fic: and so goes spring (katniss/peeta, pg-13; 1/2)
title: and so goes spring (1/2)
author: hyacinthian
rating: pg-13
author's note: read over by several people (too many to thank but pauline, chloe, leah for some) and not too thoroughly edited, so let me know if anything jumps out at you. post-series.
summary: settling back into the rhythm of things is the hardest part. post-series.
In the peace, Katniss lets her hair grow long, and begins to learn how to live again.
It isn’t easy. She’s unused to its steady rhythm, to its slow, clodding pace. Not like the rush of survival, all blood in the throat and the fast pulse of blood beneath the skin. She busies herself with the spring planting, with hunting again, with learning how to move and breathe and live in her own skin. She lets her hair grow long and does not touch it, does not plait it or braid it, barely allowing herself to tie it back when summer sets in, thick and humid, when she can’t stand the feel of the strands sticking to the back of her neck.
Peeta moves next door and she can hear the creak of his flooring, the strange echoes that stir in his house and pass to hers, the ghosts they both share.
He calls out in his nightmares and she slips into his bed, pinning his body with hers. It doesn’t take another thought. She clings to his back, her leg tucked around him, and waits for the tremor of his body to still. This is what they do. This is what they have always done. In war or peace, this is what they have always done.
-
Her hair grows long, and Peeta becomes enamored with the way it feels to skim his fingers along the ends. It seems too delicate for the both of them. And he says, “It’s different.”
Katniss’s lips quirk at the corners, and he can already sense the retort lingering on the tip of her tongue. Instead, she walks to the counter, a slight sashay in her hips, and reaches for the bag of wet katniss roots, barely covered by burlap. The knife edge is sharp, gliding easily through a root in her palm and she turns, handing him a half to peel. “Better?” He squints at her, evening sun streaming through the window; her hair’s turned a different shade in the light, drawing her softer. The shadow along her jaw more muted. In the book, he’d run the pad of his thumb along the paper there to soften the lines, smudge all the charcoal into an ashy shadow.
He reaches for a small knife on the counter, turning the katniss root in his hand, the blade running lightly across the skin. Thin strips of peel fall in bits to the wooden countertop.
“Do you like it?”
“Do you?”
Peeta brushes at his mouth with the butt of his hand, and the katniss peel falls to the floor quietly. “It suits you.”
“Better than before?”
“It suits you now. But a year ago, or five...?” He pauses and she halves another katniss root in her palm; they have never really thought to talk about the past. They lived through it, and it’s enough to keep on living.
He cuts a piece of katniss from the end and pops it in his mouth. She smiles at him, a sly curve, and the root crunches bitter in his mouth, cold and starchy.
“Good?” she teases, with a soft laugh, and he sets the knife aside, reaching for her hips. It’s a small moment of not knowing how to move; her hips press back against his hands and then, a few stumbles closer.
Her lips brush the bridge of his nose, and this is worth it, he thinks, coming back to District 12, and the ashes of where the bakery once stood, and the shadows left in the stones and the fields, and the memories, and the curve of her mouth. Thinking he could forget this, maybe that’s impossible. She hums, a soft giggle lingering just behind it, and he kisses her.
They sit at the dining table, the sack of katniss on the table between them, her feet bare against the floor, and his hands still dusted with flour by the wrists. There’s always something left behind. She pauses from her peeling to look towards the window; there’s something about sunsets that still manages to stun her into silence, even now, with everything they’ve seen. She slides her feet into his lap then, and he watches her wait for the moonrise.
(Peeta keeps his hands against the arch of her foot, and she thinks of the moon, swaying, perhaps a little drunk in the sky above the cave, and the weight of the bags against her shoulder and the lightness of the arrows in the quiver and the rattle of Peeta’s breathing in sickness.
His thumb brushes the jut of her ankle, and she looks away from the sky.)
He feeds her a piece of raw katniss and she grins, crunching it between her teeth. “Good?” he says, and she moves to his side of the table, laying her legs across his lap.
She presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Thanks for the help,” she says.
He runs his fingers along her back.
-
It isn’t a question of good days or bad days, good hours or bad hours - this is what the others in the District don’t understand; there aren’t moments when he’s Peeta, and other moments when he’s no longer Peeta. It’s all him, lucid or mad, whole or splintered - everything still belongs to him and his back hasn’t yet broken under the weight; this, Katniss understands, and she leaves him to it.
Sometimes, in his episodes, he shuts himself inside his house and she can hear the sound of breaking dishes, his heavy footfalls when he paces; the worst ones are when she can’t hear anything but silence, when he has retreated so far into the past that she can only sing softly to him, ask him to come back to her.
Tethered to each other with twine, the both of them. Nothing but an unspooled thread that she hopes will never sever. (But when he looks up at her mid-song, and echoes the last refrain in his low voice, she will remember the shade of his eyes, and the size of his pupils and the slightness of his wrists, and everything else will no longer matter.)
-
He plants trees and vegetables outside his house - fostering a small garden - and she finds herself watching him when he works, his hands in the earth, muscles rippling with each movement. (Peeta catches her once, flashing a smile, and she goes hunting for the rest of the day.)
The first batch of tomato plants don’t blossom; the apple trees bear small, sour fruit, but he tries to make the best of it. They start to cook in her kitchen. Nothing complicated, not like the dishes they had in the Capitol, but the sorts of things she’d make at home. He cooks the apples down with sugar and spices until they’re slightly bittersweet, but palatable. Neither of them are for sweets, anyway.
The pots and pans are dirtied - she burns one of the smaller pots - and they leave the cleaning until the morning. After dinner, she leads him upstairs and they lie in bed together, too full to do anything but sleep.
-
His hair grows long, past his ears, and she’s struck by how much he resembles one of the smaller stray pups that used to run around the Hob.
She trims his hair with kitchen shears on the steps outside her house. His hair is thicker than she expects, lighter on the ends, and she runs her hands through his hair a few times when she’s finished to check her own work.
“I’m sure you did fine,” he says.
“It’s your head.”
He laughs then, his hand touching hers.
-
Letters from her mother come sometimes. Infrequently. She can never bring herself to open them, lets them collect on the corner of a kitchen counter until they begin to yellow.
She writes letters to Prim. It’s so easy to forget that she’s gone, not just living with her mother in a better district. She forgets sometimes, halfway into a sentence about Buttercup and Peeta’s failed attempts at growing pumpkins, his inability to understand climate and crops, and the ink bleeds and smudges across the pad of a finger, and everything will feel fresh, a wound re-opened.
Prim is gone, yes, and can’t ever return, or be reached. Her sweet smile, the way she forgot to tuck her shirt in, her half-finished thoughts and excited chattering in the mornings, the way she would crush Buttercup to her chest as a child - these things that can’t make up a person, and it’s all that Katniss can remember of her sister.
Prim, she writes, I still think about you every day.
When the pain finally goes away, Prim will mean less in some way, and Katniss - it isn’t something she can allow herself to do. (But the same lesson, learned by rote: life goes on. Steadily. Unchangingly. The sun continues to rise and set; the seasons continue to cycle; and leaves will fall from the trees each year, and she feels change in her bones with each growing year, with each year passed, and Prim remains a fixture, unchanging, unchanged, and Katniss cannot bridge that distance.)
-
Peeta writes her a short note, and sticks it beneath a green tomato on her front stoop.
You were the only girl I ever loved.
She slices the tomato open and eats slowly, the flesh still tart and firm on her tongue.
-
Later: his house, the instinct that accompanies Hunger Games victors at the rustle of branches in the wind. The trees are never trees; ghouls still know how to reach for hearts inside ribcages. It’s a cool night, the wind strong, and he pads downstairs with a knife in hand. (The longer it goes, the more foreign it feels; there was once a time when the weight of a knife in his hand felt more comfortable, meant safety, meant something besides fear. And he’s forgotten how much it slows him, the nervous energy rending his muscles taut. He can’t recall if there was always this much to pay attention to, or if he was better at it when he was younger.
A few years could make a difference, couldn’t it?)
Katniss has a nearly empty white liquor bottle in her hand, feet bare, dressed only in a nightshirt, the wind whipping her hair around her face.
“Katniss?” She hands him the bottle and the scrap of his note, the paper wrinkled and well-worn.
“Loved?” she asks. He wraps an arm around her shoulder and she buries her head into the crook of his shoulder and they are children again, or have they always been children playing at being adults, playing at being real adults or adults playing at being warriors or warriors playing at being weak; he forgets the order and he forgets which goes first and which comes later, but he can feel the heat of her breath through his shirt and they are children, they were children, they are children, and have they ever been anything else? Her voice is high; he forgot that about her.
He wraps his arms around her and she presses a wet kiss to his neck, and oh, his mistakes, his sins, their sins. Everything adds up, and the longer they live, the more they mar. She knocks her forehead against his shoulder, wiping at her eyes, and he doesn’t remember what he’s supposed to say.
“I love you,” he says, and she kisses him, open-mouthed and wet, and he says it again, and she knocks her heel against his calf, and she stands on the balls of her feet and kisses him, and kisses him, and tugs at his hair with her hand, and pushes him backwards into his house, and kisses him. “I love you,” he says, and that’s an admission, isn’t it, guilt and a war crime and anger and guilt and, “I love you.” It’s important to take responsibility for the things you have tamed, or the things you have ruined, or the things you have always decided to keep.
He skims his hands along the small of her back, underneath her shirt, and she shivers, and he forgets the layout of his own house; everything is the smell of her, the taste of her, the way she pulls her shirt over her head and stands nearly naked in his house, the way she tears his shirt in her impatience, her laugh when he trips up the stairs.
They were children playing at being adults, or adults playing at being children; one of those is the right answer.
There is the hard muscle of her thighs and the curve of her hip and the soft moan she makes, the brief flash of teeth, when he runs his tongue along her breast; he watches her take off her armor, and cannot stop watching. He watches her take off her armor and she reaches for him and guides him inside her and they have always protected each other, haven’t they, and now they’re whole, they feel whole - adults playing children and children playing adults, all of it the same - and they are soldiers in armor, and armor galvanizing itself, and she bites the shell of his ear, and his hand grazes against her clit and she hisses and the mattress squeaks with each movement, and she laughs, and laughs.
The moon dips lower to the earth than he’s ever seen, and Peeta counts the pockmarks on the underside of her arm, and tries to still his hips and maintain control. She laughs and digs her nails into his shoulder and kisses him until her own lips redden, swelling slightly, and she laughs and digs her heel behind his leg, and we have time, peeta, we can do this again, her stuttering laugh, and he buries himself inside her and she says stay and he laughs into her neck. Yes, stay, yes, he had no other plans, yes, never leave, never leave, not me.
-
“I love you,” he says, washing greens in a pail of water, and she looks up from stirring the soup on the stove.
It’s important that he say it. She can’t be his conversion chart for reality and unreality for the rest of his life, not without give and take, not without him acting on his own behalf. She crosses the room and reaches for the bowl of diced squash and kisses him lightly.
“Real,” she says.
He frowns, shaking the greens roughly. “That wasn’t what I was - ”
The squash enters the water, sounds like stones in a pond. “I know. Things are different now.” In the distance, the tolling of bells.
-
She keeps expecting someone to take it away from her. To take Peeta away from her and remind her that this was just another way of keeping the Games dramatic until the finale. (She hasn’t picked berries since, just in case, and he doesn’t eat them; she hasn’t seen him eat them since the cave, and part of her wonders if he still resents her for taking his choice away.)
And in the space between dinner and bed, when he returns to his house and she busies herself with household chores, sometimes she invents things to tend to, things to check on, just to pull her thoughts from the idea that something has happened to him. That someone has come to collect him because she let him out of her sight, that she does not watch over him the way that she used to. All debts must be paid, and she’s learned that lesson a long time ago.
When he finally stumbles over at night, and she’s pretending to be asleep, it’s enough to feel the mattress sink beneath his weight, enough to feel the light touch of his hand as he presses his body against hers, slipping his arm around hers.
She was never good at lying, but it’s enough that he pretends.
(“I’m not going anywhere,” he tells her one night, but Katniss knows no one can make those kinds of promises. There’s no telling what could happen.)
-
Katniss grows her hair long and leaves it unbraided and Peeta can’t bring himself to run his hands through it (even though there are moments when he desperately wants to; in the mornings, when Katniss wakes up and her hair is matted and tangled from sleep and she smiles up at him and he thinks there’s nothing more godly than that).
Everything is still so vivid - the snapping jaws of beasts chasing them through sewers, the endless winding passageways of tunnels, mouths stretched open, skin pulled carelessly off bone, sharp canine teeth tearing human throats out, the wet sound of bursting veins - and he can’t bring that to her.
They have started over, and they’re better this time - both of them - but the past is always buried in a shallow grave, and you can never be sure. And who’s to say that these parts of himself will ever get better? It isn’t like Katniss - she’s a survivor, and she would make it work at all costs. But him? Weak enough to be exploited and tampered with? The Capitol’s strength was untested for so long, and how can they know?
It isn’t up to him. He’s always known that.
-
He doesn’t bake. Not really.
Drawing occupies most of his time, and Katniss seems intent on finishing the book to honor their friends and tributes so he leaves that mostly to her. At night, when he takes a chance at thumbing through her work for the day, it never ceases to surprise him - how unexpected she is on the page. How her voice seems to change. The small straight lettering of her penmanship, reserved mostly to the bottom corners of pages, paragraphs compressed into the smallest lines he’s ever seen.
Katniss was never meant to be a politician. That, he’s always known.
But in the margins of the pages, he can see her potential. The rhetoric of statesmen and philosophers latent in her simple language, the details she chooses to express about the tributes, about their friends, about the people they had lost. The book is dotted with blank squares where she wants him to draw something - anything - because she doesn’t think it would be enough.
Her eulogies are the real memorials. Paper lanterns break down, but her words will outlast the both of them.
-
They never talk about plans.
It seems too much like tempting fate, so they avoid having the discussion of what they’re doing or where they’re going. Seems like everything works to a natural endpoint with them anyway. (And how is the ending this time? And how has it changed since the moment with the berries in the Arena? Or the wedding? Or anything else? The story has always run the same route.) One morning, Katniss wakes up and Peeta’s still sleeping, and frustration and irritation settle in her belly for no reason she can think of.
His clothes are scattered across the floor, carelessly discarded; his paintbrushes left out to harden in the night breeze in the kitchen; there’s daubs of paint on corners of the kitchen table; large bricks left outside her house to start building an oven that isn’t even really for her or her house, and she just wants to know when he decided to claim parts of her house for his own.
They have never delineated space but this is her house, and he’s in her bed and in her kitchen and in her yard and in the tomatoes she has in the icebox and in the yeast he insists on keeping in her pantry just in case (and this is the real riddle: in case of what, exactly? In case they have a bread emergency and he needs yeast at arm’s length?), and did she ask him to be here?
The sun hasn’t risen yet, and the village is quiet. The birds haven’t started singing.
She starts walking, fully intending to just wander around the district, maybe the outskirts of the woods, but she ends up walking to his house. The doors aren’t even locked, the lights are all out, and Peeta is still sleeping in her bed.
Everything about his house feels emptier than hers. The lights aren’t on, and the windows are covered with curtains. There are a few sketch books lying around the living room, unsharpened pencils lying nearby; katniss roots on the table she’d given him a few days ago; a few bottles of white liquor from Haymitch, still capped and unopened; unfinished drawings, half-finished shopping lists, sealed letters to his brothers.
“Find what you were looking for?”
She doesn’t turn. She should have known he’d come looking for her. Neither of them are particularly deep sleepers. Lying on the back of a chair, the jacket she wore the last time she visited; she hadn’t even realized it was missing.
“Are you angry with me for coming?”
She can barely hear his footsteps as he approaches. She wonders if he’s barefoot. If he woke up to find her missing and - “No,” he says. “I just... wish I knew what you were trying to find. I could help you.”
“I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “You were asleep upstairs and I just - there was so much of you everywhere.”
“Do you want there to be less of me?”
She sighs. “No.” She was never good at this kind of thing - and he knows that, the bastard - and she doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. It isn’t that she resents him for taking over part of her space; it isn’t even that it’s her space because it isn’t (she won it, but she didn’t win it fair and she doesn’t want to have won something in order to claim it; she didn’t win Peeta and he didn’t win her, and every day is a fight to make herself earn her house because it isn’t hers yet, but it will be). Just trying to define something that she can’t, same as always.
“I just wanted to be near you,” he says.
“You live next door.”
“You should tell me if you think that I’m being - ”
“Don’t be stupid,” she says, and he huffs out a short laugh. “That’s not what I was saying. You’re everywhere in my house, and I just wanted to see yours. To see if I was - to see how you lived in your house.”
“Katniss,” he says, his voice tired, “you mean more to me than the house.”
She picks up her jacket, toes around the kitchen. “Do you think it belongs to you? The house, I mean?” He doesn’t answer, and there’s loose soil on the floor of his kitchen, and a gardening glove left on the seat of a stool. “I don’t - it doesn’t feel like my house is my house, and I keep trying to make it my house. I need to make it my house. I don’t want them to be in any part of it anymore. It’s not going to be the Victor’s Village anymore. I want it to belong to me.”
“And it won’t if I’m there?”
“Well,” she says, and the sunlight’s just beginning to come in through the kitchen windows, and, god, they really did build these houses to be beautiful, “do you want your house to belong to you?”
“The house doesn’t matter to me. Owning something doesn’t matter to me.”
“It matters to me.”
“I know it does,” he says.
“I guess I just wanted to see if you were... trying to own part of something that’s mine. Does that - does that make sense?” She chews at her nail, and stares at the flat patch of lawn in his yard. “I - I don’t want you to stop staying at my house, but I just ... wanted to know.”
He turns on his heel, and the breeze rattles the front door. Her hand tenses before she’s even aware of it. They’re so vulnerable here. Laying aside weapons was either the smartest decision they’ve ever made, or the most incredibly stupid. Everything sounds like wolves at the door.
“I just want to own... being me.”
She turns to look at him. “Do you?”
Catching her gaze, he runs his hands through his hair. “Not completely. Do you own the house?”
“Not completely.”
The corners of his mouth turn up. “So?”
“It’s my house,” she says.
“I know.”
He closes the gap between them, and she walks into his arms; it’s still the easiest thing she knows how to do. Her hand brushes against the short hairs at the back of his neck, and he presses a kiss against the top of her head. “Peeta,” she breathes, half-singing, “My Peeta.”
“Am I?” he whispers, and she wants to hit him for asking such a stupid question, but she kisses him instead, and that seems the more enjoyable solution. Kisses him and kisses him and says, “You’re so stupid sometimes.”
“Let’s get breakfast,” he says.
“Then you should probably put pants on.”
“Then let’s not get breakfast and just stay here and never put pants on.”
She smiles. “I don’t like your house.”
“Then let’s go to your house.”
“My house?”
“Your house.” He turns away from her then, half-squatting, and she just stares at him for a second.
“What are you doing?”
“Stop asking questions, and come on. Come on, come on, it’s not like I do this every day.” She wraps her legs around his waist and he’s bracing her legs with his hands, taking small bouncing steps towards her house. She digs her chin into his shoulder; he even gives a light whinny to hammer the whole thing home, and she laughs so hard her eyes tear. Maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t do this more often.
-
They meet Haymitch for lunch, and he’s at least less drunk than the last time they met. His house is still the same remarkable state of drunken disarray, but at this point Katniss figures it’s as much a stand-in for personal style as it is a marker of his lifestyle.
He squints at them, rubbing a hand over his chin. “You’re looking weird,” he says.
“Yeah, well, you’re looking pale.”
Haymitch waves his hand. “Not all of us can rely on that glow of young love,” he says, reaching for the turnips.
Katniss gives him a kick under the table.
-
The thing about life after is how determined everyone is to label it as something different. And it doesn’t feel that different. She’s a different person, and so is he, but everything else is remarkably the same. Fewer people now, but the bustle of the mornings is still present; everyone still gets up to go to work; the schools have started to reopen again and already, the sound of children laughing is beginning to echo around the village in early morning.
The riddles have always been about trying to slip back into sheep’s clothing: she has already summoned the wolf, and it can’t be so easily removed. It took months to be able to sleep without the knife underneath her pillow (in case, just in case), and she still locks up her bow and arrows every night, and on windy nights, she sometimes mistakes the rustle of the trees for Rue’s light step.
The book helps. Writing about it helps. Haymitch helps. Peeta helps.
Still, part of her still feels so fragmented. People keep looking at her like one day she will wake up and be whole again and the rest of it will seem like a nightmare or a bad dream but she will be Recovered and won’t it be nice to be Recovered and whole and to know that this was just another cross to bear for a time? And Katniss doesn’t know that the day will ever come, but maybe it’s worth pretending because she was theirs - their Mockingjay - and people want their historical icons to be whole and preserved and easily recorded.
She was none of those things, and it’s worse even now. But there are moments.
Small. Unexpected. When she waits in line at the butcher’s, or is talking about cuts of meat with him; when Greasy Sae barters with her over something; discussing the District sport teams when she goes to buy white liquor for Haymitch; and Peeta. When he kisses her, when he slips into bed beside her, when he picks her clothes up off the floor but will leave his own.
She confesses it to Haymitch once - that she isn’t a whole person, isn’t recuperated, recovered, whatever they want to call it - and he laughs at her, one of those old derisive laughs that makes her want to hit him over the head with something, and he just shakes his head and says no one is, sweetheart.
Sometimes Peeta will look at her a certain way and it won’t feel like a lie, but that’s always been their problem, she supposes; with Peeta, she could never tell what was true and what wasn’t.
In the end, maybe it never mattered.
-
(part two)
author: hyacinthian
rating: pg-13
author's note: read over by several people (too many to thank but pauline, chloe, leah for some) and not too thoroughly edited, so let me know if anything jumps out at you. post-series.
summary: settling back into the rhythm of things is the hardest part. post-series.
In the peace, Katniss lets her hair grow long, and begins to learn how to live again.
It isn’t easy. She’s unused to its steady rhythm, to its slow, clodding pace. Not like the rush of survival, all blood in the throat and the fast pulse of blood beneath the skin. She busies herself with the spring planting, with hunting again, with learning how to move and breathe and live in her own skin. She lets her hair grow long and does not touch it, does not plait it or braid it, barely allowing herself to tie it back when summer sets in, thick and humid, when she can’t stand the feel of the strands sticking to the back of her neck.
Peeta moves next door and she can hear the creak of his flooring, the strange echoes that stir in his house and pass to hers, the ghosts they both share.
He calls out in his nightmares and she slips into his bed, pinning his body with hers. It doesn’t take another thought. She clings to his back, her leg tucked around him, and waits for the tremor of his body to still. This is what they do. This is what they have always done. In war or peace, this is what they have always done.
-
Her hair grows long, and Peeta becomes enamored with the way it feels to skim his fingers along the ends. It seems too delicate for the both of them. And he says, “It’s different.”
Katniss’s lips quirk at the corners, and he can already sense the retort lingering on the tip of her tongue. Instead, she walks to the counter, a slight sashay in her hips, and reaches for the bag of wet katniss roots, barely covered by burlap. The knife edge is sharp, gliding easily through a root in her palm and she turns, handing him a half to peel. “Better?” He squints at her, evening sun streaming through the window; her hair’s turned a different shade in the light, drawing her softer. The shadow along her jaw more muted. In the book, he’d run the pad of his thumb along the paper there to soften the lines, smudge all the charcoal into an ashy shadow.
He reaches for a small knife on the counter, turning the katniss root in his hand, the blade running lightly across the skin. Thin strips of peel fall in bits to the wooden countertop.
“Do you like it?”
“Do you?”
Peeta brushes at his mouth with the butt of his hand, and the katniss peel falls to the floor quietly. “It suits you.”
“Better than before?”
“It suits you now. But a year ago, or five...?” He pauses and she halves another katniss root in her palm; they have never really thought to talk about the past. They lived through it, and it’s enough to keep on living.
He cuts a piece of katniss from the end and pops it in his mouth. She smiles at him, a sly curve, and the root crunches bitter in his mouth, cold and starchy.
“Good?” she teases, with a soft laugh, and he sets the knife aside, reaching for her hips. It’s a small moment of not knowing how to move; her hips press back against his hands and then, a few stumbles closer.
Her lips brush the bridge of his nose, and this is worth it, he thinks, coming back to District 12, and the ashes of where the bakery once stood, and the shadows left in the stones and the fields, and the memories, and the curve of her mouth. Thinking he could forget this, maybe that’s impossible. She hums, a soft giggle lingering just behind it, and he kisses her.
They sit at the dining table, the sack of katniss on the table between them, her feet bare against the floor, and his hands still dusted with flour by the wrists. There’s always something left behind. She pauses from her peeling to look towards the window; there’s something about sunsets that still manages to stun her into silence, even now, with everything they’ve seen. She slides her feet into his lap then, and he watches her wait for the moonrise.
(Peeta keeps his hands against the arch of her foot, and she thinks of the moon, swaying, perhaps a little drunk in the sky above the cave, and the weight of the bags against her shoulder and the lightness of the arrows in the quiver and the rattle of Peeta’s breathing in sickness.
His thumb brushes the jut of her ankle, and she looks away from the sky.)
He feeds her a piece of raw katniss and she grins, crunching it between her teeth. “Good?” he says, and she moves to his side of the table, laying her legs across his lap.
She presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Thanks for the help,” she says.
He runs his fingers along her back.
-
It isn’t a question of good days or bad days, good hours or bad hours - this is what the others in the District don’t understand; there aren’t moments when he’s Peeta, and other moments when he’s no longer Peeta. It’s all him, lucid or mad, whole or splintered - everything still belongs to him and his back hasn’t yet broken under the weight; this, Katniss understands, and she leaves him to it.
Sometimes, in his episodes, he shuts himself inside his house and she can hear the sound of breaking dishes, his heavy footfalls when he paces; the worst ones are when she can’t hear anything but silence, when he has retreated so far into the past that she can only sing softly to him, ask him to come back to her.
Tethered to each other with twine, the both of them. Nothing but an unspooled thread that she hopes will never sever. (But when he looks up at her mid-song, and echoes the last refrain in his low voice, she will remember the shade of his eyes, and the size of his pupils and the slightness of his wrists, and everything else will no longer matter.)
-
He plants trees and vegetables outside his house - fostering a small garden - and she finds herself watching him when he works, his hands in the earth, muscles rippling with each movement. (Peeta catches her once, flashing a smile, and she goes hunting for the rest of the day.)
The first batch of tomato plants don’t blossom; the apple trees bear small, sour fruit, but he tries to make the best of it. They start to cook in her kitchen. Nothing complicated, not like the dishes they had in the Capitol, but the sorts of things she’d make at home. He cooks the apples down with sugar and spices until they’re slightly bittersweet, but palatable. Neither of them are for sweets, anyway.
The pots and pans are dirtied - she burns one of the smaller pots - and they leave the cleaning until the morning. After dinner, she leads him upstairs and they lie in bed together, too full to do anything but sleep.
-
His hair grows long, past his ears, and she’s struck by how much he resembles one of the smaller stray pups that used to run around the Hob.
She trims his hair with kitchen shears on the steps outside her house. His hair is thicker than she expects, lighter on the ends, and she runs her hands through his hair a few times when she’s finished to check her own work.
“I’m sure you did fine,” he says.
“It’s your head.”
He laughs then, his hand touching hers.
-
Letters from her mother come sometimes. Infrequently. She can never bring herself to open them, lets them collect on the corner of a kitchen counter until they begin to yellow.
She writes letters to Prim. It’s so easy to forget that she’s gone, not just living with her mother in a better district. She forgets sometimes, halfway into a sentence about Buttercup and Peeta’s failed attempts at growing pumpkins, his inability to understand climate and crops, and the ink bleeds and smudges across the pad of a finger, and everything will feel fresh, a wound re-opened.
Prim is gone, yes, and can’t ever return, or be reached. Her sweet smile, the way she forgot to tuck her shirt in, her half-finished thoughts and excited chattering in the mornings, the way she would crush Buttercup to her chest as a child - these things that can’t make up a person, and it’s all that Katniss can remember of her sister.
Prim, she writes, I still think about you every day.
When the pain finally goes away, Prim will mean less in some way, and Katniss - it isn’t something she can allow herself to do. (But the same lesson, learned by rote: life goes on. Steadily. Unchangingly. The sun continues to rise and set; the seasons continue to cycle; and leaves will fall from the trees each year, and she feels change in her bones with each growing year, with each year passed, and Prim remains a fixture, unchanging, unchanged, and Katniss cannot bridge that distance.)
-
Peeta writes her a short note, and sticks it beneath a green tomato on her front stoop.
You were the only girl I ever loved.
She slices the tomato open and eats slowly, the flesh still tart and firm on her tongue.
-
Later: his house, the instinct that accompanies Hunger Games victors at the rustle of branches in the wind. The trees are never trees; ghouls still know how to reach for hearts inside ribcages. It’s a cool night, the wind strong, and he pads downstairs with a knife in hand. (The longer it goes, the more foreign it feels; there was once a time when the weight of a knife in his hand felt more comfortable, meant safety, meant something besides fear. And he’s forgotten how much it slows him, the nervous energy rending his muscles taut. He can’t recall if there was always this much to pay attention to, or if he was better at it when he was younger.
A few years could make a difference, couldn’t it?)
Katniss has a nearly empty white liquor bottle in her hand, feet bare, dressed only in a nightshirt, the wind whipping her hair around her face.
“Katniss?” She hands him the bottle and the scrap of his note, the paper wrinkled and well-worn.
“Loved?” she asks. He wraps an arm around her shoulder and she buries her head into the crook of his shoulder and they are children again, or have they always been children playing at being adults, playing at being real adults or adults playing at being warriors or warriors playing at being weak; he forgets the order and he forgets which goes first and which comes later, but he can feel the heat of her breath through his shirt and they are children, they were children, they are children, and have they ever been anything else? Her voice is high; he forgot that about her.
He wraps his arms around her and she presses a wet kiss to his neck, and oh, his mistakes, his sins, their sins. Everything adds up, and the longer they live, the more they mar. She knocks her forehead against his shoulder, wiping at her eyes, and he doesn’t remember what he’s supposed to say.
“I love you,” he says, and she kisses him, open-mouthed and wet, and he says it again, and she knocks her heel against his calf, and she stands on the balls of her feet and kisses him, and kisses him, and tugs at his hair with her hand, and pushes him backwards into his house, and kisses him. “I love you,” he says, and that’s an admission, isn’t it, guilt and a war crime and anger and guilt and, “I love you.” It’s important to take responsibility for the things you have tamed, or the things you have ruined, or the things you have always decided to keep.
He skims his hands along the small of her back, underneath her shirt, and she shivers, and he forgets the layout of his own house; everything is the smell of her, the taste of her, the way she pulls her shirt over her head and stands nearly naked in his house, the way she tears his shirt in her impatience, her laugh when he trips up the stairs.
They were children playing at being adults, or adults playing at being children; one of those is the right answer.
There is the hard muscle of her thighs and the curve of her hip and the soft moan she makes, the brief flash of teeth, when he runs his tongue along her breast; he watches her take off her armor, and cannot stop watching. He watches her take off her armor and she reaches for him and guides him inside her and they have always protected each other, haven’t they, and now they’re whole, they feel whole - adults playing children and children playing adults, all of it the same - and they are soldiers in armor, and armor galvanizing itself, and she bites the shell of his ear, and his hand grazes against her clit and she hisses and the mattress squeaks with each movement, and she laughs, and laughs.
The moon dips lower to the earth than he’s ever seen, and Peeta counts the pockmarks on the underside of her arm, and tries to still his hips and maintain control. She laughs and digs her nails into his shoulder and kisses him until her own lips redden, swelling slightly, and she laughs and digs her heel behind his leg, and we have time, peeta, we can do this again, her stuttering laugh, and he buries himself inside her and she says stay and he laughs into her neck. Yes, stay, yes, he had no other plans, yes, never leave, never leave, not me.
-
“I love you,” he says, washing greens in a pail of water, and she looks up from stirring the soup on the stove.
It’s important that he say it. She can’t be his conversion chart for reality and unreality for the rest of his life, not without give and take, not without him acting on his own behalf. She crosses the room and reaches for the bowl of diced squash and kisses him lightly.
“Real,” she says.
He frowns, shaking the greens roughly. “That wasn’t what I was - ”
The squash enters the water, sounds like stones in a pond. “I know. Things are different now.” In the distance, the tolling of bells.
-
She keeps expecting someone to take it away from her. To take Peeta away from her and remind her that this was just another way of keeping the Games dramatic until the finale. (She hasn’t picked berries since, just in case, and he doesn’t eat them; she hasn’t seen him eat them since the cave, and part of her wonders if he still resents her for taking his choice away.)
And in the space between dinner and bed, when he returns to his house and she busies herself with household chores, sometimes she invents things to tend to, things to check on, just to pull her thoughts from the idea that something has happened to him. That someone has come to collect him because she let him out of her sight, that she does not watch over him the way that she used to. All debts must be paid, and she’s learned that lesson a long time ago.
When he finally stumbles over at night, and she’s pretending to be asleep, it’s enough to feel the mattress sink beneath his weight, enough to feel the light touch of his hand as he presses his body against hers, slipping his arm around hers.
She was never good at lying, but it’s enough that he pretends.
(“I’m not going anywhere,” he tells her one night, but Katniss knows no one can make those kinds of promises. There’s no telling what could happen.)
-
Katniss grows her hair long and leaves it unbraided and Peeta can’t bring himself to run his hands through it (even though there are moments when he desperately wants to; in the mornings, when Katniss wakes up and her hair is matted and tangled from sleep and she smiles up at him and he thinks there’s nothing more godly than that).
Everything is still so vivid - the snapping jaws of beasts chasing them through sewers, the endless winding passageways of tunnels, mouths stretched open, skin pulled carelessly off bone, sharp canine teeth tearing human throats out, the wet sound of bursting veins - and he can’t bring that to her.
They have started over, and they’re better this time - both of them - but the past is always buried in a shallow grave, and you can never be sure. And who’s to say that these parts of himself will ever get better? It isn’t like Katniss - she’s a survivor, and she would make it work at all costs. But him? Weak enough to be exploited and tampered with? The Capitol’s strength was untested for so long, and how can they know?
It isn’t up to him. He’s always known that.
-
He doesn’t bake. Not really.
Drawing occupies most of his time, and Katniss seems intent on finishing the book to honor their friends and tributes so he leaves that mostly to her. At night, when he takes a chance at thumbing through her work for the day, it never ceases to surprise him - how unexpected she is on the page. How her voice seems to change. The small straight lettering of her penmanship, reserved mostly to the bottom corners of pages, paragraphs compressed into the smallest lines he’s ever seen.
Katniss was never meant to be a politician. That, he’s always known.
But in the margins of the pages, he can see her potential. The rhetoric of statesmen and philosophers latent in her simple language, the details she chooses to express about the tributes, about their friends, about the people they had lost. The book is dotted with blank squares where she wants him to draw something - anything - because she doesn’t think it would be enough.
Her eulogies are the real memorials. Paper lanterns break down, but her words will outlast the both of them.
-
They never talk about plans.
It seems too much like tempting fate, so they avoid having the discussion of what they’re doing or where they’re going. Seems like everything works to a natural endpoint with them anyway. (And how is the ending this time? And how has it changed since the moment with the berries in the Arena? Or the wedding? Or anything else? The story has always run the same route.) One morning, Katniss wakes up and Peeta’s still sleeping, and frustration and irritation settle in her belly for no reason she can think of.
His clothes are scattered across the floor, carelessly discarded; his paintbrushes left out to harden in the night breeze in the kitchen; there’s daubs of paint on corners of the kitchen table; large bricks left outside her house to start building an oven that isn’t even really for her or her house, and she just wants to know when he decided to claim parts of her house for his own.
They have never delineated space but this is her house, and he’s in her bed and in her kitchen and in her yard and in the tomatoes she has in the icebox and in the yeast he insists on keeping in her pantry just in case (and this is the real riddle: in case of what, exactly? In case they have a bread emergency and he needs yeast at arm’s length?), and did she ask him to be here?
The sun hasn’t risen yet, and the village is quiet. The birds haven’t started singing.
She starts walking, fully intending to just wander around the district, maybe the outskirts of the woods, but she ends up walking to his house. The doors aren’t even locked, the lights are all out, and Peeta is still sleeping in her bed.
Everything about his house feels emptier than hers. The lights aren’t on, and the windows are covered with curtains. There are a few sketch books lying around the living room, unsharpened pencils lying nearby; katniss roots on the table she’d given him a few days ago; a few bottles of white liquor from Haymitch, still capped and unopened; unfinished drawings, half-finished shopping lists, sealed letters to his brothers.
“Find what you were looking for?”
She doesn’t turn. She should have known he’d come looking for her. Neither of them are particularly deep sleepers. Lying on the back of a chair, the jacket she wore the last time she visited; she hadn’t even realized it was missing.
“Are you angry with me for coming?”
She can barely hear his footsteps as he approaches. She wonders if he’s barefoot. If he woke up to find her missing and - “No,” he says. “I just... wish I knew what you were trying to find. I could help you.”
“I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “You were asleep upstairs and I just - there was so much of you everywhere.”
“Do you want there to be less of me?”
She sighs. “No.” She was never good at this kind of thing - and he knows that, the bastard - and she doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. It isn’t that she resents him for taking over part of her space; it isn’t even that it’s her space because it isn’t (she won it, but she didn’t win it fair and she doesn’t want to have won something in order to claim it; she didn’t win Peeta and he didn’t win her, and every day is a fight to make herself earn her house because it isn’t hers yet, but it will be). Just trying to define something that she can’t, same as always.
“I just wanted to be near you,” he says.
“You live next door.”
“You should tell me if you think that I’m being - ”
“Don’t be stupid,” she says, and he huffs out a short laugh. “That’s not what I was saying. You’re everywhere in my house, and I just wanted to see yours. To see if I was - to see how you lived in your house.”
“Katniss,” he says, his voice tired, “you mean more to me than the house.”
She picks up her jacket, toes around the kitchen. “Do you think it belongs to you? The house, I mean?” He doesn’t answer, and there’s loose soil on the floor of his kitchen, and a gardening glove left on the seat of a stool. “I don’t - it doesn’t feel like my house is my house, and I keep trying to make it my house. I need to make it my house. I don’t want them to be in any part of it anymore. It’s not going to be the Victor’s Village anymore. I want it to belong to me.”
“And it won’t if I’m there?”
“Well,” she says, and the sunlight’s just beginning to come in through the kitchen windows, and, god, they really did build these houses to be beautiful, “do you want your house to belong to you?”
“The house doesn’t matter to me. Owning something doesn’t matter to me.”
“It matters to me.”
“I know it does,” he says.
“I guess I just wanted to see if you were... trying to own part of something that’s mine. Does that - does that make sense?” She chews at her nail, and stares at the flat patch of lawn in his yard. “I - I don’t want you to stop staying at my house, but I just ... wanted to know.”
He turns on his heel, and the breeze rattles the front door. Her hand tenses before she’s even aware of it. They’re so vulnerable here. Laying aside weapons was either the smartest decision they’ve ever made, or the most incredibly stupid. Everything sounds like wolves at the door.
“I just want to own... being me.”
She turns to look at him. “Do you?”
Catching her gaze, he runs his hands through his hair. “Not completely. Do you own the house?”
“Not completely.”
The corners of his mouth turn up. “So?”
“It’s my house,” she says.
“I know.”
He closes the gap between them, and she walks into his arms; it’s still the easiest thing she knows how to do. Her hand brushes against the short hairs at the back of his neck, and he presses a kiss against the top of her head. “Peeta,” she breathes, half-singing, “My Peeta.”
“Am I?” he whispers, and she wants to hit him for asking such a stupid question, but she kisses him instead, and that seems the more enjoyable solution. Kisses him and kisses him and says, “You’re so stupid sometimes.”
“Let’s get breakfast,” he says.
“Then you should probably put pants on.”
“Then let’s not get breakfast and just stay here and never put pants on.”
She smiles. “I don’t like your house.”
“Then let’s go to your house.”
“My house?”
“Your house.” He turns away from her then, half-squatting, and she just stares at him for a second.
“What are you doing?”
“Stop asking questions, and come on. Come on, come on, it’s not like I do this every day.” She wraps her legs around his waist and he’s bracing her legs with his hands, taking small bouncing steps towards her house. She digs her chin into his shoulder; he even gives a light whinny to hammer the whole thing home, and she laughs so hard her eyes tear. Maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t do this more often.
-
They meet Haymitch for lunch, and he’s at least less drunk than the last time they met. His house is still the same remarkable state of drunken disarray, but at this point Katniss figures it’s as much a stand-in for personal style as it is a marker of his lifestyle.
He squints at them, rubbing a hand over his chin. “You’re looking weird,” he says.
“Yeah, well, you’re looking pale.”
Haymitch waves his hand. “Not all of us can rely on that glow of young love,” he says, reaching for the turnips.
Katniss gives him a kick under the table.
-
The thing about life after is how determined everyone is to label it as something different. And it doesn’t feel that different. She’s a different person, and so is he, but everything else is remarkably the same. Fewer people now, but the bustle of the mornings is still present; everyone still gets up to go to work; the schools have started to reopen again and already, the sound of children laughing is beginning to echo around the village in early morning.
The riddles have always been about trying to slip back into sheep’s clothing: she has already summoned the wolf, and it can’t be so easily removed. It took months to be able to sleep without the knife underneath her pillow (in case, just in case), and she still locks up her bow and arrows every night, and on windy nights, she sometimes mistakes the rustle of the trees for Rue’s light step.
The book helps. Writing about it helps. Haymitch helps. Peeta helps.
Still, part of her still feels so fragmented. People keep looking at her like one day she will wake up and be whole again and the rest of it will seem like a nightmare or a bad dream but she will be Recovered and won’t it be nice to be Recovered and whole and to know that this was just another cross to bear for a time? And Katniss doesn’t know that the day will ever come, but maybe it’s worth pretending because she was theirs - their Mockingjay - and people want their historical icons to be whole and preserved and easily recorded.
She was none of those things, and it’s worse even now. But there are moments.
Small. Unexpected. When she waits in line at the butcher’s, or is talking about cuts of meat with him; when Greasy Sae barters with her over something; discussing the District sport teams when she goes to buy white liquor for Haymitch; and Peeta. When he kisses her, when he slips into bed beside her, when he picks her clothes up off the floor but will leave his own.
She confesses it to Haymitch once - that she isn’t a whole person, isn’t recuperated, recovered, whatever they want to call it - and he laughs at her, one of those old derisive laughs that makes her want to hit him over the head with something, and he just shakes his head and says no one is, sweetheart.
Sometimes Peeta will look at her a certain way and it won’t feel like a lie, but that’s always been their problem, she supposes; with Peeta, she could never tell what was true and what wasn’t.
In the end, maybe it never mattered.
-
(part two)