Chapter 3: First Fire
I don't go back to the bakery, or to Peeta's house. I go to mine.
It's colder than his. It always is, no matter how much wood I burn, as if the walls remember that nobody really lives here. I sit on the floor in front of the fire with my back against my mother's old chair and my father's jacket around my shoulders, and I try to decide whether I'm angry.
I want to be. Angry is easy. Angry has edges I can hold. He told me no and then he said yes, and he did it on a day I couldn't get out of bed, and now on Thursday morning there will be cameras in that bakery while he lights the fire he painted in our book. The Capitol made us perform once. A whole country watched me kiss him and decided what it meant before I knew myself. I swore that was over. I swore nobody would ever again get to point a lens at the two of us and call it love.
But the anger keeps slipping out of my hands, and what's underneath it is worse. Because I know what that interview will cost him. I've held him through enough nights to know. They'll ask about the hijacking, and he'll have to sit under the lights and say out loud how they filled him with venom until he believed I was a mutt, and he'll do it calmly, in that steady voice, so that nobody watching will know how hard he's gripping the arms of the chair. He'll do it for a surgery and eight beds and a blank space at the top of a drawing.
He'll do it for Prim. And he didn't tell me, because I would have said no for him.
I barely slept last night, and at some point I fall asleep right there on the floor. When I wake, the fire's gone to ash and there's a blanket over me that I didn't put there, and on the kitchen table sits a loaf of bread, still faintly warm, with no note. There doesn't need to be one.
I spend what's left of the afternoon in the woods, because that's what I do. I'm not proud of it. Some animals freeze when they're cornered and some bolt, and I have always been the kind that bolts.
I end up at the meadow. Not the one past the fence. The one in the district, the one that used to be the Seam, where they dug the graves after the firebombing and then planted grass over them because nobody could think of anything else to do. It's green now. Somebody has been mowing it. Somebody has also planted a row of evening primroses along the near edge, small and new, the same pale yellow as the ones at my house, and I don't have to wonder who.
I sit down in the grass and stay until the sun starts going orange, and by the time I stand up I know two things. The first is that I'm not going to let him do the interview alone. The second is that I'm terrified of the other thing, the thing he painted, and I'm going to have to look at that too.
He's at the bakery when I come down at dusk, of course he is, feeding the last of the curing fires. The roof is on now, the crooked beam hidden behind fresh planks, and the inside smells of sawdust and warm brick. He's sitting on the crate I sat on that first night, watching the coals. He looks up when I come in and doesn't stand, as if he's afraid any sudden movement will send me back to the woods.
"You left me bread," I say.
"You didn't come back."
"I went home. My house is home too."
"I know." He rubs his thumb along a burn scar on the back of his hand. "I wasn't sure you'd want to see me. After Cressida."
"She told you."
"She came and found me. She felt terrible." His mouth twists. "I was going to tell you, Katniss. I was. I just needed you to be out of bed first."
"You told me you'd said no."
"I had said no. And then on Monday you didn't get up, and I sat on the stairs for an hour listening to you not getting up, and I thought about the miner's wife and the twice-a-month doctor and what Prim would say to me if she saw me turn down eight beds because I didn't want to talk about something that already happened." He looks at me straight. "It's mine to tell. The hijacking. I'd rather tell it myself than have them make up their own version. They've done that before."
I swallow. "You'll hate every minute."
"Probably." He almost smiles. "I'll be gripping the chair the whole time. You'll be able to see it."
"And Thursday." My voice doesn't come out right. "The first fire. Cressida says you were very particular. In writing."
Something changes in his face. Color comes up his neck.
"I saw the page," I tell him. "In the book. I wasn't snooping. It fell open."
For a moment he looks so stricken that I almost reach for him. Then he puts his face in his hands and laughs, a short helpless sound, and says through his fingers, "Of course it fell open. Of course it did."
"Were you going to do it in front of them?" I can't keep it out of my voice, the old terror, the lights and the crowd and Caesar Flickerman's teeth. "Peeta. Were you going to light that fire with Plutarch's cameras on us and ask me—"
"No." He drops his hands. He looks horrified. "No. Katniss, no. Is that what you thought?"
I don't answer, which is an answer.
He gets up then and comes to stand in front of me, not touching, close enough that I can see the flour in his eyebrow. "The crew's call time is ten," he says. "The opening is at noon. That's the fire they'll film. That's the one I put in writing." He takes a breath. "The first one's at five. At dawn. Before anyone's awake. I told Plutarch first fire Thursday. I didn't tell him which first fire."
I stare at him.
"And I wasn't going to ask you," he goes on, quieter. "That's why the page isn't finished. I kept trying to write the question and I couldn't make it come out right. They made us say things for years, Katniss. They made you say yes to me in front of the whole country when you didn't even know what you felt. I didn't want this to be one more thing you had to say yes to." He looks at the oven. "So I wasn't going to ask. I was going to light it at five, with the first loaf, and just see if you came. And if you didn't, that was all right. It would still be a good oven."
The coals tick in the brick. Somewhere outside, very far off, one of Haymitch's geese is complaining at the dark.
"Who made the first loaf?" I ask.
"I was going to," he says. "Tonight."
I take off my father's jacket and hang it on a nail and push up my sleeves. "Wash your hands," I tell him. "Then show me again. I'll try not to strangle it."
At five in the morning the square is blue and silent and the bakery smells like the inside of a loaf.
We built the fire together. That part matters, in the Seam. Not one person lighting it while the other watches. Both of you, kindling and pine and the first spark. My hands shake a little on the matches. His don't, which surprises me, until I realize he's not afraid of this fire. This one he chose. When the pine catches and the smell rolls out, resin and smoke and hot iron, I watch his face and wait for it to go away from me. It doesn't. He looks at the flames, and then he looks at me, and stays.
The loaf is ugly. I kneaded it, and it shows. It's lopsided and dense at one end where I lost my patience. Peeta says it's perfect and I tell him he's a liar and he says that's not true, everyone knows he can't lie anymore, and I have to turn away so he won't see my face.
We hold the toasting fork between us. My hands and his, exactly like the painting, his broad and scarred, mine calloused at the fingertips. The bread darkens slowly over the coals. Neither of us speaks. Neither of us needs to. When it's done he breaks it in two and gives me the bigger half, which is the sort of thing he does without thinking, and we eat it standing in front of the oven with the sky going pink through the front windows. It's hot and slightly burnt and tastes like smoke.
It's the best thing I've ever eaten.
When it's gone I wipe my hands on my trousers and look at him. He's watching me with that face, the one that still undoes me, years later, every time.
"Real or not real," I say. "You're my husband now."
He doesn't answer right away. His eyes are wet. "Real," he says.
So I kiss him. In the bakery that stands where his family's bakery stood, in front of an oven that will remember this fire, with nobody watching but a crooked beam. He tastes like burnt bread and he kisses me back like he's been waiting seven years to do it properly, and maybe he has, and when we finally break apart there's flour in my eyebrow too.
"It's a gift," I tell him.
He laughs into my hair.
At noon, the sun comes straight through the front windows the way he wanted, and Cressida's crew is set up by the counter, and half the district has crowded into the square to watch. Peeta sits in the chair they've placed for him. He grips the arms. I can see it from the doorway.
Cressida asks her first question, and he starts to answer, and his voice is steady, and his knuckles are white.
I walk into frame.
Nobody stops me. That was in writing too. I take the empty stool beside him and put my hand over his on the arm of the chair, and after a second his fingers turn and lace through mine, and Cressida, who is very good at her job, doesn't say a word about it. She just nods at Pollux to keep rolling.
"Katniss," she says. "Is there anything you'd like to add?"
There are a thousand things. None of them are for the Capitol.
"The clinic," I say. "You can put her name on it. Primrose Everdeen." I look at Peeta, then back at the lens. "That's all. The rest is ours."
That night, in the book, under his painted oven and his unfinished question, I write one word in my own hand.
Real.