Fic Post: Isolation [The Hunger Games]
Part III of the Alternate Takes series.
isolation
the hunger games
katniss/peeta, katniss/haymitch
2130 words
r
On A03.
When he plants the primroses, she thinks that maybe, someday soon, they will have a future together.
---
It starts slowly, and Katniss pretends not to notice in the beginning. The nightmares continue, Peeta’s desperate cries echoing into the dark nights, and his flashbacks lasting longer and longer until he stands for immense periods, immobile as he grips the ragged edges of a doorframe or their bedpost.
One day, she comes home from a hunt and sees him huddled up in a corner, terrified of the air in front of him. She tries to comfort him, bring him back to her with a kiss on the mouth, but all Peeta does is dig his nails into his skin until he bleeds.
---
Katniss wakes up one midnight, and Peeta’s hands are holding her down, his breath hot on her neck. She wonders briefly if this is the way it’s going to happen for them, in their cramped room when it’s still starry outside and she’s still not sure if she’s ready at all, until he screams and his body seizes up.
She spends the remainder of the night stroking his hair and dampening his neck with a torn bed shirt.
He doesn’t remember in the morning.
---
She brings it up when she calls the doctor. She writes everything down, every little detail and every miniscule incident, and recites them over the phone line until her voice aches and she’s reaching the point of a total nervous breakdown.
“Sometimes these things happen,” the doctor says lightly, after Katniss finishes. “Sometimes people just don’t get better in the way we want them to.”
“But he was doing fine for so long.”
She can hear the doctor shift in his chair. “You knew he would never be the same, Katniss, no matter how far he progressed.”
“You have to help him.”
The man on the other end of the line sighs and hangs up.
---
It gets to the point where his hands are at her throat on a daily basis.
Peeta has a plethora of knife marks on his forearms. She’s taken to blunting the blade she hides under her pillow so she won’t draw so much blood every time she wrestles him off, but the scars remain, fresh and painful for Peeta to find and tend to in the morning. Most of the time he just puts a murky salve on top of the wounds, foregoing bandages and risking infection and odd looks from their neighbors in town.
They begin to change the sheets nightly.
---
Katniss shows up, eyes dead, on Haymitch’s doorstep. She has a box of liquor from the most recent shipment next to her on the ground, a crucial part of a deal she struck with Haymitch in return for keeping an eye on Peeta when she was out hunting.
“Trouble sleeping?” Haymitch asks pointedly, touching a small mark on the side of her neck. “Didn’t think Peeta had it in him, really.”
She doesn’t answer, but pulls the collar on her shirt up about the mark.
“He’s never going to get better,” she says after a couple, holding an open bottle out to Haymitch.
Haymitch takes it, and motions for her to come inside. “Never thought he would, sweetheart.”
---
One night Peeta chokes Katniss so hard that she almost passes out. The only thing that saves her is the glass of water she always keeps by the bed, which she smashes into his face in a last minute moment of desperation. He yelps, jumps out of the bed, and runs to the bathroom, where he expels everything from his system in two massive heaves.
After pulling glass shards from her hand and wrapping her wrists up with cloth, Katniss sleeps on rocking chair in the corner of the room, buried in a pile of blankets.
When they eat breakfast in the morning, Peeta’s eye is black and blue, and Katniss has the stark marks of his fingers on her face. Neither of them says anything.
---
There are good nights and bad nights.
Sometimes he sleeps through the dark hours with not so much as a twitch (Katniss knows he’s been taking some sort of drug to help with the flashback, but she doesn’t ask about it and he won’t tell.) Other nights he remains in a state of constant panic or, on the worst nights, he succumbs to an insurmountable rage that consumes every cell in his body.
Tonight is a good night. Peeta is happy and laughing as he pours a watery pudding mixture into a serving bowl and tells her about his plans to go into town the next day to buy a new set of paints. He’s just getting around to telling her which colors he wants (the gray of her eyes, the vibrant pink of the wildflowers that grow in their backyard), when Katniss puts down the plate she’s cleaning and wraps her arms around Peeta’s midsection.
“I love you,” she whispers, her hands wandering through his hair.
It’s a familiar if not wary touch, and she pushes herself into it, working off the buttons on his grey shirt and letting him carry her up the stairs to their bedroom as he kisses the side of her neck. She laughs when he drops her on the bed, moving over her quietly.
Katniss breathes more quickly when he kisses the side of her hip, his lips burning into her skin as he peels back her pants.
“Peeta…” her voice trails off.
All of the sudden, his hands grip her thighs (tootighttootighttootight) and she knows he’s lost.
“Peeta, what…”
“Go!” he hisses, clenching the sheets around him as she stumbles toward the door. “Just go.”
Katniss runs out of the house, half-dressed and leaping through the growing snow banks that cover her street. When she reaches Haymitch’s house, she doesn’t bother knocking. She jimmies the front door open with a stick and lets herself in, grabbing the first blanket she finds strewn on the floor and finding a spot on the loveseat that seems the least offensive.
She wakes up to the smell of eggs and some sort of water fowl cooking on the wrought iron stove. It’s burnt badly and tastes like dirt, but she appreciates the sentiment.
Haymitch pretends not to notice the bruises on her forearms and shoulder when he hands her a glass of water. She pretends not to notice that this is the first time he’s been sober in almost a year.
---
Peeta actually does manage to knock her out the next time. The only reason she doesn’t die is because Peeta falls into another one of his fits that makes him curl up into a little ball and sob for hours on end. Katniss wakes up with a pounding headache and the taste of blood in her mouth, sprawled across the ground as Peeta wails.
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore, Katniss,” he says later as he sips broth from the blue bowl she brings him.
“We have to try,” she replies, wincing as he touches the cut on her forehead with two fingers.
---
They’re sitting in the living room, watching the last of the fire burn out. Haymitch is three bottles deep, and Katniss is nursing her second, taking small sips that leave her throat raw and her mind meddled.
“You going home tonight?” he drawls, throwing kindling on the dying flames and taking a moody drink. “Or have you officially moved in?”
“Do you want me to move in?” she asks sarcastically. “Do you like having somebody here at your every beck and call?”
He grunts, dropping the bottle on the floor and leaving it there. “Like you do anything for me at all, sweetheart.”
---
Katniss doesn’t go back to Peeta the next day. She knows he wouldn’t open the front door.
---
She surprises herself three nights later when she pulls her shirt off and forces a half-conscious Haymitch onto his back.
“He’s gone, Haymitch,” Katniss growls, tugging at his shirt and shoving her bare breasts against his chest. She presses her mouth to his, briefly, before she starts working on his trousers with trembling fingers. “The mourning period has to end sometime.”
“You were never good on the bottle,” he says, his liquor-heavy arms struggling to push her off. “Get yourself home, sweetheart.”
“What home?” she says angrily, pushing herself against him until he’s hard and twitching.
“Katniss…” His hand dangles on her shoulder, waiting.
She sits up, suddenly embarrassed. Her arms wrap around her breasts, and she shifts, looking for her discarded shirt on the ground. “Fine. Whatever.”
“Katniss…”
She drops her arms again, turns to face him. “Please, Haymitch. Just…please.”
He sighs, finally letting her kiss him when she crawls into his lap and puts her hands on him. He’s made worse decisions in his life.
---
She stays the night. They lay together on his bed, the covers kicked to the floor in spite of the brutal winter cold. He’s not as restless as Peeta, but he shifts and contorts in his dreams every so often. His hands flit over her stomach once and awhile, surprisingly possessive and disturbingly strong.
Katniss thinks about leaving once or twice. She knows that Peeta has taken to locking himself in their room until the morning, so she’d be safe sleeping on the couch or in the rocking chair again. But when she makes the effort, actually pushes herself up on her palms, something stops her, and she slides back down next to Haymitch, breathing in his wretched scent of liquor and rage and something else she can’t quite put her finger on.
The truth is that she doesn’t want to sleep alone anymore.
---
In the early morning, she swears she can hear Peeta all the way down the street, practically howling. She takes a couple steps into the hallway before Haymitch grabs her hand and pulls her back into his room.
---
She’s on her back, thrashing through a nightmare when Haymitch rouses her with a firm hand on her wrist. She nearly hits him when she comes to, a scream dead on her lips when her eyes flutter open.
“Same thing?”
Katniss nods. “Same dream. Nightmare. Same. He swallows the berries. I win. None of this happens.”
She shifts, pulling the covers over her body.
“We both know he’s better off dead,” she whispers later when she leans back over him, straddling his waist.
“Oh Katniss,” he sighs, kissing her carefully.
---
On a warm spring day, Katniss wakes up in the crook of Haymitch’s arm, her head sore from the amount of alcohol she consumed the previous evening. She hears the faint sound of a car outside and the telltale screech of wheels pulling up in front of a house. Stunned, she pulls on a pair of dirty pants from the ground and a shirt that may or my not be Haymitch’s, and runs outside without shoes.
Peeta holds a travel bag in his right hand and the keys to their home in the left. He hands them both to a man in a gray coat, and slides into the front seat of the car.
Haymitch watches from his front porch as Katniss follows Peeta down the street, sobbing as the car turns a corner and disappears in a fog of dust.
---
Her house sits vacant for months.
They eat, drink, fuck. It’s a routine and she’s glad for it. It keeps her mind off the fact that Peeta’s right back where he started, sitting in a white room with restraints on his scarred wrists as doctors poke and prod and pretend that they have any concept of how to fix the terminally broken.
Dr. Aurelius calls every so often, leaving news that never makes her feel any better. Katniss makes a point to ask whether or not she should make a trip back to the Capitol, but, after a couple months, she and the doctor both know that it’s nothing more than a perfunctory gesture of goodwill: Peeta’s not going to get better, and there’s absolutely nothing Katniss can do about it.
Haymitch learns how to cook, eventually. He even tries his hand at baking, but nearly burns his house down when he forgets to set a timer. The drinking doesn’t stop, but wanes considerably when Katniss says she’s pregnant (she isn’t, but Haymitch doesn’t need to know that). He even cleans out one of the guest rooms and tells her that the kid can stay there when it’s born.
It’s not perfect, and she still thinks about Peeta whenever she goes outside and sees their house, lonely and abandoned, but she moves on.
end.
Disclaimer: so not mine. really.
the rest of the alternate takes series
| i. the capitol wins | ii. prim does not die | 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 |