Chapter 2: Primrose Season
The primroses come up the week after the first curing fire, the way they do every year, whether or not I'm ready for them.
Peeta planted them along the side of my house the first spring we were both back. He never asked. I came home from the woods one evening and he was on his knees in the dirt with his sleeves pushed up, and I almost screamed at him, and then I saw what they were and couldn't say anything at all. Evening primroses. Pale yellow, the kind that open at dusk. Every year they bloom the same week the Capitol bombs fell outside the President's mansion, and every year I lose most of that week.
This year I lose Monday entirely. I don't get out of bed. Peeta brings tea at some point and sets it on the nightstand and doesn't say anything, and later he brings bread and takes the cold tea away, and later still he lies down on top of the blankets with his back against mine so I can feel him breathing. He doesn't ask me to talk. That's the whole trick of him, I think, sometimes. Knowing when not to ask.
Tuesday I get up before light and take my father's bow and go out under the fence, which hasn't carried a current in seven years but which I still duck under like it might. I don't hunt. I walk to the lake and sit on the flat rock where my father taught me to swim, and I watch the mist come off the water, and I let myself think about her.
Prim would be twenty now. She'd have hated the clinic, the three rooms and the twice-a-month doctor. She'd have taken it over by force. She'd have bullied the Ministry into sending medicine on every train, and she'd have done it so sweetly that they'd have thanked her for the privilege. I think about the miner's wife who died last winter. I think about a surgery with real beds.
And then, because my brain is a traitor, I think about a painted oven door and a question with no end.
When I get back it's past noon and Haymitch is sitting on my porch steps with a goose in his lap like a fat white cat.
"You're on my porch," I say.
"I'm aware." He strokes the goose, which closes its eyes in bliss. It has never once closed its eyes in bliss for me. "Boy's been baking since five. He does that when you go to the lake. Bakes until you come back. There's enough bread in that house to feed the district for a week."
"I didn't ask him to wait."
"No, you never do." He squints at me. "You look less dead. That's nice."
I sit down on the step below him, which I would never have done seven years ago. The goose opens one eye and considers biting me, then decides I'm not worth the effort.
"Did he really tell Plutarch no?" I ask.
Haymitch takes his time. "Peeta tells you the truth," he says finally. "He's about the only person alive who does, so I'd hang on to that if I were you. Used to be the best liar I ever met. Now he can't hide a surprise party to save his life." He scratches the goose's neck. "He's planning something, by the way. Badly. He keeps asking me what Seam folks do about fires. Like I'd know. I was raised in the Seam and I can't remember the last fire I lit that wasn't by accident."
I keep my eyes on the primroses. They're closed now, waiting for evening. "What's he planning?"
"Sweetheart," Haymitch says, and his voice is almost kind, which is how I know he's about to be awful. "If I knew how to make you two say things to each other, I'd have done it the first year and saved myself a lot of liquor."
The train that afternoon brings Cressida.
I know her before she's off the platform. The shaved head, the green vines tattooed over her scalp, and behind her Pollux with a camera case on his shoulder and a careful, apologetic look on his face. Pollux can't talk, the Capitol saw to that years ago, but he signs a greeting to me, small and quick, and I sign back the one word I learned from him in the tunnels: friend.
"I told Plutarch you'd say no," Cressida says by way of hello. "He sent me anyway. I came anyway. Those are two different things, and I want you to know which one I'm here for."
"Which one?"
She hands me a roll of paper. It's architectural drawings. A long single-story building attached to the side of the clinic, with neat little labels in a draftsman's hand. Surgery. Recovery, eight beds. Pharmacy. Maternity. A cold room for medicine that spoils.
"That's real," Cressida says. "Whatever else Plutarch's doing, that part is real, and it's sitting on a desk in the Capitol waiting for a signature. I thought you should see it before you made up your mind."
My hands have gone tight on the paper. At the top of the page, where a name for the building should go, someone has left a blank.
"What's that?" I point.
Cressida looks at me steadily. "If you let us, we'd name it for her."
I don't say anything. I don't think I could. Pollux shifts his camera case from one shoulder to the other and looks at the ground, which is the kindest thing anyone has done for me all week.
"I'll think about it," I hear myself say, and Cressida nods as if that's more than she expected, and maybe it is.
That night Peeta teaches me to knead.
It's not a lesson either of us planned. I come into his kitchen and every surface is covered in loaves, Haymitch wasn't exaggerating, and Peeta has another batch of dough on the board and flour up to his elbows. He takes one look at my face and says, "Wash your hands," and I do, and then he puts the dough in front of me.
"I don't bake," I say.
"You don't have to bake. You just have to knead. Heel of your hand. Push it away, fold it back, turn it. Again."
I push. Fold. Turn. It's sticky and warm and it fights me.
"You're strangling it," he says.
"It's dough."
"It's alive. Yeast is alive. You have to be nice to it."
"Rabbits are alive. You don't complain when I strangle rabbits."
"I don't eat raw rabbit," he says reasonably, and comes around behind me and puts his hands over mine. "Like this. Not so hard."
His hands are bigger than mine and warm from the oven and scarred across the backs from years of burns, and he guides my wrists through the motion, push and fold and turn, until the dough stops fighting and starts to give. His chin is near my shoulder. I can feel him breathe. Something in my stomach turns over slowly, like the dough, and I'm suddenly aware of how quiet the house is.
"Peeta," I say.
"Mm."
The page is on my tongue. Real or not real? What were you going to ask me? I can feel the words sitting there, and I know that if I say them he'll answer, because he always does, and then I'll have to answer too.
"There's flour in your eyebrow," I say instead.
He laughs, and his breath stirs my hair. "There's always flour in my eyebrow."
"How? You haven't even touched your face."
"It's a gift." He reaches past me and pinches off a bit of dough and presses it into a shape on the board, quick and absent, the way he draws. When he takes his hand away it's a primrose. Five rounded petals. He doesn't say anything about it. He just leaves it there by my hand, where I can see it.
I turn my head. He's very close. His eyes are very blue, and for once they're not somewhere else, they're right here, on me, and I think if I leaned back even a little I'd be kissing him, and I want to, and I'm afraid of how much.
Buttercup chooses that moment to leap onto the counter and land squarely in the flour sack. A white cloud goes up. Peeta swears, which he almost never does. Buttercup sneezes, looks at us both with total contempt, and stalks off trailing white footprints across the floor, and by the time we've finished laughing the moment has gone wherever moments go.
But he leaves his hand on my back while we clean up. And I let him.
The next morning I walk down to the square with a basket of turkey for Greasy Sae and find Cressida inside the bakery with Thom, measuring the light through the windows with her hands held up in a frame.
"It's a good room," she tells me. "He's very particular about the light. He asked for the opening at noon so the sun would come straight through the front." She jots something on a pad. "And he's very particular about the first fire. He made Plutarch put the date in writing."
My mouth goes dry. "What first fire?"
Cressida glances up, and I watch her realize that she has stepped on something.
"The oven," she says carefully. "Thursday morning. He signed on Monday, Katniss. The interview, just him, and the opening. He's going to talk about the hijacking on camera. All of it. In exchange for the clinic wing." She hesitates. "He made them promise you wouldn't be filmed unless you walked into frame yourself. I thought you knew."
I don't remember leaving. I remember the square going past, and the pale stone of the Justice Building, and the basket of turkey still on my arm. I remember thinking, very clearly: Monday. Monday, I didn't get out of bed. Monday, he brought me tea and lay down at my back and didn't say a word, and somewhere in between he picked up the phone and handed his worst memories to the Capitol.
And Thursday morning, in front of Plutarch's cameras, he's going to light the first fire.