(broken)

He couldn't remember being whole, ever. Life had chipped away at him since the day he was born. Hunger, thirst, exhaust, cold. Those broke him on the outside, made his olive skin pallid with sickness and his eyes cold from having to survive. Eventually the despair of it all began to break him on the inside. When his father died, he lost most of himself, and it would never come back. When Katniss came into his life, what he had lost stayed gone; only now, he had a bit of her to replace it. He leaned on her and became her best friend; when they were together, they were almost half and half. Even apart, there was a little bit of the other always there. When he fell in love with her, he became artificially whole. She didn't finish him, but it felt complete enough that his words became warmer and he no longer looked like hell all the time.

When the Hunger Games stole her, everyone thought he had been broken, crumbled beyond repair. He hadn't. There wasn't anything left to break, of course. But the shock of no longer feeling whole sent him back into a darkness again. He looked sick. He glared at everyone. His words bit.

He looked like hell because he simply didn't care anymore.

He had nothing left but the little shards of himself that, no matter how hard anyone tried or how crappy life got, would somehow always remain.

(belief)

When she came back, he expected to start feeling okay again, to begin falsely believing that he had earned back what he had lost. He didn't care about reality, he just wanted his life to become a fantasy land where he wasn't so completely empty anymore.

Nothing changed. When he was with her, nothing flooded into his heart and gave him sustenance like it used to.

When she left for the Games again, unlike the first time, there was no shock of emptiness.

(empty)

When he left her, somehow, the few shards he had left of himself fell away into oblivion. He thought he had known emptiness all his life; now he knew he was wrong.

Emptiness was having nowhere left to turn, no more hope of earning yourself back. Emptiness was different than being broken; when he had been broken, there was someone who could pick up the pieces and glue them together in a cracked, spiderwebbed window, one that, if they were to get too close, would cut them with the sharp edges of the glass and give a warped, creased image of him. Katniss had been the one to pick him up, and with him, she had still gotten cut, deep slices into her that would leave scars forever.

When he was broken, Katniss had been his hope. He was empty now, so there was nothing left to hope for.