Chapter Text
1. Bread.
Katniss and Peeta still do not talk much. This only benefits me. Katniss has never been one to seek out company, and so this does not affect our relationship in the slightest. Peeta, however, cannot stand solitude for very wrong.
The fact that he ends up at my door is a curse in that I must entertain company. I like seeing Peeta sometimes. He is someone to break the monotony of liquor and memories, and the hollowness in my own eyes is not reflected in his, like it is in Katniss’. Other times, I need to wallow, need time to marinate in my sorrows like the corn that makes the poison in my bottle. Sometimes Lenore Dove and my family will come to see me and I don’t like to keep them waiting. My fellow Tributes come less often.
It is a blessing in that he brings sustenance. Peeta bakes with abandon, throwing yeast onto his pain and allowing it to rise into something delectable. Who will eat what he makes is a whole other question that he doesn’t necessarily have an answer to. Waste is out of the question; living in District 12 teaches one to hoard every morsel one gets. Going through the Arena makes doubly sure of this, where starvation is almost inevitable. Some of it he will eat himself. If he is feeling courageous, he may give some to Katniss, though neither of them has much of an appetite. If there is a radical amount of food, it goes to the citizens of 12, whoever Peeta can find roaming the streets. They are not eager to waste either. Some goes to me.
Of course, I don’t eat much either. The thought of a full plate sickens me. But a slice of one of those frosted cakes every now and again is something I allow myself, despite the price of Peeta that it comes at.
Peeta slips inside. I am awake but hardly aware of my surroundings, staring blankly out the window. The smell of the fresh bread he brings fills my senses, and I turn to see him holding out a steaming tray.
“You spoil me,” I say, extracting one of the buns. It is dark brown, with little seeds. I look at it for a few seconds, before I turn my questioning gaze to him. Why District 11 bread?
“The kind they sent Katniss after Rue died,” he tells me. “I wanted to know what it tasted like.”
“Can’t help you there. I’ve never tried it,” I tell him. I am apprehensive, not of the taste - Peeta has never made a bad batch of anything - but of what I will remember the longer I look at the little crescent in my hand which took years of moonshine to drown. I can already begin to recall Lou Lou’s face again as her hand shot out to grasp one of these in the Tribute apartment. I take a bite anyway. It’s good. Of course it is.
Peeta sits in front of me, eats one himself. “Katniss has. I’ll ask her if I’ve done it right.”
We finish our rolls and look at the rest of the basket. Nearly full. Neither of us can stomach more.
“There’ll be some lucky townspeople today,” I say.
Peeta nods, but seems reluctant to go. I don’t tell him to leave. He has another roll in his hand, and is slowly picking off all the seeds with his fingernails.
“What’ll you do with those?”
“Birds.”
I hum in acknowledgement.
Peeta follows my gaze out the window. “Nice day.”
“You should go out someplace. The Meadow or something.”
“Not alone.”
I do not offer to go with him. I don’t know whether he wants me to or not. He is fiddling with a chain around his neck that I recognize as having belonged to his elder brother. Must have survived the bombing. It makes me think of my flint striker.
“I want to go home,” he says quietly.
I know he does not mean his house fifteen steps away. He means his home before the bombings, before the Games, back when things were okay, as okay as they could have been in the Capitol’s District 12. Home and the people who lived in it. Peeta has no family left at all now, no mother, no father, no brothers.
“Me too, kid,” I reply.
Peeta gets up and opens the windows. He sleeps with them open in his house. One of these days, a tick or a mosquito will come in and bite him, and he’ll get a fever. But he can’t do without fresh air. Probably feels claustrophobic. I don’t want anything from District 12 getting in, am happy to stay in a bubble that lets in nothing of the outside world’s horrors, which hover at the window with a dagger and are always quicker to stab and slice than you are. But I don’t stop him, because the sight of him standing there leaning on the sill with his eyes closed, the breeze ruffling his curls around his face and obscuring his features so I can imagine he is Sid who has gotten to grow up, is compensation enough. If I can have a hand in bringing him peace in some small way like this. So I let him stay.