[fic: the hunger games]
it was a garden sprung up in the graveyard of my bones
the hunger games. peeta x katniss. spoilers. "do you know? I think we're weeds." ~3700 | r
Her house smells stale, musty, a museum to the dead. The little girl’s room is lined with a fine film of dust and she dares not even disturb that. Sometimes Katniss thinks she will be content to remain sequestered in the house she had won for Prim, a guardian to a tomb.
But eventually, she stirs. Eventually, things must stir. Even if the wound never heals, the body grows accustomed to the pain, and things stir.
And outside her home, a bush of primroses grows.
Sometimes, Katniss fancies herself and Peeta a bit like weeds-severed at the head by the indifferent Capitol, gripped and plucked and removed from the garden. But, oh, the Capitol did not know how deep their roots went. Weeds were stubborn, and the sprouted back stronger than before.
There is a weed in Peeta’s smile. His strong, blunt fingers curl over the wrist of Greasy Sae, steadying her, and outside Katniss’s window the old woman laughs and pats his cheek like an affectionate mother-Katniss remembers that Peeta’s mother had thought he would die, almost two years ago as the camera filmed every moment of it.
Her fingers trace patterns on the grimy window, but Peeta does not look up at her. Katniss is not sure if she wants him to. They grow around each other, over each other, never quite sure when to touch, where to touch.
Her inaction bothers her suddenly, and Katniss races from the room, coming back with a soaking dishrag. She scrubs her window clean, and lets cool, spring sun shine in.
The first time Peeta shows up announced in her home she finds him in the kitchen. Her foot hovers in mid-air, suddenly unbalanced. She walks on quiet feet, ghosting around her own home-habits hammered into her body like nails.
His back is to her. He doesn’t see her. The sweet smell of fresh bread fills her nostrils, but she does not step inside. It seems to her, suddenly, that the kitchen might be his sanctuary, his heaven, and she hums with a worry that she might taint it, violate it, by stepping into it, onto the tiled floor.
Katniss backs away, she goes hunting, out into the woods that feel more like a home to her than anything has ever been. Sometimes, she lays down on a bed of soft, crunchy leaves and soft, moist earth and considers letting it eat her, eat her alive until she is the earth. She misses feeling part of whole. Even in the games she had been defined by the group-the Tributes and then the Victors and then the rebels; even as the Mockingjay it was the group that had mattered. Now she is nothing but the remains of a girl who had been set alight, and had been burned into ash and bone.
But every time she forces herself up, forces on foot ahead of the other. And even though it hurts, even though she wants to sink to her knees, she forces herself to go back to the house that used to be a home, back the empty rooms that used to be full. She isn’t sure why; perhaps it’s nothing more than a natural inclination to endure. She’s been honed down to the fine, sharp edge of survival, biting and cutting and bitter-but surviving.
It’s the first night Peeta leaves bread for her. The house seems less empty, and staring at the sweet, glazed roll, smelling the remains of the raising yeast, Katniss realizes that she wants to live, specifically. Wants to breathe and eat and sleep and dream and have nightmares. That she is not just acting on instinct, on habits, but driven by an urge to live.
She shovels the bread into her mouth. It’s the first full meal she’s had in months, only nibbling at what Greasy Sae forces her to eat. Her stomach has grown lean and gaunt and protests the gooey thickness as it slides down her throat. Katniss ignores it, and eats it all.
Later, she leans sideways over the sink, vomiting the bread out. The backs of her elbows and knees shake and shudder with the strength of her heaves and acidic salvia burns the roof of her mouth.
But Katniss Everdeen realizes she wants to live.
Her kitchen, then, becomes Peeta’s. That is how she thinks of it, something entirely and fully his, something not hers. He bakes her bread every morning, and sometimes waits around for her to get back home from hunting. They’ll eat together, and speak in a sort of shorthand that has Greasy Sae laughing.
There’s something not quite right with both of them, Katniss thinks. The world marches at a pace that cannot match, and instead are forced to stumble along beside. But they-they? They move in sync, in harmony with one another. Whatever beat pulses his heart, or her heart, it is the same pulse.
Katniss becomes afraid to step inside her own kitchen, tip-toeing along the tiles whenever she needs to go inside as if she will smear it, stain it, somehow if she does.
Even before the Games, her diet had been steady disappointment. She had known the world to be cruel, and thus had expected cruelty, braced for it. Whatever girlhood she might have had she had sacrificed upon the altar of the relentless god of hunger. But for Peeta there had been niches, alcoves, of softness, of warmth, to wedge himself into, to keep patches of his skin smooth and soft. It must have heart worse then, Katniss reasoned, to have that sense of security become ingrown and then ripped away-like a fishing hook pressed just underneath the skin and then pulled by an uncaring, and unconcerned, hunter.
She leaves him that space, that place, to grow. Their chests had been cut open, scooped out, and hollowed, the bones of their ribs like cradles to their barely beating hearts. Around him, sometimes, she is afraid to breathe too heavily, as if he might break.
Or maybe she is afraid she will.
Sometimes she awoke from nightmares and lay still on her sweat-dampened sheet, concreting on breathing like Dr. Aurelius had suggested when she had grudgingly admitted being haunted by the chains of those memories-Rue dead and Prim dead and Madge’s ashes and Finnick’s bloody neck.
Sometimes she stands and goes to her window, and watches the dark glass of Peeta’s room like some great, silent sentential. She cannot protect herself, not from the nightmares, but she can pretend she’s strong enough to protect him. But sometimes his lights are not always off. She can see the warm orange-glow through his drawn curtains and thinks she might see his shadow, pacing his room like a caged animal.
She dreams about going to him, laying her hand upon his chest. It’s open, his chest, and his blood pumps from his beating heart, down his sides and onto the ground, creating a pool and then river beneath him, around him. She imagines filling up the empty holes in him, the cracks that only she can see because they are the reflection of hers. She dreams of making him whole-and she dreams herself becoming whole.
It’s one of the few times Katniss’s dreams do not turn into nightmares.
Once, she had laid her book upon his lap.
“Will you?” she had asked.
Carefully, Peeta had picked up a discarded piece of charcoal, and started to draw.
And then, they had started growing into each other.
There are bad days, of course. There are always bad days, and always will be. Katniss begins to expect them, almost thrive on them. Peeta keeps himself closeted, closed, still so afraid of what he had been in the Capitol, that wild half-tamed beast bucking and twisting. Sometimes he looks at Katniss and she can still feel the phantom press of his fingers upon her throat, but she has learned to not push away but rather to push toward and she settles her weight against him like a worn coat.
She misses Old Peeta, but in the way she misses Old Katniss. They are not the same anymore, the Girl Who Was on Fire and the Boy With the Bread. They are not the children who left home to die and came back alive, and then left to die again.
Once, he takes out her book and draws. First Rue. And then Snow. And then Coin. And then Finnick. And then his mother. And then his father. And then. And then Prim. Sweet little Primrose with the ends of her hair curling and flaring as if she were on fire. And Katniss might have cried, might have cried then, expect it splotches in a fat corona where Peeta’s tear lands. His fingertips leave thick black smudges on the heavy paper.
He’s trembling, shaking. And Katniss Everdeen might have run before, before when she was Girl on Fire and when she was the Mockingjay. She might have run then, from him, the way she had when his eyes had turned to her for the first time biting and cruel, so antithesis to the boy she had thought of as ally, lover, friend, husband-all crystallized facets of him shattered and swept aside to make room for this new one, with the lopsided smile like a whetted razor and arms like steel bands crossed over his chest, the only thing holding him together.
Once, she had worshipped no power higher than her own, once she had come to every and all as a conquering general might to a besieged city.
Now, she comes to him artlessly, steps into his dissonant world because she recognizes it as one she occupies, a space she can understand. There are roots that connect them, wood-veins that push the same blood back and forth between them.
Katniss lays a hand upon his wrist.
“Peeta,” she says. “Peeta. That’s enough.” And it is.
Their suddenly fumbling fingers twine, and he turns his face to hers. “Sometimes I don’t think anything’s real anymore,” he admits. “Sometimes I think I must be in some unreal world and my body is dying, bleeding out somewhere. Maybe I’m crazy. No. I’m definitely crazy. Maybe I did die in that cave and this is some strange sort of limbo. Would it have been better if I did die in that cave, in your arms?”
“No.” And the certainty in her voice is final. “I’m alive and you’re alive and we’re alive, and do you see how outside the window your primroses are growing? Alive. That’s what’s important. Nothing else matters, except how we’re alive. That’s real.”
“Real,” he repeats and clings to it, that sensation of realness. Bigness. His fingers claw, birdlike, at her wrist, bringing her closer. She’s barely steady herself, but she has become the anchor to his world, his fixed point. She feels constantly buoyed along but here, for him, she is the rock in the ocean in the storm and she opens her arms to him, a safe harbor in the storm of his mind.
This is not love, not yet. It’s more than love, and so much less. It’s necessity. Here, in this moment, if they don’t have each other, if they don’t take and be taken, give and receive, there might be nothing left. The world around them is large, so big that it swallows them up with an indifferent gulp, and Katniss needs it to be less so. Just less than what it is, something small so she can manage it, so she can feel like that her voice might be heard if she chooses to shout.
She takes the universe, she whittles it down to the curve of Peeta’s cheek, to his hand on her shirt and then under it, and then the gasp she breaths into his mouth. Her lungs expand with breath not her own, and her fingers find solid, warm flesh and dig in, hold on.
At a young age, she learned the world was cruel and had thus expected cruelty, and braced for it. So when the pain came, when they managed to adjust her legs so they fell on either side of his hips and after a few more nudges and breathless mumbles he was inside her full and big and hard, she was not surprised and it did not hurt so terribly. And then it faded and they were racing, racing, racing, toward something neither of them quite grasped-education is wanting here in District 12.
Katniss thinks of it a bit like the first few minutes in the Games-though she had sworn herself to never ever ever ever think of them, to let them die in her mind the way Prim had died, the way Rue had died, and Thresh and even Cato and Clove; let it die inside her because it did not deserve to be a living thing when all the rest were dead-but the idea of it clings like a burr to her mind. Like the first few minutes of the game, they rush breathlessly to the Cornucopia, to grapple for perchance, reach that bright precept of pleasure.
Peeta reaches it first.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he mumbles against her naked breast and Katniss doesn’t understand, not at first, until he lays heavily on top of her, spent. Oh, she thinks. But she isn’t too upset, even though her body hums with unanswered passion. Peeta rests his head heavily upon her shoulder, his hand strokes her hip.
There’s always next time, Katniss thinks.
He awakes her up as dawn spreads its heavy, warm arms across the blind-filtered shadows of her house. In the orange glow of early morning, his eyes are narrowed, considering. She wiggles, uncomfortable, beneath him, half-on the couch, half-off.
Peeta puts his mouth to her breast, suckling, and then reaches between her thighs to tentatively explore the warm, wet junction there. The pleasure is sharp, biting, and she arches up into him in surprise. Encouraged, Peeta bites softly down into her breast, his tongue teases a nipple. His fingers slip inside.
She comes undone, completely, around him. Maybe she’s meant to. Maybe the only proper way to pick herself and reemerge scabbed over and healed is to fall apart entirely.
Peeta falls back asleep, but Katniss slips out from under him. She dresses in the quiet, predatory way that has become imbued in her. She grabs the bow from its lax spot leaning in the doorframe. Sometimes, when someone knocks-Greasy Sae or Haymitch-she panics, eyes darting to it, thinking oh no but what if they see? before she remembers that that is not her world anymore.
She doesn’t hunt. She wouldn’t eat whatever it is she killed, and that would be a waste. But to go to the woods without her bow is like walking down the road naked. Impossible; like severing an arm.
Katniss baths in the stream. It feels wrong, somehow, to scrub herself in the shower. Almost as if she would be doing a disserve to Peeta, like she was ashamed of him and the way he had come into her last night. But out here, where the stream is cool and soft and blue, it feels like an old, practiced ritual. A woman come to offer nature the most primitive gift she knew how to give; for what use did nature have for something material, manmade?
Her hair falls down her back, and then dries in a stubborn, thick frizz that clouds around her face. She takes a long, winding path home, passing Thom who blinks at her in surprise. Katniss imagines with her bow and her hair all wild and tangled she must look like some great, savage beast come to feast upon them. She only smiles.
Haymitch meets her at the way mark home. He’s scowling, but that’s no surprise. He’s always scowling. It’s sort of lovely, having that kind of consistency.
“There you are,” Haymitch says.
“Where else would I be?” Katniss wonders.
“Not where you’re supposed to be, obviously.” The scowl deepens, curdles like bad milk on the flat, pale line of his lips. “Go on up and see him, girl. He’s half sick with worry, and likely to burn down the whole house in a few minutes.”
“What?” Katniss says.
Haymitch spits and curses. “I thought it was the females that were supposed to get the hysterics.”
She rushes home in a dead heat, leaving Haymitch to kick at loose peddles and the clinging remains of the ashes. She dumps her bow somewhere beside the door, and finds Peeta in the kitchen, hands folded over the wooden table. Greasy Sae gives her a smile with all her crooked, yellow teeth and leaves them.
He doesn’t look hysterical, Katniss thinks, a bit sour. She’s a sweaty mess now, thanks to Haymitch. And she just spent the afternoon scrubbing in the river.
“Are you alright?” Peeta asks.
She blinks. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Well, I thought-” He makes an odd motion with his hand. “And you ran off, is what I mean. You ran off and I thought-you might not have liked it or you were hurt or I did something wrong.”
Katniss can’t help it. She laughs, full in his face, a belly full laugh. And for a moment, she is the old Katniss and the new Katniss, combined into something that is whole and real and solid. Because she’s laughing at Peeta-he thinks he hurt her when all he did peel back the infected scab for it scar properly.
“You’re an idiot,” she tells him, with affection.
His smile comes slowly and the ghost of the old Peeta, who had stood in the rain and tossed her bread with a red welt blooming like a lover’s first kiss upon his cheek, hooks around its corners and hangs there.
“Maybe,” he concedes. “But I’m yours.”
Sobering, she walks around the table. She lays a hand upon his chest, where his heart beats against his bones. The pulse in her wrist answers in time.
“Yes,” she says. “Mine.”
They are like the roots of a tree, and they sprout up from the dead, ashy earth and curve around each other and then into each other, twining, tangled. Her dark hair falls over his face like leaves, his arms bow around her like branches. There is a sort of unbalance between them and the world, and they will never again be sure how to walk upright in it without stumbling, but there is her hand upon his wrist, and there is his hand coasting along the back of her neck. And it is enough, and if they cannot exactly work within the world, then they can work beside it, step in and out of it as they please.
She comes home from a hunt, dead fowl dangling at her fingertips. Peeta is in his kitchen. She has stopped thinking of the house as her house. Sometimes their slips in, smooth and easy, like rain in the spring. Because it has become their bed, stroking and touching and nurturing that tiny spark inside them that says we will do more than survive, we will live. And she has stopped thinking of Peeta’s house as his. Theirs, as well.
But the kitchen. The kitchen is still his.
And she hesitates at the threshold. His back is to her, and she has stalked in quietly. He does not see her. She thinks about going, leaving him to the sweet scents of bread and his heaven.
Instead, she steps in. He says nothing, merely offers a distracted smile as he goes back to kneading, and Katniss realizes with a jolt he wants her here. Wants her in this little carved cove he has designed for himself. Whatever peace he’s found, he wants to share.
She lays her catch upon the counter, plucks a few feathers. She feels lethargic. She leans sideways, only at her hip and neck. She leans until her head rests upon his shoulder. It’s not a soft shoulder, nor is it very solid anymore. It’s bony, tending toward leanness, but it’s broad and it’s real and, most importantly, it’s Peeta’s. She lays her head there and inhales the fresh clean scent of him, flour and yeast. He’s not very tall, but she is very small and she likes that if she turns she’d turn into his solidness, be surrounded by him. And she’s no longer afraid of being suffocated by such closeness.
“Do you know,” she murmurs. She thinks about a dead man and his lover and a tree he was hanged from and she thinks if she is ever hanged, she will call for Peeta to join her. And it is not selfish, not entirely. There are no gods left, in this world, no power to pray to. There is only each other, and the connection that hums between them, and they could not survive its rending. If she was hanged, she would do Peeta a kindness and ask him to hang with her, so he would not be left afloat in their apathetic world. She hopes he would do the same. “I think we’re weeds.”
They face opposite directions, and Peeta still gently kneads his dough, but she still feels him smile.
“Weeds,” he says. “Yes. Like dandelions.”
He cannot know it, and she does not say, but her heart breaks for the last time. It’s a clean break, though, not like the messy jigsaw Katniss-shaped pieces the Capitol had strewn about the floor after the fire had burned itself out. It’s a clean break and with spit and glue and the human urge to laugh and love and live, she will piece herself back together. And under her watchful eyes, so will Peeta.
She will build up this house of cards and shield it if a bitter wind comes to blow it down. Hardly anyone can say they have been given much of a solid foundation to build their home, anyway. Katniss is, suddenly, satisfied.
And it has been so long since she cried in front of a person, she has forgotten that odd embarrassment of being watched. She has forgotten what it’s like to cry with someone watching her-someone not a surly cat.
Still, when she turns her face into the curve of Peeta’s arm, it’s wet.
And outside, the stubborn little primrose bush slides into a summer’s full bloom.
the hunger games. peeta x katniss. spoilers. "do you know? I think we're weeds." ~3700 | r
Her house smells stale, musty, a museum to the dead. The little girl’s room is lined with a fine film of dust and she dares not even disturb that. Sometimes Katniss thinks she will be content to remain sequestered in the house she had won for Prim, a guardian to a tomb.
But eventually, she stirs. Eventually, things must stir. Even if the wound never heals, the body grows accustomed to the pain, and things stir.
And outside her home, a bush of primroses grows.
Sometimes, Katniss fancies herself and Peeta a bit like weeds-severed at the head by the indifferent Capitol, gripped and plucked and removed from the garden. But, oh, the Capitol did not know how deep their roots went. Weeds were stubborn, and the sprouted back stronger than before.
There is a weed in Peeta’s smile. His strong, blunt fingers curl over the wrist of Greasy Sae, steadying her, and outside Katniss’s window the old woman laughs and pats his cheek like an affectionate mother-Katniss remembers that Peeta’s mother had thought he would die, almost two years ago as the camera filmed every moment of it.
Her fingers trace patterns on the grimy window, but Peeta does not look up at her. Katniss is not sure if she wants him to. They grow around each other, over each other, never quite sure when to touch, where to touch.
Her inaction bothers her suddenly, and Katniss races from the room, coming back with a soaking dishrag. She scrubs her window clean, and lets cool, spring sun shine in.
The first time Peeta shows up announced in her home she finds him in the kitchen. Her foot hovers in mid-air, suddenly unbalanced. She walks on quiet feet, ghosting around her own home-habits hammered into her body like nails.
His back is to her. He doesn’t see her. The sweet smell of fresh bread fills her nostrils, but she does not step inside. It seems to her, suddenly, that the kitchen might be his sanctuary, his heaven, and she hums with a worry that she might taint it, violate it, by stepping into it, onto the tiled floor.
Katniss backs away, she goes hunting, out into the woods that feel more like a home to her than anything has ever been. Sometimes, she lays down on a bed of soft, crunchy leaves and soft, moist earth and considers letting it eat her, eat her alive until she is the earth. She misses feeling part of whole. Even in the games she had been defined by the group-the Tributes and then the Victors and then the rebels; even as the Mockingjay it was the group that had mattered. Now she is nothing but the remains of a girl who had been set alight, and had been burned into ash and bone.
But every time she forces herself up, forces on foot ahead of the other. And even though it hurts, even though she wants to sink to her knees, she forces herself to go back to the house that used to be a home, back the empty rooms that used to be full. She isn’t sure why; perhaps it’s nothing more than a natural inclination to endure. She’s been honed down to the fine, sharp edge of survival, biting and cutting and bitter-but surviving.
It’s the first night Peeta leaves bread for her. The house seems less empty, and staring at the sweet, glazed roll, smelling the remains of the raising yeast, Katniss realizes that she wants to live, specifically. Wants to breathe and eat and sleep and dream and have nightmares. That she is not just acting on instinct, on habits, but driven by an urge to live.
She shovels the bread into her mouth. It’s the first full meal she’s had in months, only nibbling at what Greasy Sae forces her to eat. Her stomach has grown lean and gaunt and protests the gooey thickness as it slides down her throat. Katniss ignores it, and eats it all.
Later, she leans sideways over the sink, vomiting the bread out. The backs of her elbows and knees shake and shudder with the strength of her heaves and acidic salvia burns the roof of her mouth.
But Katniss Everdeen realizes she wants to live.
Her kitchen, then, becomes Peeta’s. That is how she thinks of it, something entirely and fully his, something not hers. He bakes her bread every morning, and sometimes waits around for her to get back home from hunting. They’ll eat together, and speak in a sort of shorthand that has Greasy Sae laughing.
There’s something not quite right with both of them, Katniss thinks. The world marches at a pace that cannot match, and instead are forced to stumble along beside. But they-they? They move in sync, in harmony with one another. Whatever beat pulses his heart, or her heart, it is the same pulse.
Katniss becomes afraid to step inside her own kitchen, tip-toeing along the tiles whenever she needs to go inside as if she will smear it, stain it, somehow if she does.
Even before the Games, her diet had been steady disappointment. She had known the world to be cruel, and thus had expected cruelty, braced for it. Whatever girlhood she might have had she had sacrificed upon the altar of the relentless god of hunger. But for Peeta there had been niches, alcoves, of softness, of warmth, to wedge himself into, to keep patches of his skin smooth and soft. It must have heart worse then, Katniss reasoned, to have that sense of security become ingrown and then ripped away-like a fishing hook pressed just underneath the skin and then pulled by an uncaring, and unconcerned, hunter.
She leaves him that space, that place, to grow. Their chests had been cut open, scooped out, and hollowed, the bones of their ribs like cradles to their barely beating hearts. Around him, sometimes, she is afraid to breathe too heavily, as if he might break.
Or maybe she is afraid she will.
Sometimes she awoke from nightmares and lay still on her sweat-dampened sheet, concreting on breathing like Dr. Aurelius had suggested when she had grudgingly admitted being haunted by the chains of those memories-Rue dead and Prim dead and Madge’s ashes and Finnick’s bloody neck.
Sometimes she stands and goes to her window, and watches the dark glass of Peeta’s room like some great, silent sentential. She cannot protect herself, not from the nightmares, but she can pretend she’s strong enough to protect him. But sometimes his lights are not always off. She can see the warm orange-glow through his drawn curtains and thinks she might see his shadow, pacing his room like a caged animal.
She dreams about going to him, laying her hand upon his chest. It’s open, his chest, and his blood pumps from his beating heart, down his sides and onto the ground, creating a pool and then river beneath him, around him. She imagines filling up the empty holes in him, the cracks that only she can see because they are the reflection of hers. She dreams of making him whole-and she dreams herself becoming whole.
It’s one of the few times Katniss’s dreams do not turn into nightmares.
Once, she had laid her book upon his lap.
“Will you?” she had asked.
Carefully, Peeta had picked up a discarded piece of charcoal, and started to draw.
And then, they had started growing into each other.
There are bad days, of course. There are always bad days, and always will be. Katniss begins to expect them, almost thrive on them. Peeta keeps himself closeted, closed, still so afraid of what he had been in the Capitol, that wild half-tamed beast bucking and twisting. Sometimes he looks at Katniss and she can still feel the phantom press of his fingers upon her throat, but she has learned to not push away but rather to push toward and she settles her weight against him like a worn coat.
She misses Old Peeta, but in the way she misses Old Katniss. They are not the same anymore, the Girl Who Was on Fire and the Boy With the Bread. They are not the children who left home to die and came back alive, and then left to die again.
Once, he takes out her book and draws. First Rue. And then Snow. And then Coin. And then Finnick. And then his mother. And then his father. And then. And then Prim. Sweet little Primrose with the ends of her hair curling and flaring as if she were on fire. And Katniss might have cried, might have cried then, expect it splotches in a fat corona where Peeta’s tear lands. His fingertips leave thick black smudges on the heavy paper.
He’s trembling, shaking. And Katniss Everdeen might have run before, before when she was Girl on Fire and when she was the Mockingjay. She might have run then, from him, the way she had when his eyes had turned to her for the first time biting and cruel, so antithesis to the boy she had thought of as ally, lover, friend, husband-all crystallized facets of him shattered and swept aside to make room for this new one, with the lopsided smile like a whetted razor and arms like steel bands crossed over his chest, the only thing holding him together.
Once, she had worshipped no power higher than her own, once she had come to every and all as a conquering general might to a besieged city.
Now, she comes to him artlessly, steps into his dissonant world because she recognizes it as one she occupies, a space she can understand. There are roots that connect them, wood-veins that push the same blood back and forth between them.
Katniss lays a hand upon his wrist.
“Peeta,” she says. “Peeta. That’s enough.” And it is.
Their suddenly fumbling fingers twine, and he turns his face to hers. “Sometimes I don’t think anything’s real anymore,” he admits. “Sometimes I think I must be in some unreal world and my body is dying, bleeding out somewhere. Maybe I’m crazy. No. I’m definitely crazy. Maybe I did die in that cave and this is some strange sort of limbo. Would it have been better if I did die in that cave, in your arms?”
“No.” And the certainty in her voice is final. “I’m alive and you’re alive and we’re alive, and do you see how outside the window your primroses are growing? Alive. That’s what’s important. Nothing else matters, except how we’re alive. That’s real.”
“Real,” he repeats and clings to it, that sensation of realness. Bigness. His fingers claw, birdlike, at her wrist, bringing her closer. She’s barely steady herself, but she has become the anchor to his world, his fixed point. She feels constantly buoyed along but here, for him, she is the rock in the ocean in the storm and she opens her arms to him, a safe harbor in the storm of his mind.
This is not love, not yet. It’s more than love, and so much less. It’s necessity. Here, in this moment, if they don’t have each other, if they don’t take and be taken, give and receive, there might be nothing left. The world around them is large, so big that it swallows them up with an indifferent gulp, and Katniss needs it to be less so. Just less than what it is, something small so she can manage it, so she can feel like that her voice might be heard if she chooses to shout.
She takes the universe, she whittles it down to the curve of Peeta’s cheek, to his hand on her shirt and then under it, and then the gasp she breaths into his mouth. Her lungs expand with breath not her own, and her fingers find solid, warm flesh and dig in, hold on.
At a young age, she learned the world was cruel and had thus expected cruelty, and braced for it. So when the pain came, when they managed to adjust her legs so they fell on either side of his hips and after a few more nudges and breathless mumbles he was inside her full and big and hard, she was not surprised and it did not hurt so terribly. And then it faded and they were racing, racing, racing, toward something neither of them quite grasped-education is wanting here in District 12.
Katniss thinks of it a bit like the first few minutes in the Games-though she had sworn herself to never ever ever ever think of them, to let them die in her mind the way Prim had died, the way Rue had died, and Thresh and even Cato and Clove; let it die inside her because it did not deserve to be a living thing when all the rest were dead-but the idea of it clings like a burr to her mind. Like the first few minutes of the game, they rush breathlessly to the Cornucopia, to grapple for perchance, reach that bright precept of pleasure.
Peeta reaches it first.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he mumbles against her naked breast and Katniss doesn’t understand, not at first, until he lays heavily on top of her, spent. Oh, she thinks. But she isn’t too upset, even though her body hums with unanswered passion. Peeta rests his head heavily upon her shoulder, his hand strokes her hip.
There’s always next time, Katniss thinks.
He awakes her up as dawn spreads its heavy, warm arms across the blind-filtered shadows of her house. In the orange glow of early morning, his eyes are narrowed, considering. She wiggles, uncomfortable, beneath him, half-on the couch, half-off.
Peeta puts his mouth to her breast, suckling, and then reaches between her thighs to tentatively explore the warm, wet junction there. The pleasure is sharp, biting, and she arches up into him in surprise. Encouraged, Peeta bites softly down into her breast, his tongue teases a nipple. His fingers slip inside.
She comes undone, completely, around him. Maybe she’s meant to. Maybe the only proper way to pick herself and reemerge scabbed over and healed is to fall apart entirely.
Peeta falls back asleep, but Katniss slips out from under him. She dresses in the quiet, predatory way that has become imbued in her. She grabs the bow from its lax spot leaning in the doorframe. Sometimes, when someone knocks-Greasy Sae or Haymitch-she panics, eyes darting to it, thinking oh no but what if they see? before she remembers that that is not her world anymore.
She doesn’t hunt. She wouldn’t eat whatever it is she killed, and that would be a waste. But to go to the woods without her bow is like walking down the road naked. Impossible; like severing an arm.
Katniss baths in the stream. It feels wrong, somehow, to scrub herself in the shower. Almost as if she would be doing a disserve to Peeta, like she was ashamed of him and the way he had come into her last night. But out here, where the stream is cool and soft and blue, it feels like an old, practiced ritual. A woman come to offer nature the most primitive gift she knew how to give; for what use did nature have for something material, manmade?
Her hair falls down her back, and then dries in a stubborn, thick frizz that clouds around her face. She takes a long, winding path home, passing Thom who blinks at her in surprise. Katniss imagines with her bow and her hair all wild and tangled she must look like some great, savage beast come to feast upon them. She only smiles.
Haymitch meets her at the way mark home. He’s scowling, but that’s no surprise. He’s always scowling. It’s sort of lovely, having that kind of consistency.
“There you are,” Haymitch says.
“Where else would I be?” Katniss wonders.
“Not where you’re supposed to be, obviously.” The scowl deepens, curdles like bad milk on the flat, pale line of his lips. “Go on up and see him, girl. He’s half sick with worry, and likely to burn down the whole house in a few minutes.”
“What?” Katniss says.
Haymitch spits and curses. “I thought it was the females that were supposed to get the hysterics.”
She rushes home in a dead heat, leaving Haymitch to kick at loose peddles and the clinging remains of the ashes. She dumps her bow somewhere beside the door, and finds Peeta in the kitchen, hands folded over the wooden table. Greasy Sae gives her a smile with all her crooked, yellow teeth and leaves them.
He doesn’t look hysterical, Katniss thinks, a bit sour. She’s a sweaty mess now, thanks to Haymitch. And she just spent the afternoon scrubbing in the river.
“Are you alright?” Peeta asks.
She blinks. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Well, I thought-” He makes an odd motion with his hand. “And you ran off, is what I mean. You ran off and I thought-you might not have liked it or you were hurt or I did something wrong.”
Katniss can’t help it. She laughs, full in his face, a belly full laugh. And for a moment, she is the old Katniss and the new Katniss, combined into something that is whole and real and solid. Because she’s laughing at Peeta-he thinks he hurt her when all he did peel back the infected scab for it scar properly.
“You’re an idiot,” she tells him, with affection.
His smile comes slowly and the ghost of the old Peeta, who had stood in the rain and tossed her bread with a red welt blooming like a lover’s first kiss upon his cheek, hooks around its corners and hangs there.
“Maybe,” he concedes. “But I’m yours.”
Sobering, she walks around the table. She lays a hand upon his chest, where his heart beats against his bones. The pulse in her wrist answers in time.
“Yes,” she says. “Mine.”
They are like the roots of a tree, and they sprout up from the dead, ashy earth and curve around each other and then into each other, twining, tangled. Her dark hair falls over his face like leaves, his arms bow around her like branches. There is a sort of unbalance between them and the world, and they will never again be sure how to walk upright in it without stumbling, but there is her hand upon his wrist, and there is his hand coasting along the back of her neck. And it is enough, and if they cannot exactly work within the world, then they can work beside it, step in and out of it as they please.
She comes home from a hunt, dead fowl dangling at her fingertips. Peeta is in his kitchen. She has stopped thinking of the house as her house. Sometimes their slips in, smooth and easy, like rain in the spring. Because it has become their bed, stroking and touching and nurturing that tiny spark inside them that says we will do more than survive, we will live. And she has stopped thinking of Peeta’s house as his. Theirs, as well.
But the kitchen. The kitchen is still his.
And she hesitates at the threshold. His back is to her, and she has stalked in quietly. He does not see her. She thinks about going, leaving him to the sweet scents of bread and his heaven.
Instead, she steps in. He says nothing, merely offers a distracted smile as he goes back to kneading, and Katniss realizes with a jolt he wants her here. Wants her in this little carved cove he has designed for himself. Whatever peace he’s found, he wants to share.
She lays her catch upon the counter, plucks a few feathers. She feels lethargic. She leans sideways, only at her hip and neck. She leans until her head rests upon his shoulder. It’s not a soft shoulder, nor is it very solid anymore. It’s bony, tending toward leanness, but it’s broad and it’s real and, most importantly, it’s Peeta’s. She lays her head there and inhales the fresh clean scent of him, flour and yeast. He’s not very tall, but she is very small and she likes that if she turns she’d turn into his solidness, be surrounded by him. And she’s no longer afraid of being suffocated by such closeness.
“Do you know,” she murmurs. She thinks about a dead man and his lover and a tree he was hanged from and she thinks if she is ever hanged, she will call for Peeta to join her. And it is not selfish, not entirely. There are no gods left, in this world, no power to pray to. There is only each other, and the connection that hums between them, and they could not survive its rending. If she was hanged, she would do Peeta a kindness and ask him to hang with her, so he would not be left afloat in their apathetic world. She hopes he would do the same. “I think we’re weeds.”
They face opposite directions, and Peeta still gently kneads his dough, but she still feels him smile.
“Weeds,” he says. “Yes. Like dandelions.”
He cannot know it, and she does not say, but her heart breaks for the last time. It’s a clean break, though, not like the messy jigsaw Katniss-shaped pieces the Capitol had strewn about the floor after the fire had burned itself out. It’s a clean break and with spit and glue and the human urge to laugh and love and live, she will piece herself back together. And under her watchful eyes, so will Peeta.
She will build up this house of cards and shield it if a bitter wind comes to blow it down. Hardly anyone can say they have been given much of a solid foundation to build their home, anyway. Katniss is, suddenly, satisfied.
And it has been so long since she cried in front of a person, she has forgotten that odd embarrassment of being watched. She has forgotten what it’s like to cry with someone watching her-someone not a surly cat.
Still, when she turns her face into the curve of Peeta’s arm, it’s wet.
And outside, the stubborn little primrose bush slides into a summer’s full bloom.