream. Then I wait, resigned, for the paralysis to burn away with the prickly sensation like a million small needles poking my skin. Finally, when my mind settles back into my tingling body, I sigh and rub the sweat away from my face.
When I get up, it's actually cold, stone cold. It's late January, now, the third straight month of winter storms. The house around me seems ghost-like in the darkness and my breath makes a visible cloud around my face. After a moment of confusion, I realize I fell asleep in the living room, lying, knees slightly bent, on a couch that is a little too short for me. I swing myself off the sofa and realize I'm clutching a paintbrush, hard, in my fist. I set it down on a side table and head over to the fireplace - stiffly. I'm pretty well accustomed to the artificial leg, now, but there's always a bit of stiffness when I've fallen asleep with it on. The cold doesn't help, either.
The fire in the coal-burning insert has died down to ashes. I pull it open and put in some more coal, stoking it until the sparks coalesce back into flame. It should have lasted the night, but sometimes I get wrapped up in my work, and I must have forgot to restock the coal before lying down on the sofa, contemplating my current painting. Sometimes I still forget that it's just me to do all the chores.
As the fire sparks to life, it illuminates the half-circle of easels in the room. I usually don't paint in here. There is better light in the either the study, which is south-facing, or the front room, with its big windows looking east. But I'm required to bring some of my paintings on my trip, so I set them all up in the largest room of my house, picking the ones I want to bring, touching these up. The whole process has filled me with anxiety. I'm just demonstrating my commitment to keep busy, per the Capitol's instructions – no one is really going to care about how good they are, just that they exist. But I'm also rather proud of them.
This morning … wait, is it? I wonder, and squint at the clock on the mantelpiece. Yes, it's four AM – great. ...This morning's nightmares are not a surprise, really. Today, at last, brings the Victory Tour and everything about it that I have been dreading.
Since it's early enough, I start on some bread. As with Katniss and her hunting, it is my way to keep myself busy, to cling on to some semblance of the person I was before the Games. I don't make it in bulk for the bakery - as arranged, I work there only on Sunday afternoons, frosting the cakes for the display window. I just make a few loaves in the morning - something routine, something busy and mindless.
While the bread rises, I look over my paintings. The light is now good enough to see them in detail. I won't be on the train until early afternoon, so there is some time to make substitutions, if I want. But I decide to wait and get Portia's opinion. She'll be here in a few hours to help me get ready for the train.
After I knead the bread dough a second time and set it to rise some more, I figure it's late enough in the morning to go to the bakery, so I get dressed and walk into town.
After the whole Solstice dinner fiasco, everyone in the family finally seems to get it that I'm still really struggling. There is a wary, careful relationship between me and the rest of them - which is an improvement over the sullen, silent, occasionally angry one that existed when I first came home. I have tried harder to understand it from their side - they see that I am rich, alive, mostly whole. Famous, celebrated, free of obligations. My solitary moodiness must have been very difficult to understand. It's impossible to explain, entirely; so, it is on me to somehow bridge the gulf in between us.
So, I just smile and listen to how everyone else's life is going. For the four of them it is bread, bread and bread. Baking it, marketing it, selling it. The millstone of life grinding on and on. At least, there's movement for them, of some kind. Breakfast is brief. They have work to do - I've got a journey to prepare for.
Back at home, the bread is ready to bake, and I pop it in the oven. Within a few minutes, the smell of it - the warm, sweet scent - fills the house. It makes the strange house feel a little bit like home; which is a relief, because my old home feels a little bit like I never even lived there.
When the bread is done, I still have an hour or so before the team from the Capitol is due to arrive, so I walk over to Haymitch's house.
I don't bother to knock - he's probably asleep, anyway - but open the door on a dark front room and the typically noxious smell. The house is cold, too - as I go through the kitchen toward the dining room, I feel a blast of chilly air coming from an open window somewhere. Then I hear the voices.
"If you wanted to be babied, you should have asked Peeta."
The dining room scene would be alarming, if I didn't know the players. Haymitch stands, basically upright, clutching a knife that he points toward Katniss, who perches on the sill of the open window, as if ready for flight.
"Asked me what?" I say casually, finding a space on the table to set the loaf of bread down on. I hold my hand out to Haymitch, specifically to his knife.
"Asked you to wake me up without giving me pneumonia," says Haymitch, handing it over. I see now that his hair is dripping wet and I smile.
While Haymitch dries himself with his shirt, I find one of his liquor bottles and wash the knife down with alcohol, and sit down to slice up the bread. Haymitch sits down again, rubbing his temple, and I hand him the heel of the loaf. Then, I look up at Katniss.
She's looking at me with one of her unreadable expressions. I catch hints of sadness and anxiety in her dark gray eyes, but it's hard to tell if these are because of me, despite me or have anything to do with me at all. In a couple of hours, we'll be on a train again, linked together on the tour for two weeks, and it's amazing how similar it feels to the first time we left District 12. Despite all the confidences and all the physical closeness in the arena - let alone our mutual debt for each other's lives - it's as if we're strangers.
"Would you like a piece?" I ask her, awkwardly.
"No, I ate at the Hob," she awkwardly replies. "But - thank you."
"You're welcome."
"Brr," says Haymitch. "You two have got a lot of warming up to do before show time."
Katniss looks away from me, frowning. "Take a bath, Haymitch," she says, then swings around and out through the window.
Haymitch and I sit in silence for a while. Since I've eaten breakfast already, I don't join him, but watch him eat, wondering, as I often do, about the enigma that is my mentor. Although Hunger Games reruns are frequently aired on TV, I've never caught his, and he's never spoken of his Games, except to warn me of the personal consequences of killing other people.
"What's 'show time,' exactly, Haymitch?" I ask.
He blinks at me. "You know what it is, boy."
Once he says it, I immediately understand. The cameras will be on us in every district, every day for the next two weeks. They will want to see my besotted face, hear my besotted declarations of love again. Like the night of the interviews last year, I will have to put on a performance - baring again all the secrets of my actually besotted heart, for the entertainment of the crowds. Only - it will be even worse this time, now that my feelings have been actually rejected.
Gloomily, I head back over to my house and have just sat down in front of the fireplace when the doorbell rings. It's my stylist and prep team - Portia, who designs my wardrobe, and Julia, Calla and Antonia, the bright, painted girls who do my hair, nails and skin.
When I went into the arena, they primped my entire body. This morning, they just wax the stubble off my chin, pluck a few stray eyebrow hairs, apply a light layer of zit cream and a light layer of makeup, trim my hair - which is curling over my eyes and down below the nape of my neck - and buff my fingernails down to perfect crescent moons.
That leaves me to Portia, who dresses me in warm and comfortable slacks, a white sweater and a new coat of midnight blue.
"What do you think of the paintings?" I ask her.
"You're a natural, Peeta," she says. "It's almost too bad that you can't get professional instruction. I honestly think you could make your living at it, if you lived in the Capitol. But if you keep doing it - and keep a critical eye on yourself - you will develop your own style and continue to improve. It's interesting, I can't think of any artists who have come out of District 12."
Of course not. It's a luxury to be one - only a Victor could afford to spend the time, to have access to the resources. "Did you - learn drawing and - everything - somewhere?" I ask curiously. As a district citizen, I'm not supposed to know anything, really, about the rest of Panem; but maybe, as a Victor, my privileges extend a little further now.
Portia hesitates for a moment, as if pondering the same question. "Yes. I went to art school. After high school. That's where I met Cinna." She smiles. "We always ended up getting paired up on projects, and here we are!"
Cinna is Katniss' stylist and he and Portia started pairing us up with matching outfits long before we took on the roles of star-crossed lovers in the arena. In fact, for all I know, they worked with Haymitch to devise this strategy even before I confessed to Haymitch how I felt about Katniss. This is one of those things I've had time to wonder about over the last few months - I can't shake this feeling that there was some larger plan cooked up among them regarding me and/or Katniss from the very beginning.
Effie Trinket arrives, in furs and gold pants, and a very striking orange wig. I greet her with a smile and she double-kisses me on my cheeks. "What a handsome young man!" she gushes. "And where are these paintings I've heard so much about?"
Given how excited she's been to get regular updates on my progress, I don't know how she's going to feel about the subject matter - the mutts and the other tributes, the sometimes-surreal efforts to recreate the strange hallucinatory images of the tracker jacker poison. She might have been hoping for benign landscapes and fruit in bowls. I hold my breath, but she gasps in approval. "Oh - these are delightful. The perspective! The shading! You might have been painting all your life!"
"Thanks, Effie." Of course. What is horror for me – the madness and sorrow and death of it all – is all just part of her job.
"We'll get these packed up and on the train for you. Now - I'm going to go over to Katniss' and supervise her getting out of the house. I've got three cameras out on the green, so what I'd like is a shot of the two Victors greeting each other there. Portia, have Peeta leave the house and walk over the green toward Katniss' at 1pm sharp. I'll have Katniss meet him halfway. Then off to the train station!"
She vanishes, and I glance at Portia. "That's not vague," I say wryly. "By greet, does she mean for me to shake Katniss' hand, or …?"
Portia glances at me with a look very reminiscent of Haymitch. "The Capitol loves a bit of spontaneity," she says.
It takes me awhile to figure out why that turn of phrase is so familiar. She said the same to me when I greeted Katniss for the first time after the Games, in front of the live television audience. That ended in about ten minutes of spontaneous kissing - an act unlikely to be duplicated today. I'm not about to kiss someone who doesn't want it. A convincing hug may be in order, though.
The snow has started coming down in a way threatening yet another blizzard when Portia opens my door and waves me out. I can see Katniss in her doorway. I plaster a smile on my face and start walking over to her. But she runs. Startled, I catch her in my arms and spin her around once before losing my footing in the wet grass. I end up on my back, she on top of me.
I look up close into her face. Her smooth, glowing skin, her shining eyes. Her pink, wet lips. Her eyes bore into mine for a moment. They are trying to tell me something - or trying to hide something, I'm not sure which. Then she licks her lips and puts them down on mine.
I close my eyes. My hands tighten on her arms as the kiss lingers, ever so slightly – just long enough so that it can no longer be categorized as "friendly." I restrain my side of the embrace with an enormous effort; I understand - that this is for the cameras. I understand that she dictates the terms. But ... when she parts from me, an apology in her eyes - but also, a tiny gleam of … I can tell, I can feel, that she is not displeased. I wonder - does she even realize it? And does she realize that behind the act I can feel her curiosity?
Then she stands and takes my hand to help me up out of the snow.