THG Pg. 258: "Trust me. Killing things is much easier than this," I say. "Although for all I know, I am killing you."
"Can you speed it up a little?" he asks.
Nothing changes. Peeta still shows up for breakfast and agrees to a walk (no mention of painting today; the rain stopped a long time ago) as naturally as if it had never been in question (as if Katniss didn't stay awake all night, cramped in a closet, imagining the door between her and Peeta slamming shut forever). He walks at her side as if unafraid (as if he isn't heartbroken), and points out a flower she names for him (clematis, nothing special, no particular meaning, just like a magpie instead of a mockingjay), and pauses to stare at a view of meadow and glade that she's never particularly noticed before (but it is beautiful, enough to make her chest ache now that she stops to really look at it). When they return home, Peeta even smiles at her before excusing himself to his own house.
It's the smile that gives it away, really. Katniss has spent a lot of time with Peeta (in some ways, more time, she thinks, than with anyone else in her whole life), and has been the recipient of a great many of his smiles. She knows that he's good with people, but grows tense in great crowds. She knows that he pauses before taking any step down, having to think through the movement with his new leg, and that he experiments with recipes but if given the choice for himself will always choose the simplest fare, and that he likes to fall asleep on his left side but invariably will turn onto his back once his breaths have evened out to light snores.
And she knows (far too late, maybe) just when he is faking.
She doesn't need to remember the smile he offered District Twelve (for the audience), his hand limp in hers, because that awful moment lives, constantly, in the back of her mind.
The smile he offers her today, standing in her kitchen, half out of the door, is the same one as on that train so long ago.
All Katniss's relief drains away, her contentment evaporating like water in a desert as she stares after him.
He's faking. None of this (his ease, his friendliness, his comfort with her) is real. He said, implied, hinted, that he loved her (she wasn't, isn't, faking) and she ran (she slammed him away from her, into something more dangerous than a shattered urn; she took her hand from his; she left him alone, broken and hopeless like in District Thirteen). She left him, abandoned him (and midnight may never strike to bring them back together).
She's the audience (again), the one he's faking for.
Katniss lifts her hand, half-surprised not to bump up against actual glass. All her determination, her unspoken vows, to help him (to ensure he never has to feel alone, wandering isolated through fractured mindscapes, again) come to nothing.
She's failed.
(But at least he's still alive. Her love has not struck him the fatal blow.
Yet.)
It feels like she blinks and breathes only a few times, but then Peeta is entering her kitchen with a basket of baked goods in hand. His smile (the polite, social, not-real one) fades as he takes in her statue-still position exactly where he left her.
"Katniss?" he asks. So tentative. So careful. Like she's the Capitol, expecting a story worth telling. Like she's the Districts, liable to explode at the slightest wrong (right?) word. Like Snow, all too willing to deal out torment and venom if he dislikes his current amusement's show. (Like a girl, given love selflessly and continuously, only to scorn it and depend on it and take it for granted and lash out if it takes a form she doesn't prefer.)
"Why are you here?" Her lips crack when she speaks, so dry they stick together.
Peeta frowns. "It's dinnertime."
"I'm not hungry."
"That's too bad." Peeta turns and heads to the counter, sets down the basket, and pulls back the cloth. "I guess these cheese buns will have to go to waste."
The dual temptation (her favorite food) and threat (food isn't to be wasted) jars Katniss into movement. Though she drags her feet, she's at the table too soon, forced to sit within arm's reach of Peeta. The cheese buns are still warm (while she stood uselessly in place for hours, Peeta was working, as per usual), and they taste just like the first ones she ever tasted, back when they were trying to find a way to be friends away from the Capitol's gaze.
Somehow, Peeta sneaks some meat onto her plate as well, and before Katniss knows it, she's eaten an entire meal. Peeta washes the dishes, stares at her (worried? or just polite?), and then tells her good night. He leaves. Katniss eventually makes her way to the rocking chair where once she tried to die a slow death. The curtains cover the window. It doesn't matter. All Katniss can see is that fake smile.
She knows why his smiles aren't real anymore.
History simply repeats itself, after all.
Once more, Peeta was brave. Once more, Katniss ran. And now he acts (for the audience), and they're trapped in their separate hellscapes.
It's strange, then, that Peeta shows up the next morning for breakfast. Just like usual. She wonders if she's only imagining that the circles under his eyes are darker now (she doesn't think she is).
"A walk?" she rasps through her dry throat.
Peeta fills a water glass for her, sets it in front of her, and nods. "If you want."
"Do you?" she asks.
He tilts his head (always so invariably curious). "I don't mind."
Katniss is silent for nearly their entire walk while she tries to figure out that answer. (Does he not want to walk? Is this something else he's only doing for her sake? Should she tell him to stop coming just to ensure she's not forcing him into something he doesn't want?) Maybe that's why it takes her several days before she realizes that something else has changed.
He's stopped asking her real-not-real questions.
The one thing she promised him to do. The one thing she could offer him (that won't get him killed, anyway; that won't just disappoint him), and she ruined this too.
He doesn't trust her.
She wonders why this surprises her (why it hurts like an arrow in her gut).
More days pass. More quiet walks. Peeta learns a lot about flowers and then, as they begin to ripen, berries too. It's not enough. Katniss doesn't want to be a walking plant book to him. But every time she tries to tell him he can still trust her, her voice dries up.
Eventually, feeling almost desperate, Katniss answers the phone when Dr. Aurelius calls.
"If you want to remember the past," he says after she's stammered out an incoherent mess of words circling around her desire to clear up the mess between her and Peeta, "and need a safe place to keep those memories, why don't you try writing them down? It'll pin the thoughts down, which might help you find clarity, but it'll be something you can close up and set aside if it gets to be too much."
If she never talks to him again, Katniss figures Aurelius has earned his pay.
Peeta won't (or can't, maybe; Katniss well knows what it's like to have words snagged irrevocably in her throat) ask her for clarity anymore. So Katniss will give it to him in a different way.
"I talked to Dr. Aurelius," she says one day, when they've been quiet for the entire walk from the outskirts of the woods nearly to the shallow river where she and Gale used to refill their canteens.
"I'm glad," Peeta says. Politely. Sincerely, too, because that's who he is.
"He gave me an idea, but I…" Katniss looks down at the forest floor, overgrown with grass and weeds and moss now that summer is well into its prime. "I don't think I can do it alone. I was wondering if you could help me. Maybe in the evenings. After dinner."
All she hears for a good long while is the grass swishing against her legs and the ground shaking under Peeta's steady footsteps. (She wishes, for just a minute or two, that it would rain.)
When Peeta finally speaks, his voice is unsteady (real). "Are you sure that's a good idea?"
What a ridiculous question. What even constitutes a good idea anyway?
"I want to make a book," she says. "To remember the people we lost. So we never forget why we fought. And what we lost. A memory book."
Peeta stops walking. Katniss notices immediately (he's still so loud), but she walks a bit farther before stopping and looking back at him (it wouldn't do to make him feel crowded).
"Katniss…" he says. (Katniss. I'm so tired, she hears in his tone.)
"I don't want to forget," she says as firmly as she knows how in this broken, Prim-less world. "Do you?"
"I can't help but forget," he says helplessly. "Sometimes it's all I can do not to lose even my name."
"Then help me with this book. You can read it whenever you need a reminder."
He looks away. "Maybe I don't want a reminder of everything."
"You can skip some pages."
His laugh has nothing humorous about it. It's sad and exhausted and as bitter as Peeta knows how to be in this broken, unreal world.
He's dying, Katniss thinks. The parts of him that make him Peeta, that keep him going (that make him plant flowers and bake bread and paint skies and magpies), they're going out, bit by bit, like candle flames being extinguished (and for all she was the girl on fire, Katniss knows, doesn't she, what—who—really kept her burning on and on and on, long after she would have gone cold and dark on her own).
(If she can't do the same for him…then what's the point?)
"Peeta," she says. She doesn't try to approach him (because he'd flinch). She doesn't say anything else (because he'd smile politely, not-real, at her). Instead, she just looks at him, and wonders if he knows that she'll die if he does.
That he's the only thing keeping her breathing.
The only reason she doesn't curl back up in that rocking chair and just let the world go.
(She wonders if it'd be kinder for them both to just give up.
But Peeta isn't built like that, and she can't let him fight alone.
So they'll both keep going, hands entwined between them on this chariot called life.)
"Okay," he says, slowly. "But…I may not be able to do it every night."
"Me neither," she admits.
"Can we…"
They start walking back toward the houses by some unspoken agreement. By the time Peeta manages to finish his question, they've nearly reached Victor's Village.
"Is it okay if we put even my mom in the book?"
For the first time since it rained, Katniss slides her hand into Peeta's.
"Yeah," she murmurs. "Everyone we've lost. Everyone we loved."
Katniss is tired of not-real, but she doesn't feel even the least bit bad about pretending not to see the tears Peeta blinks away (at least the tears, she thinks, are more real than that polite smile).
THG Pg. 304: "Ah, that'll be nice," says Peeta, tightening his arms around me. "You and me and Haymitch. Very cozy. Picnics, birthdays, long winter nights around the fire retelling old Hunger Games tales."
Their book takes a long time to get started. At first, it's because they wait for supplies on the train—paper and different colored pens and felt-tipped instruments that leave dark colors in their wake (Peeta experiments with these for days, fascinated by the range of motion they allow him; Katniss watches him for days, fascinated by the world locked inside him, glimpsed only briefly during his most intensely concentrated moments). Then, they stall.
Katniss knows that's what she's doing when she says they are too tired from their long walk one day, when she pleads a headache another, when a few evenings slip her by without her noticing, when they find themselves in his living room staring at the fire without any of their new supplies with them. She knows, but it's hard, to summon up the memories she's spent months covering. To peel the soaked and sour bandages from the wounds that have only just stopped bleeding.
"Okay," she says, finally, when she's disgusted by her own cowardice (when she spent hours on their walk this afternoon silent, trying to remember Prim's favorite flower). "Okay."
Peeta watches her put out the supplies on the low table in the living room. She's never seen the point of this table, but it comes in handy now, wide enough to hold the papers, the twine to tie them together, the colored pens, the scissors and the pictures Effie sent from the Capitol. When she's done (when she can't bring herself to care anymore about the exact placement of the pages), Katniss sits cross-legged in front of the table and picks up the pen. She slides a page closer to herself.
It's blank. White. (So, so innocent, but that will be marred the instant Katniss sets her mark to it.) Just a flat, featureless surface, and how did she ever think that Prim could be constricted and contained, melted down and distilled to such a point that she could be held on such a limited medium.
Gradually, Katniss becomes aware that there's something warm next to her. Something sturdy. Something that smells of cinnamon, which allows her to take in a full breath as she greedily inhales the familiar scent.
"Can I make a suggestion about who we start with?" Peeta asks softly.
Katniss nearly breaks down at this unexpected reprieve (nearly throws herself into Peeta's arms in gratitude). "Yes," she says, too eagerly. "Yes, who should we start with?"
"I…" Peeta's breaths are as unsteady as her own. "I already drew him. But…tell me if I got it wrong?"
It takes Katniss a minute to place the face that Peeta slides across the table to her. Without Finnick's bronze hair or the baker's blue eyes, square and solid rather than starved as the morphlings, dressed in District 13's bland uniform rather than either of the Games' uniforms, Katniss's mind reels to see what's actually there rather than what's not.
But she blinks, she breathes, and then she knows.
It's Mitchell. Part of the Star Squad. The man Peeta (hijacked and driven beyond his endurance, triggered by flying body parts and bloody memories, by Katniss with a weapon in her hands and the Capitol all around him) killed.
Her eyes fly up to meet his, but he's intent on the portrait (she wonders how many nights he's spent working on it; how many others he's made; how long he's tortured himself with this death that should be laid at Snow's feet and on Coin's hands rather than him).
"I…think his jaw is wrong," Peeta says. His face blurs until Katniss wipes a hand quickly over her eyes. "When I imagine him…his face is always turned to the side. But he had brown eyes, didn't he?"
"Real," Katniss says (she doesn't know, doesn't remember, never really looked past her own vengeful purpose to consider specifics about Mitchell, but she trusts Peeta's eye for detail). "I recognize him. I think you captured him."
Peeta nods, still avoiding her eyes. "Delly got me his personnel file from 13. I can tell you about him if you want to write it down."
Katniss puts the pen to her paper and lets Peeta transcribe out his guilt and his regret and his shame. She fills up one side of the page with the facts (his parents and his cousins, his wife, his accomplishments and his rank), and the other with little things she can dredge up (he lit the fire for their Squad, most nights, and he laughed easily with Mesala, and she remembers him complaining about the cold).
Pressed up against her arm, Peeta's tremble reverberates through Katniss. "We…we should probably record how he died."
"Okay," Katniss says evenly, and she curls her body in around the page to block Peeta's view of the words she writes. When she's done, she slides it over to him and waits for his reaction.
"'Mitchell died fighting for Panem's freedom, slain in the Capitol during the final invasion. His death was a direct result of Snow's cruelty and Coin's ruthlessness.'" Peeta looks up at her, finally, for the first time all evening, meeting her eyes. "And me."
"No," Katniss says defiantly. "It wasn't you. He knew that, Peeta—I know he did, because when he pulled you away from me, he did it with his own hands. No weapons. No restraints. Nothing. Because he knew who you really are. Anything else that happened came from outside of you."
She knows he doesn't believe her. She knows that if she sets down the pen, he will snatch it up and add what he thinks is the truth.
"Trust me, Peeta," she says, softly. "Not real. Whatever you think…it's not real."
His face crumples. Lifting his hands, he covers his eyes, his raining tears, and hunches in on himself. Katniss lets him, but she lays a hand (carefully) on his back to let him know that he's not alone.
They don't work on the book again for a couple days, until Peeta sets out the supplies and slides her a blank page and asks about her father. This is an old loss, one Katniss hadn't planned on putting into the book, but for some reason, it feels good to talk about him. To tell stories she's never put to words, and write out all the things she loved about her father. To watch as the face she remembers more as a series of impressions rather than solid details materializes in black and white under Peeta's hands, the charcoal smearing across his fingers like coal-dust.
In this way, they begin to make progress—one night a week, they write the hard things, so difficult, so horrible, that it leaves one or both of them in pieces on the floor. Then they'll take a break only to come back with a few easier entries.
It's Peeta's idea to invite Haymitch to write out details of the many tributes that never made it back home.
"That's one thing I'm thankful for," Peeta says at dinner one night. "That we never had to be mentors. I know going back in the Games was terrible, but…"
"It would have been worse to send kids in," Katniss finishes for him.
"I don't think I could have survived that," Peeta says. "But Haymitch did. He did it for years, and I know he wasn't perfect, but he still tried for us."
Katniss has a few more complaints than that, but it's nice, to see things from a different perspective (to see the world through Peeta's eyes), so she nods and agrees.
"We can ask him tomorrow," Peeta says. "I'll invite him to dinner."
"We should make it a picnic," Katniss says with a jaded sort of amusement. She doesn't expect Peeta to get the reference (she doesn't expect; she hopes), but he does.
With a smile, he says, almost shyly, "Not quite the Hunger Games tales I thought we'd be telling."
But when they head to Haymitch's the next day, he's not there. Katniss isn't too worried (knowing him, he probably ran out of white liquor and went to buy some off whoever he can ambush), but Peeta frets through their whole walk. It annoys Katniss, at first (the woods are hot and muggy, thoughts of her father's lake are tempting but memories of taking Gale there warn her off, and the gnats are biting, but she only notices these things because Peeta is more worried about Haymitch than her), but then Katniss remembers watching Peeta through her window, emerging from Haymitch's house and shattering and then putting himself back together.
How many times has he fed their mentor (the same mentor who never sent him any gifts in the Games)? How often has he spent days when Katniss is outside his reach cleaning Haymitch's house or Haymitch himself (the same man who chose Katniss over Peeta, again and again, and left Peeta behind to be tortured and hijacked)?
They have so few people left to care about (and Peeta cares with everything he is), so Katniss feels herself soften and suggests going back to look for Haymitch.
It doesn't take them long to find him. He's trudging back to the Village from the trainyard, his eyes unusually lucid.
"Where were you?" Peeta asks. "You should have warned us you'd be—"
"I had to go. My phone doesn't work anymore." Haymitch sneers. "And no matter who the President is, they never like being kept waiting."
"The President." Katniss feels herself spiraling. The ground beneath her feels as unsteady as if it will cave in on her (as if she will join Prim by way of her father's route).
"Seems the people have been clamoring for an update on their Mockingjay. Paylor said she'd rescind your travel ban so you could return to the Capitol—or District 13 if the Capitol's too hard—for an interview."
Peeta's hand finds hers. Their fingers intertwine. Her thumb rubs against a burn scar, shiny and smooth, against one of his knuckles. Katniss fixates on the feel of that single scar, little more than a freckle, and tries to envision it in her mind.
(All she sees are flames. Little sisters going up in smoke. An arrow fired too late. Finnick's body falling back beneath the bite of a mutt. Peeta asking to die.)
"Don't look so worried, sweetheart." Haymitch shrugs and flexes his fingers as if searching for an absent bottle. "I managed to talk her out of it."
"What do they want in return?" Peeta asks, and Katniss's relief gutters before it even fully forms.
"Just a few pictures," Haymitch says. "Candid shots of the Mockingjay recovering from the war with her baker husband."
Bile rises. Katniss swallows it back, but her mouth and eyes burn with the fumes.
Peeta's hand falls away from hers. "What?" he asks. He stands alone, a little apart from Katniss and Haymitch (the way it's always been, really, but how? why? when did the shift take place? Katniss never has understood the dynamics here entirely). "That's not…that's not real. They can't make us do this. Can they?"
"Look, either we send them some pictures or they come out here with a full camera crew and probably the new Caesar all decked out in the color of the season." Grimacing, Haymitch sighs. He meets Katniss's gaze, and she feels just a bit steadier. "I told you, there's no getting off this train."
Slowly, one step at a time, Peeta falls away from her. His pupils are dilating, his hands (burned and scarred and beautiful) clenching into tight fists, his expression twisting (unrecognizable, but not really, because Katniss remembers this, all twisted up with the smell of charred flesh and the sight of a duck tail incinerating).
"They want a happy ending," Haymitch says. "So that's what we have to give them."
Katniss drops her eyes from Peeta (she doesn't want to see him slip away from her, because who knows if he'll find his way back again?) and stares at the ground. At the browned grass and the waddling roly-polies.
A happy ending? She'd settle just for an ending, period.
THG Pg. 320: "I wonder how she found us," says Peeta. "My fault, I guess, if I'm as loud as you say."
They don't talk about it. Peeta's not surprised. Haymitch and Katniss communicate in looks, in tiny signals he doesn't see, in contexts that pass right over his head. Words are his chosen form of communication and if he doesn't force them, if he doesn't begin the conversations, they never get spoken aloud.
And how can he begin this?
Sorry, Katniss, he could say. I know this is your worst nightmare, but I once told a truth in a place where only fake was allowed, once bared my heart when I was supposed to armor it in camouflage instead, and now we're stuck in this loop forever.
Sorry, Katniss, he could try instead. You're kind and nurturing and more of a healer than you'll ever admit so I know you won't let this tired act go, and that means you're stuck with me forever and ever without end.
Sorry, Katniss, he thinks to himself. We never said I do, never fed each other toast or wore the Capitol's over-the-top wedding clothes outside of the Quell's interviews, but I've trapped you with me in this eternal façade anyway.
Please don't hate me for it.
No. No, he can't say any of that. Better to learn muteness (to become the Avox he once feared Snow might make him, when he woke up with jungle-sweat and death-blood smeared all over him) than to ever speak aloud any such selfish confessions.
Besides, Katniss isn't much of one for apologies. Or even for regret (for sentiment or for what-ifs or for love of a stupid baker's boy). She faces what comes and deals with it and then screams the nights away in payment of what her own strength has cost her. She prefers to simply endure than to process or negotiate or concede.
And for once (in just this little, inconsequential detail), Peeta will do things her way.
They eat breakfast in silence.
They walk together in quiet that may be companionable (but probably isn't).
They separate (with relief) to lick their wounds in privacy.
They meet up to stare at the beginnings of their book and fail to make any progress on it.
They part for the night without a word and Peeta stares up at his bedroom ceiling and imagines this is the rest of his life.
Silence. Companionship without partnership. Without friendship. Physical proximity without emotional relationship. Just passing the time.
(It's what he deserves. It's all he's good for.)
I'm sorry, Katniss.
The words are always there, bottled up behind his lips, pressed close against the backs of his teeth, tickling the roof of his mouth, snagged like Mags's fishhooks in his throat.
I'm sorry, Katniss.
He's always been a burden around her neck. The loud footsteps that marked her out, the wounded baggage she couldn't abandon, the lovesick puppy she was too kind to kick away. The district partner she hoped she didn't have to kill. The co-victor dogging her wake, making her split her crown and piling responsibilities on her shoulders. The fiancé that wasn't enough for either her or Snow. The partner who did nothing at all to save her in the Quell while their lives ticked down in dangerous wedges. The prisoner who lashed at her with his absence and his wounds and his own strangling hands. The unwanted neighbor she has to pretend with all over again.
I'm sorry, Katniss.
"This is stupid," Katniss says one evening. Her voice is so raspy, her tone so harsh (any noise at all so startling), that Peeta flinches and feels reality slip around him. The living room of his house fades to the living room of hers, Prim and Mrs. Everdeen bustling urgently, Haymitch's sour smell just behind him, Katniss writhing madly in his arms, screaming for another man while blood coats the air and stains Peeta's hands and drips from Katniss's eye.
"Not real," he whispers to himself, and unclenches his fists, and looks up to meet Katniss's expressionless face.
"This is stupid," Katniss says again, a bit gentler, when she's sure he's back with her (if they can ever be sure of that; Peeta doesn't think he is, he's pretty sure there's a huge part of him stuck back in the Capitol somewhere, buried in a cell filled with rotting body parts and coated in tracker-jacker venom). "We're not getting anything done this way. Maybe we should…maybe we should take a break."
The tearing sensation deep in his chest hurts so badly that Peeta is fixed in place, convinced irrevocably of this moment's reality. He's thought, in turns, that this book is a bad idea, a terrible torment, a sneaking temptation, an excuse to not be alone for more endless hours of the day. Only now, with his heart bleeding out inside him, does he realize just how much of his (stupid, heedless, irresponsible) hopes he's pinned on the memory book.
"Okay," he says in a small voice (because Katniss deserves to have some freedom).
(Because Katniss shouldn't have to keep putting up with a boy who only stares at her and never helps her.)
"Okay," Katniss says. With a resolute air, she reaches out and pulls the blank pages in front of her. Peeta moves to get his bad leg under him, ready to stand and escort her out, but Katniss doesn't collect any of the other supplies. She doesn't pack anything up. She doesn't stand and walk away.
Instead, she takes her pen firmly in hand and bends over the page.
"Katniss?" Peeta asks, a whisper of noise to test whether he's imagining this (whether she's really already walked away and now he's alone, for the tenth day in a row, for the hundredth, imagining company that won't leave him behind, alone and lonely).
"Prim is…" Katniss's breath is so painful that her shoulders make an unnatural movement, outlining the sharp edges of her shoulder blades under her shirt. "And I'm not ready for Rue either. And Thresh…we don't see Thresh the same way. People are hard," she tells him, silver eyes flashing up from under her lashes as she darts a severe look his way. "Maybe telling events will be easier."
"What do you mean?"
"A way to work up to…to Rue." Katniss bends her fierce focus back to the page. "We'll write down the story of the Reaping."
"No." Peeta shakes his head (sniffs covertly in an attempt to smell the tang of venom, if it's there; it's always there, in some measure). "About…Thresh. What did you mean about Thresh?"
Katniss blinks at him, her focus broken. "You…you waited for him to die. You wanted him to die."
Peeta's stung. "No, I didn't." His hands are turning into fists again, but for once, he doesn't stop them. A rush of anger, foreign and freeing, sweeps through him. "I never wanted him to die."
"It's okay, Peeta, you didn't know him." Katniss shrugs and looks back down to the paper where she's written a few lines of black ink (her story, always hers, never his, because his is never as important, never as significant, never as meaningful as hers). "He was just another tribute. You wanted me to go home. But we owed him, and that matters to me. To the Seam."
"Right." And finally, words come back to Peeta (unhindered by the sorrys that were waiting there, all evaporated now). "Just another tribute. He showed me how to throw a spear, when we were in training. Did you know that? He didn't have to, but he saw me watching him, and he slowed down his movements and let me note everything he did. It's the reason I picked a spear, when the Careers let me have a weapon, the reason I was able to fight Cato off while you were pumped full of tracker jacker venom. He hid in those fields in the arena, and I could have talked Cato and Clove into going in there—I knew you would have gone for the trees instead—but I remembered Thresh demonstrating that move for me, and I agreed that we could try the fields later. But you're right. I'm just a merchant. I don't care about people and the kindnesses they choose to show and the ways they find to help and the goodness they display even when forced to the worst of humanity. I just wanted him dead. That's all a mutt like me could ever want, right?"
Peeta's not even aware that he's stood, that he's moving backward, doesn't even remember that it's his house they met in today until he's already pushing through the front door into the warm night and stumbling down the steps of his porch. Until he walks past where the primrose bushes should be and sees nothing and realizes that he just stormed out of his own house (that he left Katniss alone, hurting, speechless, again).
Breathing hard, he stops and stares up at the sky in an attempt to keep the tears that burn in his eyes from spilling over. He hates crying, hates it. It never does any good. Just betrays weakness and invites more hurt and blinds him to any beauty that might help cheer him.
But there is no beauty here. The primroses are at Katniss's house. The garden they planted, seeded by the gifts of survivors like them, is along the side of Katniss's house. The plant book where he once drew likenesses of natural beauties is safe within the walls of Katniss's house. All his house is left with are the paintings of pain. Of nightmares. Of the emptiness that's all that remains of him (the rest was scraped out and minced up and left to rot in the Capitol).
"I'm sorry, Peeta."
I'm sorry, Katniss.
Just that quickly, with her small voice just behind him and her hand falling to rest, light as a butterfly, against his spine, the apology is back, restlessly pacing within the confines of his mouth.
"I didn't know that," Katniss offers, "about him helping you. I didn't know."
"I never said," he offers in return, but he feels her move, sharply, a shake of her head, he thinks.
"Debts," she begins, but Peeta shakes off her hand and takes a careful step forward.
"I'm tired of debts," he snaps. "I'm tired of having to count costs and pay back pain for pain or kindness for convenience. I wish…I wish we could all just do the right thing and have that be enough. Don't you?"
She's silent for so long that Peeta has time to follow the glow of one star to another to another until he's mentally drawn a bow and an arrow and a braid hanging over the angle of a cocked elbow in the sky.
"I don't know," Katniss finally says. She reaches out again, her hand warm on his shoulder blade. "I've never thought about it. But…you're not a mutt, Peeta."
"Yes, I am." Peeta forsakes the stars in favor of darkness, squeezing his eyes tightly shut (a boy again, small and defenseless, useless and unwanted, hiding under a blanket while his mom raged and his dad said nothing). "How could I be anything else? You're right, Katniss. This world isn't full of beautiful things. It's just…cold. And hard. I just fooled myself, a long time ago, into thinking I saw things that weren't really there. I guess I was playing real-not-real long before Effie ever read my name. I should have learned better. I should have…I should have known I was wrong."
Sudden warmth collides with him, almost pushing him forward a step until he steadies himself—Katniss, he realizes, plastering herself against his back, her arms locked around his waist, her breath hot against his spine.
"No, no, no," she's saying. "That's not true, Peeta, it's not. Not real. Not real."
"Katniss…" he sighs. I'm sorry.
"You smiled at the Capitol crowds, when we were in the train. You waved and smiled. And when we were in the chariot, you did the same thing. It made me look. It made me see them. Monstrous, garish, but human, too—like our prep teams, you know, not knowing any better. You washed Haymitch when you didn't have to, and it made me think he could help us. You laughed with the tributes when we were training, and you saw Rue before I ever did, pointed her out to me so that I noticed her and kept noticing. You talked to Cinna and he showed you the roof, the only good parts of our time there, right? You were friendly with Portia, and you were kind to your prep team, and you saw the careers as the children they were, and you gave me your own tourniquet so I could grant Cato a mercy killing."
"Katniss," he tries. His hands fall (dreamlike, shaking) atop hers, so strong and sure and warm that it takes his breath away.
"You brought my mother and Prim bread even when I wasn't speaking to you. You donated part of our winnings to Thresh's family, to Rue's. You put yourself in front of me when they shot that old man. You felt sorry for the Capitol and treated them like people and reminded them that they were—and you made them see that we were too. You got Johanna to feel something besides defiance, and you played with Finnick, and you gave that morphling a beautiful last moment, and you wanted to save as many people as you could. You warned District 13 even though it meant…I don't know what, but terrible things for you. You comforted Pollux and you saved us when we froze in that Capitol street and you complimented Tigris and you didn't let me take that nightlock pill. You planted primroses for me. You feed everyone."
"Katniss, please, don't—"
"I give up," Katniss whispers against his back, a secret that sinks through his skin, winds around his spine, nestles deep inside his heart, stitching up the tear that's already stopped bleeding. "All the time, Peeta, I give up, over and over again. I stop looking. I don't care. Until you—you make me see. You remind me to care. When the dark days come, when I can barely move, when I don't even realize how much time is passing…the reason I get up again is because I remind myself."
He can't help himself. Trembling, breathless, Peeta presses her hands deeper against his stomach as he leans back into her.
"Remind yourself of what?"
"Of how beautiful you are," she says. "How good you are. I may have been the girl on fire, Peeta, but you were always the match."
He's a burden to her. The millstone tied around her neck. The reason the cameras are always turned on them, forcing them to play pretend, backing her into a corner so she has to do things that are anathema to her.
But sometimes…maybe, just maybe, sometimes he helps. Maybe sometimes he speaks when she can't, lies when she falters, holds her when she trembles, paints the memories out into the open for both of them. Maybe he isn't always completely useless.
(Maybe, sometimes, he's wanted.)
"I'm sorry, Katniss," he exhales out into the humid night, and wonders if he imagines the kiss she plants just behind where his heart beats.
(He knows he doesn't.
It's real.)