Well, it was a fair enough question, she supposed. In the moment, her answer had been a simple enough mathematical calculation, but this removed from it, the actual why of it all was a different thing entirely, and it wasn't quite as cut and dried. "When I was a kid, I wouldn't have made it without him," she said. "Not just the Games, it was everything that came after. Navigating the entire world. I wouldn't have lasted, it all would have eaten me alive. He didn't just look out for me, he took care of me. Nobody had ever done that before. And then I got older and it all just - it got hard, and strange, and complicated. I always wished it hadn't gotten hard."
There was a delicate-looking towel folded on top of the vanity in front of the mirror; she picked it and began to summarily ruin it, scrubbing the paint from her arms best as could be done without the aid of soap and hot water. "I don't know how genuine it is on his part. I never have. A lot of the time, it feels like he looks at me and sees - some version of me that's kind and sweet and worth it, and you and I both know I'm none of those things. He looks at me and he sees the best thing he ever did. I stayed with him after they announced the Quell because I wanted - everyone had someone to give a shit about them, Bucky and Steve and Peggy have each other, and Scott has his daughter, you and Jarvis have each other, and Clint didn't deserve to be alone. I didn't want to be alone, either. It was nice, there was always a clock on it til the Reaping, it was never going to be sustainable, but it was really nice. I would have been happy with us just having the month, but he wanted more from it. You know he thinks big."
She shrugged, a quick rise and fall of her shoulders. She still didn't know why Clint had done it, if it had just been impulse or fear or real desire, but he had said it, and she'd answered. "He's a good man. I owe him, and I genuinely care about him, and he's a good man, and it's what he wants, and I don't think we'd make each other unhappy. And it's all contingent on both of us actually making it out alive."
She tossed the now-filthy to the point of unfixable towel back onto the table. It was the best she could do. It was the most she had to give, and she'd never really learned how to give another person more than everything she'd outlined. Any time she'd ever tried to do more, to be more, to feel more - a stolen kiss when she was seventeen, everything that had happened with Clint - it had been something the Capitol had stolen from her, and this was who she'd become, who she'd grown into on the scraps that were left. God knew why anyone would want to marry someone who couldn't aim for something brighter, better than that, but Clint seemed to want it, anyway. "Sorry. Went full-monologue there."