Fic Post: Abate [The Hunger Games]
Part I of the Alternate Takes series.
abate
the hunger games
katniss/peeta, katniss/gale, katniss/finnick
2320 words
r
On A03.
The Holo explodes as they enter the Capitol, and Peacekeepers are on them in moments, armed with itchy trigger fingers.
Beetee calls the explosion a technical malfunction in his later testimony in front of the Tribunal the Capitol holds to appease the ailing Districts. It’s all Snow can do to not execute him on the witness stand, but he shows resilient restraint in his moment of triumph.
Their surrender is unconditional. District 13 is under Capitol control within days.
---
Haymitch is the first one executed.
It’s actually fairly kind. One injection. Painless, or so they tell her. Haymitch laughs, drunk, and says he wishes he could have the Nightlock instead. Katniss laughs too, and then screams when they restrain her hands and wheel Haymitch out of the hospital room.
---
Katniss allows them to augment her body. Her hair is dyed a slightly reddish brown and they stuff her chest full of hard plastic that makes her look and feel incredibly foolish. She inherits new stylists with puffy cheeks and bright blue hair and dead eyes who dote on her every move. They primp and polish her until she feels like one of the dolls she sees in the Capitol markets, shiny and grinning through their eternal sadness.
After they bring her to the dressing room, they show her the extensive wardrobe that has been pre-approved by the President himself. The fabrics are fine, beautiful even, and she touches them with a certain amount of reverence, until she realizes that they are all a watery shade of blue.
Katniss gets it: The Girl on Fire is meant to be extinguished.
---
They take Gale a month later.
You have until morning, she’s told by a hushed voice as she and Gale are corralled into a plush room with vaulted ceilings and a bright aqua carpet. Katniss knows they’re filming it: She can hear the buzzing of the cameras as they fumble their way toward the bed at the center of the room. She winds her hands into his coat and pulls him on top of her before she can change her mind, lose her nerve.
“I love you,” he whispers against her skin as she finishes with a whimper. His hands grip her tightly, like he’s afraid she isn’t there at all. “So much, Katniss. Never forget.”
In the morning, he’s gone. By the time Katniss starts sprinting down the hall, half-hysterical, she knows that she’s too late.
---
The Capitol makes a whole special about it: How Katniss and Peeta come back together after her awful betrayal in trust. They bring in psychologists and love gurus and every other person who they think could possibly have some insight into her grand affair. They speak with their hands, their mouths wide open and gaping as they dissect what could drive a simple girl like her to cheat on such a devoted spouse.
She and Peeta don’t watch, of course. But she hears the murmuring on the streets, sees the way the Capitol women turn their nose up at her when she tries to buy something in the marketplace.
In the end, Katniss knows that most people will never trust her again: The Girl on Fire has betrayed the Boy with The Bread, and that’s that.
It’s fine, really. She’s never really trusted herself either.
---
Katniss has her first child nine months later. He’s got gray eyes and black hair and looks just like any number of Seam kids she grew up with. He’s stubborn and bites when she holds him to her breast for his supper.
Peeta loves him and the child loves Peeta much more than he loves Katniss.
Katniss sleeps oddly well for a few weeks, dreaming of what it would have been like if she and Gale were still in District 12, raising their child in the woods by the moonlight.
---
It’s not terrible, in many ways. They have a nice house in District 1. They have a press schedule. They go to meetings where their opinions don’t matter, but their presence is nevertheless mandatory. Occasionally, they are required to travel across the Districts that remain (there are only eight now, the other five obliterated in footage that is shown nearly daily on the Capitol’s television feed), stopping at the homes of people who the Capitol deems important to Their Cause. They make small talk, eat local cuisine, stand for photos in front of memorials to the Capitol soldiers lost in the uprising. Her mouth hurts from smiling so much.
When they get back to District 1, she takes off her heeled blue shoes and crawls under the covers of the bed and lets Peeta hold her when the sleeping pills she slipped into her drinks refuse to quell her aching mind.
She forgets the cameras after awhile.
---
Her mother dies, unexpectedly, one late fall afternoon.
Nobody bothers to tell her.
---
Every so often, they are given mandates as to things they must do to maintain their security and the security of those they love. For the first few months, it’s nothing special: Showing up at announcements by the President, giving courtesy interviews to a Caesar Flickerman, being seen at the latest fashion shows. It’s not taxing, but Katniss resents it nonetheless.
Four months after her first child is born, the phone rings, and when Peeta picks it up, his face turns white.
There’s nothing soft about the way they make love that night, staining the sheets with their sweat and tears and the red blood from Peeta’s back where Katniss claws him as she shrieks. They go until the light hours of the morning, when they crumble into an exhausted heap at the foot of the bed.
Katniss’s second child is born eight and a half months later, her gray eyes and brown hair matching Katniss’s own. Katniss can barely look at her.
---
The Hunger Games continue. Katniss begs and pleads and makes idle threats over the phone and in her now-weekly interviews, and eventually Snow concedes that having her and Peeta in their current condition as mentors is not ideal. She and Peeta are officially pardoned from their Hunger Games mentoring duties.
The District 12 tributes are, inevitably, the first to die. They are stabbed to death by eager Careers who have a score to settle with those who came from the District that started the Second Uprising in the first place.
Katniss reads about it in the newspaper the next morning as Peeta bakes something sweet for her son and daughter.
---
Finnick comes around every so often. He’s drugged out of his mind most of the time, sloppily throwing his arms around Peeta and Katniss and kissing their faces until they both blush. Katniss heard rumors that Annie was married off to some wealthy Capitol man who can pay for her mental health care, probably to buy Finnick’s compliance for another few years. She has no idea what happened to their child.
One night, after Peeta has gone to sleep, Finnick grabs her, sober and terrified. Katniss considers yelling, but with the heavy sedatives they’ve put Peeta on these days, she doubts anybody would hear, much less help.
“Do you still love Peeta? After all of this?”
Katniss considers for a moment, and then kisses him.
They fuck on the couch, cameras rolling.
---
Prim is next.
A band of Peacekeepers find her humble dwelling in District 5, which she shares with a tall young man that wants to marry her, and shoot her point-blank. The footage they show on television is gruesome: Blood spattered everywhere, the young man holding her dead body in disbelief.
The newscaster says something about a bear mauling. Katniss wants to drink herself into a stupor, but every time she opens a bottle all she can think of is Haymitch as they carted his body to the morgue.
Her son and daughter play around her on the ground, laughing and oblivious.
---
Her third child has bright green eyes and golden hair. He is mischievous even in his infancy, finding things around the apartment and hiding them in places that make Peeta laugh until he nearly weeps.
She thinks about trying to explain it all to Finnick, but his good moments are far too few and in between these days to grasp the concept. But Katniss and Peeta let him play with the boy, watching with careful eyes as the two weave rope around the glass legs of their kitchen chairs.
---
One evening, Peeta sits at the table with the green-eyed boy, showing him how to roll pieces of dough into a ball. The toddler shrieks with glee and pounds his fists against the table and Peeta tackles him to the ground and tickles him into submission.
Peeta and Katniss share their bed again that night. She hovers over him for a moment, her fingers playing along the lines of his face as he kisses the side of her neck.
In the morning she is sore and sated. They don’t get up until her youngest starts crying.
---
Her fourth child is stillborn, with clouded blue eyes and fair blonde hair. Peeta doesn’t leave his room for three days, and Katniss and Finnick travel to District Four and fuck in the ocean until her skin in waterlogged.
---
Johanna, Beetee, and Boggs all go silently, without official report from the Capitol. The only reason Katniss knows they’re dead is because Snow sends her photos of their executions, disturbing in their portrayal of Katniss’s own impotence.
---
Her eldest son starts going school in the fall. He is an instant celebrity, the first born child of the Girl on Fire, and he starts asking questions that neither she nor Peeta are ready to answer. They tell him to wait, just a few years, and he whines and whines until Katniss sends him to bed without his dinner.
The other two children, her son and daughter, remain silent as they pick through their lamb stew.
---
Katniss has one more child, a girl with dark hair and blue eyes. She is quiet, sleeps through the night, and eventually has a penchant for shooting things with the little slingshot Katniss fashions out of fabric and plastic scraps she finds around their home. Katniss knows that Peeta would never play favorites, but she notices the way he slips their daughter an extra big slice of bread at the dinner table.
For a moment, Katniss lets herself feel happy.
---
Katniss doesn’t flinch when she hears the news about Finnick, but she does raise a brow when she sees the unexpected fallout.
People quietly mutter in the streets, increasingly disgruntled. Even in his later lunacy, Finnick was very popular and he is missed by all of those in the Capitol who he charmed with such ease. People begin to question the official story about his death, and the local paper begins printing material about District 4’s greatest Victor that, by all accounts, qualifies as treason under current Capitol law.
Katniss feels a sick sense of thrill when she sees the Capitol’s president being picked apart by the District leaders in pirate television spots.
It appears that Snow has finally overplayed his hand.
---
They are closing in on thirty.
Peeta is beginning to get round around the middle again, and Katniss’s hair has finally filtered out the chemicals that turned it reddish brown.
She thinks about Finnick from time to time, Gale more often, but their faces pass quickly.
“Is it enough?” Katniss asks him, one afternoon, as they tend to their little garden. Her knees scrape against the hard soil as she buries some vegetable seeds in the ground.
“Yeah,” Peeta answers, watching as their four children scamper around the grassy knoll across the street. He holds her hand, squeezing it slightly. “It’s enough.”
---
Snow doesn’t contact them again.
Eventually the cameras stop rolling, moving onto “bigger and better programming” (or so the Capitol commentators promise with a look of worry in their eyes and truth stunted on their lips). Katniss knows better, understands that she and her family are a reminder of something that the Capitol now wishes it could forget: Nobody can look at Finnick and Katniss’s child without remembering the handsome Victor and his descent into madness.
Nobody wants to remember, anyway.
---
They make a decision, a few days before Katniss turns twenty-nine
They don’t ask permission. They really don’t need to. Snow is officially under house arrest, and an interim government has been put in place. They are not perfect: Many of them have Capitol pasts and see wisdom in many of Snow’s more brutal techniques, but the remainder is composed of good, solid folks who come from the Districts and remember what it was like to want freedom and some sense of equality.
The Mellark family leaves District 1 on a Tuesday night. They bring enough food and money to scrape by for awhile, and leave the rest of their existence behind.
---
They build a house, not far from the one where she grew up.
Peeta eventually plants primroses with their children, who will never know Prim’s sweet smile and soft laugh. Katniss teachers her children how to build snares. Their eldest son gets it so quickly that it makes her eyes water, and, for a moment, she is brought back to being sixteen, when she and Gale ran through the Meadow and the wind caught his hair. She nearly cries when their son swims around the pond, impervious to any fear of water, and she remembers Finnick, laughing in the surf as they swam in District Four’s warm waters.
Katniss hunts that afternoon, and Peeta scares away the game with his noisy leg. They laugh when their little girl shoots a squirrel.
They are home.
end.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. No, seriously.
the rest of the alternate takes series
| ii. prim does not die | iii. peeta never recovers | iv. katniss does not shoot coin | v. gale returns to district 12 | vi. katniss refuses to have children | vii. annie dies, finnick does not | viii. katniss dies |