Mrs. Everdeen's Thoughts on Katniss in Thirteen
If there was one thing that she had never wanted for her daughter, it was that she would end up being like her mother. It was a sad state of affairs when you realized that the heartbreak you were feeling over your child's hurts was because they were your own. She had never wanted this for Katniss. She had been almost certain that her oldest had escaped inheriting her temperament. It was obvious now that she had not. She knew the expression on her child's face all too well. It was the same blank look about the eyes that she had witnessed in the mirror each day after her husband had died.
Depression was not supposed to be her strong, able daughter's lot in life. The soul crushing sense of loss that kept you trapped behind a fog that you could not seem to penetrate was something that Katniss was supposed to be immune to; she was supposed to be made of sterner, hardier stuff. She only wishes that were the case.
Katniss is her daughter. (The words feel strange even in her head because she has always thought of Katniss as belonging to her father.) Katniss is her daughter in ways that she had hoped she never would be. She wonders if anyone else even notices. On the surface, it is Prim who is her mother all over again with her gift for healing things, her light hair, and her blue eyes that everyone muttered about looking out of place back in their home in the Seam. There is so much more to it than the things that are seen on the surface.
It's the underneath that matters now, and it's Katniss who is like her underneath. She wonders, for a moment, how it is that she has missed that all these years, but she realizes that it was hidden after they lost their husband and father. Katniss couldn't afford to be destroyed then. As much as she had loved her father, she had loved her sister more. She had held together for Prim because Prim had needed her. Prim had been the center of Katniss's world, and she had lived her life accordingly. She had fought when fighting was hard. She had pushed on when it would have been easier to curl up and let the grief take over. She had, without a second thought, volunteered to go to her death because Prim mattered more than anything else.
She knew what it said about herself that her husband had ranked higher on her own personal scale than her children. It was not a comfortable piece of self-knowledge, but she had acknowledged and made as close to peace with it as she could come long before Prim's name had ever been drawn on that Reaping Day. She wondered, when the initial fog lifted, if Katniss would come to similar terms with the knowledge that her sister had been replaced (knowing Katniss as she now thought that she did, without her even realizing that it had happened).
Peeta Mellark was what mattered to her daughter now, and Peeta Mellark's absence (and probable demise) was what drove her normally stoic child into the twilight of existing instead of living in which she was engulfed. Prim recognized the signs even if she did not say the words. She could see it in her youngest's eyes when she looked between the two of them when she thought that neither would notice. Prim might have gotten her eye color and their shape from her, but the expressions of which they were capable were all her father. She knew how to read those eyes.
If anyone had asked her two years ago which of her children would crumble if they had lost their home, she (as she imagined most anyone acquainted with them all would have done) would have said it would be kind hearted, sensitive Prim. She could see now that they all would have been wrong. Prim loved the whole world, and that left her with something left to love no matter what losses piled up on her. She cried her tears, but she kept going. She was her father's child in that respect.
Katniss who let so few in and focused her affections so narrowly found herself at a loss when the object was no longer there to be the object. She should have seen it sooner - the ways they were alike. There was a reason that Ari Everdeen had no friends to count for all of her years living in the Seam. The Donner twins had been the companions of her childhood. Losing Maysilee had, ultimately, meant losing the both of them, and she had never seen the need to seek a replacement. She had acquaintances. She had her children. She had had a husband whom she had built a world around.
Katniss had Prim. She had had Madge Undersee to fill the social obligations of her student life. She had had Gale Hawthorne to help lighten the drudgery of the care of a family she had undertaken at far too young of an age. She had not wanted anyone else. She had not needed anyone else. Katniss would have done without Madge and Gale if the circumstances had changed one way or another just as she had done without the Donner twins (with a thought from time to time of how it had been different when they were there before she shrugged her shoulders and went on with the way things were without them).
She should have noticed the similar turn of their dispositions earlier. She's noticing it know. She wishes that she weren't. She wishes that it wasn't there to see. She wishes for a lot of things that she can't have even though she has long, long ago given up on wishing. Peeta Mellark was a bad idea from the start, but she doesn't have the heart to wish that her daughter had remained oblivious to the boy's inclinations. She's never had the heart to wish that she had remained oblivious to why that young Everdeen (as her mother had called him) was always lingering around after he had brought them things for the shop.
Katniss will mend as well as such things can be mended. She'll do it because she has a chance that not all of them are given. If she could have blown the mines completely to pieces in the days after she had lost her husband, the fires would still be burning. Katniss can fight back. She has a target; she has the means waiting at her disposal. There is anger to be found in the dark kind of grief that she and her daughter have clung to, and Katniss will be using hers. What remains to be seen is what will be left of her daughter after she does. She doesn't know. She's never found a way to burn out hers.