Color Theory

Heavy Trigger Warning for Non-graphic Domestic Abuse.

My lip is fat and dense when I touch it, and idly I wonder if it will blush that same rosy-plum the last one had, and the others that came before that.

The Others: a dynasty of lumps and bumps and bruises blamed on doors and brothers and stairs. They turn colors I haven't seen anywhere else, and I can't help but stare at them, greedy for any color at all, even these. Or maybe especially these. They're what my body does to say what I can't, and their audacity is fascinating. There is no green like a healing bruise, no blue like a fresh one. No white like the bloodless shock of my skin, no black like the darkness of my room when the key turns to lock me in.

Mom taught me about color.

The first one she tells me about is stupid, and it feels like a slap at the back of my head. But it looks like a dusky pinkish-brown that is dirt, burnished copper pots and the tiles beneath my shoes as the force from her blow knocks my head forward until I am staring at the bakery floor. She is screaming, but I am far, far away, wondering which color exactly those tiles were. Pink? Brown? Orange? Years later, I learn the name. Sienna. Even now when I see it I can hear the smack of her lips as they form the 'p' in 'stupid'.

Today, she gives me a fat lip and teaches me a new color. It is an quiet sort of shade, only I know how badly it throbs. Its the color of Mom being careful not to bruise: the shell of an egg, milk in soft light, when you repaint a wall only to find it's not white, just slightly off, and you never noticed until it was time for a fresh coat. Today I understand that cream is invisible, and later, when no bruise forms, I understand that that is because it is ubiquitous.

Cream is the color of assumption. The color of my markless skin.

My mother's hands: those same ten fingers and twin worn-smooth palms have given and taken so much from me that it all tangles together until I both love and fear them at once.

First, love.

I love them when they're wrapped around the neck of a frosting bag. They're steady, every movement quick and purposeful. I watch as the world drops away from her, and I can see underneath her sharpness and anger the kind of attentive care I so badly want to know firsthand.

I am five when her tremors start. That's when I learn sienna, but not its name. New colors with no names quickly follow. I am confused when robins-egg happens, devastated with cerulean and terrified of mauve.

When these colors repeat, Mom teaches me the meaning of 'pattern'.

Dad's turned back becomes 'sallow'- the color of the sweat trail that leaks down the back of his white work shirt. Everything I know of yellow is him, but everything I know of red is Katniss, and that I also learn when I am five. Her dress, and Dad's rushed, whispered confession, I was a goner- they're the brightest reds I've ever know.

Red is a secret I am bursting at my seams to tell, and I do in a breathless rush when I see my mother after school. I tell her about the girl, Katniss Everdeen, and her dress, how she sang, and Dad and Katniss' mother.

Did you know Mom? Did you know about Katniss Everdeen's mom?

When we get home Mom is trembling, but I am not sure if its pain or something else, and I am scared that she is sick because once I was sick and trembled with too-cold and too-hot all at once.

I ask Mom if she is sick but she says no, and go upstairs now to your room and don't come out, do you hear me?

I am cerulean and mauve with the quilt over my head when the screaming starts, and I learn a hard lesson in keeping red to myself.

Mom was sick though, and the older I got, the worse she became. This is when she teaches me fear. Her hands, once slender and strong- now stiff and swollen, shiny pink, like she had soaked them in too-hot water. Splotches of carnation burst into life on her arms and legs and cheeks, and she disappears into her room for days.

But bakeries don't wait for sick women. There are orders to fill, cakes to frost, and Mom's job is now mine as she shakily puts the frosting bag in my hands and snaps at me not to fuck up.

The color of the frosting is a bluish-lavender, like the clouds of a winter dawn, or the smell of buttery, expensive soap.

I try. I do. But I am not Mom, and she does not have patience for me with her fingers fat like sausages and the skin of her face pulled tight and hot.

Lavender becomes my first lesson in self-hatred. There are others, and they all have corresponding colors- a muted palette of private heartache, a fog of greyish-purple-blues that have names like periwinkle, mist and wisteria, but feel like a rolling pin against my ribs and taste like the bitter saliva around a hastily mumbled 'Sorry'.

I live for the splashes of red in my life. Katniss knocking into me obliviously in the hallway at school. When I catch her eyes on me from across the room. The tightness of her braid as I stare at it in class and learn nothing at all about history, but everything about the back of her head.

I start to draw. Mix pigments from old tea leaves and rotten berries. I make sketchbooks out of old school papers and draw right over them. My skills with the frosting improve, and I am rewarded by Katniss and her sister staring, right there in the bakery window, eyes wide and glossy, at the cakes. My tongue aches with a thousand fevered 'pleases' and I throw myself into drawing and frosting ever brighter, ever more intricate designs.

'Come back' I urge with yellow frosted primroses and bright red posies. 'Come inside.'

One day Mom sees Katniss and Prim, and I am devastated when she screams them away. When they don't come back, every cake bleeds into the next.

Its my name they call at the Reaping. I am about to learn every danger lurking in green, but Mom has one last cruel shade to show me.

Her eyes are a blue so sharp it could only be called steel when she says: "District Twelve may finally have a winner. She's a survivor, that one."

That's when I know. She's given up on me.

So that's what I do too.

A/N:

So my beta had this idea, and we kind of talked about it, but the longer I thought about it, the more I was dying to write it. I want to explain whats behind it, because her idea was really genius, and became instant head-cannon for me.

Peeta's mother suffers from a painful, debilitating condition called scleroderma, complicated by vasculitis, which gradually leaves her unable to frost the cakes at the bakery, her only outlet for her creative energy. When Peeta has take over, she focuses her anger and resentment toward him.

The second idea in this is mine and comes from Peeta's survival of the hijacking. Though its not broadly accepted that Dissociative Identity Disorders exist, its pretty much head cannon for me that its this that allows Peeta to survive the hijacking. Because dissociation is a response to trauma, we see the beginnings of it in a young Peeta trying to make sense of his mother's violence.