Chapter Text
The morning after Lucy Gray reveals our kinship to me, I wake hungry. This is out of the ordinary; after so many years of malnourishment, my body’s signals have been worn down, any hunger queues usually only coming when I’m on the brink of starvation. Which, luckily, is not a state I’ve been in for some time.
But despite our full meal the night before, I wake with a groaning stomach. Peeta is still asleep, one arm tossed above his head, and I don’t want to wake him. Instead, I slip downstairs and begin to make us breakfast myself. I take the bowl of eggs from Haymitch’s geese from the refrigerator, as well as a small tin of lard and our open jar of blueberry reserves. A refrigerator still feels like a luxury to me, compared to the icebox I grew up with. The bakery always had refrigeration, but Peeta’s described to me how often it went out, ruining half their supplies and sending the family (and his mother) into a downward spiral.
I light the gas and grease a pan before cracking two of the eggs into it. The yolks, orange and bulbous, remain unbroken and I smile thinly, triumphant. I toss some salt, pepper and parsley from the garden over the still-translucent whites. I wish we had cheese- there’s a new goatman in town, and I put talking to him on my mental to-do list- but the eggs will be good with just the seasoning, too. While they fry up, I put the kettle on and break open two sweet buns from the cupboard. I spoon a dollop of preserves onto each, spreading them with the utensil’s curve. I’m so impatient as to eat half of my bun early, while I wash off some late-season strawberries. With the eggs done, I make our plates, setting the berries in a bowl between them and filling two mugs with hot water, honey and chamomile. I’ve just finished folding our napkins when Peeta emerges from the top of the stairs.
“Good morning,” I say, happy to see him. He smiles at me with narrowed, sleepy eyes.
“Morning. What’s all this?”
“Breakfast,” I shrug, pulling out my chair and sitting down.
“You made it?”
I roll my eyes at him. “Just because you usually make breakfast doesn’t mean I’m incapable of doing so, Peeta. My ability to cook doesn’t just kick in at noon.”
Grinning now, Peeta pulls out his own chair. “Well, you could’ve fooled me,” he jokes. “I seriously don’t think I’ve ever seen you make an egg.”
I huff some air toward him. “Everyone can make eggs. I don’t think there’s a person in Panem who can’t cook an egg.” Taking a bite of my own—delicious, might I say—fried goose egg, I reconsider my words briefly. “Well, maybe Haymitch. Anyway, it’s not like I tried baking something.”
“Now that would be dangerous,” says Peeta, and I throw my napkin at him.
Without the tales of Lucy Gray to occupy us, the day stretches out like a breath of fresh air. After breakfast and the dishes, Peeta gets started on a few dozen loaves of standard brown bread to pass out around Twelve tomorrow, as well as some treats to throw in to the mix. Usually he’d do this at his house, having converted it to his more professional kitchen, but neither of us are in much of a mood to go out. I sit in the living room, enjoying the various scents and sounds of his baking while I work on some of our clothes that need repairs. When the pile of mended things outstands the pile of non-mended, I stand and stretch, feed buttercup, remember for the first time today to brush my hair. It’s still short, barely brushing my collarbones, but it’s gotten fuller. I leave it down after combing it and finally change out of my pajamas, into a pair of denim pants and a loose shirt the color of bay leaves. Returning downstairs, I find Peeta bent over a letter at the kitchen counter.
“What’s that?” I ask, pulling out a stool to sit on.
“From Annie,” he says. He passes me a snapshot of the baby—who has somehow become a toddler—and I study his features, grief coiling flatly in my stomach. “She says she’s going to visit Johanna in the fall.”
“That’s nice,” I say, putting the photo down. It may make me selfish, but I’m glad that my exile removes any expectation of my making visits to other districts. Suddenly something occurs to me. “Peeta, do you think we should tell them about Lucy Gray?”
Peeta doesn’t look up from the letter, but he frowns. “Oh. I don’t know—I hadn’t really thought about that. Do you?”
I shrug. “I guess we should ask her either way. But… I think I’d be interested to know if some long-lost Victor showed up in Seven or something. And they’ll understand. To be discreet, I mean.”
Peeta nods. If there’s one thing Lucy Gray—and frankly, all of us—would not want, it’s any sort of media attention regarding her reappearance. I do have to wonder if folks around Twelve will catch on eventually—with all the recognition being paid to the Reapings, the Games, Lucy Gray’s face will surely continue to be broadcasted, and even with as many years as have passed she is still recognizable. At least, she was to me. Unless she plans on living like a recluse for the rest of her days, others are bound to notice her. I hope that, in the tradition of Twelve, it can become a sort of open secret—nobody denying her presence, but no one calling attention to it, either.
“I suppose we’ll just ask her at some point,” says Peeta, and I nod. He drops the letter to the counter and asks, “What do you want to do for lunch?”
We end up making a bit of a picnic—cheese buns, sliced pears, and some smoked turkey and a few cookies—and bring the basket out to the park behind the old merchant neighborhood. This strip, once an overgrown little area where town kids would gather to jump rope or play jacks or draw with chalk on the cracked pavement—has been redone into a genuinely pleasant space, a soft crop of green grass coming up and a few benches put in here and there. It’s nice, to spend time in a place that’s special to Peeta. I have so many special places, and I love getting to watch him point out each nook and say, “That’s where Rye and I would practice wrestling when we were little. That’s where me and Delly used to draw.”
We end up spreading our blanket decently close to the fence, beside a patch of wildflowers. The buildings being reconstructed here look remarkably similar to how they used to, neat little townhouses designed to host businesses on the ground and apartments above. Of course, these shops are in much better repair than the ones that stood pre-bombing, and I’m sure they’re leagues more advanced on the inside—air conditioning, telephone wiring. So far, Twelve has seen the formal return of a butcher, seamstress, metal smith and woodworker, and cobbler in the form of Delly’s brother. At what was once the Hob, most other provisions can be found, from soap to fish to fruits and vegetables, and anything that can’t can be ordered direct on the train with our ration tickets. We are still in need of a healer—medics the Capital deployed live in the old Peacekeeper camp, but few trust them or their pills and injections—as well as a dairy monger. A candy maker would be exciting. The school is reopening soon, too. I close my eyes and imagine that, one day, Twelve will be the type of District with businesses that surpass basic needs… a bookstore, maybe even a restaurant. As if following my train of thought, Peeta says suddenly, “Katniss, I think I’d like to reopen the bakery.”
My eyes open, and I turn to him. “Really?”
“Yeah. The District is getting bigger. Pretty soon I won’t be able to keep up, just using our kitchens. It’ll make some jobs for people, too, and maybe create some space for… I don’t know, community? I could partner with someone to sell coffees and teas and such, put out tables so people could eat in-house. It might be nice.”
“That sounds very nice,” I nod. It does. A bakery-café in Twelve is just the sort of thing I was imagining moments ago, and Peeta seems to have considered the idea quite a bit. Which is why I ignore the twist of anxiety in my gut, the same twist that appears when any change threatens our routine. “Where do we start?” I ask him.
“I don’t know. I should talk to Thom about getting a business grant… find a space… and then construction? It’ll take a long time to get up and running, at least a year or two. I guess that’s why I want to start now,” he says.
“Yeah.” I look again at the row of buildings, their backs to us while they serve as a little barrier between this natural space and town square. I try to picture what Twelve might look like in a year or two, with Peeta’s bakery and who knows what else having sprouted. I try to picture what it could look like in five, ten, fifteen. The image that flashes through my mind—an older Peeta walking through town, holding a little hand as I trail behind them—is so unexpected that I hurry to rid myself of it, but not as with as much horror as I once may have. I can’t even begin to consider what this might mean but, if I’m honest, there was a brief moment during which the image actually registered as something… nice. Something to strive toward.
But that’s all too much to think about. Instead, I turn and face Peeta, my boy with the bread. He returns my gaze and grins at me, reaching to push some of my hair behind my ear before giving me a lingering kiss. “I love you,” he says after, our foreheads touching.
“I love you,” I nod against him. And it is always, and it is real.