It gets easier. A life in the wild trees and the strange air, unscented with civilization, has shifted her understanding of emotions. As she has dispensed with hot showers and a feather pillow and electricity, so she has dispensed with her hatred for Snow. What good does it do her out on the road? It is too heavy to carry. It is not gone, of course, but she has tidied it away somewhere deep inside herself. She will find it again, if she requires it.
Her fear is different: that is a survival instinct. Yet every physical interaction from him is orchestrated with gentle care. If he must touch her, he does so lightly. His little bows and his etiquette are not just performance, she learns, but some genuine way he attempts to express an affectionate respect for her. She disagrees with him that she trusts him, but she at least trusts him not to kill her.
And she has other feelings about him now. Snow was once violence and power, cruelty and bloodshed. Now he is the absence of hunger, because he helps her forage and cooks for her. He is a mostly pleasant distraction on the road, with his educational lectures and wry comments. He is what keeps her warm at night. He is blue eyes in the morning, stew and tea, a rich laugh, deep breathing at her side.
His physical presence has come to offend her the least. He never used his physicality to frighten her before, when they were enemies, and she finds no terror now in the broad, ageing shape of him. His body has a sturdy heaviness to it, the chest full, the limbs strong, but the bones of his knees and hips and elbows show through sharper than those of a younger man. It provokes no ill feeling inside her to wake and find her hand on his arm, her head on his shoulder, her body against his. It only feels warm.
This is how she wakes on a morning of spectacular, singular cold. Shivering wracks her body and she burrows her shaking animal body into the depths of the sleeping bag, pressing half-awake limbs against her only source of warmth, finding some solace from the icy air in the crook of an arm.
'Miss Everdeen?'
She offers an inarticulate groan in answer, one that says: yes, I'm awake; shut up, I'm sleepy; it's cold, let me get warm.
Snow lifts the sleeping bag and she peers up and out of it, and there she meets his cool eyes. She usually finds him sitting upright and awake, staring down at her and smiling, but today he has remained beneath the sleeping bag. There is a cold flush to his face and his breath steams.
'I believe it snowed in the night.'
'Ugh.' She presses her face into the sweat-sticky alcove between the bedroll and Snow's arm. Then she extracts herself, shivering all the while, to confront the cold beyond the tent. She yanks the zip down a few inches and reveals the curdled grey of the sky above white-dusted treetops. An insidious twist of cold slides into the tent and she closes the zip sharply, groaning, then smacks the top and sides of the tent to dislodge the snow.
'Poor luck,' says Snow. 'We did suspect a cold front would set in before Spring.'
Katniss retreats beneath the sleeping bag, all of her body shaking. She folds her body back against Snow's and lets his heat seep into her.
Do not get too attached to that warm body, she reminds herself. The rebellion are going to take it to pieces.
'Thought I'd had enough bad luck with snow,' she puns flatly, then stares at her companion. For a moment, Snow looks at her with the blankness of either confusion or disdain for the pun, and then he cracks a concessionary smile.
'Yes indeed, Miss Everdeen.'
'We can't stay here,' she says, still shaking. She pulls the sleeping bag as tightly around her as she can. It doesn't work well: the bag is designed for one person, and its use as a blanket does not maximize insulation. 'We need food. How much is left?'
Snow hands to her first her own backpack, which she never lets him search, and then goes through his own.
'Six packets of dehydrated meals in mine,' he says, then lets the bag fall with displeasure. 'That is all.'
'I have seven, plus half a bar of chocolate.' She runs a hand through her hair, exasperated and a little fearful. 'This won't get us to that ruined city, nowhere near. If we dropped to one shared meal a day, then I don't know… Maybe.'
'That's not enough sustenance for the amount of energy we are exerting,' he says. 'Richmond is far. We need the calories.'
'What we need is game,' she says, irritated. 'And good luck to me finding it in the snow. Everything will go underground.'
'Well,' says Snow, and his expression is strange. 'I believe in you.'
He is so intense and wholly committed to this belief that it is difficult not to be moved by it, and in spite of herself Katniss feels a certain warm determination fill her. Yes, she can find game. Is she not a hunter?
'Right,' she says. 'I will hunt this morning. If the snow gets worse, then hunting will get worse. If it gets better, then good for us. If I don't catch something by noon then we keep moving.'
He inclines his head. 'As you wish. I will wash up then build the fire.'
She nods and he nods, and she watches him pull on his waterproofs once again. The thick sweat stains marring both of their clothing are starting to become invisible to her. She is forgetting what it felt like to be clean. Brief scrubs of faces and underarms in rivers: this is the best they get. The scents of Snow's body intermingle so much with her own that they weave into one, thick lattice. She wonders if she smells of his blood breath.
Snow unfolds his long, almost spidery legs as he stands and exits the tent as Katniss winds her hair into a braid. She slept without nightmares and now she wakes without anxiety. Is this a problem? Doesn't she need to be afraid of Snow? He makes it so difficult with his polite compassion and gentle concern. But that must be his plan, after all, to get her to trust him. And to what end? Not to kill her. To take over the rebellion? Or just to be near her?
He likes you too much, she tells herself. It's dangerous.
But as she clambers out of the tent, blinking in the snow-bright light and the glitter of frost, she feels a peculiar warmth resist the cold air. Apart from Peeta, nobody has liked her in so long. Even Haymitch, who she knows loves her in his own way, only visits when he needs something. And Peeta needs something too: love, a hearth, family. Children. Snow wants and needs nothing from her, except to smile at her in the mornings like a merry specter and to murmur unsettling compliments. There is something nice about this.
Katniss chews a small piece of jerky and delays putting her boots on until the last minute. Her right foot aches. They have to keep moving. Thinking about Snow, chewing jerky, stamping from one socked foot to the other to keep warm, she fails in her hungry exhaustion to notice an extruding rock. Rudely, it collides with her toes.
'Shit,' she curses, pain shooting through her foot. An incredible agony bursts from her toe — the same one Snow said had frostnip. She sits, clutching her foot, and considers taking off the sock to survey the damage. There's something wrong with it, and ignoring the problem will only exacerbate it. But they are in the middle of nowhere. What can she possibly do about it?
As she sits there, considering, she is too distracted by pain and anxiety to hear the noise of the animal approach. And then she looks up and, from surprise and stupidity, she screams.
A bear.
Her brain processes information rapidly. Black bear. Rarely dangerous. It's hungry: interested in the food. Not me. My gun. Where is my gun? Where is my bow?
The bear does not like the sound of her scream. It is large, confused by her, but does not see her as a threat. That is a problem. She needs to be threatening. Scare it off.
Then the bear steps towards her as she lies supine on the floor, and she wonders if she might die here. It doesn't think she's dangerous, and it's hungry.
'Get away!' she shouts, and it does not. It steps closer.
Katniss shuffles backwards, feeling the ground madly, hoping for her bow, hoping for her arrows, hoping for her gun. She turns her head. There — lying in the edge of the tent, a few feet away. If she can just get a little closer, just a little.
'NO!'
This new noise startles her and then she sees Snow, standing at his full height, briefly paused at the tree-line as he assesses the situation. And then he strides to the bear which, distracted and confused, no longer knows if it is going to get any food.
Katniss takes her eyes off the bear and throws herself at her gun, scrabbling through the dirt, her skin electric. A few seconds. Grasp the gun. Turn. Shoot.
They are not aggressive animals… We couldn't get that unlucky… We couldn't…
'GET OFF! GET AWAY!'
She has never heard a voice so loud as Snow's, and as her hand closes on the gun she turns back to see the tableau: the bear rearing at her, about to throw its weight upon her; Snow between them, feet planted, blocking it from her body, absolutely unafraid and furious. More than furious: insulted.
It takes four seconds for Katniss to flick off the safety, aim the gun, and fire. It takes three for the bear to pull back its paw and — in raw animal confusion at this bizarre situation — take one fat-clawed swipe at Snow's chest.
He doesn't dodge. Later, she will wonder if that was deliberate. If he took the blow to ensure that she did not.
Her aim with the gun might not be good, but at point blank range, there is no possibility for error. The shot echoes and her ears ring.
The bear drops.
Snow drops too.
Katniss spares one second to assess that the bear — a hole in its face, mouth open, tongue loose, eyes rolled — is dead, and then she rushes to Snow.
'Snow?'
His hands are pressed against his side and beneath his fingers spreads a thick silhouette of blood. The bear has cut him deep. It's bad. It's very, very bad.
'Oh shit,' she says.
Snow is still conscious, his eyes vibrant, and they lock onto hers. 'Med kit. Alcohol. Glue gun. Now.'
For a moment she is paralyzed, staring with horror, and then she obeys. Fingers scrabble for her pack, for the fastenings, then delve inside to locate the kit. She wrenches it out, unzips it, then her shaking hands find the medical alcohol and the glue gun.
When she turns to Snow he has peeled back his shirt and pressed his hands over the wounds within.
'Be quick and don't be stingy,' he says through hard-grit teeth, and then he pulls his hands away.
Three huge, wet caverns. Yellow flesh inside. Puddles of blood.
Katniss' mind shuts down and narrows to the tiny, quivering moments of the present. With trembling hands, she unscrews the alcohol and pours it over the gashes; they drink it greedily, and Snow breathes in sharply. Then she raises the glue-gun. Nozzle to wound. Squeeze. Drag. Repeat. Repeat.
The moment the third wound has been closed, Snow falls back to the ground, his head hitting the gravel, and he emits a low, strange groan that suggests both pain and relief.
'Good, Katniss,' he says, and his eyes are half-closed. 'That'll… halt the bleeding. Stitches, next.'
Katniss had hoped the glue would hold the wound together entirely on its own, but she can see already that blood is oozing out of one edge, a little red worm seeking the surface.
Katniss, echoes Snow's voice in her head. He only calls her that when the situation is really dire.
She locates the needle first, and then the thick black thread. She wills her fingers to obey her as she threads the loop, and she shivers.
'Have you done this before?' Snow's voice is exhausted. Either blood loss or shock is sinking into him. Katniss barely notices that her hands are already dripping red with his insides.
'I stitched Peeta,' she says, and despises how high her voice is. 'And… a couple of times I helped my mother. But… nothing like this.'
Her hands tremble as she hooks the needle into the skin, and then her mind blanks. Where does it go next?
Snow reads her mind with ease. 'There, Miss Everdeen,' he murmurs, and puts one hand on the back of hers. He guides the needle and she hooks the flesh again, and then he guides her again, and then she is able to do it herself. She sniffs deeply, only vaguely aware that she is on the verge of tears.
'You are doing… a terrible job, Miss Everdeen,' Snow murmurs, and her laugh is choked and wet.
'I'm really bad at sewing,' she whispers. The tears are coming now.
Calmly, firmly, but with shaking fingers, Snow takes the needle and thread from her. It with mesmerized horror and fascination that Katniss watches him put them to his own wound and sew it up himself, deft and practiced, hands moving like strange pale birds.
'Can I do anything?'
'Tell me a story.'
She thinks she has misheard. 'What?'
'Tell me a story. Tell me about your sister. A pleasant memory.' His fingers, slick with blood, work the thread through the wounds.
'I… She… I tried to teach her how to make rabbit snares,' she whispers, sobbing. It's the first thing that comes to mind. 'Simple. Taught her the knots at home. Easy to make a rabbit snare. Hard to catch a rabbit. We… we went into the forest…' She watches the slide of needle through skin, over and over, and blood spills carelessly onto the ground. 'Set up the snares. She was so excited. I never let her go in the forest. And we went to the lake. The only time I took her. It was beautiful.' She laughs and feels her upper lip grow gross with snot, then wipes her face. 'No, it wasn't. It was winter, it looked like trash. But we sat there for hours. And then we went back and we'd caught a rabbit. And Prim…' The thick black thread pulls Snow's flesh taut, overlaying old scars with a neat new pair of shoelaces. 'She couldn't kill it. She just couldn't. And she wouldn't let me do it either. She begged me to let it go.' Katniss laughs. 'We were so hungry. And I let that stupid rabbit go, and I was so mad at her.' Then she weeps hard. Sobs shudder through her, slamming out of her lungs, and she rocks a bit on the ground. 'Why did you make me tell you that?'
Snow cuts the thread on the final wound and ties it with speed and grace. 'To distract you, Miss Everdeen.' He is pale and tired, but the bleeding has stopped. A huge pool soaks the ground. 'Come. Help me to the tent.'
Getting Snow into the tent is hard. He wraps his arm around her shoulder and she eases him inside, then they clumsily fall to the ground together. She tries to take the worst of his weight, which saves Snow from some pain, but jars her shoulder. He is a large man. Then she gets their packs and spare clothes and makes a pillow for him the best she can, and with difficulty she works his legs into the end of the sleeping bag. He does not argue; he does not complain. He lets her minister these little helps, and when she catches his eyes they are a deep, fascinated blue.
'Thank you, Miss Everdeen,' as she smooths the sleeping bag around his waist.
They both sit for a moment. His breathing is labored and his face is ashen. Katniss is furious at herself for crying.
'We're alright, Miss Everdeen,' says Snow, and for the first time in the chaos she shoots him a hateful look.
'Don't comfort me. I'm fine. You're the one bleeding out.'
'I would not bleed out from these wounds. No major blood vessels,' he says, and his smile is lopsided and tired.
She shakes her head at him. 'You shouldn't have protected me from that bear. I could've shot it.'
'Perhaps,' he says, head tilted. 'Or perhaps it would have killed you.' His eyes close. 'I didn't want to watch you die again.' His eyes open again, but only briefly. A slit of inhuman blue. 'I need to rest now.'
'Of course,' she says. 'I'll stay here. I'll watch over you.'
A twinge of his lips that express his strangest smile lights his face. With a little delirium, he murmurs: 'You can be my guardian angel.'
And then his eyes close, his breathing drops, and he passes instantly into unconsciousness. Katniss studies the open slackness of his mouth and the wet glint of his tongue within, the stately carve of his cheeks, the rough heather of his beard. Uncertainly, she reaches out and brushes a lock of hair out of his sleeping face.
She does not know what an angel is.
At some point she must have fallen asleep watching Snow. As she teeters on the edge of wakefulness, a very old thought comes to her, dredged up from the deep. Prim wet the bed again.
And as she rises from sleep into cold wakefulness she thinks, No, Prim is dead.
Then she realizes that the liquid soaking her is not urine but blood. The bright light in the tent tells her it must be noon.
'Snow? Snow.'
He stirs slowly. Katniss stares at the three mute mouths that mark his wounds. One is bubbling blood.
'Miss Everdeen?' His voice is uncharacteristically slow and sleep-slurred. He is exhausted.
'You're bleeding.'
Snow blinks, then raises his head, then examines his wounds. 'Oh,' he says. He rubs his face as though waking up is far more of an inconvenience than his chest bleeding. 'Those are the stitches you did, Miss Everdeen.'
'Oh, shut up,' she spits, but she's already going through the medical kit. 'I'll do it better this time.'
'Give it here,' he says softly, and after a moment of hesitation, she does. Snow sets to work immediately, restitching the open lips, and she watches with fascination.
'Do you want some morphling?'
'We only have two vials. We should save them for more serious matters. Besides, morphling has effects on one's mental processes that I do not enjoy. I prefer to remain in control of my faculties.' His alien blue eyes gaze into hers.
'You should at least take a couple of drops,' she says. 'Those wounds are deep.' What she does not say is, I don't want to think about you in that much pain.
Snow does not look pleased when she extracts a vial from the medical kit.
'I really do not mind pain, Miss Everdeen.'
'I mind,' she snaps back. 'Do you want to administer it yourself or do I have to hold you down?'
He rolls his eyes at that. 'I'll do it. Just one drop.'
'Two.'
The annoyance in his expression is broken by his smile. He loads up the pipette. 'As you wish.'
She watches him closely to make sure he takes it. His lips part and he extends his tongue, which is an oddly vibrant shade of red, and then he adds two drops of morphling.
'That's all I'm taking,' he says, and hands it back to her.
As Snow finishes his stitches, Katniss turns her attention to her own problem. There is a thick, wet stain of Snow's blood creeping over the top of her chest. She peels off her long-sleeved shirt, but it has soaked through to the t-shirt beneath. Satisfied that Snow's attention is on his wounds, she peeks under her t-shirt to see it has already soaked her bra and breast beneath.
'Great. You've ruined my clothes.'
She looks at Snow. His gaze moves slowly from her face to her bloody chest, then back to her face.
'I apologize, Miss Everdeen,' he says.
She usually makes him leave the tent to change, but his bleeding, freshly-stitched, shirtless state she does not feel capable of kicking him out into the snow. And she has no wish to brave the cold herself. She fingers her clothes uncomfortably and examines her prisoner, then sighs in resignation.
'I'm going to change. Don't look.'
Snow inclines his head, consenting, then shuts his eyes. Katniss pulls off her layers, pausing at her bra. She studies Snow's closed eyes. Then she unhooks that too and frees her breasts, and quickly sponges them clean with her bloody t-shirt. Then she quickly pulls on her clean, spare t-shirt and shirt.
'You can look now.'
Snow opens his eyes again, but there is exhaustion in them. 'If you don't mind, I would like to go back to sleep.'
'Sure,' she says. There is worry in her voice. There is no more bleeding, but Snow looks paler than she has ever seen him, exhausted. Dying?
'Miss Everdeen,' says Snow, and she finds comfort in the smile that slides along his mouth. 'I am alright. Come. Lie down. You might as well catch up on your sleep..'
And she does as she is told. She rejoins her place on the tent floor beside him, damp with their sweat, damper with his blood. She rests her cheek against her own bloody clothes, shivering without the sleeping bag, which remains cocooned around his healing body. His blood smells like salt and, in her sleepy state, like food. She rubs her nose into the blood and she dreams of a rabbit caught raw between her teeth.
'My angel.'
She thinks she dreams this, but she cannot be sure. Her eyes open, lashes fluttering, and she feels rested and starving. She raises her head and there, as ever, is Snow. He is wide awake and smiling. He does not look on the verge of death.
'Good afternoon, Miss Everdeen.' His eyes flick away from hers and his smile broadens. 'You… Oh, dear.'
She frowns at him and sits up. 'What?'
Snow takes a deep breath, another huge smile barely suppressed. 'Your face is covered in my blood. So is your hair.'
'Oh.' She pulls a bit of dried black blood from her hair and flicks it into the corner of the tent. 'Oh well.' Her gaze goes to his chest, which looks better. Less raw. 'How are you doing?'
'The wounds need cleaning, but otherwise I am well.'
'That must hurt a lot,' she says, chewing her lip.
'It does. But I don't mind. Pain is only a physical sensation. One can overcome such things.'
She rolls her eyes. 'You're so weird.'
Snow's laugh is rich and deep, and Katniss cannot suppress her own smile.
'Thank you,' she says at last. 'For saving me from the bear. Even if you didn't need to…' She shrugs. 'You risked your life to do that.'
Snow's smile has an old, familiar unpleasantness to it, big-teethed with cruelty. 'Perhaps I saved you just to make you trust me, Miss Everdeen. A calculated risk. Perhaps I had no notion that the bear would strike me. And now I can capitalize on your need to care for me and manipulate you into becoming my ally.'
She stares at him. His skeletal grin, his sparkling eyes, his pale and sweat-shining skin.
'No,' she concludes at last. 'You didn't want it to kill me. You were…' Frightened? No. 'You were offended. That's what it was.' Now it is her turn to tilt her head at him. 'How dare some common animal interfere with Miss Katniss Everdeen. Am I right?'
The cruelty leaves his smile and it widens in dark joy. 'Yes,' he murmurs. 'That would have been an unbefitting death for you, mockingjay.'
She rolls her eyes. 'Don't call me that.'
He nods. 'I apologize, Miss Everdeen.'
'You can just call me "Katniss", you know. That's what you called me when you were bleeding out.'
His brow furrows deeply. 'I much prefer "Miss Everdeen".'
'Why?'
He thinks about this hard. 'It's more appropriate,' he says at last.
'You're so old-fashioned.'
'I'm old,' is his smiling reply. 'I would not be comfortable being on first name terms with someone your age. And the form of address is a mark of respect.'
'Just don't expect me to call you "Mister Snow",' she bites back, and he laughs.
'Of course not, Miss Everdeen. You can call me whatever you like.'
'I'll stick with Snow,' she says. Then, pettily, she adds: 'Mister President.'
Snow smiles back. They are, she realizes, entertaining each other. He likes her little jokes and her chiding, and she enjoys his wry humor. She has the peculiar understanding that this is not something she ever shared with her mother. She lost her sense of humor when her husband died. Katniss has never thought of herself as a person of great levity, but she has always enjoyed her dry jokes with Gale and Prim. She could always make Prim laugh, and Prim could make her laugh.
Now who does she have to laugh with? A smiling killer.
'I feel exhausted,' she says. 'I've slept all day and yet I'm still tired.'
'Emotional strife can be exhausting,' says Snow. 'You should eat some chocolate. That will help.' Wincing slightly, he turns to go through her pack which serves as a pillow. As he does, his bare shoulder shifts and turns and reveals his back to her, the first she has seen of it.
A gasp of disgust and disbelief empties from her mouth.
'What the fuck is that?' she whispers.
Snow turns back to her, confused and concerned, and then realization lights his eyes. 'Ah. That.'
'Did you get a tattoo of the mockingjay symbol?'
Because there it was: huge, the diameter of her splayed fingers, embossed in thick white loops, hemmed by his shoulder blade. She is revolted and terrified. Is that the kind of man he is? Is that the flavor of his obsession? Did he want to carve his back with his horrible infatuation?
Snow's laugh is like dry leaves. 'No, Miss Everdeen.' He can sense the trepidation in her. 'I may be obsessive, but that would be too much even for me. No, Coin's people gave me that when my execution was delayed, when I was held in the bank. They were rather impatient and agitated that they didn't get to see my death, and they were not a well-disciplined mob.'
Her anxiety has shifted to a new shade of terror. 'They marked you with my symbol?'
'They branded me,' he says mildly. 'They did other things, too. But that was their pièce de résistance.'
'They tortured you.' Coldness settles inside her guts.
'Oh yes.' He pauses, assessing whether or not she wants to hear this. 'Cutting, burning, deprivation, degradation, the usual. They were amateurs.' His eyebrows rise eerily. 'I've had worse.'
Katniss cannot form thoughts. Her mind builds a chaotic overlay: her, the triumphant mockingjay; President Snow, her enemy, deserving death and agony; an old man in a cell, burned with her own symbol. Did he cry out when they did it? Did they think she would rejoice? If she had seen this scar three years ago, when the pain of the war was fresh, would she have been happy? Now, she feels only sickness. Something green and slimy works its way through her.
Katniss folds her legs into herself and rubs her hands over her face. 'I never wanted this,' she mumbles into her fingers. 'I never wanted to be the mockingjay. I never wanted all this death. I never wanted people getting branded in my name. Even you.'
'Oh, Miss Everdeen,' he murmurs, his smile melodic. 'Don't fret. The brand has rather grown on me. I'd much rather your symbol than Coin's.' He tilts his head back and forth, evaluating her. 'It felt like you were with me.'
She has nothing to say to that.
Snow picks up his shirt, rent and blood-soaked, and stiffly he tries to struggle into it.
'You don't need to hide it from me,' she says. 'It's alright.'
'I don't want to upset you.' His smile twitches. 'You hide your scars from me, after all.'
It is the first he has acknowledged them, those islands of pink and seas of white that now make up the wreck of her skin after she was set on fire. In vain, she had hoped he hadn't noticed — but of course he notices; he notices everything about her with such intimate specificity.
'My burn scars are disgusting.'
'No, they're not,' he says immediately. 'Don't think that. They're a part of you, and you're…' He cuts himself off abruptly, then tries again. 'You are not disgusting, Miss Everdeen. They enhance you.'
'Oh please.' She yanks off her shirt and t-shirt again. Blood-soaked bra and shining scars on display, she indicates the mess of her stomach. Wriggles of pink and white on the worst parts. Fresh rose where the grafts took. Dark red where they didn't. 'This? This is an improvement?' She shakes her head. 'What am I now to anyone? An insane girl who was set on fire and then tried to assassinate the president. These are my reminders of that. I'll never be anything else.'
Snow's gaze roves over her scars — memorizing the map of them, she thinks — and then lift back to her eyes, and he tilts his head at her in question. 'You are many other things, Miss Everdeen. A hunter. A survivor. My shepherd.' His smile is small and beautiful. 'This…' He gestures at her ruined abdomen. 'It's just skin.' Then he gestures at his own chest, the scars of which are impossibly dense. 'It's all just skin.' He leans back, breathing out hard, and she watches his naked chest surge with it. 'I like your scars.'
'Do you like yours?'
'Some of them.' The smile lingers in his eyes. 'The mockingjay brand might be my favorite.'
She looks at them properly. His chest is strange to her. She has seen so few men of his age at all, and none in any state of undress. Few men lived into their seventies in District 12; indeed, she has never met a man as old as Snow. His age shows clear on his body: there is a spray of white hair on each side of his chest, though little below, and his nipples are small and dark. One big scar yawns across his left side, beneath his ribs, passing above the gouges left by the bear. That one looks like a knife wound. There is a peppering of tiny white scars on the other side that resemble buckshot. There is what must be a bullet scar on his upper chest, and there are a series of little white lines that must have been wrought by a blade. Two pin-pricks on one arm express a snakebite. Some scars are burns; she knows a burn scar more intimately than any other. Other scars are more mysterious to her. His left arm is flecked with scars like fish scales, and his right has a huge pink tear running along the forearm.
'You didn't have them healed. Couldn't your medical people do that?'
'They could have. But I chose to only remove the scars on my face and hands, for the sake of appearances.' He touches a fingertip to the center of his forehead. 'My bullet scar, for instance.'
She considers the patch of his forehead, framed by deep lines. 'Did it hurt, when you shot yourself?'
'No. It was like waking up very suddenly, only in reverse.'
Her eyes feed on the marks on his chest. 'You got the other scars in the Peacekeepers?'
'Most of them,' he says. He seems totally unconcerned with her gaze.
'You don't mind me looking at you?'
He considers this. 'Not anymore. We've seen a lot of each other.' He pauses. 'As President, I always maintained an immaculate appearance. Perfection and strength. As I grew older, I let less and less of my skin show. I didn't want people to see me as old and weak. And I would have never have wanted you to see me that way. But…' A smile twitches his mouth. 'Well, none of that matters now, does it? I allowed you to see me bleed, after all, back in the greenhouse.'
And so he did, coughing blood into his handkerchief. Showing himself to her. Quietly honest and intimate in a way she doubts he ever is with anybody.
'I don't think you're weak,' she says slowly. 'I think you're…' She takes him in: his calm, pleasant features; the rough brush of his beard; the fall of his neck, nothing like Peeta's, loose and differently textured; the thick veins of his hands; his naked chest and stomach dressed only in bandages and scars. She looks away and pulls her clothes back on. 'I think you're strange.'
'I will not argue against that, Miss Everdeen,' says his smiling voice.
They sit for a moment, not speaking, his bare chest rising and falling with the certainty of breathing and life, and then Katniss shakes herself.
'I'm going to skin and cook that bear,' she says. 'Shouldn't let the meat sit out too long. We can live off that thing for days.'
'Rather fortuitous, really,' he says, and his smile is frighteningly bright. 'I'd say getting mauled is a small price to pay for a few days of hot dinners.'
She cracks a hesitant smile at this, not entirely sure if he is serious. Then she climbs out of the tent and sets herself to the long, difficult task of skinning and dressing an entire six hundred pound black bear.
The bear is a wonderful bounty. She builds a big fire to cook any parasites out of the meat as best she can. With no way to tan the fur and not fancying wearing rotting beat skin, she instead drapes it over their tent for insulation. She digs a hole in the ground and fills it with hard-packed snow and ice from a little creek, then uses this to store the excess meat. It will last them for days, maybe a week if the weather remains cold enough.
Carrying slabs of well-done bear steak in her hands, she crawls back into the tent where it is now tolerably warm from body heat and the fur insulation. Snow is asleep again. It is curious to her how little sleep he usually seems to need, always waking before her, and yet can sleep so promptly and extensively when he needs to heal. He has a peculiar control over his body.
She wakes him, amused at getting to be the one to watch him wake up for a change. She smiles at his slow, reluctant blinks and the way his mouth twitches. Then he is bright and alert again, smiling at her, but a spasm of pain interrupts his smile as he sits upright.
'Morphling first,' she instructs. 'Then you can eat.'
He gives a sigh of exasperation that is remarkable in its childishness. 'Miss Everdeen—'
'No morphling, no bear meat,' she taunts.
A smile of cruel delight creeps up his face. 'Would you take pleasure in starving me, my dear?'
She is about to get annoyed at him, but then her own cruel smile blossoms. 'No morphling, no bear meat for either of us,' she says. 'Would you take pleasure in starving me? Goodness knows I starved in District 12 for long enough. You must have got something out of it.'
Snow's expression is quite calm in response to this. Without engaging the argument, he accepts the morphling and again administers two drops.
Satisfied that he has taken his medicine, she gives him his dinner. They eat messily, tearing into it with fingers and teeth, and Katniss fancies there is something peculiar to the way Snow watches her eat. His eyes do not leave her mouth when she bites into it.
'You're watching me eat,' she says through a full mouth.
Snow chews and swallows, ever the neat predator. 'It's interesting. You eat the way that cats do, tearing it into strips with your teeth.' Still, he stares at her mouth, with a certain lack of focus in his eyes. 'I would love to watch you eat raw meat.'
She pauses in her chewing and Snow slowly looks from her mouth to her eyes, his own gaze still a little fuzzy.
'Sorry,' he says. 'The morphling confuses my thoughts. This is why I dislike it.'
He is careful not to speak again for the rest of the meal.
After they've finished eating, she tends to Snow's wounds. His stitching work is impeccable and she marvels at the perfect swoop and cross of the black thread. He lets her clean them with alcohol and wrap new bandages about his waist, which requires awkward coordination from them. He stretches and shifts as she winds bandage around him, smelling his sweat, aware of the dark scent of his underarms and the soft skin of his upper arms. The wounds are in good condition. No infection, no bad smells. He got lucky.
'Why did you do it?' she mutters, tying off the bandage. 'I could've shot it.'
'You might not have reached the gun in time. And I told you. I didn't want to see you dead.'
'Stop saving my life,' she mutters.
'You saved mine when you shot Coin,' he counters.
'That was absolutely not an attempt to save your life.' She pauses and her eyes go to some other place, some other time, years ago when she wanted him dead more than anything in the world. 'I wanted you dead. When I thought Coin had you executed, I… I felt like I was in a dream, watching that. Everything felt so floaty and unreal.'
'Ecstatic,' he murmurs. 'I did enjoy how much you wanted me dead.'
She remembers the way she trembled watching what she thought was his death. It had been private, evil, delicious, self-effacing. She hadn't felt like a real person, only something with a hungry mouth getting to fill itself for the first time, to nurse on blood. She had avoided Peeta for days afterwards, and she had killed more game than they could possibly eat.
'Is that how you felt, trying to kill me?'
'No,' he answers shortly. 'I enjoyed the game of it. The challenge. But I did not… lust for your death.' He wets his lips. 'Sometimes I thought on the idea of being killed by you.'
She has nothing to say to that either and decides to blame the morphling again. There is a slow awareness growing in her of the particular, biting fervor with which he seems to view the violence of their relationship. His obsession with her does not feed the desire to kill her. And yet there is something whetted to his adoration of her. Despite his insistences that it isn't sexual, she cannot put the thought entirely out of mind. There is something lurking inside that open adoration. Something with jaws wound with ropey, bloody saliva.
She shivers.
Snow must be able to see the discomfort in her expression. He speaks with polite geniality. 'Miss Everdeen, perhaps we should plan out our next moves. We cannot stay here forever.'
'Can you walk?'
'I will be ready for gentle travel in a few days. Ideally, we find somewhere more suitable to recuperate than this tent. You still intend to pass near Richmond, yes? As I mentioned there is a cache of emergency provisions there, stored at what used to be the natural history museum.'
'Are there are a lot of these caches?'
Snow smiles one of his more unpleasant smile. 'I like to be prepared, Miss Everdeen. You remember how many pods I installed in the Capitol.'
A deep shudder grips her spine and Snow's expression turns to concern. No, she had forgotten that. She had put those particular tortures (and Finnick's death, and Boggs', and…) out of mind. It was just her and Snow in a tent. Not the President who took such pleasure in scraping out the sanity of her mind.
'Miss Everdeen?'
Snow is quirking his head at her like a dog.
'It's fine,' she says, shrugging it off. 'But we're still a long way from Richmond. Days, maybe weeks of travel if we were moving at our usual speed, and you're going to slow us down. We'll run out of food long before we get there, even with the bear meat.'
Snow considers. 'There are Peacekeeper cabins,' he says. 'They're scattered all over the country to support far-flung missions in the wilderness. Dozens in every District. I can't promise we'll find much at one of those places — goodness knows I doubt Coin has the resources to restock them — but we would at least have shelter and warmth.'
'Are there any nearby?'
'May I see the map?'
The map. The location of the rebel base is neatly marked with an X. Of course, if he really wanted to know it, he could simply wait until she fell asleep then help himself.
She shakes her head.
'Well, that will make it difficult to locate one,' he says mildly. 'But suit yourself.'
'I'll think about it,' she says carefully. Maybe she can fold the map in such a way that he won't be able to see where the base is located. She feels like an idiot amateur next to him. She's lucky he has such tremendous, eerie respect for her. If it was Coin she was transporting, the woman would have slit her throat by now.
Coin is a liar, she reminds herself. Snow has never lied.
And he likes me.
They pass their evening chewing bear meat and sipping nettle soup in the humid tent, sheltering from the cold. Snow is too tired for much in the way of conversation, so he rests and she examines the map. No solutions present themselves to her, but if they can just get to Richmond she knows they can make it. It's just a week of travel to the base from there. If there's food at this museum, then they will be saved.
But it's a long way there yet.
'How are your wounds?'
Snow glances down at his open shirt and the bandaged gashes. 'They're in good condition. I was fortunate. No major blood vessels, no infection. They will heal well.'
She changes his dressings a final time before they sleep. Katniss peels back the bandages which are sticky underneath with bright blood, but still free of infection. She rolls fresh dressings over the cuts, smoothing her fingers over the adhesive, feeling the hot, soft skin of his abdomen beneath her. His breathing is deep and even as she performs these little tasks. He spreads his arm from his body to let her tamp down the edge of the dressing and she casually breathes in the deep, thick scent of his underarm sweat. The hair there is thicker than that on his chest, soft and fragrant.
'Are you alright?' he asks. There must be something discomfited in her expression.
'Fine. You just need a bath.'
'I'm sure we both do,' Snow smiles. 'I apologize if it's unpleasant.'
'Not really,' she says idly, beginning to wrap a bandage around his waist. He shifts to accommodate her and she feels the smell of him go through her. 'I bet I smell just as bad.
'You smell different,' says Snow.
'How?' she says, concentrating on taping down the bandage.
'Just different,' he says, oddly curt. She does not enquire further before they turn in to bed.
She drifts between sleep and waking, a hybrid space knit by the cold of the tent and March on one side and the body-warmth of Snow on the other. Her dreams are weird and abstract: images of her father, smiling with living vitality; a tiny rabbit, trembling with fear; a pretty fountain in Snow's gardens, only the liquid it spits high is blood. Why is she dreaming of blood tonight?
'Miss Everdeen?'
There is tight worry in the deep voice that reaches out to her, and Katniss shifts herself back into wakefulness. The tent is light inside, so dawn must be settling in. She rolls over to look at Snow.
'Mm?'
'Are you hurt?'
This question confuses her sleepy mind, so she pushes herself up. 'What?'
Snow lifts his hand. His left palm is soaked with fresh, red, wet blood.
'It's not mine,' he says. 'The bandages are secure.'
Katniss stares, uncomprehending, and then as she shifts she becomes aware of a familiar damp sensation between her legs. Her eyes widen and mortification hits her, and she can only catch a glimpse of the realization on Snow's face before she covers her eyes with absolute shame.
'Oh. Oh, I see,' says Snow.
In the short silence that follows, Katniss knows that this is the most humiliating moment of her life. She had forgotten. She hadn't even thought to pack sanitary pads. Every trip she had ever taken to the woods had never lasted more than a few days, so it simply hadn't occurred to her. And it's not like Haymitch would have reminded her.
And now her menstrual blood is on Snow's hand.
'It's alright,' comes his strange, bright voice. 'It's perfectly natural.' She hears a low tone of humor vibrate into her. 'Now we've both stained the other with blood. It seems fitting.'
Katniss does not remove her hands from her face. Snow seems to sense her predicament.
'If you're not adequately supplied with menstrual products, Miss Everdeen, you might find the dressings in the medical kit will suffice.'
Finally, dying a little inside, Katniss removes her hands from her eyes, though leaves them covering the lower half of her face. 'You need those.'
'We are abundant in dressings, Miss Everdeen.' His smile is a strange new flavor of delight. His palm shimmers with her blood. 'The smaller ones aren't large enough for my wounds, and those should serve your purposes.'
Katniss nods and then, face flushed with shame, she rustles through the medical kit, scoops up a couple of the dressings, grabs her pack, and then clambers out of the tent as rapidly as she can. There will be a stain on her, and he will see it.
She retreats to a safe distance, her skin boiling, then yanks down her pants and surveys the damage. Fortunately her underwear has caught most of it. She changes quickly, her skin goosepimpling in the cold, and lines her clean underwear with the dressings, then goes to the creek to wash the blood out of her clothes.
When she returns, she throws Snow a glare as if to warn him not to say anything clever. But Snow is as fresh-faced and genial as ever, still smiling, unconcerned with anything.
'Sorry,' she says abruptly and takes her seat beside him. There is a bloodstain on the bedroll, but she thinks Snow must have wiped up the worst of it. This horrifies her.
'Miss Everdeen, it is just blood. You do not need to be embarrassed.' He rubs his fingers over some of the blood from the wounds on his chest, and then, to her horror, he rubs them in the bloodstain she left. 'You see? It's just blood.'
She exhales slowly. 'You're a really strange man.'
His smile is big but kind. 'I have lived a long life, Miss Everdeen. I had a wife and granddaughter, and I was raised with a female cousin. I am neither new to or offended by menstruation.' He gives a little laugh and she wishes he would shut up. 'Do you know, my granddaughter was at my home when she had her first period. She came to me quite terrified. Her mother had explained absolutely nothing about menstruation, so I had to talk her through it. The poor thing thought she was dying.' And then, with mournful suddenness, he cuts himself off. His smile fades at the edges. He makes an odd, dismissive expression with his eyebrows: Well, that's that.
Katniss feels caught between two strange currents. The one is her utter mortification over the present situation. The other is the sharp way Snow cut himself off. She realizes that, for a moment, he had forgotten his granddaughter was dead. He must think about her so little. He has not grieved her, has not processed that death.
So Katniss finds herself talking, surprised at herself, but the words come easily.
'I was twelve when I got my first period,' she says. 'It was just after my father died. My mother was catatonic. I had no idea what was happening.' Having sputtered this out, she has no idea what should come next. 'I had to ask an older girl at school.' She realizes this is the first time she has ever discussed menstruation with a man; she has never brought it up with Peeta. 'Anyway. I taught Prim…' The energy for the words goes as she thinks of her sister and her dead face, and silence falls upon her.
'You miss her very much,' Snow observes. His voice is soft.
'Yes,' she says brusquely. 'But she's dead. Like your granddaughter.'
They sink into silence after that, for which Katniss is grateful. Snow's endless appetite for conversation seems dampened by the effort of speaking and healing, so he sits quietly while she studies the map and considers their possible routes.
After some time, she becomes aware of a subtle shift in Snow's attitude. It takes her a moment to figure out what she is sensing, simply because she has never felt it from Snow before. It is an uncomfortable hesitancy about speaking. She looks at him as he looks at nothing, clearly preparing himself to form words, and she waits impatiently for whatever it is he is so struggling to express.
'Miss Everdeen,' he says at last, when her staring has become impossible to ignore. 'I require your assistance. Will you help me to my feet and out of the tent?'
'Sure,' she says. 'Why?'
His voice is clipped and taut. 'I need to relieve myself. So, if you are amenable to helping me to a tree I could lean against, that would be… satisfactory.'
She should laugh. This is a perfect opportunity to laugh at him: President Snow, man of malice nonpareil, now a pathetic invalid who needs her help to take a piss. But she does not laugh. Curiously, she finds there is nothing funny about it.
'Of course. Come on. Give me your arm and lean against me.'
With awkward coordination she fixes his arm around her shoulders and then, in an act requiring incredible effort on her part, is able to drag him to his feet. They walk slowly from the tent. She can tell that Snow is trying very, very hard not to let any expression of pain or exertion show. She brings him to a broad, heavy pine, then disentangles herself. It is only when his arm leaves her shoulders that she remarks inwardly how unoffended she was by this intimate contact.
It's just Snow, and he's hurt, her brain thinks with a shrug, and she marvels at herself.
'Do you need any help with—'
'No,' says Snow in a tone that brooks no argument. 'Please, if you would just give me some privacy.'
She nods. 'I'll be in the tent. Call me if you need anything.'
She leaves and she waits in the tent, and she tries not to listen to anything she might hear. The map provides a limited distraction but she finds herself worrying about him. She has seen old men visit her mother for treatment and walk away with healthsome cheer, only to be found dead in their beds the next day.
It takes a very long time for Katniss to hear the distant sound of urine and she worries how difficult it was for him to undo his clothes.
A ghastly thought drifts into her mind: What if Prim survived the explosion? What if only a little bit of her was left? Just her head, and parts of her body hanging together? And she didn't recognize me and she was always in pain forever?
Katniss suddenly wants to throw up.
'Miss Everdeen?' comes Snow's voice.
She clambers up and returns to his side. He looks dreadful: pale, sweat-gleaming, panting shallowly. She tries not to notice that he has been unable to fasten the final button of his waterproofs.
'Tent?' says Snow, attempting to sound unaffected. She can hear the strain in the syllable, and she knows he would speak in longer sentences if he could.
Without complaining, without mocking, she helps him back to their nest. Summoning all of her strength, she lowers him to the bedroll as gently as she can and Snow releases a huge sigh of relief once he is sitting once more. He breathes deeply, recovering himself, and Katniss chews her lip.
'You should have some more painkillers,' she says.
'No,' Snow snaps, and Katniss jumps slightly. 'I am alright.'
'No, you're not,' she argues, and in response Snow only takes a deep, shaking breath and releases it.
'No more painkillers,' he says with finality.
She gets it. He has his pride, and he so appreciates his consummate control over his body and mind. He doesn't want to embarrass himself further.
But when she looks at him, his handsome face drawn in suppressed pain, his breathing only deep and steady because he is forcing it to be, his old hand hanging limp and the fingers half-curled, that pathetic undone button on his waterproofs — well, she feels something akin to pain. It's unnecessary suffering.
'Shall we eat breakfast?' she says brightly. 'It's good to keep your strength up, and we probably can't eat all of this bear before the meat goes bad.'
Snow, his eyes closed, nods. Agony and effort tremble in his almost-placid lips, like a still lake whose water is only slightly disturbed by some monster below.
With his eyes shut, it is a trivial matter to secret the morphling vial into her hand. And once she is outside the tent, going through the makeshift meat storage, she finds she doesn't even need to think about adding two, three, four, and then five drops to his steak.
Serve you right for poisoning so many people, she thinks, then cracks a smile. Well, it's a kind of revenge, she supposes.
'Here you go,' she says a little too brightly when she hands him the steak, but he suspects nothing. He chews slowly but effectively and she is grateful that his appetite has not diminished.
'It's good meat,' he says at last. 'Well done killing the bear.'
'I just shot it. Didn't even use my bow. Feels like cheating, really.'
He smiles tiredly and then lapses back into silence. She lets him rest and eat, and she watches him carefully. She doesn't want him to pass out and choke.
'You've killed bears before?' he says.
'Only one,' she says. 'Mostly I avoided them. I had to run away from one once.' She remembers telling Peeta that story when they trained for their first Games. Peeta. She has not thought much of him lately. Thoughts of the journey, of dangers, of getting attacked and falling into a river and killing people, and thoughts of Snow have crowded Peeta out. She hopes he is safe and well, and not missing her. What she missed most about Peeta was him firm, warm body sleeping beside her.
She shoots Snow a resentful look. Now she has this other warm body.
'Black bears aren't usually aggressive,' says Snow in an oddly light tone. 'I shot some from my apartment building when they got too nosy. But white bears… clever beasts… you can find them…' He frowns. 'Sorry, I'm having difficulty remembering what…' A deeper frown knits his brow and then two very intense, very angry blue eyes find hers. 'Did you drug me?'
'Five drops,' she says frankly. 'I don't like seeing you in that much pain.'
There is hurt and offence in his expression. 'Oh, bad form, Miss Everdeen, bad form…' His mouth remains open and he looks around himself, as though searching for the words he has lost. And then, so suddenly that Katniss jumps, he promptly flops to the floor in front of her. 'That was underhanded.' The slur in his voice leaves no question that the drugs are taking their intended effect.
'You'd never have allowed me to give it you otherwise,' she says.
'Deceit,' he objects weakly. 'Disrespect.'
'I didn't technically lie, so it's fine,' she snipes back. 'Had you asked me if I'd drugged the food, I would have told you.' Her voice softens as she looks down at him lying beside her, his face tilted up, childish offence at this injustice upsetting his striking features. 'And I wasn't trying to disrespect you.'
She pops the last chunk of steak into her mouth and grinds up the tough meat. It hardly compares to the fine tenderloin they served in the Capitol.
Snow is watching her eat. There is something illegible in those shocking blue eyes. 'Are you hungry?'
'I'm always hungry out here.'
A glistening drop of saliva collects in his slack, drugged mouth. 'I love watching you eat.' A ragged, uneven smile animates his open lips. 'Like a lion. Little lion. A lionette.' That red, wet tongue presses out between his teeth. His eyes, half-closed, are those blue gas flames. 'Would you like to eat me?'
Katniss blinks at him. 'No,' she says firmly. 'I think you should go to sleep now, Snow.' She drags the sleeping bag over his bare shoulder, tucking him in the way she did to Prim when she was sick. 'Get your rest.'
Very little sense remains to tie his words together and his eyes are almost shut. 'You can… The thigh… But I want to be awake…'
'You want to be asleep,' she orders.
'Awake,' he insists, in whatever nonsense his morphling-soaked brain is pursuing. 'I want to watch…'
'Sleep,' she counters, and this time his eyes fall closed. His breath comes deep and slow, and a light snore soon fills the tent. Katniss rolls her eyes at him. 'You're insufferable,' she tells him, and perhaps there is some frowning twitch in his sleeping brow.
Katniss falls back against the back of the tent and lets out a long, exhausted sigh. So, he has not just killed for her, but now nearly died for her, too. He murmurs her praises and he bleeds, and he bears a scar in the shape of her token. And he is content to follow her and obey her, and live and die as she commands.
He must like her so much.
What would it be like if he still had power? Would he be trying to kill her again, or talk around to his side? How far would he go to force her to obey him, if he could? There is little doubt in her mind that his affable obedience would be severely diminished if someone handed him back the presidency.
As she watches him sleep and thinks of how close he came to death, she remembers what should have been his execution. She remembers the madness in his eyes, the sick relish as the raised her bow. He was fearless and full of weird, blinding thrill. Is that what he wants from her? Just a noble death?
No, he wants more, she is sure. But what, she cannot say.
She must remember to ask him what an angel is.