The Unrecorded Hours, Part III

[hollycomb]

She can feel the summer beginning to wane as they walk back to the house, and wouldn't be surprised if the day before was the hottest one they'll have, the season heading down the other side of the mountain now, afternoons more golden than bright. Peeta takes her hand and she squeezes his, rolling her neck on her shoulders.

“Need a back rub?” he asks.

“I wouldn't turn one down.”

She thinks about what the rest of their day will be like: Peeta's hands kneading her tight muscles until she's drooling onto her pillow, which will lead to hot kisses pressed all the way down her spine, which will probably give way to sex, culminating in a nap. They'll wake up to the sunset and mutter plans for dinner on the way to the tub. He'll sit between her legs while she washes his chest and sings his song for him, because he's got to associate it with happy moments, too, if she wants it to keep bringing him out of his episodes. And because she likes singing it, and he likes hearing it: the Peeta song, his name, her voice.

Will this be the rest of her life? She's not sure why the idea should make her feel vaguely panicked, but it's probably something to do with not trusting anything that seems like it will be easy, like tucking in for a few minutes of peace during the Games only to wake up to a wall of fire. Her hand tightens around Peeta's, and she laughs when she sees Haymitch wandering around in his yard, herding geese.

“You missed the reunion tour,” Peeta calls to him, and Haymitch looks up with a scowl, the geese scattering around his legs, going wherever they please.

“I heard all manner of shouting,” Haymitch says. “So I figured it was going off with a bang.”

“What are you doing with those birds?” Katniss asks, shaking her head at their disarray.

“Dancing the waltz,” Haymitch snaps. “What does it look like I'm doing?”

So they spend the rest of the day not lounging and bathing but helping Haymitch build a proper pen in his yard. He grumbles through the whole thing, complaining about the heat, twice bringing a hammer down on his thumb. Katniss bandages it for him while Peeta puts the finishing touches on the pen, his sweat-soaked shirt stuck to his back. So the bathing portion of the day will go as she predicted, at least.

“What's going on with this?” Haymitch asks, gesturing to her face.

“Huh?”

“You're grinning like you're on camera,” he says. “Pre-Mockingjay. Like the girl in the sun dress who just got engaged.”

“I am?” she says, and he laughs at her alarm as she touches her lips.

“Don't worry,” he says. “I wouldn't dare to presume that he's responsible.”

“Why won't you come for dinner?” she asks, her blush well-hidden under her sunburned cheeks.

“Maybe I don't like your cooking.”

“Haymitch.”

“Alright, for God's sake. If it's that important to you.”

He doesn't come that night, because he gets drunk and forgets, or the night after that, for the same reason, but the next night he shows up with a bottle of wine, which he polishes off almost entirely on his own before dinner.

“Well, well,” Haymitch says when Peeta sets a slice of the meat pie he made in front of him. Peeta said that Haymitch would be the sort who liked meat pies, and if the ten thousand times Haymitch expressed his excitement over the meal while it was cooking are any indication, he was right.

“I kind of wondered what was going on over here,” Haymitch says, looking around the kitchen as if he's searching the corners for cobwebs - they're up there, complete with spiders, and they help keep the bug population down. “But it's like a real house.”

“What did you expect?” Peeta asks as he takes his seat. “An optical illusion?”

“That would be a stretch?” Haymitch says with a snort. Katniss gives him a look. He shrugs. “Though I more or less knew this would happen,” he says, visibly suppressing a burp until he's finished the sentence. “If you survived. Which I tended to not count on, to put it mildly, but I thought, you know. If you were to, theoretically, there would be a house like this.” He tears open a roll and dips it into the gravy that's dripping from his slice of pie. “A real house,” he says, to clarify, hiccuping.

Peeta walks Haymitch home while Katniss cleans the kitchen. She picks up a knife and rubs it clean with a soapy rag, wondering how much longer they'll have running water and realizing only as she's placing the knife on the drying rack that it's the one she cut her wrist with. Was it six months ago? Sometimes it feels like only six days. She sets it on the rack and looks down at her scar, startling when she hears Peeta's footsteps on the front porch.

“Want me to do the rest?” he asks, coming to the sink and resting his hands on her hips, bending down to kiss her neck.

“I've got it,” she says. “How was he?”

“Snoring before I was out of the bedroom,” Peeta says.

“I shudder to think of his bedroom.”

“It's pretty bad.”

“Damn him,” Katniss says, shutting off the water. “How can he live like that?” She knows, actually, too well, how easy it would be to turn into Haymitch. Without Peeta, she would be worse. Not alive, not really.

“I actually thought he seemed kind of happy,” Peeta says. “Well - for Haymitch. Or for us, maybe. He was happy for us.”

“He told me I looked happy,” Katniss says. She sniffs a laugh. “He said I looked like I did on TV when I'd just - when you'd just -”

“What?” Peeta says when she trails off there. “You want me to guess? We did a lot of things to each other on TV.”

“Ha. Well, he said I looked the way I did when you asked me to marry you.” She rolls her eyes, probably the wrong thing to do, but she only meant to dismiss Haymitch for equating her real happiness with that dreadful performance. She's afraid to meet Peeta's eyes, afraid he'll get down on one knee and try to ask again, for real this time. She busies herself with drying the dishes.

The summer starts to die off, and it makes her feel cornered, though she's always liked fall and won't mind winter now that she's got Peeta for warmth. There's still something about the shortening days seems like a warning that she's running out of time. She figures out why one day when she brings flowers to Prim's grave - primroses, from the yard. The obvious choice, but they bloomed so beautifully this summer.

“God, Prim,” she says, standing and looking at the lake, the light already golden across its surface. “You're not really gone, are you?” It still seems impossible. She gets no answer, just birds twittering in the distance, the lake lapping gently against the shore. The crushing weight of what can't be undone comes to take her breath away like two giant hands that clap around her, and she presses her fingers over her mouth, wishing for the first time since these visits began that Peeta was here with her.

In a week, it will be too cold to swim. Already, the water is chilly when she dips her toes in. She wipes her eyes dry as her plan formulates. She won't cling to the safety of any walls between her and Peeta the way that she did in District 13, and this is the last one standing.

“What do you think about a picnic tomorrow?” she asks him when they're in bed together that night, somewhere between the initial cuddling stage and actual sex, his hand spread open on her stomach as he kisses her ear.

“Okay,” he says, distracted, and she laughs, which gets his attention.

“What?” he asks, sitting up on his elbow.

“Nothing,” she says, because she wants him to keep doing that thing to her ear, his teeth dragging over the lobe. She decides then not to tell him the significance of the lake, the fact that it was her secret place where she went with her father, that the smooth white stone on the eastern shore is her sister's grave. She doesn't want the mood to be somber, and doesn't want to try to recreate those days with her father. The place can't be what it once was, not with her father and sister gone, and she's tired of thinking of it as a tomb to the past. It needs to become something new, something that can belong to her and Peeta, a place to lie in the sun and soak up the last of the summer. The last wall she can take down for him.

The next morning, she feels weirdly nervous. She packs a basket with food: deer jerky from a doe she shot just a week after Johanna and Gale left, cheese she got from the fledging black market that's set up not far from the burned out hull of the Hob, strawberries she picked that morning from a patch she'd been waiting to harvest on a special occasion, leftover rolls from last night's dinner, apple butter, and walnuts that Peeta candied with sugar and cinnamon. It's too much food, really, but she wants to spend the whole day there. Peeta is tired, yawning; he did yard work all day yesterday while Katniss spent time at her sister's grave. It's quite a trek to the lake, and she makes sure he eats a hearty breakfast so that he won't be exhausted and irritable by the time they get there. While he eats, she dresses upstairs, choosing a sun dress from the closet full of old Cinna-designed clothes that she almost never touches. For as well as she remembers the victory tour, it might be the one she wore when Peeta proposed. She rather hopes not as she braids her hair into two plaits and pins them up so they'll be out of the way when they swim. She doesn't want him to think she's making fun of him. But if she can't remember the dress from that day, why should he?

“You look pretty,” he says when she bustles back down to the kitchen, double-checking the picnic basket for napkins and a knife to spread the apple butter.

“Oh - thanks.” She touches her hair, actually wishing for a mirror. It's been a long time since she could bear the idea of looking herself in the eye, but she does feel pretty today, her bones light with hope and a not-unpleasant anxiety.

She wears her hunting boots with the sun dress, thinking about the long walk, and Peeta laughs as he watches her lace them up, bending to kiss the top of her head.

“What would your prep team say?” he asks. He wilts a little, smiling sheepishly, as if he's not sure he should have made the joke. She grins and waves her hand through the air.

“I'm a trend setter in my own right at this point,” she says. “They'd just pluck my eyebrows and send me on my way.” At some point the savagery of their treatments must have taken its toll, because she doesn't grow hair on her legs or under her arms anymore, save for some colorless wisps up toward her thighs. Peeta never has been able to grow even the most minuscule amount of stubble on his face, and she doesn't ask what they treated him with during those first Games. Only once has she lain awake at night worrying that it might be so closely bound up with levels of testosterone that it could mean he can't have children. Why should that matter? It shouldn't. It doesn't.

He carries the basket and she carries her bow, slung around her back, her quiver at her waist. She sings so that he won't think too much about the long walk, just softly, still cautious about making too much noise out here in the woods. She feels foolish enough wearing this dress as she treks through her regular hunting grounds, but Peeta is smiling at her like she's never found her more beautiful. Gale would laugh, but she never would have done this for Gale. It's why she resented Peeta for so long: loving him has not only made her do the damnedest, most foolhardy things, it's made her want to do them.

Her heart is beating fast when they reach the lake, as if she's introducing him to a family member and is afraid that both parties might not like each other. He puts the picnic basket down and marvels at it, says he can't believe he never knew it was here.

“It was sort of a secret,” Katniss says. “My secret, I guess. So. I wanted to show you.” She smiles when he turns from the lake to look at her, feeling shy, which makes no sense. Oh, the things he's seen her do. She laughs when he walks over to lift her up and spin her around.

“No spinning!” she says. “No spinning, ever. Can we agree to that?”

“Oh, you're right, sorry,” he says, actually blushing when he sets her down. “I just - was happy.”

“God, sweetheart,” she says, the word just falling out of her, so easily that she finds she's not even surprised. She pulls his face down to hers and gives him a loud kiss on the lips. “Don't be sorry.”

They eat first, ravenous after the long hike. Katniss packed a blanket, and they stretch out on it when they've stuffed themselves, Peeta licking sugar from the corners of her lips as she grins up at the sky.

“Have you digested?” she asks, a large slice of her heart aching with the question. Her father used to ask her this on their days at the lake, before he'd let her swim. Peeta nods.

“I think so,” he says. “Why?” He touches her knee, which is usual precursor to seduction, mostly a suggestion that he wouldn't mind being seduced, that he's waiting to see what she'll do.

“'Cause we're going to swim.” She sits up and pulls her dress over her head, showing him the surprise that, for him, will probably rival the lake. She's got nothing on under the dress, just her boots. She stands before he can grab her, kiss her and derail her plans, laughing as she walks backward toward the lake, unable to stop looking at him as he gapes at her.

“Your turn,” she says, squatting down to start unlacing her boots.

Peeta gets out of his clothes so fast that he almost trips over his pants as he kicks them away. She's out of her boots now and wading to the water, keeping a straight face as he rushes into it and bursting into laughter when she sees its temperature register in his eyes.

“It's not that bad after you start swimming,” she says, shivering herself but trying to put on a brave face as she sinks down until her waist is covered. She swims out a little further, holding in a shout as the chill of the water envelopes her skin. She closes her eyes and tries not to think of Finnick, then lets herself remember him as he was when he was radiant, the way he sighed when the salt water eased the toxins from that gas in the second Games out of his skin. He was so, so beautiful. Nothing that happened to him during or after the Games could take it from him, and she clings to her memories of his grin, doesn't fight them away.

“Shit!” Peeta is crashing into the water beside her, flailing like someone who never really learned how to swim. “Katniss - holy - s-so cold, God.” He grabs hold of her, able to stand where the water would be up to her forehead, and clutches her against him, shivering. She laughs and loops her arms around his neck, her legs tight around his waist.

“If we actually swam around, we'd warm up,” she says, but he just hugs her closer, his teeth chattering in her ear. She's never felt more naked, out here in the woods, in her lake, Peeta's hands all over her as he struggles to get warm. It feels good, like dropping something heavy and hurrying on, free of it.

“Do you still think I'm a prude?” she asks, pressing her smile to his neck, knowing the answer.

“If I say no can I get out of this water?” he asks, and she laughs.

They dry off in the sun, which is still hot enough to make the sunburn on her cheeks ache. She feels warm until the wind blows across them from the lake, her nipples almost sore with stiffness. Peeta is trying to be a good sport, stretched out on the blanket beside her, and she covers her mouth with her hand when she sees that he's actually managed an erection.

“Well,” he says when he notices her grinning at him, looking from his lap to his face. “It's just - I'm sorry, okay, but. Look at you.”

As much as she wants to remake the lake into a joyful place, she can't bring herself to actually have sex here, so she puts on her dress and boots, packs up the basket and pats Peeta's ass as he zips his pants up over his hardon. The walk back to the house seems to take much longer, both of them tired and impatient. He isn't alone in being affected by the sight of her naked body as it dries in the sun; she can't stop thinking of him, the way the tiny golden hairs on his stomach held droplets of water and caught the light. She wants her mouth there, on his stomach and lower, wants to make him feel so warm.

They barely get through the door before they start tearing each other's clothes off; Peeta actually kicks the door shut, dropping the picnic basket on the ground and tackling her to the stairs. Her dress is hiked up, no time to pull it over her head, and she pulls his shirt up so that his bare chest can touch hers, both of them scrabbling at the front of his pants as they breathe against each other's mouths.

“Hey,” she says, just before he can push inside her. She holds his face, cursing herself, because she meant to say this while they were still at the lake.

“Hmm?” He's so hard, wet at the tip, she can feel it.

“You - you're my husband, okay?” She's come to hate ceremony, but was awake in bed all last night, practicing this line. “That's how I think of you. My husband. Okay?”

He blinks, and makes a sound in the back of his throat like a dying animal might, making her afraid that she's said the wrong thing again. Then he surges forward, kissing her, sinking into her.

“Then - you -” he says, like he's pronouncing words from a foreign dialect, unsure. “You're my -”

“I'm your wife,” she says, whispering it in his ear. It's their secret, not something to be broadcast or voted on, small but magnificent, like the pearl she keeps in a sachet in her underwear drawer, the one she pressed to her lips when he was away from her.

He doesn't say anything, just pushes into her, fucks her, and suddenly it feels good to think of it that way, feels good from her toes to her fingertips, because she trusts him to do anything, everything, and they can make any word that someone else assigned to them their secret and unrepeatable vow, a pearl hidden in an oyster. His mouth is on her collarbone, his tongue in the hollow of her throat, his breath on her neck.

“Katniss,” he says, the name shuddering from him like it's his own secret place, freezing water and hot sunlight. She nods and clings, then falls open, letting him have everything.

They're both achy and delirious afterward, his knees propped awkwardly on two different stairs, another stair pressed against her back, just under her shoulder blades. He picks her up, leaving his pants on the stairs, and carries her to the bedroom. She's close to sleep as soon as he places her on the mattress, helping her remove her bunched-up dress and moving down to untie her boots.

“Peeta,” she says, feeling drugged, on a strain of morphling that could never be recreated in a lab.

“Hmm?” he says. He throws her right boot over the side of the bed and bends down to kiss her knee before starting on her left boot.

“Nothing,” she says, reaching down to pull her fingers through his bangs. “You need a hair cut. I love you.”

He doesn't gape at her in disbelief, doesn't look wrecked, just smiles as he pulls her left boot off. She reaches for him, and there's a fish hook snagged in her heart, the memory of the day in District 13 when she thought he was reaching for her, the day his hands closed around her throat when she thought he was trying to cup her face. Not real, not real. Nothing is real but this: his skin warming hers as he presses against her from shoulder to ankle.

“Love you, too,” he says, easily, watching her eyelids droop, too heavy to keep open. “Wife, my wife. Love you so much.”

She dreams of Prim. She's on fire at first, but calm, and she reaches out around herself to cup the fire in her hands, untouched by it, grinning at Katniss as she holds it between her palms, just a small flame now.

“It's this dumb trick,” Prim says, rolling her eyes. “C'mon.”

They're walking through a city that could be the Capitol, but it's not as garish, not as cold. It's like a picture from one of their history books at school, the ones Gale scoffed at, saying there was never any place like that, not really.

“I think I married Peeta,” Katniss says as they walk, past vegetable stands and perfume shops, street musicians who sing almost as well as their father.

“Good,” Prim says. “He loves you more than anyone.”

“I know that.”

“Yeah, but you spent a lot of time trying convince yourself that you didn't.”

They come to a zoo, and Prim shows her animals that couldn't have possibly existed, ever, but she insists that they did, once, tugging on Katniss' elbow and laughing at her disbelief. They're nothing like mutts but so strange: little flightless birds that waddle over rocks, giant horses with necks as tall as her house, a bird with blue and green feathers that Cinna would want to interpret as a dress.

She wakes up feeling fuzzy, stuck between the dreamworld and reality. She can't remember the last time she actually wanted to linger in a dream, and rubs her hand across her face, rolling onto her back to watch the dawn begin to glow from behind the closed curtains. Peeta is fast asleep and holding onto her tightly, not even snoring, his face buried against her neck. She smiles up at the curtained window, runs her fingers through his too-long hair, and feels as if Prim is still here, egging her on.

Extracting herself from Peeta's arms without waking him takes some doing, but she has a hunter's grace, and he's still sleeping soundly as she creeps out of bed. She goes to the closet, opening it with practiced stealth, and selects an elegant white blouse, a long navy skirt. She puts on fancy underwear and closes her eyes as the fine fabric slips over her skin: Cinna made these for her, and she wants to believe that he anticipated this day when he did. She goes to the bathroom and brushes her hair out, pinning it up the way her mother did that day, the day when she stood beside Peeta after they were chosen for the reaping. In lieu of a mirror, she uses the window over the bathtub, seeing all of them in her reflection: her mother's cheekbones, her father's eyes, Prim's softness. She puts her hand against the glass, touching all of them, not afraid to see them anymore.

Down in the kitchen, she feels none of the nervousness that she experienced yesterday when she brought Peeta to the lake. The sun continues to rise, but the morning still feels quiet, even when she leaves the kitchen door open to let in the birdsong from the woods. Preparing the food is easy: a loaf of bread sliced into careful pieces, arranged on their nicest dish, an antique passed down from her father's family. Making the fire is harder, only because she hasn't even touched a match since she was set on fire herself, not by Cinna's genius but by the bombs that killed Prim. Her hand shakes, but she steels herself, shoving the past into a manageable corner as she throws the match into the kindling.

The fire grows, making her heart clench and then relax, because this is what she needs. She gets the bread from the kitchen and sets the plate on the hearth, tending the fire, waiting to hear footsteps on the second floor. When she does, she closes her eyes and waits, squeezing her hands together in her lap. It's as if everything depends on this moment, but she's not afraid. She knows what will happen, there are no deviating variables, but it still matters so much.

When she hears him coming down the stairs she turns, still sitting on the hearth, beside the plate of bread. He's wearing nothing but his shorts, squinting into the dull light from the window, scratching his stomach. Their eyes meet, and he gives her a questioning look. His gaze shifts to the fire, the bread, and his eyebrows shoot up.

“Oh -” he says, grabbing both sides of the door frame. “I - oh - ”

“Peeta -”

“Wait!” He holds up a hand, looking petrified, nearly hyperventilating. “Wait - I didn't - let me - hang on!”

He tears back up the stairs. She hides her laughter in her hands, her eyes watering already.

When he comes down again he's still breathless, wearing his finest white shirt, tucked into black pants, no belt, his shoes still untied as he works on his tie, as if he thought he had a time limit.

“Okay,” he says, panting. “Oh-okay, I'm, I'm almost ready.”

“Sweetheart,” she says, laughing around the word, tears streaming down her face as she holds his arms out to him.

It can't be too different from any toasting ceremony: the nervous laughter, the slightly burned bread that they feed to each other, hands clasped hard, as if they're still afraid they could fail to meet some secret requirement and be thrown out of marriage. They're both crying, trying to play it down, wiping their noses on their sleeves.

“I've always loved the flavor of burned bread,” she says, though it might be unfair. She doesn't ever want him to think that she loves him because he saved her that day. She loves him because he's saving her now, every day, with a kind of sustenance that she couldn't have anticipated needing when she was a starving girl in the rain. In hindsight, she feels as if she knew this would happen: Peeta opening his door, giving her everything he could spare, taking his punishment for daring to love her. So easy to believe that it was inevitable now that they've done all the work.

She calls her mother that afternoon, Peeta's head in her lap. Stroking his hair makes her braver, and she cries into the phone as she tells her mother about the dream with Prim at the zoo. She wishes that Peeta had someone to call, and realizes that he does when he drags her over to Haymitch's house to announce the good news. Somehow, he has champagne.

“Well,” Haymitch says, toasting them on his back patio as the sun goes down, Katniss almost dozing against Peeta's chest, Haymitch lifting his glass toward the sky. “I knew it.”

“You did not,” Peeta says, laughing, probably a little drunk.

“Oh, let him say so,” Katniss says. She cracks her eyes open and looks at Haymitch, can only really see his silhouette. “Rewriting history is underrated.”

She's so tired that she lets Peeta carry her all the way home, and she tries to think of what this reminds her of: something from the Games? The victory tour? Before that, from the District 12 that they lived in together but separately? By the time he places her in their bed and kisses her nose she's sure:

There was nothing like this in her past, no memory to cling to or run from. This is brand new, one of a kind. Cinna would call it couture. Katniss blinks awake just long enough to smile at Peeta, her husband, reaching up to stroke his cheek. She's going to have to learn to know joy without trying to thread it back into sorrow. Warm in their bed, the taste of the bread from their ceremony still on her tongue, she knows that Peeta will teach her.

//the end//

Theme song: Post-War

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