Chapter Text
Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a little boy who thought in colors no one had ever seen before. He lived with his parents and his brothers over the bakery that had been in their family for generations, and he learned how to make breads and cakes and cookies and pies, but the colors? Those were in him from the start.
Wait.
I should start with me, shouldn't I? Isn't that how this is supposed to go?
I've never really been good at talking about myself, though. How proud I am of my sister – of course. Or shooting, or magic, or anything other than me. Anything at all.
Except him.
He had a gift, of course. But he didn't realize what it was. He thought that everyone could do what he did so effortlessly that he didn't even have to think about it. He created the most beautiful things. Our favorite thing to do was to go into Town to look through the windows and drool over whatever he'd made that morning. I swear he used to frost cookies in all the right colors just so he could stack them up into rainbows melting into each other, or yellows and oranges like the fall coming to life, or the dark heart of a coal burning on Midwinter's Day, when the day is cold and short and the night is colder and very, very long.
No, we never bought anything. We were poor, after all, and it was enough to look through the window and imagine how they tasted. And anyway, I don't think his mother would have let us through the door. Like I said, we were poor, and we looked like it. She hated that. Or us. I could never decide. I like to believe that we would have braved the witch one day, but that winter, our father died.
We weren't exactly interested in cookies after that.
It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I thought I would never be able to breathe again. It was like a living thing, huge and heavy and overwhelmingly oppressive, that crushed every part of me under its massive weight and turned me into coal. I couldn't feel anything. Not even grief. Maybe I thought that if I didn't exist, neither would the grief. It was silly, of course, but I was just a kid.
I can say that now. I thought I was so grown up at the time.
Mom took his death harder than we did. She fell into this blackness inside of her and she couldn't find her way out. If she even tried. I hated her for it at the time, you know? She left us alone. We were just kids – I was twelve – and she left us alone: no food, no money, no family to help. We were kids. And somehow, I had to keep us alive.
I couldn't have done it without him.
Yeah. Him. I was surprised, too.
We had some stuff left, and I made it last as long as I could. Maybe I could have done better if I knew anything about cooking except what Dad taught me. I tried to eat as little as I could, because... But it didn't help. We were all getting thinner, and Mom wasn't coming back. And then the food ran out. Nothing left.
People talk about hunger like it's just something that happens, like it's just there, the same way that they talk about the snow piling up on their roof. They don't think about the stormclouds over their head, the ones that make the snow in the first place. They don't think about the hard freeze that has to happen first. They don't think about the echoing hollow inside of you that just grows bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger until it's not a hollow at all – until the hunger is all that there is. Until you're just a skin over a need that feels like it's bigger than you are. Hunger's like that. It eats you up from the inside out: stomach first, then fat and muscles, and then everything that makes you you. All gone. Every bit. Until you kill it or it kills you.
I know that you know. I'm just hoping you forgot that. If nothing else.
I crept into Market Chipping that night, looking for anything I could bring home, but I was too late. I think they cleared the bins in the evening, after most everyone went home, so they were empty. I was so hungry, I would have taken anything, but there wasn't anything to take. I don't remember very well after that. I think I fainted a little, and the bins made a huge crash. Maybe that's what caught his attention. I don't know for sure. But a few minutes later, the back door opened – it was him, with bread in his hands and a huge red mark coming up on his face – and he looked over his shoulder and pretended to throw it over the fence to the pigs.
But instead, it landed in the dirt in the alley. Right at my feet.
He didn't stick around to watch me stare at it while I tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Once I realized what it was, I ran home so fast my feet felt light, and for the first time in days, we went to bed with full bellies.
He gave that to us.
The next day was the first day of spring. I could feel it on the air. There's a smell, too, rich and green, like the plants are all waking up from winter. Our father used to sing spring into life. He was a wizard, a real one, and he could do anything he set his mind to. His songs were haunting. More than once, I saw him sing birds out of the trees to come land on his hand. And he did that without magic. With it? He could sing the whole world into spring, if he wanted to.
I saw the boy with the bread in the schoolyard the next day. He didn't try to talk to me. He just looked at me. Or... Not at me, not really. At the hollows in my cheeks, and the dark circles under my eyes, and my wrist where it wasn't covered by my sleeve. I knew what he was looking for. I didn't like it. I felt exposed, like he was looking inside of me.
I was ashamed.
Instead of looking at his face, I let my eyes fall down to the ground, instead. And right in front of me, there was a crack. In that crack, there was a dandelion growing. It wasn't open yet. Spring hadn't gotten that far.
Not yet.
Everyone always said I'm my father's daughter.
I opened my mouth and I sang. Quietly, so no one could hear me. Intensely, with everything that I was holding inside, everything that woke up again that night for the first time in weeks, after I finally filled the raging beast inside my stomach.
You know the song, right? Of course you do. Everyone knows the song.
Deep in the meadow... under the willow...
At first, nothing happened. I was so disappointed. But then, right in front of my eyes, it swelled, and lifted its head, and unfurled every petal. I watched it so hard it felt like it was blooming in slow-motion. When it was done, I felt it inside – I felt it sigh. It settled down again, turning its head toward the sun, and that's when I knew.
He gave me more than bread. He gave me hope.
I looked up – I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe that I would be brave enough to go over and say thank you – but he was gone. I only saw the edge of his backpack and the back of his shoe as he went around the corner into school.
It didn't matter, not then. I could thank him later. What mattered now is that I could do it. I could feed us. I could hunt, and grow the edible plants, and if I practiced, if I tried, who knows what else I could do? If I had my father's magic, then maybe I could do just as much with it as he could.
So I did. It wasn't easy, and we struggled, but we never went too hungry ever again. Not like those black days.
At the same time, Mom wasn't getting better. She just laid there, like she was sleeping, but her eyes were open. She hardly ate anything. I couldn't wake her up, no matter what I did. She never responded to me at all.
Not to me.
I hated her for that, you know. I couldn't see her pain – I could only see my own. Our mother abandoned us. That's all I knew. So I hated her. Maybe I could have reached her if I hadn't. Who knows? I was convinced that we didn't need her. I was bringing home enough food. It wasn't fine, but it was a life, and we were living it.
And then one day a few months later, I came home, and she was standing in the kitchen, stirring a pot of soup on the oven. And humming. I don't know why, but it was the humming that pissed me off.
"What are you doing?" I said.
And she turned to look at me and smiled – smiled, like she used to. Before. Like nothing happened. Like she hadn't spent months checking out while I kept us alive by a stranger's handout and pure chance. It was just us in the house, no little sister to worry about, and I'm not too proud to say that I screamed at her. For hours. I called her the worst names I could think of and every foul word under the sun. She just stood there and took it, smiling at me in that way of hers. Tired. Understanding. I hated her more for it. How could she possibly understand what she put us through?
Afterward, she tried to hug me. I think I hit her. I know that I cried. She wrapped me up in her arms and leaned her forehead against mine – I was almost taller than she was, even then – and sighed. "I'm sorry, sweetheart," she said to me. "I don't know what happened. I was lost, I think, and I couldn't find my way out through the dark. When I woke up this morning, it was just gone."
I stood there and thought about that for a few minutes.
"What do you mean, gone?" I asked.
I didn't want to trust it. It was too easy. If it went away that fast, who's to say that it couldn't happen again?
"I don't know. It was..." She obviously didn't want to say what we were both thinking. So I said it for her.
"Like magic."
She nodded reluctantly.
That's when I realized that we were probably on a time limit. Whatever the dark cloud was, it went away – or was taken – and that meant it could come back at any time. I don't know why that changed how I felt about her. Maybe it felt like the cloud was something done to her, rather than something she did to us. It pulled us together again. Us against it. Whatever it was.
"You have to tell Prim that you might get sick again, and make up a reason why," I told her, probably more harshly than I needed to. "Don't let her wonder if it's her fault." I don't think I imagined the pain on her face when she agreed. I regret that – and I don't. It needed to be said. Just... maybe not right then.
But Mom never got the chance.
We waited, you know? At first, we just thought that school let out late, but then it was afternoon, and nothing, and I went out to look but – And then it was nighttime, and I – I –
I will never have the words to explain how scared I was. We both were. Mom went looking, too, even though she was still weak from being bed-bound for months. We looked and looked all night long, everywhere we could think of, but –
Shit. Sorry. Um. Don't look at me. It's been years, but I guess it still kind of feels like it was yesterday.
I don't want to think about this anymore.