Mr. Mellark
He had been thirteen when he first really noticed Ari. District 12 was not overly large when it came to population, but there were still plenty of children and teenagers running around. Just because two people the same age happened to both grow up in town did not mean that they necessarily knew each other. Yes, there would be recognition that he was the baker's kid on her part; he would have been able to tell you that her parents ran the apothecary shop. That did not mean that he would be able to tell you much about her other than the twin girls whose parents made and sold candy (a shop that was a very rare visit for nearly everyone in the District no matter what kids from the Seam might mutter to the contrary) seemed to be with her a lot.
They had not been friends as children. Their parents were nodding acquaintances, but they did not spend time together in anything other than a business capacity. His parents (when they spent a rare evening with friends) played cards with the proprietors of the general store, and his mother did her visiting and gossiping with the woman who ran the seamstress shop where people also rented their toasting clothes. The point being that Ari the apothecary's daughter was a part of the background of his life just like hundreds of other people in the District that he might notice in passing but did not really think about as anything other than a part of the background. That changed in some subtle, sneaking up on him manner over the course of the year when he was thirteen.
He had never been able to pin down what it was that had started the whole thing. She was someone that he became aware of without realizing how or why it had happened before he was too far in the midst of it all to do anything about it. Very nearly all of the kids from town were blond, so it was not as if it were the brightness of her hair that had somehow caught his attention. She was not loud or popular. There was never a crowd of people surrounding her that would draw your attention to whatever corner it was in which she had placed herself. He just found himself noticing - where she was, what she was doing, or whom it was that she was talking to (not that there were many of those to notice). She was just so quietly focused that he found himself wondering what it would take to draw her attention from whatever it was that she was involved in at the moment and to something else - namely him.
He did lots of things during the course of his day that he did simply because they were what he was supposed to be doing. He did not spend much thought or effort on them. He got them finished off and moved on to the next thing on his list. Ari, it seemed, never just did anything. She never just listened or just spoke or just read or just whatever the action of the moment might have been. Whatever it was that she was doing, whoever it was who had her attention, she threw every last bit of her being into it. It was fascinating to watch. It was intriguing to think about. There seemed to be no middle ground of just getting by with Ari. Either something had the whole of her focus and intensity or it got nothing from her at all. He thought it might have been a little bit exhausting to approach life in that way, but it was as if he could not stop thinking about it once the idea of her had lodged itself somewhere in his brain. He found himself watching her more. He found himself noticing more and more about her. He could not seem to stop; he did not think that he wanted to stop. Nothing in his life had ever seemed as interesting as he now found Ari.
It was a challenge in a way, but it was also something that became a bit of an obsession. He wanted to break through that wall that she seemed to have around her that separated the things and people deemed worthy of her notice and those which were not. He did not want her eyes to ghost over him as if he were a chair that happened to be inhabiting the same room that she was. He did not want to be merely a part of the background of her life. He wanted her to see him. He wanted to have her recognize that he was a person that she had noticed. He wanted just a bit of that focus that she placed so intently on the things and people about which she cared to be turned in his direction (although he instinctively recognized that there would be no such thing as just a bit of focus from Ari). The more he watched, the more he knew that his initial impressions had all been correct - Ari did not give just a bit of focus to anything. When Ari was focused on something (when Ari cared about something), then her whole world revolved around whatever that thing or person was.
He wanted that. He wanted that in a way that it had never before occurred to him to want anything. He wanted to know what it would be like to have someone build an entire piece of their life around him. It was a tantalizing prospect. He half wondered why the entire District was not full of teenage boys trying to do the same thing that he was. Who would not want that? Who would not want to feel as if he was the most important person to someone who seemed to love so whole heartedly? It was not as though his parents did not love him. It was not as though he was suffering from neglect or a lack of attention. Ari was different. He did not know how to quantify that difference or put it into words. He just knew that it felt as if you would be the most special person in the world if you could be the object of that affection.
He tried everything he could think of those first few months just to get her to look in his direction. They were all the desperate pleas for attention that a newly teenage boy was capable of coming up with in all of his ignorant, unrefined glory. Not a one of them worked, and he got himself in more trouble in six weeks than he had in the rest of his life all put together. It was not until one day that he was staring at the lunch table where Ari sat with the Donner twins that something broke through his feeble, poorly thought out succession of attempts. He was about to do something truly desperate that involved the completely unthinkable act of wasting a part of his lunch to throw it at her (thirteen year old boys do tend to suffer from a combination of impulsiveness, a lack of patience, and a propensity for the grand gesture) when he noticed one of the twins (he thought that it was Maysilee, but he was never entirely certain that he was telling them apart correctly) looking right at him with her eyebrow raised in what could only be interpreted as an you have got to be kidding me sort of a look.
It stopped him cold as she shook her head at him and turned back around to the conversation of the other two girls. He spent a sleepless night that day contemplating his as yet complete and utter failure at eliciting any sort of a response from Ari at all (while drawing a slew of negative responses from all of the adults in his immediate vicinity) and admitted that he had been going about this all wrong. He needed a different way. He needed a better way.
He walked directly over to their lunch table the next day and sat himself down before there could be any protest and proceeded to ask Maysilee for assistance with understanding some question about mining coal that they were going over in class for what had to be at least the seventh time and that they all could have parroted the answer for since they were seven. It was clumsy and awkward, but Maysilee Donner smiled at him, nodded her head in approval, and summarized the process for him as if it had been a completely understandable and legitimate question. Her sister rolled her eyes and looked at him as if he were an idiot. Ari did not even seem to notice that he and Maysilee were conversing within a couple of feet of her. That did not matter. He had successfully inserted himself into her space. Maysilee approved (and if anyone was in a position to know what it would take to work himself into Ari's notice, then it would have to be one of the Donner twins).
He sat at their lunch table every day after that. His other friends teased him about spending all his time with the girls, but he ignored their jabs and did his best to not let himself get disheartened when there were days where he spent his entire lunch period in complete silence because there was no way he could find to include himself in the topic on which they were conversing. Sometimes, he wondered if they were speaking in some sort of a code because he could not make heads or tails out of what it was that they were saying. He stayed anyway. He liked to listen to Ari talk. He liked the way her thoughtful, softly spoken tone contrasted with the louder, often accompanied by large gestures manner in which the Donner twins communicated. On the last day of school that year, Ari looked him directly in the eye. A feeling of warmth washed over him as he realized that she was actually seeing him. She was not just vaguely registering that the boy who came to talk to Maysilee was sitting at a table with her. She was actually seeing him. It would have seemed like a pathetic, small step to anyone else, but it was justification of all of his time and effort to him. It was working. He was wearing her down.
He did not lose any sleep that night. Instead, his dreams were haunted by visions of what it would be like when she finally smiled at him. It was six more months before that event happened (a smile that he could directly attribute to something that he had said). It was two more months after that before she actually asked a question that was specifically for him. It might not have seemed like much to anyone else, but he treasured those moments and the knowledge that he was making progress. He was working himself into her world. He was making himself one of the recipients of her attention.
Then, Reaping Day of the year that they were sixteen came. Everyone dealt with Reaping Day in a different way. Some people pretended that it did not exist as well as they could for all of the time that they could (it was not as if they could ever get away from it what with the mandatory viewings and the Victory Tour and the extra edition in the previous year of the reading of the Quarter Quell Card). They stood in the square in their appropriate places on the day itself, but (provided that the name that was called was not theirs) they did not talk about any of it on any occasion. There were those who dwelt on the possibility of it being them through the year as a whole (you could always tell who those were by the shadows that deepened under their eyes as the day drew closer). There were those who tried to be as aloof as possible. They shrugged their shoulders whenever the topic arose. They wore resigned expressions on their faces as they stood in the square.
He was not a member of any of those categories (not really). He did not think about the Games on an everyday basis, but he did not ignore their existence either. He knew that his name was in the bowl on the stage (he knew, like everyone did whether they admitted to it or not, exactly how many slips of paper featuring his name there were). He did not mention it to anyone, but the knowledge was there.
That day had carried the knowledge that there would be twice as many names being drawn, but it had not really felt any different than any other Reaping Day - until one of the names was Maysilee's. His memories of that day are all coated in a sort of glazed over gloss. The thing that stands out most is the expression on Ari's face. By the time Maysilee was shaking hands up on the stage, Ari was already blank. A wall had already gone up, and not even the remaining Donner sister still clutching at her arm seemed to be registering through it.
He wanted, more than anything, for something to break down the wall that Ari had built up around herself. It did not seem right to him that one year's worth of the Games should have killed Maysilee, turned her sister into a chronically ill shadow of herself, and turned Ari into some sort of a recluse who spoke to no one unless required as she went through the motions of finishing her years at school. He watched her more carefully now than he had during the years when he had fought so hard to gain her notice. There was no use, he felt, in trying to draw her notice now. She was too closed off; she was too committed to keeping everyone that was not already a part of her circle blocked out. What chance did he have of breaking through that when he had had so little luck in the years when only her natural reticence was working against him?
So, he bided his time. He was present but not pushing. He watched but did not try to find ways to wiggle himself under her fences. When someone was finally able to push passed her walls, there was no one more surprised than he was (and it most definitely was not him who did the pushing). It was a man from the Seam that he could not even place. He did not think that they had gone to school together (or if they had there had been enough of an age difference that he could not remember). The next thing anyone knew, Ari was gone. She was tucked away in some house in the Seam with not a sign of her to be seen anywhere around her parents' shop. No one seemed to know exactly what had happened, but the rumors ran rampant.
Her parents had kicked her out, her new husband was keeping her locked up so that she could not come to her senses and try to go home, or she had not actually gone to the Seam at all - she was sick and unable to leave her room. They flew fast, and they flew loudly. Ari had always been so self-contained that there was no one around town to know her well enough to dispute or counter the sayings. Her parents were not doing any talking (the apothecary shop was the only place in town that the gossip was not flying). The sad women who now inhabited the upstairs of the candy shop by themselves did not mix much, and he did not know what to say. He was in something like a state of shock. He had always thought that it was just a matter of time. He had thought that he would eventually work himself back in the way that he had during those years at school when he had integrated himself into her life by being present at her table. It had never occurred to him that someone would come out of nowhere and make all of his thoughts of someday irrelevant.
He thought that he should feel more disappointed than he did, but he just felt odd - as if some long off promise of something to come had been quietly canceled. It was gone, but it had never really been his. He learned that while he might have been the obsessive type, he was also apparently not the type to be devastated. His life went on much as it had before Ari got married. He never saw her. He learned to recognize her husband (he seemed to be the one that did any necessary shopping in town). He always found himself wondering how she was, but he did not find himself disliking the man that had slipped under her fences and ended his dream of someday. He seemed nice enough. He hummed and sang as he made his way around town, and he noticed that the birds always went quiet in the presence of the sound. A man like that had to be a decent man. He could not believe the rumors of Ari locked away or beaten. They made about as much sense as the ones that insisted that her father had gone into a rage when he learned of her involvement with a miner and had gotten her taken away by Peacekeepers. People came up with the strangest, most nonsensical ideas when their tongues got to wagging.
When his parents started inviting over "friends" that they had never invited over before with their daughter a couple of years his senior in tow, he did not think much of it. When they suggested that he might think about getting married, he did. It did not seem like such a bad idea. His parents were not in the best of health (they had had him very late in their lives), and they could use an extra set of hands to help out around the shop. So, he got married. He was not the type of person to be unhappy about his life. They got on well enough.
A baby came along fairly quickly. He noticed that she did not seem to cope very well with the baby's crying, so he did his best to make sure that he was the one that settled the boy whenever it was possible. His mother clung to her new grandchild (having buried her husband just days before the child's birth), and his wife was happy to hand him off - he did not bother to think too deeply about that. Not everyone needed to be enamored with babies. The second one followed on the heels of the first, and he noticed that she seemed unpleasantly surprised. He was not. He had never exactly regretted the fact that he was an only child (he had never known anything else). His wife having been an only child as well, he thought she might share his thought that it might be nice for their little boys to have each other to play with and help each other with their chores.
She was pregnant with their third (and loudly displeased about that fact) when his mother was buried next to his father. He tried to keep the little ones out of her way, but she seemed to be looking for reasons to be angry. By the time their youngest and last was born, the older ones had learned to be wary of their mother's reactions. Peeta never cried as a baby the way that the older two had. It was as if he was sensitive to the feeling in their home and acted accordingly. He knew that was a silly thought. He was just a calmer baby than the older boys had been, but he did grow up to be an observant child. He did not know whether he was also more sensitive to the feelings of those around him or if it was a consequence of his observations.
It makes sense to him (in an odd sort of a way) that his sensitive youngest would catch on to that same quality that had drawn him to Ari in her daughter far earlier than he had. He was only five, and it was his very first day of school when he came home with stars in his eyes and told him about the little girl with her hair in dark braids that stood in front of the class and sang for them all. In his halting, small child kind of way, he attempts to make them understand that the little girl was singing in front of everyone but he does not think that she even knew that all of them were there watching her.
"It was that girl," he tells him. "The one that you showed me."
His wife went still at those words. Her lips pursed up in the manner that his son (as small as he was) had already learned to recognize as a sign that danger was approaching. Peeta clammed up and stopped his chatter, but he knew from the dark look that was sent his way that he would be hearing about it later. He just allowed himself to appreciate the fact that for once it is a round of yelling that she holds back until after the children cannot hear. Peeta never talked about the dark haired girl in front of his mother again. He never mentioned a word about her in front of his older brothers who were quick to tease without really knowing what it was that they were teasing about.
He watched his little boy over the years that followed. He never seemed to make the effort to draw the little Everdeen girl's attention in the way that he had tried to draw her mother's what felt like so very long before. He learns by careful listening that the little girl's name is Katniss, but he never hears it from his youngest's lips. Peeta is a study in contradictions. He is open and friendly with every person that manages to cross his path, but he somehow manages to be that without anyone being any the wiser about what it is that he is thinking and feeling. Little Delly Cartwright from the shoemaker's shop plays with him often but even her kindhearted worry over everyone and everything that crosses her path never seems to accomplish an understanding of the relationship with his mother that Peeta has.
He does not go out of his way to hide it. His wife does not go out of her way to hide it. She does her yelling and name calling where any number of people can happen to overhear. His boys are rough and tumble and have bruises enough of the normal variety that the occasional ones that did not happen in the normal course of events go unnoticed (or at least unremarked on) by those in a position to see. He counters her whenever he can, but he would be the first to admit that he has never really stood up to her and demanded that she stop. He has always chosen subtle machinations over direct confrontation. He knows that it may have been the wrong choice, but it is the choice that he has made. He does not want a strife ridden home - there are plenty of things outside of their family to worry over without adding to it. Letting her do her yelling and name calling to get it out of her system seems to be the quickest and easiest way to get them all back to peace. They went on and years went by and his children went through their own Reaping Days. It was different standing on the outside watching the children in the square, but he still kept a count in his head - now of the number of slips that were in the bowl for each of his children. It was different, but it was still part of his normal.
Then, there came another Reaping Day that changed everything. This time it was Peeta's name that was called by the woman on the stage that swished her overly long fingernails through the slips of paper and changed the course of people's lives. He was already prepared to spend his days offering whatever quiet consolation he could to his child as he watched Ari's daughter go into the Games.
He had followed along with the rest of the District in automatic response as they lifted their fingers to their lips in honor of the girl's willingness to take the place of her sister, but he would not think about why it was that they had done it until much later. He was too busy thinking about how hurt his sensitive boy was going to be over this development. He did not even register, in those initial instants after the boy's name was called, who it was that the woman had announced. He was too busy thinking other thoughts. It was not actually until he saw Peeta climbing the stairs up on the stage and noticed the way that the other parents standing in the vicinity of him and his wife were so very carefully not looking at them that he realized what it was that was happening. He had not expected that. He had never really expected that. He knew (or should have known) better. He had seen plenty of teenagers from town have their names drawn over the years. He had known or known people who had known those who had gone. That it would be one of his children had never been a visible reality for him.
He moved through the expected motions for the next half of an hour without feeling anything. He had gone numb. It was as if he was standing to the side watching his body make its way into the Justice Building to bid goodbye to Peeta. When thoughts started forming again, they were disjointed threads that he could not seem to manage to hold onto as they brushed by the edges of his mind. There were images of the faintest wisps of blond hair that had clung to the mostly bald head of the third and last of his little boys. There were pictures drawn with rocks scratching out lines in the dirt as the little boy had so determinedly tried to engrave the things he saw inside his head into some measure of sharing and permanence.
When was the last time (the thought halted for a moment as he clung to it) that he had seen Peeta draw? He lost the train of it; it was forced out by the last picture of his son that his memory brought forward to stay as he shifted from one foot to the other separated from final goodbyes by a door that the Peacekeeper seemed to be tarrying to open. It was of a not quite teenage Peeta standing straight with his shoulders thrown back, swelling bruise clearly visible on the side of his face and around his eye as he looked not at his yelling and cursing mother but at something none of the rest of them could see.
It was not the only time his wife had struck one of their children. It was not the only time she had screamed herself nearly hoarse over some offense or other that she believed they had committed. It was the only time that his sensitive son had not slouched his shoulders and caved in on himself as if the words were beating him down. He did not think that Peeta had even heard her. His wife had noticed that something was different, but she was not observant enough to know what it was. She had merely yelled louder and longer in consequence. He had let her. He had been too busy trying to figure out their child to intercede.
On that occasion, Peeta had not needed his intercession. He had been beyond her words. He had been (likely) beyond noticing the pain of where she had struck him. There had been conviction in their son's stance that day, and he had never known why. She had claimed that he had burned some of their most expensive loaves which made no sense at all. Peeta was the most careful of their children (and the most mindful of avoiding his mother's temper). He had always thought that there must have been something else that happened that day; he had never discovered what. He did not know why the memory was sticking with him now in the midst of his numbness and detachment until he realized that there had been a like stiffening of his son's posture as the guards led him through the door at the back of the stage as if he had decided something that gave him equal conviction.
He was still pondering over that thought when a series of words from his wife finally drew him back into the reality of what was happening in front of him. He double blinked as he reconciled that her words had actually been stated (not some bizarre figment of his imagination). She did not wait for their time to be up after her pronouncement. She let herself out. His eyes caught his youngest's and held. There was something like pleading in them, and he recognized that it had nothing to do with the harsh words of his mother.
Peeta did not think that her words were harsh; he thought that they were true. Peeta was asking him something with his eyes that he did not want to speak in front of his standing silent with their heads bowed brothers. He thought he understood what it was, and he nodded his head in acknowledgement. Peeta gave him the briefest of smiles before throwing an arm around each of his brothers and hugging them to him in a manner that would have caused them to mock him mercilessly on any other occasion. As it was, he thought he saw a glimmer of tears in the eyes of his perpetually growly eldest. Someone reached out and drew him in, and the four of them stood together in their last minute openly united in a way that they had somehow never been before. He took the moment as it was given before they were hustled out by a Peacekeeper who seemed to materialize out of nowhere. He did not walk with his sons toward the entrance. Instead, he slipped into the other line - the ones for those saying their goodbyes to Katniss.
Ari was being helped toward the door by her little blond headed look alike and the dark haired boy he had traded a loaf of bread to just that morning. She did not see him. He suspected that she did not see much of anything. She was too busy shooing the boy off and absently patting the shoulders of her daughter who appeared to be crying rivers of tears in a silent stream that should have been capable of melting all the hearts in Panem. They would not. Panem soaked in tears the way an alcoholic soaked up liquor.
He had a message to convey. He thought it only fair that he let the girl know what he had promised his son he would do - even if she never knew that it was because of him that he would do it. It was an awkward interview, but he knew better than to expect anything else from time spent with Ari's eldest.
The next days found him having sympathy for the Donner family in a way that he had never truly appreciated before. The way he had avoided making eye contact with any of them in the weeks after Maysilee was gone came back to him with startling clarity. He was seeing that same avoidance of eye contact from every person that came into the bakery. When the Games began in earnest, the days became stranger with every passing moment. He had always thought that he had had a plan for a future built around Katniss Everdeen's mother. He had never felt anything even remotely like the devotion for her he was watching his son display on the screen that he was being forced to watch.
It took over everything. It was all that he could think about. Even when he was going through the motions of making trades for goat cheese with Prim Everdeen in honor of his promise, he was still distracted by thoughts of his son. He had thought that he had known who his little boy was (and he was still his little boy despite the fact that he had grown taller than him over the course of the previous year). He had thought he had a good grasp of what he was thinking and feeling despite his lack of talking on the subject. He was realizing with each and every moment of his child being featured on that screen in the square or the one in the bakery or the one in the small living area of their home above the shop that he did not really know his child at all. He did not know the depths of his child's thoughts. He did not know about his child's ability to be committed to what he believed he should be doing. It was startling and attention drawing; he could not look away from it.
He tuned out his wife's sighing complaints and gruff mutterings. He chose not to enter into the conversation when he heard his wife making a comment about having one less to worry about providing for (just as he chose to attribute her words to being uncomfortable dealing with grief). He watched entranced as his son came to life on those screens in a way that he had never seen him before, and when he did notice those around them, it was to notice the way that others that he never would have expected seemed to be equally entranced.
Rule changes and cozy camera angles employed in caves aside, there was just something about this Game that felt different - and it was not only because it was his child that he was watching. At least, he did not think that it was. Otherwise, why did other people seem to be lingering in the square to catch further glimpses as well? It could not just be because it had been so long since they had had a Tribute still alive so far into the process. There was something happening that they all recognized as something out of their normal, but he did not think (if the pondering expressions on their faces were any indication) that they had any better of a grasp on what it was than he did.
He thought his heart had stopped in those final moments when the two of them stood with handfuls of berries raised to their lips. He knew that he was not breathing. He had never expected that watching his son die (not that he had ever really given the idea much thought even when it seemed inevitable) would leave him feeling less overcome with grief and more choked with some bizarre sense of pride that he could not find the words to define (and he had no time to go searching for them). The near panicked voice of the announcer that broke over their moment was so completely outside the scope of what the Games usually held for the viewers that it broke him out of the state he was in and seemed to shake him into some deep place of clarity where many things that he had not thought of before were laying themselves out in front of him.
They were coming home; the both of them were coming home. It was such a strange thought that it was difficult for him to wrap his mind around it. When it finally did, he found himself lost in the memories of what it had been like the last time that someone had ridden that train home outside of a casket. He could do nothing about that. It would come as it came.
He saw the picture of the two of them poised with poison at their lips embedded in his eyelids every time that he blinked. It hovered in front of him when he closed his eyes. They had been so willing to die. They had been so ready to die. There had been nothing but resignation and affection visible on their faces at that moment. There had been nothing of fear or loss.
He thought of Haymitch. He thought of the whispers in town that swirled around the man and all of his habits. He wondered if Peeta or Katniss either one would be able to come back to this place where neither themselves nor any aspect of their lives would ever be the same and learn to fit. He wondered if either one of them would manage to summon up the determination to live that they had managed to find for dying. The living he knew would be infinitely harder. He did not know whether being together would make it better or worse. He did not know much of anything except that he had never really known the son he had before, and he suspected that he would find it difficult to ever really know the one that he had now.