relearning; The Hunger Games
Title: relearning
Pairing: Peeta/Katniss.
Summary: She is not the girl with the dandelion anymore. Set after Peeta's torture.
Peeta dreams in shocking brightness whenever he sleeps in the cell. The blood drips from his ribs like a neon flood. The sand beneath him shines the sun back into his eyes and burns him wherever he looks, wherever he touches, wherever it is he’s fallen. The sky is orange - not in the painted, paradisaical sunset-strokes he likes, but blinding and solid, and so visibly endless around him it feels like its harsh colour is warning him it’s about to swallow him whole.
Lifting her mottled head from the mess of gore that makes up his chest, fangs bared, Katniss grins at him, a feral thing. She’s always coloured in the wrong tones, so wrong they constantly act as reminders that he’s dreaming, every night. She looks like she’s been stitched into his nightmares in messy, tangled, ugly thread, but when he looks into her black beast’s eyes in the dream, he cries and loves her dearly anyway.
In her smile, between her pointed teeth, his blazing-red heart beats, thickly and grotesquely. He watches, transfixed for a moment. There’s an eruption of crimson when she bites down, then his eyes snap open at the sound of his own petrified wailing, so loud and so ragged he thinks the effort of it could burst his entire body to pieces.
-
After the second week, he realizes there is nobody to keep him company here but himself. Johanna never responds to his voice, his sadness, his anger, even his insanity. He hears very little of her, although in the deepest silences of the night sometimes he hears her making soft, frail noises that could be crying if Peeta believed Johanna was capable of tears.
She doesn’t seem to hear him when he starts talking to himself.
Half of him is truly, desperately in love with Katniss. The other half is chaos, made up of the terror of his nightmares and the terror of his consciousness, being poisoned and sat on a metal chair like a throne that captures his wrists, his ankles, his neck and his eyelids when he sits down on it. They make him watch the Games.
They make him watch Katniss. Transform her into a monster before his eyes, and - although he could never realize it - him, too.
-
Love is overthrown by madness, hate, Tracker Jacker poison. Katniss is a monster now. She is a bird of prey with talons made of needles, swooping down and trying to clutch his head and puncture his brain. She is a sea-monster, sliding out of the water and descending onto him with no eyes or face, only sharp scales that cut his hands when he pushes her away and a vast, hungry mouth. She has no eyes or face, and her hair billows around her like smoke while she reaches out and tries to choke him to death with the locket he thinks he might have gave her. On her rampage, she beats children out of her way with two black wings bigger twice the size of her, takes bites out of them with icicle fangs that go down to her collarbone. Peeta, she hisses, her snake’s tongue flicking at him, and she sounds murderously, terrifyingly hungry.
-
She is not the girl with the dandelion anymore.
-
One day they drag him outside into the sun again. He spends the hours before having his matted, filthy hair washed, having it brushed to impossible softness, being bathed and dressed by the hands of strangers. They coat his tired face in make-up. They add needless things to his outfit in an attempt to distract from how he fidgets nervously, how his chest rises and falls rapidly at the thought of returning to the world. There is nothing he would like less than to see it’s horror in person.
They give him words to say to a camera. He says the wrong ones.
One day a boy with black hair and a bow breaks him out of his cell and drags him, screaming and shaking, back to the outside world, this time to stay.
They give him sleeping syrup and lock him back up as soon as possible. The boy with the black hair stands at the end of his bed and stares at him, looking into Peeta’s thinned face for something that will never return.
-
Katniss reappears. He tries to kill her, to protect the children she will doubtlessly devour otherwise, the innocent civilians she will slaughter like mindless cattle, the silly boys with hearts of clay she will burn away to ashes. He doesn’t succeed.
They try to brainwash him into accepting her. They tell him she is human, really, there are no mutts in District 13; but as far as Peeta’s aware, there is no District 13, and this is a nightmare, deadlier than all others for the convincing shades of reality it’s painted in, for the horrifying accuracy of Katniss’s face, eyes, and scars.
He is guarded by soldiers at all times, just like before. People visit sporadically. It takes time for him to remember them. He’s allowed a hand in Finnick and Annie’s wedding cake, since he apparently harbours no resentment towards either of them, but they don’t allow him to have things to paint with, for fear of what his unstable mind could do with them.
Half of Peeta agrees with them.
-
His dreams in the hospital are black and white and sometimes even calmed. It’s mostly still nightmares - horrific memories wrapped in the poison of insanity, dulled by lack of colour, but still enough to send him thrashing and yelling where he’s tied to his bed.
His family die in black and white, crushed beneath his blasted home while he is running to them. He loses the Games the first time when Katniss forces the berries down his throat, harmless grey pebbles in his palms. Haymitch takes Peeta’s own knife from his pockets and jams it into his back, over and over and over. He watches his home be destroyed in a mess of black clouds. Katniss kisses him on the beach and he thinks she might mean it.
-
He trains for the war. He wants justice for the Games, wants the rebels to win. He wants a new world, without humans or beasts, to be forever caught in an endless sunsetting sky. Above everything, he wishes the people here would have the mercy to kill him already.
Guns tremble in his hands. The fresh air fills his lungs to bursting. He looks over at Katniss and Johanna sometimes, who both succeed at steadfastly ignoring him. He’s sometimes overcome with the urge to aim his gun with shaking hands to Katniss’s head, her heart. But he’s a bad shot and there’s a large possibility he could hit someone undeserving instead, so he always manages to stop himself. He tells himself Katniss is not his enemy anymore. Katniss is not his anything anymore.
He watches her anyway.
-
Sometimes when he sleeps, he can almost feel the warmth of her body in his arms. Strong. Comforting. It’s like having a phantom limb when he awakes to chained wrists clutching nothing between them. Nobody at all.
Sometimes he feels the press of her lips in his dreams. Sometimes after she kills him, she sits next to his body with her knees drawn to her chin and cries, his stiff, dead fingers twitching to touch her.
-
Returning to Capitol makes him regress, he thinks, although he can’t be too sure. Insanity is new and undetectable to him, mostly. Sliding back to sanity has taken what he is told is a surprisingly brief time, which to him sounds dangerous at best when he’s being thrown precariously back into a warzone.
They don’t listen to him plead for death. They dismiss him. He kills one of their men in plain sight of every one of him. They forgive him on the spot. They don’t give him what he wants.
Katniss heals his wrists and looks harried and exhausted most of the time. She doesn’t like to look at him too often, and he wonders why. People who knew him before torture like Haymitch of Delly or Gale, even, can’t seem to watch him enough.
One morning he wakes up, forgetful. “District 12 is gone,” he says lowly, to anybody willing to listen. “Real or not real?”
Gale’s voice is impossibly hard when he answers, and sharp with the pain of the wound in his neck. “Real.”
-
Peeta is burned by the bombs that hit, and a thousand little children, and Katniss, and her sister. Only he and Katniss seem to survive.
They’re both quick at healing, now, but Peeta is certain his recovery is the most significant. He quells his episodes now. He doesn’t want anybody else dead by his hands, or the hands of any other human being. He doesn’t want to die, anymore, he wants to be brought back to life completely. Haymitch tells him he’s almost there.
The Games Coin suggests almost send him back into madness. Katniss’ and Haymitch’s agreements turns his mind into a pit of fire, that turns into a pit of barking mutts who chew on the remnants of Finnick and Cato and grin at him with brilliant-red blood-drenched teeth.
Katniss shoots Coin and it is the last time Peeta sees her for months.
-
Haymitch tells her she’s safe. She’s okay. She’s a mess. They’ll see her soon, he says, with no trace of joy. The three of them will never heal, not completely. If anything, they are all survivors, and for now that’s enough to keep Peeta sane. The promise of being a mess together. Of knowing Katniss, again, of loving her.
He dreams of games and children with funny coloured hair and elaborate tattoos across their faces being plucked from their mothers arms by President Snow and thrown into a lush garden together with big, brutish weapons, full of spikes and explosives and some even set on fire sat on the space of dirt in the centre. Peeta is one of the children. He turns to watch the little girl beside him as she walks to the weapons and picks up the dandelion in front of them. She turns back around, hands stretched out, offering it up to him.
In his dream, Peeta smiles, steps forward and takes it.
Pairing: Peeta/Katniss.
Summary: She is not the girl with the dandelion anymore. Set after Peeta's torture.
Peeta dreams in shocking brightness whenever he sleeps in the cell. The blood drips from his ribs like a neon flood. The sand beneath him shines the sun back into his eyes and burns him wherever he looks, wherever he touches, wherever it is he’s fallen. The sky is orange - not in the painted, paradisaical sunset-strokes he likes, but blinding and solid, and so visibly endless around him it feels like its harsh colour is warning him it’s about to swallow him whole.
Lifting her mottled head from the mess of gore that makes up his chest, fangs bared, Katniss grins at him, a feral thing. She’s always coloured in the wrong tones, so wrong they constantly act as reminders that he’s dreaming, every night. She looks like she’s been stitched into his nightmares in messy, tangled, ugly thread, but when he looks into her black beast’s eyes in the dream, he cries and loves her dearly anyway.
In her smile, between her pointed teeth, his blazing-red heart beats, thickly and grotesquely. He watches, transfixed for a moment. There’s an eruption of crimson when she bites down, then his eyes snap open at the sound of his own petrified wailing, so loud and so ragged he thinks the effort of it could burst his entire body to pieces.
-
After the second week, he realizes there is nobody to keep him company here but himself. Johanna never responds to his voice, his sadness, his anger, even his insanity. He hears very little of her, although in the deepest silences of the night sometimes he hears her making soft, frail noises that could be crying if Peeta believed Johanna was capable of tears.
She doesn’t seem to hear him when he starts talking to himself.
Half of him is truly, desperately in love with Katniss. The other half is chaos, made up of the terror of his nightmares and the terror of his consciousness, being poisoned and sat on a metal chair like a throne that captures his wrists, his ankles, his neck and his eyelids when he sits down on it. They make him watch the Games.
They make him watch Katniss. Transform her into a monster before his eyes, and - although he could never realize it - him, too.
-
Love is overthrown by madness, hate, Tracker Jacker poison. Katniss is a monster now. She is a bird of prey with talons made of needles, swooping down and trying to clutch his head and puncture his brain. She is a sea-monster, sliding out of the water and descending onto him with no eyes or face, only sharp scales that cut his hands when he pushes her away and a vast, hungry mouth. She has no eyes or face, and her hair billows around her like smoke while she reaches out and tries to choke him to death with the locket he thinks he might have gave her. On her rampage, she beats children out of her way with two black wings bigger twice the size of her, takes bites out of them with icicle fangs that go down to her collarbone. Peeta, she hisses, her snake’s tongue flicking at him, and she sounds murderously, terrifyingly hungry.
-
She is not the girl with the dandelion anymore.
-
One day they drag him outside into the sun again. He spends the hours before having his matted, filthy hair washed, having it brushed to impossible softness, being bathed and dressed by the hands of strangers. They coat his tired face in make-up. They add needless things to his outfit in an attempt to distract from how he fidgets nervously, how his chest rises and falls rapidly at the thought of returning to the world. There is nothing he would like less than to see it’s horror in person.
They give him words to say to a camera. He says the wrong ones.
One day a boy with black hair and a bow breaks him out of his cell and drags him, screaming and shaking, back to the outside world, this time to stay.
They give him sleeping syrup and lock him back up as soon as possible. The boy with the black hair stands at the end of his bed and stares at him, looking into Peeta’s thinned face for something that will never return.
-
Katniss reappears. He tries to kill her, to protect the children she will doubtlessly devour otherwise, the innocent civilians she will slaughter like mindless cattle, the silly boys with hearts of clay she will burn away to ashes. He doesn’t succeed.
They try to brainwash him into accepting her. They tell him she is human, really, there are no mutts in District 13; but as far as Peeta’s aware, there is no District 13, and this is a nightmare, deadlier than all others for the convincing shades of reality it’s painted in, for the horrifying accuracy of Katniss’s face, eyes, and scars.
He is guarded by soldiers at all times, just like before. People visit sporadically. It takes time for him to remember them. He’s allowed a hand in Finnick and Annie’s wedding cake, since he apparently harbours no resentment towards either of them, but they don’t allow him to have things to paint with, for fear of what his unstable mind could do with them.
Half of Peeta agrees with them.
-
His dreams in the hospital are black and white and sometimes even calmed. It’s mostly still nightmares - horrific memories wrapped in the poison of insanity, dulled by lack of colour, but still enough to send him thrashing and yelling where he’s tied to his bed.
His family die in black and white, crushed beneath his blasted home while he is running to them. He loses the Games the first time when Katniss forces the berries down his throat, harmless grey pebbles in his palms. Haymitch takes Peeta’s own knife from his pockets and jams it into his back, over and over and over. He watches his home be destroyed in a mess of black clouds. Katniss kisses him on the beach and he thinks she might mean it.
-
He trains for the war. He wants justice for the Games, wants the rebels to win. He wants a new world, without humans or beasts, to be forever caught in an endless sunsetting sky. Above everything, he wishes the people here would have the mercy to kill him already.
Guns tremble in his hands. The fresh air fills his lungs to bursting. He looks over at Katniss and Johanna sometimes, who both succeed at steadfastly ignoring him. He’s sometimes overcome with the urge to aim his gun with shaking hands to Katniss’s head, her heart. But he’s a bad shot and there’s a large possibility he could hit someone undeserving instead, so he always manages to stop himself. He tells himself Katniss is not his enemy anymore. Katniss is not his anything anymore.
He watches her anyway.
-
Sometimes when he sleeps, he can almost feel the warmth of her body in his arms. Strong. Comforting. It’s like having a phantom limb when he awakes to chained wrists clutching nothing between them. Nobody at all.
Sometimes he feels the press of her lips in his dreams. Sometimes after she kills him, she sits next to his body with her knees drawn to her chin and cries, his stiff, dead fingers twitching to touch her.
-
Returning to Capitol makes him regress, he thinks, although he can’t be too sure. Insanity is new and undetectable to him, mostly. Sliding back to sanity has taken what he is told is a surprisingly brief time, which to him sounds dangerous at best when he’s being thrown precariously back into a warzone.
They don’t listen to him plead for death. They dismiss him. He kills one of their men in plain sight of every one of him. They forgive him on the spot. They don’t give him what he wants.
Katniss heals his wrists and looks harried and exhausted most of the time. She doesn’t like to look at him too often, and he wonders why. People who knew him before torture like Haymitch of Delly or Gale, even, can’t seem to watch him enough.
One morning he wakes up, forgetful. “District 12 is gone,” he says lowly, to anybody willing to listen. “Real or not real?”
Gale’s voice is impossibly hard when he answers, and sharp with the pain of the wound in his neck. “Real.”
-
Peeta is burned by the bombs that hit, and a thousand little children, and Katniss, and her sister. Only he and Katniss seem to survive.
They’re both quick at healing, now, but Peeta is certain his recovery is the most significant. He quells his episodes now. He doesn’t want anybody else dead by his hands, or the hands of any other human being. He doesn’t want to die, anymore, he wants to be brought back to life completely. Haymitch tells him he’s almost there.
The Games Coin suggests almost send him back into madness. Katniss’ and Haymitch’s agreements turns his mind into a pit of fire, that turns into a pit of barking mutts who chew on the remnants of Finnick and Cato and grin at him with brilliant-red blood-drenched teeth.
Katniss shoots Coin and it is the last time Peeta sees her for months.
-
Haymitch tells her she’s safe. She’s okay. She’s a mess. They’ll see her soon, he says, with no trace of joy. The three of them will never heal, not completely. If anything, they are all survivors, and for now that’s enough to keep Peeta sane. The promise of being a mess together. Of knowing Katniss, again, of loving her.
He dreams of games and children with funny coloured hair and elaborate tattoos across their faces being plucked from their mothers arms by President Snow and thrown into a lush garden together with big, brutish weapons, full of spikes and explosives and some even set on fire sat on the space of dirt in the centre. Peeta is one of the children. He turns to watch the little girl beside him as she walks to the weapons and picks up the dandelion in front of them. She turns back around, hands stretched out, offering it up to him.
In his dream, Peeta smiles, steps forward and takes it.