all-fire

peeta is terrified to his bones of being rejected. and, especially after all of the hijacking business, he believes that katniss has every reason to reject him.

so he would not kiss her, breaking their precious friendship. because he does not want her to leave him. leaving him to suffer without the only person he can find safety with.

perhaps my favorite moment of sunrise on the reaping. because it shows us how precisely snow was projecting himself onto these boys. first haymitch. and then peeta.

because you just know that snow was feeding peeta's insecurities when he was torturing him. telling him over and over again that katniss would choose gale/the rebellion/literally anything over him. that she would leave him at the soonest possibility he was not useful for her.

because that's all he is good for. helping the mockingjay.

but that is why the "stay with me/always" scene marks an important shift in peeta's return to himself.

because there is katniss. the hisses of mutts encroaching. holding hijacked peeta by his shackled wrists. right as he is about to lose control. close enough to kill her.

👏 and 👏 she 👏 does 👏 not 👏 leave 👏 him 👏

because her plans have always included peeta. she needs him.

she needs him in the darkness of the night. she needs him when he is injured on the bank of a creek. she needs him when he can't even remember his favorite color. rain or shine, she needs that boy like oxygen.

so give her the nightlock berries. let her kiss the rabid boy. she would do it. ten times over. because she would rather die than leave him.

One of the most valuable things that TBOSAS and SOTR added to the series, in my opinion, is highlighting just how much of a limited/unreliable narrator Katniss is, and gently challenging her perception in the early books that no resistance to the Capitol exists and/or is futile. Reading the original trilogy, you get the perception early on that there is little to no resistance against the Capitol, that it is futile and pointless to fight back, that the Capitol has well and truly subjugated its population until Katniss and Peeta spark the blaze that sets the country aflame.

But that’s not true. People have been fighting back and resisting the Games HARD, right from the very beginning. Casca Highbottom, the Games’ own creator, throwing institutional roadblocks and trying to stop Snow before he gets out of control. Arachne and the girl from District 10. Marcus and his refusal to play the game. Reaper and everything he did in the arena. Lucy Gray, who defied Snow and his Games so profoundly she was written out of history entirely. EVERYTHING ABOUT Haymitch’s Games - everything he did, Mags and Wiress and Beetee and Plutarch, Maysilee, the Newcomers. Lenore Dove and everything she did in service of revolution. Resistance against the Games, we can infer, has been active and persistent since the Games themselves were founded.

Katniss isn’t wrong or dumb for having the perspective she does early on in the trilogy; she’s working off the information she has, and there’s so much she hasn’t seen and doesn’t know about. But the resistance she feels is born at the end of THG/into CF has always been there, has always been fighting, has given the Capitol a run for their money right from the beginning. There are so many ways in which Katniss will never know just how much came before her, and how much the revolution was the endpoint of a struggle that’s as old as the Games themselves.