fic: commentfic collection // the hunger games
so i thought i should collect + clean up all the bits of commentfic i have floating around wot i wrote. this de-anons me for the anon fic meme, but y'all knew who i was so that's okay. ^^
DRABBLE MEME:
Finnick/Johanna, someday
--
Johanna Mason is not the kind of person who gives up easily, but Finnick Odair is not the kind of man you can win. (Not even if it is something you want, more than you have wanted anything since you were in the Games and you wished you wouldn't die. That is just how things go, you know.)
She knows Annie Cresta, knows the curve of her smile, knows the madness that's taken up shop in the back of her head. (After all; it is in Johanna's mind, too. She just knows how to ignore it.) She knows Annie Cresta, and she loves her, in that quiet solid way that all the Victors love each other. She kind of, sort of, even understands why Finnick loves her; a mix of masochism and pity both, and something else, deep and dangerous, buried at the heart of that love.
This does not stop Johanna wishing, sometimes (not often) that he would be thankful that he is still holding together, that she is held together, even if Annie is not.
--
"Hey," he whispers, hand on her wrist, reassuring; "Johanna. Someday they'll fall. Someday we'll be free."
They are on their way to the Seventy-Fourth games; she is feeling sick, like she will throw up. She finds herself swallowing, finds herself saying. "I wish it would be someday soon."
Here is the thing: she does not love him like the Capitol loves him, does not love the projection of him that he shows everyone, the laughing charming beautiful man who is shallow because that is the only thing he knows how to be. She does not love him for the blood on his hands, but she understands it, because it is on hers too.
(Here is the thing: she trusts him. and that is something you are absolutely never supposed to do.)
--
They have learned each other's harshnesses, broken places; he loves his mad girl, and she has lost everything she has ever loved. It is not something she has ever told him, but he has looked in her eyes and understood her darkness. There is something like continuity, running between the two of them. She knows for him it isn't love.
They learn each other with sharp words, cutting to the quick; they do not pull punches but this is how they are. Soft is not something Johanna has ever been; it is not something he would ever want from her. When they kiss they draw blood; when they fuck they wear bruises for days afterwards.
This is how it goes.
(Someday, she thinks. Someday she will be able to let her guard down; someday she will kiss him and it will not hurt.)
--
Peeta/Katniss, we are basic lies
--
it is, after all, nothing new. he loves her. she does not love him.
it's how half the stories go. (the ones with the tragic endings, or the ones where he is a secondary character.)
she says, i love you.
he says, i can live without you.
lately, all they can do is lie to each other.
--
sometimes he thinks of himself as a creature of habit, wonders if he is running on that; if that is the only reason he has not listened to his better angels and let go. he sometimes thinks he is a badly-fired clay shape, with one phrase echoing around his head to define him, i love katniss everdeen.
the thing is: they fit together, too well. they can finish each other's movements if not sentences; he knows when she is feinting, when she is shooting. he knows when to duck.
this is how he feels the faintest flinch as he is kissing her.
this is how she feels him tighten his grip, before he lets go.
both of them are running on this: things they do not say, things both of know. truths that stick in both of their chests.
he wonders if one of these days he will be brave, if he will say, everything i do is because i love you. he wonders if she will say, you and i do not fit together.
somehow, he doesn't think so. he has gotten much better at lying, since he started to understand her.
--
gale/madge, left behind
--
she asks him, do you love me because i am not the one who died? her hair is streaming across the pillow. her eyes catch his, and do not let go.
the moonlight is filtering in through the window; it falls silver across her shoulders, across her mouth and her eyelashes. he cannot help thinking that she is something delicate, something to be protected.
of course not, he says. he does not think it is a lie, but these days, he is never sure. i love you because you are you. he thinks, i love you because you survived.
sometimes he thinks he does not know who he is, without the girl on fire. this is not madge undersee's fault; it is something that happened. this is something he does not want to fall to pieces, like everything else he has touched.
he leans forward and presses his mouth to hers.
--
Katniss/Gale, aftermath
--
He says, "What are we doing?"
She bites her lip. "Hell if I know."
He wants to say, do you miss him. He wants to say, why did you choose him, in the end?
The irony of it kind of chokes him; Peeta won, in the end; it is Peeta who she wanted. But it is Gale who made it out. Now everything is fucked up.
She is kissing him, hard and fast and fierce. Her hands are behind her back, so the only place they are touching is their mouths.
He thinks it is to shut him up.
Her eyes are closed; he can see every eyelash, dark and separate against her skin. He knows she is thinking about Peeta, knows it deep in his heart. It makes him wish he had been there, to take the bullet.
--
finnick/annie +
i was lost but now i'm found
sometimes there's nothing left to save
--
"you are," he says, "so beautiful." the colour of his eyes is deep and bright and infinite, so bright it almost hurts to look at.
you are dripping, still. there is salt crusted on the roof of your tongue, stuck in the back of your nose. every time you suck in air you feel like choking. you close your eyes to shield them from the intensity of his gaze, see the red blood dripping across the inside of your eyelids.
his hand on your wrist is warm, is too warm. you are used to the saltwater, you are used to the cold. it feels like you're burning where he's made contact, it feels like you are on fire.
you almost want to go back into the sea, to be free of it. but the arena is a helicopter away, impassable, and your legs are still shaky so that dry land feels like a blessing.
you open your eyes so they will be clean, and meet his gaze. "you look like the sea," you tell him.
--
you are aware that you are not -- all together -- functional. they talk to you as though you are a small child, but you aren't; you're just tired and scared, all the time.
he is in love with all your broken places, all the ways in which you do not make a whole. he likes to sit with you and tell you stories; he likes to braid your hair and tell you that you are safe, now.
there is something about him that grounds you, that centres you; when you are with him you feel less like you are about to wash away with the tide. this does not stop you wondering why he does it, though.
he tells you it is love.
you do not want to tell him you don't understand that concept anymore.
--
he kisses you and you bite his lip open kissing back, and all of a sudden you know. it hits you like a tsunami, like a tidal wave; you tell yourself that you are not driftwood, that you are anchored. (but this is a lie; you are anchored in him.)
you say, "you are in love with the games." your voice gets pitchy, gets high, gets scared; you force yourself not to look away.
his fingertips are under your chin, tilting your face up. "oh, annie," he says, soft, sweet. "i'm so sorry."
you don't know who he's sorry for.
--
DOOMED SHIP COMMENT FICATHON:
Johanna/Finnick, when I focus, I never miss (it starts with a kiss)
--
She says, "You're bleeding out."
He says, "No need to make a big deal out of it." His smile is shaky, like his voice, like his laugh. Not like his eyes. Those, at least, are steady. (Steadily dimming.)
"Okay," she says. Her back hits the wall; she slides down and stretches her legs out next to his prone body. Her fingers are all red, and they keep sticking together. This is not a new experience. "This has never happened, Finnick. I have never seen you die."
"Careful, Johanna," he says. His skin is golden, streaked with crimson. These are colours that go well together, she thinks. These are colours stylists would delight in. "You don't want to wake up, do you?" His hands are laced across his stomach, across the bleeding open wound that's spilling out his life across his clothes, across the floor.
"Maybe I do," she's saying, "Maybe I think you're a selfish asshole and I don't want to be in your company anymore."
This is when he laughs, bright and charming, as he always was. "You really don't," he tells her calmly, which is unfair because she's never been that calm bleeding out (except that one time, with an axe in her hand, reinventing the game). "You really just miss me."
I should have learned to swim, she thinks. "Don't flatter yourself." (This means, for her, I love you.)
His left hand strains across the space between them, catches hers with its sticky redness, so his blood on her hand is sticking to his blood on his. He tightens his hand around hers, hard, like bruises on her skin will make him last longer. This means, for him, I'm sorry.
She says, "You are always going to let go." This means, I am always going to wake up.
He presses his mouth to her shoulder. The warmth of it is intoxicating.
--
THE HUNGER GAMES ANONYMOUS FIC PROMPT
[MOCKINGJAY SPOILERS]
katniss's daughter/gale's son
let's make our own mistakes
--
It is, of all things, a documentary. Ariel doesn't expect it to be showing at eleven o'clock on Monday night, as they're unpacking; she doesn't expect it to be one of those old video clips, showing just as they get the television turned on, with her mother's hair in a dark braid, a bow in her hands, her face young, less-lined; with a dark-eyed boy at her back, foil and parallel both. There is a close up on the look in his eyes, pure longing.
She stares at it for a long moment, can't move.
It shuts off with a crackle. The remote is in Con's hand. "My sister's name is Primrose," he says. He's staring at her, wide-eyed, halfway between rising and standing, with the city lights flooding through the window behind the television. He looks cornered, like something lost and feral and wild, something her mother would shoot. "We call her Rosie, but it's-- it's a common name."
She says, "Con." His name sticks to her teeth, catching there. "Con, this means what you want it to. Nothing more." She's gripping the sides of the box she's sitting on (Lamps, in his neat blocky handwriting), which is stupid and pointless but she's barely stable, she might drift away if he blew on her. This is her fault and she knows it.
"This is why you wouldn't introduce me to your parents." His hair is falling into his eyes, dark, thick; it's the same as hers; Seam hair is what Uncle Haymitch calls it. "This is why my father flinched when you walked in. You knew." It's not that his voice is angry; it's that it's hurt.
She's staring at her fingertips; when she was a child she thought lying was the worst of all sins. Then she grew up. "Con, I-- you knew who my parents are."
"My father was in love with your mother," he says, molasses-slow. "I didn't know that. And now I'm in love with you."
"I didn't want you to think about it like that," she says, and it's honest, it's true and it hurts; she can hear it in her voice, wrecked and harsh and raw. Because he's smart and funny (and the day she left Twelve for Two her mother said, you leave now you don't come back, more resignation than condemnation, and she went anyway; she goes back for holidays now but there's still something uneasy about them; she is her mother's daughter but she's not her mother, she's never liked fire), because she has never done anything on anyone's terms but her own, and he is the only person who matters, the only person who has ever seen the truth of her, stripped to her core. And she could not bear to watch that fall away, like it's falling away now. "We're not our parents."
He laughs, weakly. "You think I don't know that? Jesus, Ariel. I just-- I thought you trusted me."
"I do," she says. "I just. I didn't think it mattered. I didn't want it to matter. Your dad didn't want you to know."
There is a click; he is unfurling the curtains. There is a tiny bare lightbulb in the ceiling; on autopilot, she gets up and turns it on. There is not a lot of light, compared to the city outside. The shadows draw around them; she has never been scared of the dark. She doesn't think she could be scared of anything with him near.
"Everything matters," he says, softly.
"That means," she counters, because she grew up with a sarcastic alcoholic with too many geese, "that nothing does." Her fingertip lingers on the light switch.
His footsteps are soft behind her, like his hand on her wrist, like his chin on her shoulder, like his mouth on her cheek and then his breath ghosting past her ear. "Ariel," he murmurs. she has always loved the way he says her name. "You should have told me."
"If this is a mistake," she says, without turning, sharp; because this was her decision and she can't disown it now, "I want it to be one we made."
The chuckle stutters out of his mouth. "Fuck," he says. "Oh, Ariel."
This is when she turns, spins in his arms, meets his eyes and loops her arms around his neck. "Con; I love you," she says it, softly, carefully. "I shouldn't have to answer for that."
"Sometimes," he says, "you do things you shouldn't have to." But he's dropping his head forward, close to her; his forehead resting on hers and his breathing steady, in and out, in and out.
She wonders if his father ever took him hunting.
--
& MOAR!
Ariel Mellark + Peeta Mellark + Gale Hawthorne + Katniss Everdeen.
--
"Hey, Dad." It's Yule; Con's at home, with his parents, and Ariel's gone to visit hers. It's like duty, right. (She kind of hates it.)
Peeta is reading a book, by the fire. Ariel doesn't know where her mother is; probably the forest, that's where she goes when she doesn't want to be disturbed, and both her kids (plus Uncle Haymitch, who's a mess at the best of times) cluttering up her house will do that. "Hey, Ari," he says. He's smiling, bright and wide, brilliant; despite everything warmth floods through her, because this is her father. "How's it hanging, kiddo?"
She bites her lip, sits on the couch next to him and pulls her legs up under her. "Con saw a documentary about his dad. I need to tell Mom who I'm living with."
His eyes flash, once, before his expression smooths and settles. She's never really been able to read him. "Ari, I don't think that's the best idea."
"When's she going to find out, when I have a kid with him and she meets her grandchild's father?" she's snapping, because she loves her father but all he knows how to do is protect her mother and it's fucking ridiculous.
He winces. "Your mom-- the thing is, Ari." His knuckles are white; he hates talking about the revolution. "You have to remember that the war-- if the war hadn't happened, she'd probably have married Gale. He's everything she loved before our Games; he's everything the war broke. And you look like her, and Con looks like him, and it's-- she's always thought of me as-- not wrong, but not what she should have had. She doesn't need more evidence for that." His mouth's twisted up, and sad, and his voice has gone quiet.
She hates this; she's always been her dad's daughter. She gets up and puts her arms around him. "You can't keep her in the dark forever," she whispers.
"I know," he says, taking her hand, carefully. "But she's had enough of firelight for a lifetime; I have to try."
--
"I look like my mother," she says.
Gale winces. (He looks like his son, a lot; handsome-featured, same dark hair, same dark eyes.) "Your eyes are blue," he says.
She arches an eyebrow. "Gale," she says.
"Yeah." His sigh is a bright exhalation in the morning. "Yeah, you do, Ari. You wear your hair like she used to; sometimes I freeze and think it's her."
"I'm sorry." She doesn't think it's fair to apologize for sharing half of her mother's genes, but she thinks about not loving Con anymore, and watching shadows of both of them fall in love, and it's like a stab in the fucking heart. (But, she supposes, she would rather have a bad copy than no evidence at all.)
"There's nothing to apologize for," he says. "Ariel, if I was still in love with your mother Con wouldn't be alive, I wouldn't be married to Jo."
"She still cares about you." She has to say it, because he is a gaping wound, and he looks like his son who she has never been able to bear hurting.
"I sincerely doubt that," he says, but his eyes are wide and full of pain; he is nothing like her father. "Ariel--"
"I was in Dad's study, a while ago." She runs a hand through her hair, which tends to curl around her fingers. "There's this book, a play really. The Tempest-- it's from before. A tempest is a great wind; there is a character in it named Ariel. Ariel's not a common name. She still cares about you."
He closes his eyes. "Ari."
She aches for him; if he was not on a comscreen in her childhood bedroom she would lean forward, kiss his cheek. "I just-- you shouldn't think you're the only one who got hurt."
--
Ariel's mother is only ever beautiful in forests. As she gets older she gets slower, and a little louder-- she's still like the sound of wind through trees, but now you can hear her a little more, hear the crunch of leaves when she gets sloppy (rarely, if ever)-- but they are still where she belongs, where her eyes glow brighter, her hands move surer, where the world seems to fall into place and Katniss understands everything.
Ariel grew up with a distant, tired mother; she was always aware that Katniss loved her, and her brother, that she would do anything for either of them; but that anything didn't include things Katniss was crap at, like bandaging skinned knees, or nursing hurt feelings. At home there is always something weary about Katniss, something slow and weak and broken; when Katniss has a bow in her hand, leaves over her head, she becomes something completely different. Ariel's kind of a romantic; sometimes when she goes hunting with her mother she thinks about Diana, goddess of the forest, vibrant and dangerous and alive. Katniss wears braids; Ariel's only ever worn loose, messy ponytails, when she's hunting.
This morning they've bagged three rabbits, and are sitting out by the lake. Ariel knows she's always been the pretty child; her brother is smart, and quick, and fierce, but Ariel got delicate features and beautiful hair and contrasting brilliant eyes. When she was young she thought it was why he'd always been their mother's favourite; now she is older, and she knows it is because he looks like their father, and she looks like Katniss.
The water is clear and blue, rippling when the wind passes over it, like Ariel's father's eyes. She's skinning the first rabbit, fingers bloody and sticky. "Mom," she says.
Katniss mmm's, looks up; her eyes are startlingly grey; every time Ariel looks at her she's stunned. Her brother has those eyes, too, but he isn't yet aware of how powerful they can be.
"I moved in with a guy, last month."
Katniss raises an eyebrow. "Good for you," she says. "To be honest, I thought it would be a girl."
Ariel rolls her eyes. "Thanks ever so, Mother." This is how they work; some girls have close relationships with their mothers; Ariel and Katniss snipe at each other. Other people's mothers would find out about their boyfriends by like, the three month mark; not so much, with them. "Anyway, his name's Con. Conroy Mason-Hawthorne. Which is kind of a mouthful, but both his parents are kind of fiery so it wasn't like he'd only get one last name."
"Ariel," Katniss says. She drawls out the vowels; slow and delicate and deadly, weighted. "What are you saying?"
"His father's Gale Hawthorne."
Ariel told herself she'd be brave; she does not look away from Katniss' eyes, which are all agony, for half a heartbeat, until she blinks and looks away. "And?" Katniss asks. Her voice is calm again, controlled. "I haven't heard that name in a long time."
"I love him," Ariel says. "I-- I thought you should know. and he's not his father, like I'm not you-- he's shit in a forest, for one thing, fumbles any kind of weapon."
Her mother's mouth curves up at the edges. "That's got to annoy Johanna."
"Little bit," Ariel says. "Are you--"
Katniss laughs, edge of falsity to it like there always is. "Your dad was worried? I'll talk to him. It's fine-- it's Gale's son, he's not a sociopath, right. Gale and I have been over for so long there's nothing left to hurt."
"Bullshit," Ariel snaps, because goddamn, she's been living with this her entire life, with her mother pretending to be all right and her father supporting that and everyone going along with the stupid fucking charade that was so ridiculous Ariel had to move twelve hours away by flight to get away from it. Mendacity, Con called it, when she cried about it one night; a five-cent word he picked up from one of the books she brought home from the big library. His mouth was twisting up, at the edges. "You still care about him-- you named me after him, for fuck's sake, I saw the book in the study--"
Katniss' blink is too slow to be fake. "Ariel," she says, deadly calm, "your father named you."
--
DRABBLE MEME:
Finnick/Johanna, someday
--
Johanna Mason is not the kind of person who gives up easily, but Finnick Odair is not the kind of man you can win. (Not even if it is something you want, more than you have wanted anything since you were in the Games and you wished you wouldn't die. That is just how things go, you know.)
She knows Annie Cresta, knows the curve of her smile, knows the madness that's taken up shop in the back of her head. (After all; it is in Johanna's mind, too. She just knows how to ignore it.) She knows Annie Cresta, and she loves her, in that quiet solid way that all the Victors love each other. She kind of, sort of, even understands why Finnick loves her; a mix of masochism and pity both, and something else, deep and dangerous, buried at the heart of that love.
This does not stop Johanna wishing, sometimes (not often) that he would be thankful that he is still holding together, that she is held together, even if Annie is not.
--
"Hey," he whispers, hand on her wrist, reassuring; "Johanna. Someday they'll fall. Someday we'll be free."
They are on their way to the Seventy-Fourth games; she is feeling sick, like she will throw up. She finds herself swallowing, finds herself saying. "I wish it would be someday soon."
Here is the thing: she does not love him like the Capitol loves him, does not love the projection of him that he shows everyone, the laughing charming beautiful man who is shallow because that is the only thing he knows how to be. She does not love him for the blood on his hands, but she understands it, because it is on hers too.
(Here is the thing: she trusts him. and that is something you are absolutely never supposed to do.)
--
They have learned each other's harshnesses, broken places; he loves his mad girl, and she has lost everything she has ever loved. It is not something she has ever told him, but he has looked in her eyes and understood her darkness. There is something like continuity, running between the two of them. She knows for him it isn't love.
They learn each other with sharp words, cutting to the quick; they do not pull punches but this is how they are. Soft is not something Johanna has ever been; it is not something he would ever want from her. When they kiss they draw blood; when they fuck they wear bruises for days afterwards.
This is how it goes.
(Someday, she thinks. Someday she will be able to let her guard down; someday she will kiss him and it will not hurt.)
--
Peeta/Katniss, we are basic lies
--
it is, after all, nothing new. he loves her. she does not love him.
it's how half the stories go. (the ones with the tragic endings, or the ones where he is a secondary character.)
she says, i love you.
he says, i can live without you.
lately, all they can do is lie to each other.
--
sometimes he thinks of himself as a creature of habit, wonders if he is running on that; if that is the only reason he has not listened to his better angels and let go. he sometimes thinks he is a badly-fired clay shape, with one phrase echoing around his head to define him, i love katniss everdeen.
the thing is: they fit together, too well. they can finish each other's movements if not sentences; he knows when she is feinting, when she is shooting. he knows when to duck.
this is how he feels the faintest flinch as he is kissing her.
this is how she feels him tighten his grip, before he lets go.
both of them are running on this: things they do not say, things both of know. truths that stick in both of their chests.
he wonders if one of these days he will be brave, if he will say, everything i do is because i love you. he wonders if she will say, you and i do not fit together.
somehow, he doesn't think so. he has gotten much better at lying, since he started to understand her.
--
gale/madge, left behind
--
she asks him, do you love me because i am not the one who died? her hair is streaming across the pillow. her eyes catch his, and do not let go.
the moonlight is filtering in through the window; it falls silver across her shoulders, across her mouth and her eyelashes. he cannot help thinking that she is something delicate, something to be protected.
of course not, he says. he does not think it is a lie, but these days, he is never sure. i love you because you are you. he thinks, i love you because you survived.
sometimes he thinks he does not know who he is, without the girl on fire. this is not madge undersee's fault; it is something that happened. this is something he does not want to fall to pieces, like everything else he has touched.
he leans forward and presses his mouth to hers.
--
Katniss/Gale, aftermath
--
He says, "What are we doing?"
She bites her lip. "Hell if I know."
He wants to say, do you miss him. He wants to say, why did you choose him, in the end?
The irony of it kind of chokes him; Peeta won, in the end; it is Peeta who she wanted. But it is Gale who made it out. Now everything is fucked up.
She is kissing him, hard and fast and fierce. Her hands are behind her back, so the only place they are touching is their mouths.
He thinks it is to shut him up.
Her eyes are closed; he can see every eyelash, dark and separate against her skin. He knows she is thinking about Peeta, knows it deep in his heart. It makes him wish he had been there, to take the bullet.
--
finnick/annie +
i was lost but now i'm found
sometimes there's nothing left to save
--
"you are," he says, "so beautiful." the colour of his eyes is deep and bright and infinite, so bright it almost hurts to look at.
you are dripping, still. there is salt crusted on the roof of your tongue, stuck in the back of your nose. every time you suck in air you feel like choking. you close your eyes to shield them from the intensity of his gaze, see the red blood dripping across the inside of your eyelids.
his hand on your wrist is warm, is too warm. you are used to the saltwater, you are used to the cold. it feels like you're burning where he's made contact, it feels like you are on fire.
you almost want to go back into the sea, to be free of it. but the arena is a helicopter away, impassable, and your legs are still shaky so that dry land feels like a blessing.
you open your eyes so they will be clean, and meet his gaze. "you look like the sea," you tell him.
--
you are aware that you are not -- all together -- functional. they talk to you as though you are a small child, but you aren't; you're just tired and scared, all the time.
he is in love with all your broken places, all the ways in which you do not make a whole. he likes to sit with you and tell you stories; he likes to braid your hair and tell you that you are safe, now.
there is something about him that grounds you, that centres you; when you are with him you feel less like you are about to wash away with the tide. this does not stop you wondering why he does it, though.
he tells you it is love.
you do not want to tell him you don't understand that concept anymore.
--
he kisses you and you bite his lip open kissing back, and all of a sudden you know. it hits you like a tsunami, like a tidal wave; you tell yourself that you are not driftwood, that you are anchored. (but this is a lie; you are anchored in him.)
you say, "you are in love with the games." your voice gets pitchy, gets high, gets scared; you force yourself not to look away.
his fingertips are under your chin, tilting your face up. "oh, annie," he says, soft, sweet. "i'm so sorry."
you don't know who he's sorry for.
--
DOOMED SHIP COMMENT FICATHON:
Johanna/Finnick, when I focus, I never miss (it starts with a kiss)
--
She says, "You're bleeding out."
He says, "No need to make a big deal out of it." His smile is shaky, like his voice, like his laugh. Not like his eyes. Those, at least, are steady. (Steadily dimming.)
"Okay," she says. Her back hits the wall; she slides down and stretches her legs out next to his prone body. Her fingers are all red, and they keep sticking together. This is not a new experience. "This has never happened, Finnick. I have never seen you die."
"Careful, Johanna," he says. His skin is golden, streaked with crimson. These are colours that go well together, she thinks. These are colours stylists would delight in. "You don't want to wake up, do you?" His hands are laced across his stomach, across the bleeding open wound that's spilling out his life across his clothes, across the floor.
"Maybe I do," she's saying, "Maybe I think you're a selfish asshole and I don't want to be in your company anymore."
This is when he laughs, bright and charming, as he always was. "You really don't," he tells her calmly, which is unfair because she's never been that calm bleeding out (except that one time, with an axe in her hand, reinventing the game). "You really just miss me."
I should have learned to swim, she thinks. "Don't flatter yourself." (This means, for her, I love you.)
His left hand strains across the space between them, catches hers with its sticky redness, so his blood on her hand is sticking to his blood on his. He tightens his hand around hers, hard, like bruises on her skin will make him last longer. This means, for him, I'm sorry.
She says, "You are always going to let go." This means, I am always going to wake up.
He presses his mouth to her shoulder. The warmth of it is intoxicating.
--
THE HUNGER GAMES ANONYMOUS FIC PROMPT
[MOCKINGJAY SPOILERS]
katniss's daughter/gale's son
let's make our own mistakes
--
It is, of all things, a documentary. Ariel doesn't expect it to be showing at eleven o'clock on Monday night, as they're unpacking; she doesn't expect it to be one of those old video clips, showing just as they get the television turned on, with her mother's hair in a dark braid, a bow in her hands, her face young, less-lined; with a dark-eyed boy at her back, foil and parallel both. There is a close up on the look in his eyes, pure longing.
She stares at it for a long moment, can't move.
It shuts off with a crackle. The remote is in Con's hand. "My sister's name is Primrose," he says. He's staring at her, wide-eyed, halfway between rising and standing, with the city lights flooding through the window behind the television. He looks cornered, like something lost and feral and wild, something her mother would shoot. "We call her Rosie, but it's-- it's a common name."
She says, "Con." His name sticks to her teeth, catching there. "Con, this means what you want it to. Nothing more." She's gripping the sides of the box she's sitting on (Lamps, in his neat blocky handwriting), which is stupid and pointless but she's barely stable, she might drift away if he blew on her. This is her fault and she knows it.
"This is why you wouldn't introduce me to your parents." His hair is falling into his eyes, dark, thick; it's the same as hers; Seam hair is what Uncle Haymitch calls it. "This is why my father flinched when you walked in. You knew." It's not that his voice is angry; it's that it's hurt.
She's staring at her fingertips; when she was a child she thought lying was the worst of all sins. Then she grew up. "Con, I-- you knew who my parents are."
"My father was in love with your mother," he says, molasses-slow. "I didn't know that. And now I'm in love with you."
"I didn't want you to think about it like that," she says, and it's honest, it's true and it hurts; she can hear it in her voice, wrecked and harsh and raw. Because he's smart and funny (and the day she left Twelve for Two her mother said, you leave now you don't come back, more resignation than condemnation, and she went anyway; she goes back for holidays now but there's still something uneasy about them; she is her mother's daughter but she's not her mother, she's never liked fire), because she has never done anything on anyone's terms but her own, and he is the only person who matters, the only person who has ever seen the truth of her, stripped to her core. And she could not bear to watch that fall away, like it's falling away now. "We're not our parents."
He laughs, weakly. "You think I don't know that? Jesus, Ariel. I just-- I thought you trusted me."
"I do," she says. "I just. I didn't think it mattered. I didn't want it to matter. Your dad didn't want you to know."
There is a click; he is unfurling the curtains. There is a tiny bare lightbulb in the ceiling; on autopilot, she gets up and turns it on. There is not a lot of light, compared to the city outside. The shadows draw around them; she has never been scared of the dark. She doesn't think she could be scared of anything with him near.
"Everything matters," he says, softly.
"That means," she counters, because she grew up with a sarcastic alcoholic with too many geese, "that nothing does." Her fingertip lingers on the light switch.
His footsteps are soft behind her, like his hand on her wrist, like his chin on her shoulder, like his mouth on her cheek and then his breath ghosting past her ear. "Ariel," he murmurs. she has always loved the way he says her name. "You should have told me."
"If this is a mistake," she says, without turning, sharp; because this was her decision and she can't disown it now, "I want it to be one we made."
The chuckle stutters out of his mouth. "Fuck," he says. "Oh, Ariel."
This is when she turns, spins in his arms, meets his eyes and loops her arms around his neck. "Con; I love you," she says it, softly, carefully. "I shouldn't have to answer for that."
"Sometimes," he says, "you do things you shouldn't have to." But he's dropping his head forward, close to her; his forehead resting on hers and his breathing steady, in and out, in and out.
She wonders if his father ever took him hunting.
--
& MOAR!
Ariel Mellark + Peeta Mellark + Gale Hawthorne + Katniss Everdeen.
--
"Hey, Dad." It's Yule; Con's at home, with his parents, and Ariel's gone to visit hers. It's like duty, right. (She kind of hates it.)
Peeta is reading a book, by the fire. Ariel doesn't know where her mother is; probably the forest, that's where she goes when she doesn't want to be disturbed, and both her kids (plus Uncle Haymitch, who's a mess at the best of times) cluttering up her house will do that. "Hey, Ari," he says. He's smiling, bright and wide, brilliant; despite everything warmth floods through her, because this is her father. "How's it hanging, kiddo?"
She bites her lip, sits on the couch next to him and pulls her legs up under her. "Con saw a documentary about his dad. I need to tell Mom who I'm living with."
His eyes flash, once, before his expression smooths and settles. She's never really been able to read him. "Ari, I don't think that's the best idea."
"When's she going to find out, when I have a kid with him and she meets her grandchild's father?" she's snapping, because she loves her father but all he knows how to do is protect her mother and it's fucking ridiculous.
He winces. "Your mom-- the thing is, Ari." His knuckles are white; he hates talking about the revolution. "You have to remember that the war-- if the war hadn't happened, she'd probably have married Gale. He's everything she loved before our Games; he's everything the war broke. And you look like her, and Con looks like him, and it's-- she's always thought of me as-- not wrong, but not what she should have had. She doesn't need more evidence for that." His mouth's twisted up, and sad, and his voice has gone quiet.
She hates this; she's always been her dad's daughter. She gets up and puts her arms around him. "You can't keep her in the dark forever," she whispers.
"I know," he says, taking her hand, carefully. "But she's had enough of firelight for a lifetime; I have to try."
--
"I look like my mother," she says.
Gale winces. (He looks like his son, a lot; handsome-featured, same dark hair, same dark eyes.) "Your eyes are blue," he says.
She arches an eyebrow. "Gale," she says.
"Yeah." His sigh is a bright exhalation in the morning. "Yeah, you do, Ari. You wear your hair like she used to; sometimes I freeze and think it's her."
"I'm sorry." She doesn't think it's fair to apologize for sharing half of her mother's genes, but she thinks about not loving Con anymore, and watching shadows of both of them fall in love, and it's like a stab in the fucking heart. (But, she supposes, she would rather have a bad copy than no evidence at all.)
"There's nothing to apologize for," he says. "Ariel, if I was still in love with your mother Con wouldn't be alive, I wouldn't be married to Jo."
"She still cares about you." She has to say it, because he is a gaping wound, and he looks like his son who she has never been able to bear hurting.
"I sincerely doubt that," he says, but his eyes are wide and full of pain; he is nothing like her father. "Ariel--"
"I was in Dad's study, a while ago." She runs a hand through her hair, which tends to curl around her fingers. "There's this book, a play really. The Tempest-- it's from before. A tempest is a great wind; there is a character in it named Ariel. Ariel's not a common name. She still cares about you."
He closes his eyes. "Ari."
She aches for him; if he was not on a comscreen in her childhood bedroom she would lean forward, kiss his cheek. "I just-- you shouldn't think you're the only one who got hurt."
--
Ariel's mother is only ever beautiful in forests. As she gets older she gets slower, and a little louder-- she's still like the sound of wind through trees, but now you can hear her a little more, hear the crunch of leaves when she gets sloppy (rarely, if ever)-- but they are still where she belongs, where her eyes glow brighter, her hands move surer, where the world seems to fall into place and Katniss understands everything.
Ariel grew up with a distant, tired mother; she was always aware that Katniss loved her, and her brother, that she would do anything for either of them; but that anything didn't include things Katniss was crap at, like bandaging skinned knees, or nursing hurt feelings. At home there is always something weary about Katniss, something slow and weak and broken; when Katniss has a bow in her hand, leaves over her head, she becomes something completely different. Ariel's kind of a romantic; sometimes when she goes hunting with her mother she thinks about Diana, goddess of the forest, vibrant and dangerous and alive. Katniss wears braids; Ariel's only ever worn loose, messy ponytails, when she's hunting.
This morning they've bagged three rabbits, and are sitting out by the lake. Ariel knows she's always been the pretty child; her brother is smart, and quick, and fierce, but Ariel got delicate features and beautiful hair and contrasting brilliant eyes. When she was young she thought it was why he'd always been their mother's favourite; now she is older, and she knows it is because he looks like their father, and she looks like Katniss.
The water is clear and blue, rippling when the wind passes over it, like Ariel's father's eyes. She's skinning the first rabbit, fingers bloody and sticky. "Mom," she says.
Katniss mmm's, looks up; her eyes are startlingly grey; every time Ariel looks at her she's stunned. Her brother has those eyes, too, but he isn't yet aware of how powerful they can be.
"I moved in with a guy, last month."
Katniss raises an eyebrow. "Good for you," she says. "To be honest, I thought it would be a girl."
Ariel rolls her eyes. "Thanks ever so, Mother." This is how they work; some girls have close relationships with their mothers; Ariel and Katniss snipe at each other. Other people's mothers would find out about their boyfriends by like, the three month mark; not so much, with them. "Anyway, his name's Con. Conroy Mason-Hawthorne. Which is kind of a mouthful, but both his parents are kind of fiery so it wasn't like he'd only get one last name."
"Ariel," Katniss says. She drawls out the vowels; slow and delicate and deadly, weighted. "What are you saying?"
"His father's Gale Hawthorne."
Ariel told herself she'd be brave; she does not look away from Katniss' eyes, which are all agony, for half a heartbeat, until she blinks and looks away. "And?" Katniss asks. Her voice is calm again, controlled. "I haven't heard that name in a long time."
"I love him," Ariel says. "I-- I thought you should know. and he's not his father, like I'm not you-- he's shit in a forest, for one thing, fumbles any kind of weapon."
Her mother's mouth curves up at the edges. "That's got to annoy Johanna."
"Little bit," Ariel says. "Are you--"
Katniss laughs, edge of falsity to it like there always is. "Your dad was worried? I'll talk to him. It's fine-- it's Gale's son, he's not a sociopath, right. Gale and I have been over for so long there's nothing left to hurt."
"Bullshit," Ariel snaps, because goddamn, she's been living with this her entire life, with her mother pretending to be all right and her father supporting that and everyone going along with the stupid fucking charade that was so ridiculous Ariel had to move twelve hours away by flight to get away from it. Mendacity, Con called it, when she cried about it one night; a five-cent word he picked up from one of the books she brought home from the big library. His mouth was twisting up, at the edges. "You still care about him-- you named me after him, for fuck's sake, I saw the book in the study--"
Katniss' blink is too slow to be fake. "Ariel," she says, deadly calm, "your father named you."
--