Chapter Sixteen

The chatter of my prep team dies down when I enter my room in the Remake Center, freshly showered. Their silence is painfully abnormal.

"Miss me?" I ask, lightly.

"Oh, you poor thing," says Calla.

"Yeah, well," I reply awkwardly.

"Look at you," says Antonia. "You're - ."

I look down at myself. "What? What is it?"

"You're hot," says Julia, brusquely. "What have you been doing to yourself since the last time we saw you?"

Oh. I look down at myself again. I had forgotten - two months of running and weight training. I do have some more definition, it's true. I was in pretty good shape last year, having just come off a year of wrestling, but I'm leaner, now - some of the weight I lost in the arena never did come back - and they like that here.

"And your arms are so brown," Julia adds, now frowning a little as she approaches me. "We're going to have to darken up the rest of you, to match."

"Poor you," Antonia teases her.

My blush spreads over every inch of me, brown or white.

"Behave, ladies," says Calla. "This isn't the time for that. Well - Peeta - you should - get on the table, now."

Then follows the longest prep session ever. This time, since I have to be toned, I'm waxed. Then bronzed. Rubbed all over with some shiny lotion. Last year, they barely looked or talked to me - just did the work and chatted among themselves. Now - since they've broached the subject - I'm painfully aware of my body under their hands, and every casual remark they make to me seems loaded with innuendo. As soon as they release me, I scramble directly for the robe that is laid out on a nearby chair and sit down, folding my arms.

"It's such a pity," I hear one of them say as they depart, and Portia enters. "He could have made such a killing."

"Hush, he's engaged, remember…?"

Portia comes over and I stand to greet her. She doesn't say anything, at first, just presses her forehead against mine for a moment.

"That took a while," she said.

"I made the mistake of getting a partial tan this summer," I respond, pulling up the sleeve of my robe to check out the matching upper and lower arms.

"Ah."

"Portia … what were they talking about?"

She hesitates and for a second I'm sure that she's going to make something up, but she just says, "Just that - you're very handsome and - that can pay well, here."

I blink. "Aren't there enough victors in that - profession - already?"

"What's ever enough?" she sighs.

After a silence, I change the subject. "Are you setting us on fire again this year?"

She grins. "Not exactly. I can't wait for you to see it, though - you'll love it. You want lunch?"

After lunch, Portia and I just talk about random stuff. What kind of house does she live in? If she HAD to live in a district - if she HAD to - which one? Then it's time to go. She herself, not Julia, applies my make-up. She puts me in a black unitard very like last year's outfit and tops it with a half crown, a tribute to my co-victory of the 74th Games. This outfit, though, is powered from within. When the power is on, it starts to glow like an ember with orange-red light. The light shifts and waxes and wanes so realistically, I gape at it. The crown glows too, casting shadows on my face, which is already dark with black on my eyelids and on my lips. I look strange and sinister, so unlike myself.

"It's amazing, Portia."

She shows me how to turn it off. "Let's leave that off until you're on the chariot. Conserve the battery. What we want from you this year, Peeta, is to be very aloof and above it all. Don't engage the audience. Don't even look at the audience."

I nod.

"Go ahead." She smiles. "I think Katniss already went down."

Feeling weird - last year we were escorted everywhere - I go down to the first floor of the Remake center, which is a wide, open space with concrete floors and high ceilings. The chariots are here and they are already in formation. The tributes, though, are spread about - clustered in small groups and talking to each other. Even Katniss - I see her already standing by our chariot and in close conversation with another tribute. By her stance, she's a little uncomfortable and I soon see why. Her companion is a young man, naked except for a glittery wrap around his waist. Finnick Odair, the sex symbol of Panem.

He gives Katniss a slight bow and leaves her before I reach her. I can see the slight look of disgust on her face as he turns his back.

"What did Finnick Odair want?" I ask her.

She turns to me and leans in. Her face, like mine, is heavily made up, and she looks fierce and terrifying - probably pulls it off quite a bit better than I do. She puts her lips right near mine and lowers her eyes. "He offered me sugar and wanted to know my secrets," she says in a mock-seductive tone.

I turn away from her to hide my swallow, and stare instead at Finnick's retreating back. "Ugh. Not really."

"Really," she says, in her normal cool, sarcastic voice. "I'll tell you more when my skin stops crawling."

I look back at her and consider how - how virginal she still is, despite everything she's been forced to do or to pretend. It's such a contrast to the huntress side of her - the pragmatic killer I know her to be. She'd probably as happily skin me as even talk about sex with me. I know I've never dared to bring it up. All those nights on the train. And - as far as I can tell - it doesn't seem to have ever even occurred to her.

Which I kind of like. I don't know why – it's not very flattering to me, if I think about it too closely – maybe it's because it's one of her few areas of vulnerability, one of the few things about her I can feel legitimately protective of, even if I'm just protecting her from myself. No, that's not quite right. Katniss needs no particular protection that I can provide better than she can for herself. Which might bother other guys, I guess, but really doesn't me and never has. It might be more that, around her, I am completely free to be my real self; there is no need or reason to put on some act - puffed up and macho or smooth and seductive. We've been all the way to the brink of death and back together. She knows what I am - I know what she is. There is a sort of safety in having finally figured out the exact geography of our relationship: both the infinity of it and its very specific limitations. I may have once wished for a different vista, but I have become very comfortable traversing this terrain.

But I have to admit it. In my more selfish moments, I've wished she was ready to … just once …

I shake my head clear of that. Maybe it's my preps. And Finnick. And the fact that the other tributes are all adults - and none of us are innocents. And the sultry air. But there's something different in the atmosphere tonight. "Do you think we'd have ended up like this if only one of us had won? Just another part of the freak show?"

"Sure. Especially you," she says.

I smile at that. "Oh? And why especially me?"

"Because you have a weakness for beautiful things and I don't," she sniffs - but there's a glimmer in her eye. "They would lure you into their Capitol ways and you'd be lost entirely."

A shiver runs through me, and I can't locate the source of it. It's hot tonight. "Having an eye for beauty isn't the same as a weakness," I reply. "Except possibly when it comes to you."

I see a look on her face that I haven't seen since we were alone and desperately flirting with each other in the cave - her for the sponsors, me for real. Half pleased, half panicked. Unsure of how to respond. I grin at her, taking the edge off of the flirtation, and the music starts up anyway, the wide doors of the Remake Center opening on to the Avenue. "Shall we?" I offer my hand to her and help her up into the chariot.

She pulls me up after her and looks me up and down. "Hold still," she says, and straightens the crown. "Have you seen your suit turned on? We're going to be fabulous again."

"Absolutely. But Portia says we're to be very above it all. No waving or anything." I rake the room for any sign of our stylists. "Where are they, anyway?"

"I don't know." She follows my eyes. The District 4 chariot has already exited on to the Avenue. "Maybe we'd better switch ourselves on." We do, and I watch her curiously, to see how the costume looks on her. Last year, her flame costume pushed me right over the edge from crush to serious obsession. Perhaps she's right about me. … This year, there is no costume that can elevate how I feel about her. And anyway, I will always hold up in my mind the unearthly vision I had of her in the arena, under the influence of blood loss and mental trauma - gaunt-faced and wide eyed, her tiny hands holding death - as the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The icon I will follow to the end. But there's definitely something powerful in the sexy smudge of her darkened eyelids and eyebrows, her face flickering under the glow of her costume as if she was standing in fire, throwing off sparks. As usual, Cinna seems to have located the very heart - the very center - of this girl's power, and made it wearable. It's a privilege, I realize, to be paired with her, and for our pairing to have a power of its own.

"Are we supposed to hold hands this year?" she asks.

"I guess they left it up to us."

She looks up to me now and meets my eyes. For a moment, everything around us fades away, just slightly. The crowd is mute, the music of the anthem muddled. It's not love or desire in the look she gives me. It's something even deeper than these. It's the allegiance that bound us together in the last arena, even to the defiance of the Capitol's game - an allegiance that is without real time or geography. It belongs to us - and them - to the past and the future; it is so simple: we were made, all of us were made, for combination, not competition. To join, not to cleave. To live together, not to kill each other. It's that simple.

The dark and serious look in her eyes makes me regret my earlier flirtation. In that moment, I know down deep - not just intellectually - that I will never leave that arena without her. I don't know, yet, how I can convince her to go willingly on without me. But it might not actually be that hard - where she is built a fighter, I am made for self-sacrifice. This is my job. It is the fate of unrequited love to end - and all the better if it can end to a purpose. We will reach the point - at some moment in the Games, we will reach the point - that she will see this, too.

Without further discussion, without even a flicker of change in her expression, we reach out and take each other's hands.

Katniss and I disembark at the Training Center and there we find Portia and Cinna waiting for us. Haymitch is here, too, but he's talking to the District 11 tributes. Once he sees us, he heads over, bringing them along. In person, Chaff is even taller and more imposing than Thresh, except for the missing hand. Seeder is much shorter, and her hair is streaked with gray, but she's got lean muscles and a no-nonsense expression.

She hugs me, and then Katniss, and she seems to whisper something in Katniss' ear that makes her smile. Then Chaff throws an arm around Katniss and bends down to kiss her on the mouth. She jumps back with an expression of extreme shock and both Chaff and Haymitch laugh at her. I think Haymitch better warn his friend about who Katniss is likely to now target first in the arena.

Katniss and I, along with Chaff and Seeder, are urged toward the elevators by the Peacekeepers, who seem to be tired of all the dawdling victors. Katniss takes my hand again and I squeeze it. There's a rustling sound behind us, as of someone running in a heavy dress, and then a girl appears at Katniss' side. As she walks, she's pulling off her headdress of branches and leaves. As we stand before the elevator doors, waiting, I take a good look at her. Johanna Mason. She's probably the youngest victor here, aside from me and Katniss. When she won just a couple of years ago, it was by infamously pretending to be weepy and afraid during her interview, hiding up in trees for most of the games, and then using an axe to kill off her last competitors - all tears, and any emotion, really, gone. She has dark, spiky hair and large brown eyes.

"Isn't my costume awful?" she asks Katniss, who immediately freezes - as she does whenever she's approached by assertive strangers. "My stylist's the biggest idiot in the Capitol. Our tributes have been trees for forty years under her. Wish I'd gotten Cinna. You look fantastic."

Katniss' expression closes up. "Yeah," she says stiffly. "He's been helping me design my own clothing line. You should see what he can do with - velvet."

"I have. On your tour. That strapless number you wore in District Two? The deep blue one with the diamonds? So gorgeous I wanted to reach through the screen and tear it right off your back."

Katniss inches a little closer to me and doesn't respond. Johanna, undeterred, unzips her brown, bark-patterned dress and wriggles out of it, kicking it away from herself in disgust. I look away quickly as I realize that she is now completely naked, except for her shoes.

The five of us enter the elevator together, and the glass walls reflect the orange light still glowing off of our costumes. I try to find something interesting to look at on the ceiling.

"Peeta, right?"

I look half down down at the girl and smile. I'm very careful not to look down below her mouth; still, her breasts are definitely in my peripheral vision. "Yes?"

"Loved your paintings. That one with the mutts? It's like I was watching it all over again."

She's a bit of a provocateur, I guess. I don't rise to the bait. "Thanks."

"Do you do portraits?"

I blink. "Not so far."

"Too bad, I've always wanted to get one done. Too late now, I guess."

She glances at Katniss and then winks at me, and suddenly I get it. And I grin. She gets off on the 7th floor and I venture a glimpse at Katniss' stormy face. I manage to hold it in until Chaff and Seeder get off on 11, then I burst out laughing.

"What?" she says, letting go of my hand. Our elevator stops and the door opens.

"It's you, Katniss. Can't you see?"

"What's me?"

I step out of the elevator into our suite and wait for her to follow me. She's so endearingly pissed off. "Why they're all acting like this. Finnick with his sugar cubes and Chaff kissing you and that whole thing with Johanna." I try to wipe my smile off my face as her scowl deepens. "They're playing with you because you're so … you know."

"No, I don't know."

I cast around for a good way to explain. "It's like when you wouldn't look at me naked in the arena, even though I was half dead. You're so … pure."

Her blush burns through her makeup. "I am not!" she says indignantly. "I've been practically ripping your clothes off every time there's been a camera for the last year!"

Huh. If only. How to tell her that there is a way that some girls can just edge up to a boy and look like they know exactly what they are doing - while some girls can look so awkward even when they are accepting kisses on bare shoulders? "Yeah, but … I mean, for the Capitol, you're pure. For me, you're perfect. They're just teasing you."

"No, they're laughing at me, and so are you!"

My smile has nothing to do with that - it's more about this amazing revelation that she suddenly cares about it. That she doesn't like people thinking of her as inexperienced. And that she's jealous - and that's probably as unexpected to her as it is to me. But that line of reasoning will go nowhere fast, so I'm just going to have to let her be pissed off for a while, I guess.

The other elevator opens on Haymitch and Effie, who are both smiling. Then Haymitch steps off the elevator and glowers at something behind us.

I whip around and my heart sinks.

"Looks like they've got you a matched set this year," says Effie, horribly.

She means the Avoxes, our servants in the Training Center. There's the red-headed girl from last year who Katniss met a long time ago. And a red-headed man we both know. Darius, the Peacekeeper who was punished for trying to help Gale.