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There aren't many things Lamina remembers about her mother.
She remembers that she also had red hair and that whenever they were in the village she had been forced to hold her hand.
That’s the extent of it. She’d been too young to remember anything else. Too young to remember the sound of her mother’s voice and too naive to think she'd ever have to.
Her mother had kept journals though. Journals that were buried deep in the trunk at the foot of her parent's bed and Lamina scavenged them desperately when she'd finally learned how to read. Journals that described the taste of chocolate, the joy of having a child, and a philosophy her mother had apparently lived by her whole life before she died.
Sometimes the whole is better than the parts, and sometimes the parts outweigh the whole.
It was all throughout them, written in slanted lettering, and Lamina remembers the way she’d paused to trace the s’s of her mother’s writing, curved the same way she writes hers.
Darragh has a temper, but he's also generous and courageous. I like his whole more than I dislike his parts.
I keep telling myself that eating supper with my family once a week is valuable and my duty, but I'm starting to believe the snide comments hurt more than the hugs are warm.
Lamina cries often, however even during long nights I can't find it in myself to be frustrated with her. She is so perfect, so sweet, all of her is so good.
She hadn’t quite understood what that meant. How could someone have parts? And what did it mean for their whole to be better than their parts?
When she'd asked her father, he'd given her a sad smile, clearly aware of where she’d heard it. He told her that everyone had flaws, but that some people’s flaws were too hurtful to love through them. He explained that others had flaws too, but that the whole of who they were was better than the pain of their faults. He said that even when you loved people, there were always going to be traits about that person that hurt, or that you didn't like. That it was up to her to decide whether she was willing to stick through the parts for the whole, or if they would be too much for her. Gently, he’d expressed that sometimes, you could love someone, and dislike them as well.
Even then, it hadn't made much sense. How could you love someone and dislike them at the same time?
If you disliked something about them, wouldn't you just not like them?
Lamina remembers the feeling of her bubbling laughter as her response. That was a really silly notion to live by. She had always expected her mother to be a smart woman.
And then she’d met Treech, and realized there were very few things he could do that would ever make her unwilling to love him because of a few bad parts.
It's a frighteningly cold day in November when she meets the boy wearing a thin jacket, a hole in the seam of his right shoulder.
It’s a brief meeting. He bumps into her in his rush to play ball with the other boys and knocks her textbook out of her hand. He bends quickly to pick it up, pant leg covered in a thin layer of frost from the ground as he stands back up, his bare hand brushing her gloved one as he passes it back.
He smiles brightly and she stands there hugging the book close, wide-eyed in the face of his full attention.
"Sorry 'bout that," he tells her. "Didn't see you."
She’s unable to say anything, too caught up in the sight of untamed curls and rosy cheeks. Even at ten, he is incomparable.
"Are you alright?" he asks, gaze turning wary. "I didn't knock into you too hard, did I?"
She shakes her head abruptly, trying to shake away the spell, and through amazed eyes tells him she is alright. Thanks him for picking up her book.
He laughs and it is clean and polite and unlike anything she's ever heard.
“No problem,” he says and nods his head at the book in her hands. “You seem to like them much more than anyone I know.”
Lamina's neck flushes red beneath her scarf. She thinks Treech must have seen, because he laughs again.
"I didn't mean to embarrass you," he apologizes. "It's a good thing. You're smart."
It’s the first time anyone has ever mentioned her intelligence in a way that isn’t cruel or taunting, and before she can tell him so, shouts of his name cut her off.
Treech’s head shoots up at the boys waiting for him and before he goes, he glances back at her, those eyes holding her in place. He promises to see her around and then he is leaving, like he never stopped to talk in the first place.
That is the first time Lamina learns Treech is, above everything, kind.
The next thing Lamina learns about Treech is that he is, surprisingly, pretty squeamish.
Treech stumbles into the schoolhouse one day during the break hour, blood running down his leg in rivers, and Lamina is the only one there to witness it.
Later he tells her that he had slipped after being dared to climb the large willow tree in the middle of the courtyard, and unable to say no, had climbed farther than he should have.
Pulling her nose out of a book about flora she asks if he is alright.
He is green when he squeaks out an answer.
Withholding a smile she stands, gesturing for him to follow her as she pulls out the bucket of water Mr. Chloris keeps underneath his desk and a clean cloth typically used for the chalkboard.
He watches her silently from his seat on top of the desk (one she thinks that Chloris would not be too happy about) as she cleans his wound, warning him that it may sting.
His teeth are gritted as he answers that he’ll be ok and when she gives him a strange look he says how he doesn’t like blood.
It’s a funny thing, to discover that the Treech in the grade above her, the boy who always seems so untouchable, who picked up her book for her last winter, is afraid of blood.
She almost laughs but holds it back. He asks why she isn’t. She tells him about her brothers and their tendency to always find trouble.
"I'm glad you're here," he says quietly. Her hand jerks on his knee. “I wouldn’t have been able to clean it otherwise.”
A muttered response in the form of it being no problem. She tries not to study his face when he watches her fold the cloth.
He gives a quick glance out the window before turning from it with a longing sigh. He tries for a smile as he asks her to show him the book she had been reading before he interrupted.
Lamina decides her favorite flowers are blue cornflowers. Treech likes white roses the best, but they both agree apple blossoms are the prettiest.
When Lamina is thirteen, she learns that Treech is thoughtful.
Her brothers are killed a few weeks before, caught scheming rebellion with their friends, and shot instantly.
Sleep is a foreign thing when your older brothers are dead. Lamina lies awake in bed most nights staring at the ceiling. Unable to grieve and unable to dash the hope that they are going to come home any second, she settles for trying to not think at all. To bury all the emotions living in her gut that threaten to suffocate her should she let them.
A knock on the window is easy to hear when the house is silent with death.
She starts, a brief unbridled thought that it could possibly be Elmer, too drunk to make it in the front door.
When she turns it isn’t the green of her brother's eyes that meet hers, but the brown of Treech's. Their gazes hold and Lamina is reminded of the time they met when she had been unable to look away. The moment is broken when he gestures for her to meet him at the front door.
She shrugs on a jacket over her night clothes and slips into boots, sneaking toward the main door. She isn’t worried about waking her father up. He’s taken to waiting until he thinks she’s asleep to cry before drowning his sorrows in a rare bottle of liquor.
Lamina steps onto the front porch, shutting the door behind her, back pressing to the wood of it, a whispered question wondering what he is doing there on her tongue.
He is still in his work clothes and the white of his undershirt is bright in the moonlight. He tells her he wants to show her something, asks earnestly if she will come with him.
She thinks there are very few places she won’t follow him, but it is late, and her brothers are dead, and she hasn’t seen Treech much since he started work.
She goes to say no and stops.
Treech is steady, she knows this, and the sincerity in his eyes allows her the ability to agree, and the stifling silence of a home without her brothers forces her to go.
He doesn’t let go of her hand as he leads her and he doesn’t look back either. They walk into the woods, twisting around trees and ducking below branches, the warmth of his fingers between hers the entire time. When he stops, the forest clears to unveil soft open grass, streaks of moonlight, and dazzling fireflies dancing up from the soil.
She breathes out a gasp of wonder and lets go of his hand to clasp one out of the air, the lightness of it tickling her fingers. In amazement, she asks why they are still out.
Treech’s smile is warm and wide in the light of the moon. He explains that he’s never figured it out, but that he’s been coming here since he was little. He tells her he thought she would like it.
There is a beat as they both watch the firefly sweep itself off Lamina’s fingers. Treech shoves his hands into his pockets. He says he’s sorry about her brothers.
Lamina swallows. It is a weird reality she lives in now. One where she is an only child. One where she will never feel the warmth of Acacius’s hugs or the heat of Elmer’s proud smiles again.
Her instinct is to say that it is ok, but her throat closes around the words. It isn’t ok. It will never be ok. Her big brothers are dead.
So instead of false reassurances, she avoids his eye and admits that she hasn't cried. Then she laughs unbiddenly. She thinks it is ironic, she tells him, that she, who cries at everything, hasn't cried over the murders of her older brothers. Quietly, she asks if that makes her a bad person.
Treech is fierce and firm in his response. He forces himself in front of her and she is unable to look away from him as he does so, his eyes drawing her in as they always have.
There is a fire in his typically level words when he insists she is not a bad person. That she is grieving. She is not a bad person. She is in pain.
A lump rises in her throat. A whispered confession of how she wishes it would all stop.
Treech’s brow crumples at the admission. He pulls out a piece of paper from his pants, one that had clearly been folded meticulously, and hands it to her.
When she unfolds it there is a shakily drawn picture of a bouquet of yellow pansies. Her eyes shoot up to meet his, a question in them.
"They mean 'Thinking of you'," Treech explains softly. "We read it in your flower book after you cleaned my knee, a few years ago."
She has nothing to say, too busy reveling in the fact that he remembers.
"I am, by the way," he adds, holding her gaze. "Thinking of you."
Lamina stares at him. After a moment, she thanks him.
Treech nods. "My mom always says that when people die they don't leave you. I never really understood what it meant until my Grandfather died but... it helped me. When he did. To imagine him still with me.” She watches him swallow. “Your brothers love you, Lamina. Death can't take that away."
They are quiet and then like a flood bursting through a dam, tears fall from her eyes and she sobs, clutching the drawing to her chest.
Treech doesn’t allow himself to appear alarmed for long as he wraps thin fifteen year old arms around her shoulders and she sinks into them, no longer able to keep herself steady.
He holds her for hours as she cries, and when he walks her back home after, his arm is warm around her waist.
Treech is, almost always, tired.
Bags are a permanent fixture underneath his eyes and his smiles are always weary.
Sometimes she finds it frustrating, how he will work himself to the bone because he thinks that is the only option. That all his life will ever be is a never-ending cycle of hard work with little reward.
Treech is her opposite in every way. Where she is overly emotional, he tries his very hardest to never feel emotions he deems are unworthy— and she finds that those are more often than they aren’t.
By the time she is fourteen, she has learned that Treech pushes her away at the slightest sign of their friendship being something more than just that.
And while it hurts, and breaks her heart in a way she hadn't ever been convinced was possible at fourteen until then, she loves him all the same.
One of her favorite things about Treech she discovers, is his duty to his family.
She's immensely surprised when he asks if she'd be willing to meet his younger sisters and agrees enthusiastically.
The youngest is Tilia and she reminds Lamina almost painfully of the ten year old boy who had picked up her book in the cold and fretted over knocking into her too hard. She is bright and bubbly and begs Lamina to braid her hair in the exact same intricate twist Lamina had her own in that day. She and Treech share the same thick, dark-as-night hair, and as Lamina runs her fingers through it, there is a fleeting thought of small children that have her honey-brown eyes and Treech's hair.
Elowen is only four years younger than Treech but Lamina recognizes the same bitterness in him in her. She is more reserved, with snide comments Treech chastises her for and Lamina wonders if he understands he has said much worse things to her in the quiet of District 7's forest after work. All the same, however, Treech brings out small smiles from Elowen's jaded gaze and begrudgingly convinces her to admit to Lamina a shared interest in history. They discuss rewritten textbooks and heroes long lost in the war.
When Treech walks her home, he admits to her that he is scared for them both and even more afraid of the influence he has had on them. Scared that Elowen's jadedness is a product of his own and that she will only grow more so as she ages. He worries that the world is too harsh for Tilia's bright optimism, and is ashamed that he is unable to tell her so.
Lamina does not know how to help and she hates it. She tells him that whatever awful influence he thinks he has had on them, above everything he has loved them, and that is what matters the most.
There is something different in the smile he gives her in response and when he says goodbye, he kisses her on the cheek before leaving.
She wonders if maybe he feels a duty to her too, as part of his family.
Lamina discovers many things about him throughout the years. He is attentive and shy, and when he kisses her on her fifteenth birthday, she thinks maybe he loves her too.
It's sweet and when he pulls back he looks startled, as though he hadn't expected himself to do it as much as she had been shocked when he did. There is a flicker of fear in his eyes as he stares at her and Lamina never does discover why it was there in the first place, though she has many theories.
But then he cracks a smile and she laughs and he kisses her again and Lamina decides that she will never be the same again.
The last thing she learns about Treech, and it is perhaps her least favorite thing about him, is that he is a coward.
It is a heartbreaking thing to find out, especially when it comes in the discovery that he is a coward almost entirely when it comes to her.
A conversation overheard between him and his friends at work, one that claims she is nothing more than a childhood friend to him, one that he is not particularly close with at that.
She drops the picnic basket she had brought for his lunch in her haste to leave and it must have been louder than she thought it would be because there is a strangled shout of her name and when they are safely covered by the shade of forest trees Treech grabs her wrist and spins her around.
She is barely able to form words through the shattering of her heart as she tries to explain brokenly that she had thought they— well after he kissed her she expected— she had thought he—
"We are! I do!"
He hadn't said that though, and she tells him just as much, though it is through half-finished sentences and tears and strangled breaths and his hands are tight around her wrists as he forces her to look him in the eye, and tells her she is panicking. Asks her to breathe with him.
That is another thing about Treech. He is level-headed and calm and in darker moments Lamina thinks it's because he never allows himself to experience things that will make him feel anything other than that.
He tells her he isn't ready for anyone else to know. That he doesn't want anyone else to stick their noses in their relationship and ruin it. She is too good for the cruelty of his world.
Sometimes she thinks Treech has put her on a pedestal. Fears that his hatred for himself has allowed him to see her as better than she is.
It's then that she realizes Treech is afraid.
"Why are you so scared?" she demands.
"Why are you not? " he insists.
She recognizes the fear in his eyes easily, but it takes a minute to understand there is also disbelief in them that she does not feel the same way.
This is where the disconnect has always been she realizes. Treech is often scared and he finds comfort in that fear, comfort in the familiarity of it, allowing it to stop him from most things. She, like him, is scared easily, but instead of relishing in it, she refuses to live in it and runs as far from it as she can.
There is no fixing this. Not when Treech is seventeen and she will be sixteen in three months and they have both already defined their morals.
He drops her wrists and she tells him to give her time and tries desperately to ignore the heartache in his eyes as she leaves him standing there.
One last thing about Treech. He's always been easy to read.
It's only when Treech turns his back on her in the arena does she finally understand what her mother meant about a person's parts vs their whole.
Because even as he turns from her, even as he drops his head in that cowardly way of his and slinks over to Coral, she can't find it in herself to hate him.
To wish he'd have said no? Easily. To feel destroyed? Absolutely.
But to hate him? Never.
Lamina wishes she could. It would make everything so much easier if she could look at him and feel nothing. Remember nothing.
But that isn't the case.
Because she does remember things. She remembers him at ten, so sweet and kind with that brilliant smile that is so rare nowadays. That kindness that he so easily showed and now so desperately tries to hide.
She remembers him again a year later, afraid of blood and unable to clean his own wounds. He likes white roses the best.
Treech is thoughtful. He draws flowers he's unable to afford for a girl after her brothers die and shows her fireflies.
He is weary. Exhausted beyond any amount of sleep.
He puts duty above all. He feels as though he owes his life to his family. He won't listen if they tell him otherwise.
He's shy. When he holds her it is with gentle hands that are afraid of what comes next.
He is a coward.
She remembers all of this and knows that she loves him. She remembers all of this and knows that she dislikes him.
She thinks they both know this as he catches her gaze for the last time.
She imagines there must be many things swarming in her eyes at that moment— anger, betrayal, pain.
She hates that this is what they've come to and as she looks back up at Coral, tries to imagine something different.
They were never Reaped.
Treech turns nineteen first, and she follows a few years after.
Eventually, she finds it in herself to forgive him. She loves him much more than she dislikes him.
They're able to get married. They have a home together. There are children there that share the same smile a ten year old boy once had. He loves her and finds it in himself to look past the bad parts of her.
It could have happened. It would have happened. It's all she's ever wanted.
She dies on impact.