Chapter Text
“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
The week before he’s born, his mother receives a vision from the angel Gabriel.
She describes it like this:
He had come to her in a burst of light, his golden wings spread high and fluttering above his head. Instantly recognizing the divinity before her, she’d fallen onto her knees, diving to his bare feet and kissing them. Graciously, the angel had accepted her worship, and laid a broad hand upon her hair, stroking it lightly. His skin felt neither leathery nor cracked against hers, the way their hard lives in Twelve so often made it, but soft, smooth, like wisps of gossamer. Heavenly warmth flowed down to the tips of her feet, making her weep.
In a booming voice, he’d told her that she would give birth to a boy, another boy. His mother— who had long been praying for a girl— initially felt a sharp stab of mutinous disappointment, until he told her that her son would be a great man. A godly man, who people would tumble over themselves in the streets to revere, poor Seam urchins and rich Capitolites alike; the scum and princes of the world, worshiping her son.
A saint, he’d said, ripening in her own womb.
Isn’t that just something?
When she awakened, she had apparently wailed for hours with joy, hysterical, cradling her swollen belly like it might escape from her. My little saint, she had called him, and reached over to rouse his sleeping, clueless father. Her other children had burst into the room, too, frightened by her vehemence. Our little saint!
She calls him that, now, always, running her fingers through his curly, golden hair— my little saint. Her nails scrape against his tender scalp, and Peeta sighs as he leans into her, tucking his chubby face into the sweaty crook of her neck. She smells like salt, like sunlight, like sugar, and the coal dust outside. Like hard-gotten love.
“You are God’s greatest gift to me,” she whispers.
He smiles widely, blossoming under her praise. He knows it makes his brothers jealous, but he can’t help but relish in her rare overtures of affection. He’s so grateful for it, for her, for her fleeting kisses and endless encouragement. Because of his mother, Peeta has never doubted who he’s supposed to be. He’s never had the space for confusion within his life.
In fact, he’d hazard to say he’s almost completely unfamiliar with it.
Monsignor Coriolanus Snow helps.
For reasons no one has ever been able to decipher, he transfers to Twelve from the Capitol, despite already being established there. He arrives in the middle of a gray, blustering winter, his black cassock stark against the austere, muted colors typical of their district. His hair is an eye-catching shock of white, slicked back across his pale head, and his face carries a mass of wrinkles, tucked against the corners of his mouth, his eyes, in the heavy furrow of his brow.
The church is in the middle of town, closest to the bakery and the old apothecary, which his mother interprets as a good sign. After the conclusion of his first Sunday mass, she grabs Peeta and marches straight up to him for an introduction, shoving the boy in between them. With her usual shamelessness, her bold-faced daring, she says, “This is my son. It’s in your best interest to befriend him. He’s going to be a saint.”
Peeta flushes bright red and jerks his head down to stare at his feet. He’s always wholeheartedly believed in his mother’s religious conviction, of course, but it’s strange to hear it presented to another as fact. Especially when they obviously don’t believe it.
Which Father Snow doesn’t, if his unimpressed hum is any indication. “A saint, you say?”
“Yes,” she replies. “A vision preceded his birth, delivered to me by Gabriel. He told me those exact words.”
“Gabriel?” He raises his bushy eyebrows. “And who are you? The blessed virgin, herself?”
She huffs, scandalized. “I would never imply something so sacrilegious, Father.”
“And yet…”
Nevertheless, Father Snow looks down at him, his gaze probing, almost too intense to meet. Peeta forces himself to, anyway, and is taken aback by the striking hue of his eyes, like chips of ice, or a frozen, mid-winter morning sky, more white than blue. The abject lack of warmth radiating from him is also something he finds chilling, but even at his tender age of ten, Peeta can sense how desperately his mother wants this man’s approval, so he smiles and reaches up, offering his hand to shake.
“My name is Peeta Mellark,” he says politely, once Father Snow finally takes it, pumping his little wrist twice. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” he says, not unkindly. Perhaps he’s impressed with his manners. “How old are you, son?”
“Ten.”
“And can you sing?”
He scrunches his nose, glancing up at his mother hesitantly, who firmly nods her head. Say yes, her flinty eyes spit at him.
“Yes,” he says easily.
“You can join the choir, then, with the other boys, since your mother is so determined for you to participate. Does that sound acceptable to you, ma’am?”
Her thin lips stretch into a smile. “It does.”
“Great,” he says, then directs a look at Peeta. “We meet every morning, bright and early, at 8 o’clock. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“For practice?” Peeta asks, already trembling at the thought. He had lied. He can’t sing. But he didn’t think there’d be any immediate consequences to saying that he could. He looks to his mother helplessly, at a loss for what to do, but she stubbornly keeps her attention on the priest.
“Yes, son,” he says, smiling saccharinely. “For practice.”
He disappears back inside the church, and all of a second passes before his mother whacks the side of his head with her purse, once, then twice, scolding him for making her look stupid. Blinking back tears, Peeta rubs his smarting skin as she kneels down in front of him, staring at him seriously. She grabs his shoulders and makes him promise that he’ll do well tomorrow, as if the quality of his singing voice is something he can actively control. Peeta, despite his reservations, vows to try his best.
But he still doesn’t measure up.
In front of a gaggle of other ten year old boys, seated criss-cross around him, Peeta decides to sing the Valley Song, an old folk song from Twelve, as steeped within the culture as the coal beneath the earth or the mountains high above their heads. He starts off okay, but his breathing soon becomes labored, and his voice cracks around the swelling high notes. Any impression of beauty decays around his lack of talent and nervousness, and towards the end, he’s practically whispering, praying for the ground to swallow him whole.
The other boys snigger at his obvious embarrassment, but it’s Father Snow’s blatant disapproval that truly unnerves him. When he’s done, he slinks off to one of the empty pews, and presses his face against his sweaty hands, tightly folded together in prayer. Holding back tears, he begs and begs God to give him another chance, to make his voice sweeter and his mom happy with him. This lasts up until the final audition. He can vaguely hear a shuffle of feet leading to the door, and the hard creak of it as it shuts; then, the slow approach of nice, leather shoes coming towards him. There’s a rustle of fabric as Father Snow sits down— and he knows it’s him, instantly. He just does— the weight of his attention searing into the side of his face.
“You lied to me,” he says gravely.
Peeta’s stomach bottoms out with shame. He cringes into his palms. “I’m sorry.”
“God does not suffer fools, boy. Nor does he accept liars.”
He clenches his jaw tightly. There’s a thread of resentment blooming in him, trying to slither its way onto his tongue. For a moment, he wants to blame his mother, to say that she told him to lie, basically dared him to, but… Did she? Was a suggestion a demand? A look a prod? Was it possible that he misinterpreted her in the first place? He might have. His mother was notoriously hard to read, to please. To think that she would advocate lying to a priest… how horrible is he?
“I’m sorry,” he says again, on the verge of weeping.
“Look at me.”
Peeta does so instantly, his neck spasming with the movement. Father Snow’s pale eyes slowly rake over his pinched face, before he huffs. Maybe amused, maybe not.
“You certainly look like a saint,” he says. “Crying the way you are.” He pauses, considering something. “Do you think you are?”
“What?”
“A saint.”
Peeta flushes, once again embarrassed by the idea of talking about this with someone that isn’t family. “My mom says I am.”
Father Snow hums. There’s a lilt to it, soft in the back of his throat. “Mothers generally believe that of their children. That they’re special.”
“Are you saying she’s lying?”
The implication strikes him square in the chest. He frowns up at the priest, both offended and puzzled, torn between defending his mother’s dream and begging for further clarity. Luckily, he saves him the choice by shaking his head.
“I would never accuse your mother of lying to you. I don’t even know if I think she’s lying to herself.”
“But you don’t believe her.”
“I never said that.”
“Then what are you saying?”
He leans towards him, pinning him with a searching stare. “Do you know what a saint is, son?”
“Someone who believes in God,” he says, wracking his brain. “Someone who does good things.”
“There are millions of people who believe, and there are millions of people who do good things everyday. It takes more than a prayer and a kind act to be anointed by God.”
Peeta considers this. He’s always tried to be nice, and he prays before bed every night, and doesn’t cheat on tests at school. Logically, he knows this doesn’t make him a saint, but he at least thought it put him on the right track. “Okay. But what are they?”
“A saint is someone who keeps God close to them,” Father Snow says. “They can either be martyrs, kings and queens, or people like you, baker’s sons, but what makes them different is how they live their lives, with Christ at the center of it, with heroic virtue. They perform miracles—“
“Miracles?” Peeta asks. “What’s that?”
“Something extraordinary. Something that can save someone else’s life. An act of salvation.”
“Like doctors?”
“Almost,” he says dryly. “But not as rudimentary. Saints save people through prayer.”
He thinks of the things he prays for— good food, sunny days, his mother’s smile, his father’s courage— and finds them remarkably lacking. How many times has he seen a poor, orphaned Seam child root around the meadow for stalks of grass to gnaw on? How many lives could he have saved by extending a thought to them?
Suddenly, Peeta feels very foolish, and not at all like the person he knows his mom wants him to be.
“I want to be a saint,” he says, with surprising firmness. “I want to help people the way you say they do.”
“There are many ways to help people. Not all of them are through the church.”
“It has to be for me.”
Father Snow sits back against the pew, looking thoughtful. The old, faded wood creaks ominously, and Peeta frowns; the entire church is in a state of decay.
“I can’t, in good conscience, allow you to join the choir. It would look like favoritism to the other boys.”
“I can do something else,” he insists. “I-I can draw well, and I’m good at baking! My dad says so. I can make snacks for the—“
“You can do that,” Father Snow concedes, then spares him a glance. “You’re old enough to be an altar boy, too. They usually help out during mass, carrying candles and such. I suppose your mother would like that even more.”
Peeta grins, hope soaring through him at the thought. “She might! She just wants me to do something.”
“Well, let’s just see how it all works out,” he says, before standing up. “Come back again tomorrow.”
He does, even without his mother’s prompting.
He has to admit, she wasn’t ecstatic at first. She had become enamored with the idea of him being amongst a choir of angels, blond-haired and blue-eyed like himself, like every well-to-do Merchant child, singing to an audience of heaven. The fact that his God-given vocal skills held him back from this was something she spent several days digesting, but she was nothing if not practical. And by the beginning of the next week, she was gushing about his utility during mass, anyway, cooing over his long white robes and rubbing his palms, still reddened from holding the heavy, gold-embossed bible.
The sting of his own failure lessens with time, too, and as the weeks pass, he finds himself no longer resentful of the choir boys, aglow with the superiority of their talent. Instead, he often stops to listen to them, fascinated by the lilting musicality of their voices, weaving together like sparkling thread. There’s a religious quality to it that he appreciates, and it’s not only in the lyrics they sing, but in the magic of what they’re doing. Something so much older than themselves, ritualistic, of the ancient, wet earth, coming alive again through human speech. He thinks even the birds know, because they pause with him, and then echo the boys back with a ferocity when they’re done.
Peeta rapidly comes to the conclusion that music is an evocation of God, and those gifted with it have a connection with Him that he can only yearn for.
When he’s nineteen, a fever sweeps through the district.
He sees it first at the Community Home, in the wan, yellow faces of some small children, locked together behind a door that shudders everytime Greasy Sae opens it. They chew on the warm, freshly-baked bread he gives them in between coughing fits, clearly distressed, but he’s not allowed to approach them. He’s not even allowed in the room. Sae keeps them both sequestered outside, alcohol-scented rags pressed over their faces, and throws the food at them like they’re rats to feed. He doesn’t miss the anguish that grips her weathered face.
“What do they have?” he asks.
She shrugs helplessly. She’s probably the oldest woman in Twelve— if not the oldest person in general— and she’s seen enough death to make any lesser person completely apathetic towards it. Surprisingly, though, she isn’t. Probably because she works with children; fragile-boned and perpetually starving.
“Some sickness,” she says. “I’m not sure which. Mrs. Everdeen says it looks like typhoid.”
“Can I pray with them?”
“No, Saint.” She shakes her head firmly. “You’ll die, too.”
Saint. He almost flushes, still embarrassed by it.
What was once a family nickname has spread to the whole district. First, as some attempt at mockery towards him, for his mother’s open, unearned arrogance and Father Snow’s favor. Now, with some genuine belief.
“Regardless,” he says. “I’ll pray for them. Hopefully, this stops soon.”
It doesn’t.
The sickness spreads to the Seam. Initially, they think it’s some epidemic of Coal miner’s lung, all manifesting at once. There’s a hacking cough, some sweating, a sour stomach, and a high fever, but no one truly starts to become concerned until the bodies drop like flies, like a row of dominoes. One mourning family after another. The local grave digger gets overworked and stressed until he dies, too, from the contamination. Then his teenaged son takes over.
Peeta tries his best to stay involved. He continues delivering food, as he’s done before, and accompanies Father Snow as he administers the Last Rites. He holds sobbing wives and daughters, and distracts young sons with games of catch outside and some wrestling tips. He learns to become accustomed to the scent of rubbing alcohol, always draped around the lower half of his face. A paltry effort to drown out the stink of death.
Unfortunately, not all families can be appeased. As Hazelle Hawthorne follows Father Snow dutifully into her husband’s sick room, Gale, her eldest, spits at his feet, his gray eyes burning through him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he sneers.
Peeta ignores the offense rippling through him. He’s never really liked Gale Hawthorne for reasons he can’t bring himself to pinpoint. He supposes it’s because of his cockiness, his open contempt for his beliefs. He never sees him at church, and when he does, it’s usually to walk his family back home after Sunday mass. Peeta wouldn’t necessarily care about that if it weren’t for the face he often makes when he sees him, there— his teeth bared, a prolonged, disdainful eye roll.
However, it does him no good to express that, now, when his vicious anger is rooted in his grieving. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I can leave if you’d like?”
“You can go fuck yourself. Don’t they call you a saint? Why don’t you perform a miracle and save my dad right now? Or do you not just care about us Seam folk beyond the appearance of your Christian charity?”
“Gale, shut up,” another voice cuts in, gone cold with reproach.
Both boys instinctively turn to the source. Katniss Everdeen sits on one end of a sagging couch, her legs crossed, fiddling with the tail of her dark braid. Peeta barely catches her eyes before she’s pinned them back on her boyfriend— or her cousin. He’s never been able to find out what they are to each other.
“He hasn’t done anything,” she says. “He’s here to help, so you can either get the fuck over yourself or go punch a tree outside. Stop being an asshole.”
“Stop being a bitch! My dad’s dying!”
“And that’s not his fault,” she maintains, though she does look gutted saying it.
Peeta feels awkward, nails prickling under his skin at the tension stretching between the two, tight enough to snap. While ducking his head, he excuses himself to escape it, and takes his place outside, leaning against the exterior of the house. He has a paper bag tucked against his chest, warm with a bread roll. He had meant to hand it to Gale, or his sweet-faced sister Posy, but he knew he wouldn’t take it well, that he might throw it back at his face. Christian charity, he called it. Wasn’t it? Why did that have to be a bad thing?
A soft thud sounds atop the porch, and he turns to see Katniss looking at him uncertainly. He recognizes her from school. They’re in the same grade level, though they’ve never really spoken beyond the usual, can I borrow a pencil, sure, exchange. She doesn’t speak to many people in general, blatantly preferring her own company, but Peeta knows how popular she is with the boys because of this. They call it her alluring mystique.
Really, he thinks it’s just because she’s beautiful, and remarkably so. Girls who look like her always manage to attract some kind of attention, even from people like himself.
“I’m sorry he yelled at you,” she says, stepping down to his level. Up close, he can’t help but notice how small she really is. Her worn, brown leather jacket nearly threatens to swallow her whole. The crown of her head barely grazes his chin. It’s so at odds with the scope of her reputation, which seems to loom so large above them all.
“It’s alright,” he says, smiling ruefully. “I don’t blame him. I’d probably be mad, too.”
“It’s still not your fault.”
Peeta shrugs. “It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. Grief’s weird like that. It makes you angry where you shouldn’t be.”
“That's true.” She settles into a spot beside him, her booted feet stretched out in front of her, her back against the wall. She idly watches Peeta fiddle with the bread roll, which accidentally succeeds in making him nervous. “Is that for Gale?”
“Uh— yeah. I try to bake a loaf for every family Father Snow and I visit. I know it doesn’t make up for anything, but I thought it was… I don’t know. Kind. Helpful.”
“It is,” she agrees. “If occasionally unwelcome. I don’t know if Gale will accept it.”
He sighs, long, a little beleaguered. His broad shoulders deflate with it, like a slow decompress. “I figured. He—“
“Has a lot of pride?”
“No. I just don't think he likes me,” he admits.
Katniss grunts— a confirmation enough— and draws her braid back into her fist. It wraps around her delicate throat like a serpent, long, glossy, and black. “Gale’s hard on anyone from Town. Don’t take it personally.”
She’s trying to be comforting, but the sentiment still frustrates him. Peeta isn’t nearly naive enough to pretend that he doesn’t notice the class divide. It’s entrenched into every facet of daily-living in Twelve. The Seam-born coal miners rise with the sun and descend below the deep, dark earth for six days a week while the Merchants open up shop, sell candy, and bake fluffy bread. With a few exceptions, they rarely intermarry. Friendships happen in school but aren’t broadcasted outside of it. And as everyone trudges through life, accepting this as their status quo, resentment simmers.
The only co-mingling that seems to exist happens on Sundays during mass, the tension alleviated for an hour, and then reinforced again after the Eucharist has been handed out and swallowed. It’s even worse for the sorry occupants of the Slag, Twelve’s red-light district, who are relegated to the very outskirts of town and are rarely seen outside of it. If one ever tries to venture out, they’re spat upon, publicly rebuked.
Merchant wives know their husband’s weaknesses.
As Peeta considers this, he glances at Katniss. She’s all Seam, down to her dusky skin-tone and the pale, smokey gray of her eyes, but her mother was from Town. In her twenties, she had run off with Katniss’s father and stayed married to him until his death several years ago. Because of his devotion to the church, Peeta’s resolved never to fall in love, but he can’t deny that he’s curious about what the force of it must feel like— the madness, the immediacy, the disregard for the eyes around you. What did Mrs. Everdeen feel in the days before she decided to elope, knowing that she would lose everything?
Suddenly, the door behind them slams open, and Gale Hawthorne stumbles out, his expression stricken, his wide eyes brimming with unshed tears. Moving faster than he’s ever seen her, Katniss immediately draws him into her arms and holds him tightly, rising up to the tips of her toes to press her lips against his ear, then his mouth. Not cousins, then.
She whispers something, but Peeta doesn’t need to hear it to know. His father is dead. He’s officially overstayed his welcome.
Avoiding Katniss’s eye, he places the bread down onto one of the rickety steps and begins to make his way down the road. Once he’s far enough, he stops to wait for Father Snow, who joins him after another half hour. It’s barely noon, but he’s already bone-tired. His heart hurts, throbbing dully. He thinks Twelve has seen the very limits of the devastation it can take in his lifetime. It was Mr. Hawthorne today, but who will it be tomorrow? The thought alone makes him want to weep.
It’s his mother.
Her health has never been particularly hale, but the fever takes her with a swiftness that blinds them. Just a week after her first ragged cough, the doctor has her confined to a bed. His father abandons the bakery to devote every waking minute to her— wiping her sweat, cleaning a bucket crusted with her vomit and waste, spooning soup past her parched lips— so his brothers pick up his slack, made all the more haggard by it. Peeta dangles somewhere in the hazy in-between of them all, unsure of where he should focus the majority of his energy. So he does everything: baking, cleaning, working, preparing for church, and helping her bathe. Crying and praying. Praying and crying.
None of it is ever enough. Her health continues to decline.
On a rainy Thursday night, they know she’s reached her end. Her skin has gone sunken and gray. Her chest rattles with every breath. Hard, rib-snapping coughs speckle blood onto the cracks of her lips. Their local doctor, a transplant from Four, tells them to summon the priest and ready their goodbyes. It won’t be too long, now.
His father has to leave the room after that, weeping quietly into his fist. Through the haze of his impending grief, Peeta wonders why. His parents’ marriage was never good. His father was often cowed by his mother, and his mother found him disgustingly meek— a weak, weak man, she called him. But he supposes there’s something to prolonged companionship, and the utter devastation that erupts from losing it. How can the earth continue to spin if the person who lies at the center of it, of your household, is gone? She tethered it with anger, sure, with rancid disdain, but what binds, binds forever. And they all still loved her, anyway. Fear can’t diminish that.
Father Snow arrives quickly, wet from the rain, and disappears inside her room. He’s there for all of five minutes before he walks out again, gesturing Peeta over.
“She wants you,” he says. “To her, there’s no one closer to God.”
He wants to argue, but he can’t summon the energy for it. Instead, he follows him in, tears instantly springing to his eyes when he sees her. She gets worse by the minute, her complexion nearly white, translucent from slow-moving blood. There’s no miracle that can save her at this point, no intercession from Christ that can delay the inevitable. A self-loathing so potent it steals his breath rises within him, crashing against the walls of his chest like tsunami waves beating the shore. Is he his mother’s Saint, a teenage boy who can only watch her suffer?
“Come, love,” she rasps, her voice thin, spreading her arms for him. “Come stay with me.”
Choking on a whimper, he stumbles over and collapses into her arms. Their hug is brief and painfully tight, but broken when Father Snow forcibly yanks him back for fear of contamination. He shoves a rag over his face, and Peeta loops the ends of it together behind his head, keeping it secure. He’s not too concerned for his health. If he gets sick, he deserves it. If he doesn’t— well, he supposes that’s what they call God’s will.
Is he his mother’s Saint?
“I’m sorry,” he says wretchedly. Father Snow moves around them, prepping his holy water, grabbing his bible. “I wish I could do more.”
She’s had such expectations for him, such grand ambitions. She got him involved in the church, had him lead family prayers, and read passages for them after dinner. She’s rested the entirety of her faith upon his head, and all she’s ever gotten in return was his weakness. His failure to do anything significant with it.
“There’s still so much you can do,” she says. Every word has to be wrestled through the swelling of her throat, but she endures for him, grappling for his hand and holding it tightly, pressing it against her sweaty chest. Her heart races beneath it, bucking up and out like a startled colt. “You’re still so young, and you’ve done so much already.”
He almost snorts. “I deliver bread to dying families. I visit an orphanage frequently enough to get praised for it. That’s nothing—“
“It is,” she insists. “Because that’s just the start.”
Peeta shakes his head. “Mom—“
But she’s not listening to him. She grunts out some strangled sound, and Father Snow hurriedly pulls the Eucharist from his bag. He slides the wafer onto her tongue, and Peeta encourages her to swallow, to find the strength. The act of doing so will bring her closer to God.
She meets his eyes and smiles. It’s so shocking an expression on her that it makes his chest squeeze painfully. How ruinous mothers can be, he realizes. Her joy is his albatross. It comes with so much weight.
“Remember my dream, Peeta,” she croaks. “The angel— the angel gave it to me, himself. For you.”
Then, with the last of her strength, she reaches up and slides her thumb across his forehead; the sign of the cross, etched into his skin with her sick-sweat, as holy a water as it can be.
When her eyes flutter closed and she slips away, Peeta sobs and kisses the back of her hand through his rag.
“I promise I will.”
His old question— Am I my mother’s saint?
His answer, hard-fought and won within him, pressed into the very depths of his soul— Yes. You must be.
The deaths slowly peter off, but it’s the last one of the season that truly changes everything.
On the day of Gale Hawthorne and Katniss Everdeen’s toasting, Primrose Everdeen’s body is found in the woods, her skull cracked open, blood spilling against the wet rock-face she slipped on. Katniss summarily disappears.
Gale flees to District Two. Katniss’s mother to District Four. The Hawthornes follow and offer no goodbyes.
The whole town tries to forget— the entire business too horrible, too sad, and they’re all still collectively wracked with grief, but when Katniss emerges again, weeks later, it’s in scandal, and they all can’t help but pay attention, fickle people that they are.
She shows up at church, a dark spot in a sea of white, pressed dresses and shirts. She’s cut her hair short, so it hangs above her bare shoulders. Her mouth is a sultry, red slash across her face, and her eyes are kohl-rimmed, turning the irises bright silver. When she takes the last pew nearest to the door, the whispers begin in earnest, most of them ugly.
“Haymitch Abernathy… she works…”
“That drunk? She can’t be a…”
“…But didn’t her sister just…”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s a—“
“Whore.”
Whore.
Her scarlet letter, red as her lips. Rumor says the Goat Man saw her disappear into Haymitch Abernathy’s dinky hotel and emerge as a harlot. Another Seam slut.
Even in the grips of his misery, Peeta doesn’t dare believe it until he sees Cray, their old, disgusting Head Peacekeeper, leer after her and then lift his laughing eyes to his. Without prompting, he says to him and the other Merchant men around them, “She tastes sweet and a little wild, like blackberries. I was the first in line.”
“That can’t be true.” He almost doesn’t hear himself.
“It is. Look at her.”
He does. Her gaze is stubbornly fixed to the crucifix behind Father Snow. She doubtlessly knows what’s being said about her and is making a valiant effort not to make any distress apparent, but Peeta can read it, anyway, wafting off her like perfume. It’s in the slight shake of her hands, the downward pull of her mouth. The quick slide of her eyes, darting away once they catch on his. The sting of guilt.
He’s bafflingly stricken to realize that it is true.
“Well, Saint,” Cray says, grinning at him. “Mark that one down as another lost sheep.”