Chapter Text
I could sleep for a thousand years if it weren’t for that beeping. It’s not an unpleasant sound—it’s gentle, quiet, matches my heartbeat—but it’s out of place, and I can’t quite think why. The puzzle drags me slowly but surely into to the land of the living, where it turns out I’m in a hospital bed in a blindingly white room, tethered in place by a dozen tubes. Haymitch sits in the lone chair against the wall, considering me.
“Welcome back,” he grunts.
I’m strapped down and wearing absolutely nothing under the hospital sheet. I ache all over, but especially my chest and my left leg, the one Pash’s mutt chewed up. I don’t know how I got here. The last thing I remember is Katniss’s arms around me as the hovercraft froze us in place for the ascent. Feeling the strength go out of me, knowing that I was going to collapse on her as soon as the beam let us go.
“Where’s Katniss?”
“She’s fine,” says Haymitch, though I swear he says it weird. I try to sit up, alarm sharpening my senses, but he waves a hand for me not to. “Don’t push it, kid. You already tried to die twice on them. A waste of all that effort in the arena if you ask me, but then again, you never do.”
“We’re… in the Capitol?”
We must be—nowhere in the arena or in Twelve looks like this pristine white room—but I’m barely awake enough to think clearly. And my leg really hurts. There are shooting pains all the way down to the toes.
“You’ve been under for two days. One more day in here, and then they’ll fit your prosthetic and do the exit interviews. After that, back home.”
“Home,” I say, testing out the word like it comes from a foreign language. “Wait—my prosthetic?”
Haymitch nods at my feet. And that’s when I realize, my left leg stops at the knee. The sheets fall down limp over the place where it feels like I still have a foot. My breath comes up short and I can’t draw enough air on the next inhale, either. The beeping picks up tempo to match my jumping pulse.
They amputated my leg. I only have one leg.
I’m never going to walk again.
“Calm the fuck down,” says Haymitch irritably. “It was that or bleed out on top of the Cornucopia, as I’m sure you’re aware. You’re damn lucky they salvaged this much of you.”
I ignore him, fumbling with the sheet until I get it untucked. I need to see for myself. The wound is neat, stitched closed below the joint and looking weeks healed already, but it’s like it’s not even my limb. I try to call my left foot back to mind, to remember what it looked like, but I can’t. I know from the beeping heart monitor that I have not, as Haymitch so bluntly put it, calmed the fuck down.
But he’s almost gentle when he keeps talking.
“Don’t know if you’ve seen Chaff before. One of the mentors from Eleven. Lost an arm in his games, and he decided not to take the prosthetic. He’s a paranoid son of a bitch, thought the Capitol would bug it. You can turn it down if you want, they won’t force you. But I’d just suck it up. Beats whatever they’ll have on offer in the district. You should see the shit some of the miners get fitted with, and that’s only if they can afford it in the first place, which most can’t.”
“Yeah,” I say vaguely, unsure what to do with a Haymitch who displays basic emotional intelligence. “It’s worth a try.”
I’m thinking about how I’ll never wrestle again. Not like I used to. Which is such a ridiculous concern, because I didn’t even enjoy wrestling that much. It was just a sport I was good at, and you had to have a sport at school, so.
I guess I won’t have any sports I’m good at, going forward.
Going home.
I am going home.
I’m a victor. Katniss and I are victors. It all comes back in a rush—the mutts, Cato, the long night and the moon, Claudius’s voice, the berries, the sun on my purple-stained fingers as Katniss counted down to death.
We called their bluff and lived to tell the tale.
We won.
And it’s not Katniss in my thoughts then, but my mother. The false brightness in her voice when she told me District Twelve might have a winner, and she meant Katniss. She’s a survivor, that one.
Survivor. Mother used that word, and it’s true of Katniss, but maybe not the way she meant. Mother was trying to say that Katniss knows how to stay alive. But that’s not the same thing as surviving. Staying alive would have been letting that last arrow bury itself in my chest, or turning away as I bled to death. Katniss chose neither. She held out the berries to me instead, even though neither of us could be sure the Gamemakers would take the bait. They might well have let us both die. Katniss would have failed to go home to her sister, and I would have failed to protect her.
But we did it anyway.
Because we are both survivors. In the real sense, not the way Mother meant. The berries were too risky to count as a bid to stay alive, but they were a choice to survive. To refuse to let the games redefine us. To name the brutality for what it was, to stake our lives on the fact that somewhere out there, in the Gamemakers’ control room or the Capitol audience or in the districts, others were willing to name it too.
I still can’t believe it actually worked.
“They weren’t set up for two of us to win,” I say slowly. “What happens now?”
Haymitch’s shrug is so easy that I realize he’s mostly sober. That feels like a bad sign somehow, but I couldn’t say why. He’s not acting skittish otherwise, just sort of… vague. Adrift, I suppose. He’s squinting at me like he isn’t quite sure what to do with me. I guess he wouldn’t. He’s never had a tribute win before.
“The usual,” he says finally. “Tomorrow they’ll do the recap. You’ll get back onstage and watch the whole thing with the audience. Caesar will have some questions. We can do prep for them if you like, but you didn’t need much of it before, so maybe that time’s better spent on Katniss while you get some rest.” He considers. “I guess they’ll call for a bigger chair to seat the both of you.”
“Can I see her?” I ask. That’s what’s missing in this room. It’s so… sterile. So impersonal. I’m soft and clean and uncomfortably alone after a week of sharing my nights with Katniss. The whole world is open to me again, against all odds, but the only thing I want is her.
Haymitch shakes his head. “They want to do the reunion live.”
“But—”
“It’s not a wedding,” he growls, “you don’t get to decide if you’re having a first look. Just ride it out, kid. The hard part’s over with. Two more days and you’re free to do as you please.”
I guess he’s right, but it doesn’t make me any less impatient. If I’ve been out for two days—my heart stopped, my leg cut off—how much of that does Katniss know about? Has she been awake this whole time? Is she worrying about me? Who’s with her for the wait? I’m impatient to see her, but she must be even more impatient to go home. To see her sister, her mother. All the people she fought and killed to get back to.
The drugs in my system pull me back under—an unwelcome sensation after the sleep syrup in the cave, but there’s nothing to do about it. I want to tell the attendants that the drugs are only holding me down immobile for the usual nightmares, but I can’t stay awake long enough to protest. So I stay asleep, and as long as I’m asleep, I’m still in the games. It doesn’t feel like victory.
When I next wake, Portia and my prep team are there with my new bionic leg. It’s a silver metal and plastic contraption that secures itself to an implant that has been added below my knee, then straps overtop of the joint. I’m optimistic as Portia gets it on; it looks better than I thought it would, mostly like a foot, with moving joints and toes and everything. I’m thinking maybe I won’t even notice the change. But when I try to stand, I faceplant into a rolling cart of medical supplies. You don’t notice how much work your toes and ankle are doing to keep you upright, until suddenly they aren’t anymore.
“There you go, that’s it,” says Portia, hauling me up with Juno’s help. Aquilla presses a thin cane into my hands with her four-inch nails, blinking rhinestone-studded green eyelashes at me in sympathy.
“You’ll want to use this for a while,” she says. “Until you get used to the balance. Don’t worry, Peeta, injuries like this happen all the time to victors, and no one thinks they’re less desirable for it. You earned this wound in battle.”
Earned? What did I earn, exactly? I let Lace die and I didn’t help Umber or Eshling and I burdened Katniss for a week in the arena. The only thing I’ve earned is the girl on fire’s trust. Everything else is ashes. My leg’s honestly the least important thing I’ve lost since the Reaping.
I want Katniss so much right now that it rolls over me like nausea.
“You’re sure I can’t see her?” I ask, plaintive.
“Oh, darling, just a couple more hours!” Gaius clucks. “I know it’s agony!” He holds up a shirt as yellow as the rest of his clothes, and Juno takes down a pair of black slacks to match. They set to work on me. There’s much less to do, despite the weeks in the arena, because I’ve evidently been through something Portia calls the “full polish” while I was under. My skin is hairless and glowing all over. The stings, nicks, burns, scars—they’ve all been erased as if they never happened, even the horrible gash that nearly killed me.
I’m upset over that one, and I can’t explain why to my team. I don’t even try. I cover the moment of dismay with a breathy “Incredible!” and pretend that the tears that have welled up in my eyes are from joy.
That scar… it represented something. To put it the way Aquilla did, it was the only wound that did feel earned, because I got it protecting Katniss. I thought I’d always have it as a reminder of the days in the cave as she learned to let me in.
Seeing my leg blank again, it’s like none of it ever happened.
They smooth gel through my hair, restoring it to sleek waves, and dust my face with stage makeup until I feel as painted over as I did in the muddy banks of the stream back in the arena. Portia and the prep team take up posts at the four corners of the room and I wobble my way from one of them to the next until I am walking nearly normally, learning to disguise the way the slim cane takes so much of my weight.
They coo over how handsome and refined I look, which I encourage, because if they aren’t complimenting me, they’re going on and on about the games, recapping a hundred little things I said to Katniss while we were freezing or starving or generally trying not to die. When I whispered her name in my sleep along the riverbed. When I lied to the Careers for her. The way the whole pub burst out laughing when I warned her not to step on me.
Juno holds out her wrist to me when I wobble to her corner of the room next. I squint to make out the tattoo, which is done in the same pale ink as the paisley print over the rest of her body. It’s a string of words that curl around the edges of the design, repeating over and over. Next time, in the Capitol. Next time, in the Capitol.
“Katniss said that to you before you went to the Cornucopia,” she tells me proudly. “All my friends are getting this tattoo. But it’s even more popular to get a moon stencil.”
“Because you watched the moon together,” Gaius puts in proudly. “She was crying and you told her to watch the moon until Cato died. You held each other together. It was so romantic.”
When I wobble this time, it’s not because of my artificial leg. It’s because I’m hearing the noises Cato made as the mutts reduced him to meat, and for a teetering moment, I don’t think I can stop myself from being sick.
It’s a relief to finally make my way to the first floor of the training center. At least on stage there will be Caesar Flickerman handling the show with some modicum of tact, and a thousand lights and faceless voices to remind me of the dangers of reacting to any of the Capitol’s atrocious opinions of our games in the way I’d really like.
And Katniss will be beside me, at long last. I can get through anything as long as she’s safe at my side.
We stand on metal circles below the stage floor for our reintroductions. Mine has clearly been constructed in haste. There’s a bare plywood wall to my left, separating the room, and the whole space smells of sawdust. Overhead, on camera, Caesar Flickerman’s introducing our teams one by one. First Katniss’s prep team, then mine, then Effie. Portia and Cinna inspire a deafening swell of applause, topped only by the roar when Haymitch makes his debut. And then I’m rising through the floor, onto the stage, into the light, and Katniss is there.
She is heartstopping.
Cinna has dressed her in candlelight. Her soft yellow dress glows with every ripple; her hair’s loose of its braid, falling in soft waves of dark brown that frame her face. The Capitol never sends anyone onstage without makeup, but Cinna’s used a restrained hand with Katniss’s this time. She has only a soft gloss to her lips and blush to round out the hollows that were in her cheeks when we left the arena.
She looks on the outside the way that she does when she’s sleeping. Girlish, vulnerable, soft. I love every inch of Katniss’s sharp edges and fire; they’re the part of her that made her think of the berries, that kept us both alive, that turned the entire games upside-down. But she deserves to be unguarded sometimes too. And now here she is, soft and romantic, her eyes sparkling bright with tears as they settle on me.
She closes the space between us in three steps, flinging herself into my arms. I stumble, lose my grip on my cane, and right myself by burying my face in her hair. She smells like the same shower roses, tastes like them too, when I come up for air only to drown her in a kiss that she returns with all her strength. Like we’re speaking the same, silent language.
You’re here. You’re safe. We’re going home.
The audience has fallen back to a distant white noise. I was so aware of the cameras last time I was on this stage. I could not give less of a shit about them now. Caesar taps me on the shoulder after a while and I brush him away to a roar of approval from the crowd. But eventually, we have to let Haymitch herd us to the red velvet couch that has replaced the throne-like chair that’s usually opposite Caesar.
The recap is required viewing for all of Panem, so I know what I’m in for as Katniss and I settle into the seat. They will have spent the last few days editing footage from our games together into one cohesive three-hour-long story, and all of us will watch it together like it’s some wonderful nationwide movie night, not a recording of twenty-two children’s brutal deaths.
Katniss kicks off her shoes and curls up small at my side, leaning into me hard, and I swear I can feel her shaking. I wrap an arm tight around her, glad to be something solid she can hold onto as Caesar sets up the film with a few jokes I parry effortlessly.
We are the show, just as much as the footage is. The audience has seen most of this live. The only difference will be in the framing, and in how we react, but I know before the show begins that it will be a romance. Still, it’s the first I’ve seen of Katniss’s time in the arena before she found me in the stream, and watching what happened to her is harder than I expected it would be.
Her journey is the most bloodless part of the show at first. They alternate shots from the bloodbath with Katniss’s easy way of slipping through the woods. I admire the way she fell into survivalism as easily as breathing. She sits silent and enigmatic in her tree as she overhears the Careers debating whether to get rid of me while I’m with Lace, and then when morning comes, she vanishes in the other direction, only driven back into our path by ferocious Gamemaker fireballs. I was right to think that, if she’d never had to come save me, she’d have gotten free of the arena in less than two weeks’ time.
But oh, then there’s little Rue. I didn’t realize she had been up there in the trees when we cornered Katniss. It is Rue who points out the tracker jacker nest to her; Rue who finds Katniss unconscious in the brush and treats her stings; Rue who teaches Katniss the mockingjay whistle and curls up next to her to sleep and slips into the trees to light green fires that distract the Careers so Katniss can blow up Umber’s mountain of supplies. They barely pause over Cato snapping Umber’s neck, but I add that to the list of sounds that will haunt me the rest of my days.
Marvel kills Rue. They linger on this scene. Katniss trying and failing to rescue her then singing her to sleep with a meadow lullaby that i recognize from back home; it's one that mothers sing to their littlest babies. Katniss is wooden beside me as the notes ring out, shaky and choked with tears, and I don’t have to look at my forest girl to know she has gone somewhere very far away as Rue takes her last breath on screen before us. She has relived this moment a hundred times already and will relive it a thousand times more, and it will hurt this much every single time.
I crush her to me, willing my arms to be a solid, safe retreat. There is no space to feel anything real under the bright stage lighting, but there will be later. We will have privacy again. And she will have me, always.
The rest of the film is a blur. The cameras don’t capture what it was like in that cave, and all I can manage is a vague feeling of resentment that they were listening in at all. Cato’s death drags on nearly as long as it did in real life and then whole auditorium goes silent when Katniss interrupts my declaration of love with the berries. I can see the defiance in her eyes, plain as day, and suddenly I think to be afraid.
What if the Capitol sees it too? What if they resent us for what we did to survive?
But the film ends with Katniss pounding on the glass door in the hovercraft, screaming my name as my heartbeat flatlines. She is sobbing uncontrollably. She is in pieces. And I think, maybe all they’ve seen in us is the love story, after all. Maybe everything is fine. I want it so much, I convince myself it’s certainly true. I don’t want to have to fight any more. I just want to be home with Katniss, and free.
Except, we never get a minute alone. After the recap and our crowning—the traditional laurel wreath has been reengineered to split into two halves, one for each of us—we spend the rest of the night at the President’s Mansion for the Victory Banquet. There, everyone wants a piece of me. I smile for photos until my jaw aches, and because Katniss never quite finds her giggling, bubbly stage persona, I do the talking for both of us. I admire tattoos, I sign napkins and handbags and one woman’s neck just below her earlobe, I accept dozens of jewels as they’re pressed into my hands by tearful, glittering Capitol fans.
It's so wrong. It’s wrong from head to toe, every inch, and my stomach is churning too badly for me to even appreciate the food, which is only good thing about the event.
Well, no. The other good thing is that Katniss never lets go of my hand. But she’s gripping so tight I know there’s nothing romantic about it; she needs me, desperately, to be her lifeline. She’s drowning in the celebration and the luxury too, hardly able to think over the memory of all the dying children who came before this. By the time we get back to our training center penthouse, where we’re separated again, my fingers have gone completely numb.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I say to Haymitch, when he stops me letting myself out to knock on Katniss’s door. “We just spent a week in a cave together. Why can’t I go say goodnight?”
“She needs space,” says Haymitch firmly, blocking the doorway.
“Did she say that to you? Because she looked like she needed a hug and a drink, to me.”
“I’m the mentor here,” says Haymitch, a note of his familiar snarl creeping back in, “and I’m responsible for you two. You will stay in your own room tonight so your parents don’t have my head when we take you back to Twelve. After that, I could not care less.”
There is no chance my parents care if I spend the night with Katniss and no chance her mother would say anything to her about it, either. So now I’m sure there’s something strange going on. But Haymitch will tolerate no further questions about it, so I’m forced to toss and turn in my room all night, refusing sleep syrup for fear it will trap me in another hellish round of nightmares.
I try watching TV, but all that’s broadcasting are recaps of the Games. I’d think of home instead, but it’s hardly reassuring to imagine what it will be like when I return to the bakery. My family thought I’d come back in a pine box. I don’t know what Tack or my mother will make of a living Peeta; all they know are snide jokes and harsh words, and I can’t imagine them suddenly putting on a warm welcome.
It might not be all bad. Maybe my father will be able to find words for his feelings, for once. Maybe Rhy will manage to stop feeling haunted by his choice not to volunteer, because unlike for my aunt, it did not prove a death sentence. Delly and the others will be glad to have me back at school. But that’s about the best I can prepare myself for.
I’m not looking forward to anything that’s waiting for me there. Just the girl in the other room, who Haymitch is keeping me apart from, reasons unknown.
Our interview takes place the following afternoon right in our penthouse. The red loveseat makes a reappearance and the air's choked with the perfume of three dozen vases of real roses. I’m beginning to dread the scent; it once reminded me of Katniss, but now it’s starting to feel like the Capitol’s fingerprints all over her. She emerges from her room in white and pink, another girlish look to complement my almost military ensemble of red and white. She looks just as frazzled as I feel, and I ignore Haymitch’s look of disapproval to tug Katniss off to one side.
“I hardly get to see you,” I say. “Haymitch seems bent on keeping us apart.”
“Yes,” she says distractedly, barely returning my hello kiss. Her eyes are on the array of cameras that have taken up almost the whole room, eclipsing the TV where we watched our training scores go live. “He’s gotten very responsible lately.”
“Well, there’s just this and we go home,” I say, trying to ground her. She’s almost as tense as she was during the games, when the fever was taking me. “Then he can’t watch us all the time.”
She shivers. And then they’re calling us over, so I can’t ask why. But she’s steady when she curls up next to me again, and she keeps her talking to a minimum as Caesar starts the interview. This is the rhythm we’ve fallen into by now. I can make conversation with anyone, and so can Caesar, so we constantly fine-tune our senses of humor to match each other as he asks me about how I got in with the Careers, when I decided to protect Katniss with my life, what strategy I was following as I played out my double-cross. I try to think of these questions as lines in a play, and do my best not to attach the names to real people. I tell him about Clove, Cato, Glimmer, and Marvel without letting emotion take over. It’s a little harder with Eshling, who was only doing her best to give me a fighting chance, who almost reminded me of Katniss. All I can think is, at least I wasn’t the one who killed her.
Eventually, though, the conversation turns to the romance, and this requires a little more from Katniss. By now she has retreated so far into the shelter of my arms that I’m starting to wonder if she’s camouflaged herself in the cracks of the couch. She hates the cameras so much.
“Katniss, what a ride for you,” says Caesar. “I think the real excitement for the audience was watching you fall for him. When did you realize you were in love with him?”
I drop my chin into her hair, giving an easy smile as if I already know the answer, though it hits me that I don’t. I’m just as curious as Caesar is.
“Oh, that’s a hard one,” says Katniss, with a little laugh that’s obviously a stall for time. She’s grown more tense, and I feel strange about it. It’s the cameras, I try to remind myself. She’s private. She doesn’t want to give away this piece of herself as easily as I did, and I can understand that well enough.
“Well,” says Caesar, just when it’s close to being awkward. “I know when it hit me. The night when you shouted out his name from that tree.”
Katniss nods vigorously, catching the lifeline. I can tell that this is not the real answer, and that makes me want to know what is. I would have said she fell in love much later, if I had to guess. Things were… strange, at times, in the caves. Katniss is the sort of person who would have rescued me the moment she knew she could, so her saving me after Claudius Templesmith’s announcement does not mean she loved me. Especially after watching what happened with Rue, I think that she couldn’t bear to let another person die when she had the power to stop it.
But taking on the Careers at the feast? That was a suicide mission. Far and above the call of duty. Going to that feast didn’t guarantee my survival; it only risked hers. I think of the way she looked when I asked her not to go. That already-shattered glass expression. That is when I think she knew she loved me. Anyone could see it would have been a different kind of suicide if she’d stayed and let me die instead.
“Yes, I guess that was it,” she is saying to Caesar. “I mean, until that point, I just tried not to think about what my feelings might be, honestly, because it was so confusing and it only made things worse if I actually cared about him. But then, in the tree, everything changed.”
“Why do you think that was?” urges Caesar.
She turns this over for a moment, then says haltingly, “Maybe… because for the first time… there was a chance I could keep him.”
Suddenly, there’s not a dry eye in the room. For me, though, her words have lit something warm and fierce in my heart, like a signal fire.
I press my forehead to hers and ask, “So now that you’ve got me, what are you going to do with me?”
She turns to meet my eyes, her own grey ones solemn as a wedding vow. “Put you somewhere you can’t get hurt.”
When we kiss, the tears turn to sighs. She warms up a little through the following questions, which are more about all the ways the arena tried to kill us, but I think something about the romance questions has set Katniss off kilter, because when she finds out about my new prosthetic, she’s suddenly on the verge of tears.’
“It’s my fault, because I used that tourniquet.”
“Yes, it’s your fault I’m alive,” I say, trying for a gentle tease. But she buries her face in my shirt and I think she’s shaking again.
It’s not like I thought winning was going to paper over everything that came before—it hasn’t for me—but Katniss seems one wrong word from coming apart, and she has not always been so fragile. I wish I knew what’s going on. I wish they would just let us have a moment alone together.
There’s a bad moment after that when Caesar asks about the berries, even though we knew he would have to.
“What was going on in your mind… hm?” Caesar coaxes Katniss, gently, like he sees that she’s fraying to bits, too. I kind of hate him, or maybe the audience more, for not leaving the topic alone. It was love, I want to snap, obviously love. Next question.
But at least he waits patiently while Katniss breathes carefully in, so tense against my side, gathering herself like she did for the shot that put Cato out of his misery. She seems like she’s going to give a big speech, but in the end, all she manages are a handful of choked words, her hands turning to desperate fists in my shirt as she speaks.
“I don’t know, I just… couldn’t bear the thought of… being without him.”
I drop a kiss in her hair, overcome myself. For once, Katniss is the one who’s found exactly the right thing to say. Caesar asks if I have anything to add but I just tell him that goes for both of us, and thank god, this means we finally get to sign off.
We finally get to leave this glittering palace of torment.
The wrong feeling only grows as our train sweeps us free of the Capitol. Katniss is quiet through dinner and the replay of our interview. I can’t guess at what she’s thinking about; I only know that when she excuses herself to change and then returns to the sitting room, where Effie is teaching a colorful game of cards, she settles into my arms in a strange and wooden way, like she’s forgotten what a hug is supposed to feel like.
They let us get off the train for some fresh air at the fuel stop. Haymitch wanders with Katniss and I down the track for a while. She’s holding my hand, but her grip is loose and distracted, and she’s scowling into the middle distance, all mouth and no eyebrows. She doesn’t have anything to say, which wouldn’t be that unusual if it weren't for everything else, so I try to pretend like it’s not unnerving me. I gather a little spray of pink and white wildflowers from the edge of the grass and present them to her, hoping to crack through her walls with a little gesture of normal-world affection, but she smiles only with her mouth, not her eyes, as she takes them.
“What’s wrong?” I finally ask, before I become too afraid to find out the answer.
“Nothing,” she says.
It’s silence again until we’re past the end of the train, almost in the wilderness. Then Haymitch stops and turns to both of us, putting a hand on Katniss’s hunched shoulders.
“Great job, you two,” he says gruffly. “Just keep it up in the district until the cameras are gone. We should be okay.”
And then he’s walking back to the train, avoiding my attempt to catch his eye. I turn to Katniss with a plunging feeling in my gut.
“What’s he mean?”
“It’s the Capitol. They didn’t like our stunt with the berries,” she says, all in a rush. She won’t look at me either.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“It seemed too rebellious,” she says, her whole body tight. “So, Haymitch has been coaching me through the last few days. So I didn’t make it worse.”
“Coaching you? But not me.”
Of course the berries seemed rebellious. They were. We weren’t exactly going quietly to our deaths like good little sheep. We were showing them they didn’t own us. I thought the Capitol had decided the best defense was to pretend they’d been in on the joke all along. If it were more serious than that, they would have made sure we never left the arena in the first place. If it were more serious than that, someone would have told me days ago.
“He knew you were smart enough to get it right,” she mumbles.
Smart? I want to laugh at that. But I'm the wooden one now.
“I didn’t know there was anything to get right.”
Is that why Haymitch hasn’t been letting me see her? She’s been conspiring with him behind closed doors to clean up the mess without me because… what? Because they think they know what needs saying, and they think I’m already on script? There’s only one script that I’d have memorized without any coaching: the romance. Because it’s not an act, for me, it’s not just lines, and Haymitch damn well knows it.
But for Katniss…
“So what you’re saying is, these last few days and then I guess… back in the arena… that was just some strategy you two worked out.”
“No. I mean, I couldn’t even talk to him in the arena, could I?” But she stammers over these words. I’m going cold.
“But you knew what he wanted you to do, didn’t you?”
Somehow this feels like getting Reaped all over again.
The broth that showed up just after she kissed me. The sleep syrup. Even that incredible stew. Every gift we received in that cave, arriving like a perfect postscript to Katniss baring a piece of her heart for the love story. Only, maybe she wasn’t baring her heart at all. Maybe she was just saying what Haymitch needed her to say to make the rich sponsors happy.
“Katniss?” I ask, and there’s so much more in my voice now. Confusion. Betrayal. An awful, swallowing numbness, a ringing in my ears. I drop my hand and she steps back, as if to catch her balance. “It was all for the Games, how you acted,” I say quietly, a statement and not a question. Because it’s the truth.
“Not all of it.”
“Then how much?” I shake my head. “No, forget that. I guess the real question is, what’s going to be left when we get home?”
Say all of it, I will her. Say that the Games changed things. That you changed. That now you need me just as much as I need you.
“I don’t know,” she says instead. “The closer we get to District Twelve, the more confused I get.”
I wait, but that’s all she has to offer me. That we’re going home, and home is where I will lose her to the people she really cares about. Her sister and her mother and—my heart squeezes, tight and jealous—handsome Gale Hawthorne, who she told me in the cave was no competition.
It turns out Katniss Everdeen can lie after all.
My mother was right. Katniss is a survivor. She will do what it takes to stay alive.
“Well, let me know when you work it out,” I tell her, not bothering to hide my bitterness.
I head back to the train, not waiting around for her to make any more promises she's not going to keep. Every footfall brings back a memory, turns it on its head, changes the background music until I see our story for what it really was.
I told Haymitch to save Katniss over me, so he let me tell the audience a love story, because he knew they’d shower her with gifts.
He told her to play along, be the heroine, capture the crowd, so she did. She only saved me because she was upset about what happened to Rue, and she wanted to go home.
Every word, every touch, every lingering look in the cave was Katniss trying to figure Haymitch out, not me. Trying to press the magic buttons that would bring us more medicine, more food.
And everything after that? That was just Katniss protecting her investments. She hadn’t put in all that work just to let me die. She’d decided to save me just like she decided to save her sister, only not because she loves me just as much, but because it’s who she is. Someone who can’t abide suffering if it’s in her power to stop it.
And oh, I was suffering.
But now we’re free of the games, and she’s free of me. She’s free to go home to everything she truly values, and I’m free to do the same. Though, the joke’s on me. She’s the only thing I care about that much. And I’ve lost her.
No, that’s not true. It’s worse than that.
I never had her in the first place.
I don’t see Katniss again until the train is pulling into District 12 in a cloud of hissing steam. The four of us crowd into the space between cars. Effie’s in a violently fuschia skirt that takes up the space of an entire prep team's worth of people, Haymitch reeks of grain liquor again, and Katniss stands like a wood board next to me, trying to catch my eye.
I don’t meet her gaze because I don’t know what will be in my face. My apparently-renowned actor’s touch does not exist with Katniss. I can’t help showing her how I really feel, and I don’t want her to know anymore. I don’t want her to realize exactly how much she’s hurt me. I’m afraid she won’t care.
The inches between us feel as wide as the space between the Capitol and District Twelve. In a moment these doors will open, and the crush of cameras on the other side will swallow us, spit out our chewed-up bones on the other side. They’ve consumed everything I gave them, everything that mattered most to me, and what do I have to show for it?
I reach out for Katniss’s hand without looking at her and say hollowly, “One more time? For the audience?”
She slips her fingers into mine and holds on tight, squeezing once. Maybe it means, I’m still here. Maybe it means I’m sorry.
I don’t know. When it comes to Katniss Everdeen, it turns out I don’t know anything.
I never did.
--END BOOK ONE--