Fic Post: Restoration [The Hunger Games]
Part II of the Alternate Takes series.
restoration
the hunger games
peeta/katniss, prim/rory, gale/johanna
2300 words
r
On A03.
The Concession is a well-planned farce. President Snow dresses in his very best, a dark velvet suit with a red silk handkerchief that he waves to the camera with mock sympathy for his many “indiscretions” (his words, not hers, Katniss thinks later with a swig of white liquor). Coin accepts his surrender, and, before she knows it, Katniss is dragged away from the crowd, her hands reaching out for Gale’s as her sister screams her name from somewhere beyond the mansion.
--
Katniss sits in a sterile white room with only a television to keep her company. Three nights in, when she’s trying to eat whatever swill they brought to her bedside while she was sleeping, she hears Gale on the other side of the door, pounding and calling her name. She lets him go on for what seems like almost an hour before she turns the doorknob and lets him in.
“I thought you’d get tired and go,” she says honestly, hand steady on the doorframe.
“Oh Catnip,” he says, smoothing back her hair and kissing her soundly before she can protest. “You know I’d never leave you.”
---
Coin kills Snow on a bright Sunday afternoon, surrounded by the same camera crews that filmed the Concession. She uses a bow that she’s unusually handy with. Katniss wonders if she would have suffered the same fate by the same arrow tip if she had failed to stay in line.
There was no debate as to whether Katniss would be the one to do it.
She didn’t want to anymore.
---
The move back to District 12 is inevitable. Katniss isn’t going to stay in the Capitol under lock and key forever, and it’s a foregone conclusion that her family isn’t going to live anywhere but the place her father died. She phones her mother in 13 on a Monday evening, and by Thursday morning, she, Prim, and their meager belongings board a train headed east.
Before the doors close, Gale holds her tightly against his chest and promises to join her soon. Katniss cries, just a little bit, as he hops off the train and back onto the platform.
---
She and Prim move back into the Victor’s Village home, because it seems like the right thing to do. Prim whines about the mess for awhile, while Buttercup scowls at the ash and soot on the porch until Katniss threatens to throw a bucket of cold water on him.
---
Katniss takes to watching the clock, counting the hypothetical hours until Gale comes home, back to District 12, back to her. She supposes that things will never go back to the way they were, that they will perhaps never again wander the woods as the fiercest of friends, nothing more and certainly nothing less, but she longs to see his dark eyes, feel his skin under her own as they hold hands while running against the autumn winds.
---
Peeta moves in next door after a few months. Katniss doesn’t go over and say hello, like she supposes that she ought to, but Peeta waves to her occasionally when he’s outside.
“You should invite him over for dinner,” Prim says one afternoon as she arranges flowers on the table. “I can even get out of here if you want me too.”
Katniss laughs, and throws a pillow at her.
---
Hazelle Hawthorne and her youngest children come back to District 12, with no Gale in sight. When Rory comes over with a bouquet of colorful flowers for Prim, he hands Katniss a yellowing letter with Gale’s handwriting on the front. She gets one sentence in, and can’t bear to read the rest.
Katniss sits on the front stoop for a couple days, quiet and barely moving. Prim doesn’t say much, but sits next to her and squeezes her hand until she squeezes back.
---
She and Peeta do have dinner, eventually. Katniss cooks and burns almost everything. Peeta eats it anyway, and kisses her on the front porch before he leaves.
---
Gale falls in love, quietly, and for a captive audience. Johanna is gorgeous again, and has picked up a slight Capitol accident from being there for so long (Katniss wants to tease Gale about it for hours, but she hasn’t spoken to him in almost a year and now is not the time to start). Katniss tries not to be jealous when she watches their happy faces on her television screen, and forces herself not to vomit when she watches him drop to a knee and hold out a silver engagement ring.
She imagines that Gale felt the exact same thing, back then, and hates herself a little bit more.
I’m happy for you, she writes on the back of his letter that night. She burns it in the smoldering ashes of the fireplace.
---
Peeta is a constant in her life, sometimes annoyingly so.
He brings her food she doesn’t want to eat. He washes her clothes when she gets too sick to pull herself out of bed. He even starts hunting when she breaks her foot on a snare Gale left long ago in the woods. He’s still horrible at it, but he somehow manages to take down a slow-moving deer on his third trip to the forest. When he brings it back to the house, he smiles, triumphant, and kisses her before she can berate him for dragging blood across her floor.
---
He keeps saying that they should just move in together, that it’s ridiculous that they live in different houses after everything that’s happened between them. Prim even tells her that she’d rather live alone, but Katniss just shakes her head, and moves on to a different point of conversation, like why Rory Hawthorne keeps coming over at odd hours of the evening.
She capitulates, eventually. She and Peeta take the upstairs room and Prim takes Peeta’s house. Katniss pretends not to notice when Rory leaves every morning before the sun rises.
---
She and Peeta begin a home improvement project, fixing up the house until it no longer reminds them of the unhappy memories they’ve cultivated over the past few years. Peeta paints the front of the house and Katniss begins cleaning out the cabinets that belonged to her mother inside. Rory and Prim help too, when they’re not too busy laughing and kissing on the couch.
Late in the afternoon, Peeta lifts a pot of primroses, and grins. “For your sister?” he asks loudly as Prim and Rory walk outside.
“Oh Peeta. You know they make me sneeze,” Prim says curtly as Rory wraps his arms around her waist.
---
Sometimes Peeta’s hands wander in his sleep, creeping under Katniss’s shirt to rest against her breastbone. She doesn’t fault him for it, no longer even gets fazed when he moves, hard, against the back of her thighs in the middle of the night, but like clockwork, she pulls away and rests her head against the opposite pillow.
He does try, once, when he’s fully awake and a fall storm is brewing outside. He is kissing her neck, suckling at her pulse point, when his hand wanders to the buttons on her pants and he pulls her against him, breathless. She jumps back, startled, and runs for the door.
Katniss sleeps in the downstairs bedroom that night, and shakes in the cold.
---
“You know, we should get married,” Peeta says too casually as she watches him paint a portrait of his father in the living room. “I mean, it makes sense now, right?”
She agrees, and they actually talk about setting a date. They don’t actually settle on one, but it’s the thought that counts.
---
Katniss sometimes hears Gale’s voice on the television, drifting from the living room into the kitchen as she tries her hand at a stew for dinner. Normally Peeta flips the channel whenever he hears it, but today he keeps watching the screen, his hand clenching around a pillow near his chest until his fist is white.
They sleep apart again that night.
---
Prim marries Rory on her eighteenth birthday, and he builds her a sturdy house of the wood he harvests in the forest. It’s a small ceremony, perhaps smaller than it ought to be, but Prim looks lovely in her white dress and Rory looks just like Gale when he kisses her on their front porch. They are young and beautiful and disgustingly in love.
Gale doesn’t show. Katniss doesn’t blame him.
---
Katniss is almost twenty-two.
There are a string of men, most of whom remember her for who she was, not who she is now. She suspects that she bores them when she doesn’t suddenly ignite under their scrutinizing glances. She entertains the idea of letting one bring her back to his bedroom, just to prove she is desirable to more than the broken boy who shares her house, but she never does. She is always polite, thanking them for their time, and walking away as quickly as possible.
She always comes back to their bedroom, to Peeta’s waiting arms.
That is how they work.
---
Prim and Rory have three children in as many years. They scream and run around the Meadow without knowing that they are trampling on the graves of people like Madge and Peeta’s father, whose ghosts still linger in Katniss’s mind.
“You don’t have to save me anymore, Katniss,” Prim says one quiet afternoon, as they watch Buttercup play on the floor with a dead mouse and listen to Peeta fumbling around in the kitchen with his new pots and pans.
---
Katniss and Peeta get married outside the town limits, in a quiet patch of the forest that Katniss had nearly forgotten. Haymitch brings the booze, Prim brings her children, and Gale and Johanna send them an expensive television set that Katniss doesn’t even want.
It is a simple ceremony: They both wear white linen shirts and exchange simple silver rings and traditional vows and kiss softly while their witnesses cheer.
That night, they make love for the first time. He sighs into her skin, and she cries out when his hand darts between her thighs.
---
Her mother passes on almost silently. The doctors say she inhaled too much ash and coal dust over the years. Prim and Katniss burn her body and spread the ashes over the ruins of the coal mines so she can be with their father again.
Peeta paints her picture in vivid hues of blue and green, hangs it in their living room.
---
When Prim tells Katniss that she and Rory are going to move to District 2, she’s not entirely surprised. Gale’s been sending Rory letters almost weekly imploring him to take a job there, and Prim has always wondered about the other Districts. It makes sense: Rory and Prim are young and able, and they will certainly be valuable assets to the District that is quickly becoming the center of Panem’s world.
Prim cries and cries when they get to the station, and nearly refuses to go when the train doors open.
“Peeta and I will visit,” Katniss promises, kissing Prim’s forehead. “You know that.”
It’s a lie, because Katniss knows that she can never go where Gale is again, but she also knows Prim needs to hear it, so she smiles and kisses Prim again before letting go.
---
It’s a quiet life, afterward.
Peeta continues to rebuild what he can of District 12. He even reconstructs his family’s bakery, which Hazelle helps run and becomes popular amongst the new arrivals to town. Katniss continues to hunt and keeps in regular contact with Haymitch, who still drinks too much. It’s a modest living for all of them, and Katniss finds herself inching toward happiness at the most unexpected rate.
---
Katniss finds out that she’s pregnant on her twenty-seventh birthday.
She’s alone in the house when she puts two and two together. Peeta’s at the bakery, and with the nausea she’s been fighting, Katniss is in no position to run a mile across town to tell him. She thinks about calling him, but finds that, with its blatant disuse and Coin’s probable desire to keep them cut off from the spotlight, the phone line has gone dead.
She settles for sprinting down the street, to where Haymitch’s house stands, still teetering on the edge of disrepair. She flings open the door, and he stares when she can’t speak.
“So he finally managed to knock you up?” he says after a few moments of her panting on his front stoop.
Katniss sighs, and slides down the doorframe. “How did you know?”
“You have that pregnant lady sweaty thing going on,” Haymitch spits out. “Spent the morning puking your guts all over the floor, right?”
“Something like that,” Katniss manages between breaths.
Haymitch laughs and takes a seat next to her on the ground. The smell of liquor on his breath almost makes her vomit again.
“You’re going to make one hell of a mother, Katniss,” he says, brushing her stringy hair out of her eyes.
She smiles, blushes a little, and he gives her a hug and a kiss on the forehead for good luck.
---
Katniss still thinks about Gale, when the wind blows too strongly to go out hunting. But those moments start to pass more quickly, and she sometimes forgets what it was like when he would sneak up on her and her heart would race from the surprise.
---
When she tells Peeta, he cries. She does too, and then he laughs and holds her and kisses her and spins her around in his arms until she’s dizzy with it, with him.
end.
disclaimer: So not mine. Seriously.
the rest of the alternate takes series
|i. the capitol wins | 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 |