[fic] lean on what matters (1/3)
Fandom: The Hunger Games
Author: oh_la_fraise| oh la fraise (tumblr)
Title: lean on what matters (1/3)
Rating: R
Warnings: non-explicit descriptions of rape and torture (about on par for the books)
Pairings:
Word Count: ~2000 this part
Disclaimer: The Hunger Games trilogy and its characters belong to Suzanne Collins. The title is taken from the Hush Sound’s ‘Hurricane,’ which is, at least in my head, the theme song for Katniss and Katniss/Peeta.
A/N: Obligatory post-MJ Katniss-and-Peeta-put-themselves-back-together fic. Part II will be awhile; this was written during some rare free time during Thanksgiving. Also, it's been awhile since I've read MJ, and a friend has my copy hostage, so forgive any canon errors.
Summary: Post series. It’s not that she’s in love with Peeta, necessarily, it’s that she’s not sure how to live without him.
Sent out the morning birds to sing of the damage
Now that the calm’s returned, I know I can’t manage
~
She doesn’t hesitate when she sees Haymitch is passed out, just grabs some aspirin and a glass of water and throws another over him. He sputters and curses as she waits for him to fully wake up. When he takes the aspirin, Katniss says, “how did you survive?”
He grunts, and doesn’t ask what she means. They always know what the other means. “You find something to distract you,” he says, eyes roaming the bottles lining his walls. “If you can, something to love, I guess.”
~
Katniss isn’t sure how she keeps moving.
Everything around her is ruined. Prim is gone, her mother is gone, District 12 is in shambles. Haymitch is drinking more than ever, and every time she returns to her house in the Victor’s Village-the only part to fully survive the bombing-she has to fight off the immediate wave of nausea. They hear no news from the Capitol, about who is taking control and what is happening, or at least she doesn’t hear. She suspects someone is talking to Haymitch and he just doesn’t plan on telling her anything, but besides the drinking he doesn’t seem any more morose than usual, so she figures everything’s okay.
She spends her time ignoring everything around her. She slips into the forest-taking the long way to avoid the still smoking rubble that the few remaining residents are already calling New Seam-and eventually finds her father’s old bow, a little worse for wear but ultimately still useable. She takes her time, spending days cutting new string and fixing the knock and refletching her arrows. Once that’s done she doesn’t hunt, just works on getting her aim back in shape and rebuilding the strength in her pull arm. On the first day she starts shooting, the string catches her bow arm on the recoil, leaving an angry welt. She blushes, glad no one is around to see her make a rookie mistake.
She forces herself to keep shooting.
When she stumbles home, tired and sore, Peeta is sitting on the steps of her porch.
~
Katniss doesn’t say anything. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since Prim di-since she killed Co-since the Capitol. She hadn’t expected to see him, but at the same time, she’s not really surprised. They always seem to find each other, no matter where they are.
She’s conflicted. She wants to run into his arms, and she wants to run far away and never see him again. He’s a physical reminder of everything that happened, of everything she has lost, even more so than the ruins of her home that she’s living in. At the same time, she’s lived without him, and. Well. But, the devil on her shoulder says, he was being tortured, then. Now you know he’s safe. . .
In the end, she sits next to him on the stoop, close enough to feel his body heat but not near enough to touch. “I couldn’t stay away,” he says, and she knows the feeling.
~
At first, Peeta keeps to himself, and Katniss feels his absence more keenly than she has since she returned to Twelve. She could, she supposes, go over to his house-the mansion he lived in after the Games stayed empty-but she doesn’t want to crowd him. She knows how important solitude can be. Instead, he knocks on her door one morning and drags her across the street and into his kitchen. The counters are lined with baked goods, all types of breads and muffins and cakes.
“I’ve been working on this for three days,” he says, beaming like a proud parent. He looks so much like the old Peeta, an innocent young boy who hadn’t been forced to kill and been tortured and had everything taken away from him.
“. . .Why?”
“This much baking, you can’t do it all in one day,” he says, and the twitch of his mouth tells Katniss he’s joking.
“Seriously, though,” he continues, “I thought I’d take it to the construction crews. They’re all on field rations; I think they’ll appreciate some fresh food.” A pause. “Do you want to maybe help me?”
She nods before she even realizes what she’s doing. She hasn’t been able to muster up the courage to go see what’s being done with the bomb sites, but with Peeta there she figures she’ll feel a little more confident.
They walk side-by-side, arms laden with heavy baskets. They haven’t really talked since Peeta returned; hell, she hasn’t even seen him, really. She looks at him out of the corner of her eye. He’s lost weight, and his muscles are nowhere near as defined as they used to be. Bags line his eyes; he must be having nightmares. She can see the ghost of experience dragging his shoulders down; in most ways, this hollow shell of a boy does not seem like Peeta at all.
When Peeta eventually stops, Katniss has to retrace their steps and follow the direction in her head to determine where they are. When she realizes, she sucks in a breath and gets a mouthful of dust for her troubles.
The name “New Seam” implies that it would have improved on its predecessor. This is a lie. New Seam is a leveled field of rubble and debris. Men are scattered throughout the fields, cleaning up the rubble. They remind her of the soldiers from the Captiol, with faces covered in masks (to keep them from breathing in the ash, she tells herself, not because they’re going to do something that might require them) and matching jumpsuits (old miner suits) and no skin visible to the naked eye.
She looks for her house, but everything is the same as far as the eye can see.
She inhales, and can’t help but thinking she is breathing in the ashes of the dead.
Her stomach lurching, she turns and runs, leaving the basket and Peeta behind her.
~
This time, Katniss takes her own swig from Haymitch’s bottle. She has a flash to right after the Quell was announced; who knew she would look back on those days as the good times?
Haymitch waits for her to speak. “Peeta’s back,” she says finally.
“I know.”
It doesn’t surprise her anymore that she is the last to know everything.
“Why did they send us back here?”
“Maybe they thought this was the cruelest way to kill us; make us give into the grief after everything.”
She knows this is the part where she’s supposed to protest, supposed to say that no, they haven’t beaten her, but. But Prim’s dead and Cinna is dead and Madge and Finnick and Boggs and she feels like she’s not even a real person half the time.
“Maybe so,” she agrees.
~
Peeta comes back the next day. “I’m going back to take more sandwiches.”
She isn’t sure why she follows, just that Peeta is light and sunshine even now, and she doesn’t want to let that escape.
She only makes it twenty minutes before she throws up, but that’s nineteen minutes longer than last time. Baby steps.
~
The days pass slowly. She sits by Haymitch and has silent conversations; Peeta teaches her to bake. She ventures back into New Seam, and slowly, painfully she builds a tolerance. The workers love Peeta, and she follows him silently as he moves from worker to worker, bringing them baked goods and catching up on their lives.
One day when she feels particularly strong-or particularly numb, she can’t really tell the difference anymore-she takes Peeta to the meadow. Stories of Prim edge their way out, pushing past her throat and ripping her to pieces in the process. Peeta doesn’t say much, just thanks her when she’s done. But out of the corner of her eye, she catches Peeta looking at her the way he did before the Tracker Jackers: full of longing and love and want.
She looks away, pretending she doesn’t see.
~
Once, a miner came to her mother with a broken arm, and it didn’t set properly. It knitted back together wrong, leaving his arm crooked and bent. It hurt, the man told her mother, and it clearly wasn’t like it should be, but he could use it. That was mattered, he had said, that it worked.
~
“I don’t know if I love him. I don’t know if I can love him.”
Haymitch doesn’t say anything, just waits for her to finish.
“I mean. . . I need him. I know that. I love him in that way, but he wants more and he deserves more but I just don’t know if I can give that to him.”
He shrugs. “Give it time; you’ll find out if you can sooner or later.”
~
One day, the desire to be still completely consumes the small flickering flame that drives her to move, to keep going. It isn’t that she is suicidal-she’s not-it’s just that all of the things begging for her attention don’t seem important enough for the energy it will take to deal with them. It’s warm under her nest of covers, and she needs to get up to go the bathroom and find something to eat, but the outside world is too bright, too cold. She falls back asleep again, instead.
She wakes to Peeta shaking her slightly, that ever-present look of concern on his face. I put that there, she thinks, and immediately wants to go back to sleep to avoid having to deal with the emotions that line of thought causes.
He’s saying something, she doesn’t know what, and she thinks that she was maybe supposed to meet him somewhere today.
“It hurts,” she says, and his face softens.
“I know.”
“Just,” she takes his wrist, traces her thumb over his pulse point. “Just stay.”
He nods and slides his shoes off. He crawls onto the bed, and she immediately rolls over, burying her head in his collarbone. His arm rests around the small of her back, and she feels . . .not safe, but not so adrift, either.
She knows that if it were Gale here instead, he would make her get up, go outside. He would remind her of her hypocrisy, of all the days she complained of her mother doing exactly what Katniss is doing now. And it would work, too; eventually she would crumble under the guilt and start moving again. And that’s probably what she needs-someone to fan her fire and make it blaze again-but it’s not what she wants. What she wants is what Peeta is giving her: indulgence, comfort, someone to cry on. Peeta may not be making her burn brighter, right now, but he isn’t going to let the fire die, either.
~
He smiles, so golden and bright, and Katniss feels something strange in her gut. It takes a moment, but she realizes she wants to kiss him.
~
She visits Haymitch again.
“I thought you said I didn’t deserve him.”
“You probably don’t. But the way I figure, maybe he deserves you.”
~
Part II coming sometime.
Author: oh_la_fraise| oh la fraise (tumblr)
Title: lean on what matters (1/3)
Rating: R
Warnings: non-explicit descriptions of rape and torture (about on par for the books)
Pairings:
Word Count: ~2000 this part
Disclaimer: The Hunger Games trilogy and its characters belong to Suzanne Collins. The title is taken from the Hush Sound’s ‘Hurricane,’ which is, at least in my head, the theme song for Katniss and Katniss/Peeta.
A/N: Obligatory post-MJ Katniss-and-Peeta-put-themselves-back-together fic. Part II will be awhile; this was written during some rare free time during Thanksgiving. Also, it's been awhile since I've read MJ, and a friend has my copy hostage, so forgive any canon errors.
Summary: Post series. It’s not that she’s in love with Peeta, necessarily, it’s that she’s not sure how to live without him.
Sent out the morning birds to sing of the damage
Now that the calm’s returned, I know I can’t manage
~
She doesn’t hesitate when she sees Haymitch is passed out, just grabs some aspirin and a glass of water and throws another over him. He sputters and curses as she waits for him to fully wake up. When he takes the aspirin, Katniss says, “how did you survive?”
He grunts, and doesn’t ask what she means. They always know what the other means. “You find something to distract you,” he says, eyes roaming the bottles lining his walls. “If you can, something to love, I guess.”
~
Katniss isn’t sure how she keeps moving.
Everything around her is ruined. Prim is gone, her mother is gone, District 12 is in shambles. Haymitch is drinking more than ever, and every time she returns to her house in the Victor’s Village-the only part to fully survive the bombing-she has to fight off the immediate wave of nausea. They hear no news from the Capitol, about who is taking control and what is happening, or at least she doesn’t hear. She suspects someone is talking to Haymitch and he just doesn’t plan on telling her anything, but besides the drinking he doesn’t seem any more morose than usual, so she figures everything’s okay.
She spends her time ignoring everything around her. She slips into the forest-taking the long way to avoid the still smoking rubble that the few remaining residents are already calling New Seam-and eventually finds her father’s old bow, a little worse for wear but ultimately still useable. She takes her time, spending days cutting new string and fixing the knock and refletching her arrows. Once that’s done she doesn’t hunt, just works on getting her aim back in shape and rebuilding the strength in her pull arm. On the first day she starts shooting, the string catches her bow arm on the recoil, leaving an angry welt. She blushes, glad no one is around to see her make a rookie mistake.
She forces herself to keep shooting.
When she stumbles home, tired and sore, Peeta is sitting on the steps of her porch.
~
Katniss doesn’t say anything. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since Prim di-since she killed Co-since the Capitol. She hadn’t expected to see him, but at the same time, she’s not really surprised. They always seem to find each other, no matter where they are.
She’s conflicted. She wants to run into his arms, and she wants to run far away and never see him again. He’s a physical reminder of everything that happened, of everything she has lost, even more so than the ruins of her home that she’s living in. At the same time, she’s lived without him, and. Well. But, the devil on her shoulder says, he was being tortured, then. Now you know he’s safe. . .
In the end, she sits next to him on the stoop, close enough to feel his body heat but not near enough to touch. “I couldn’t stay away,” he says, and she knows the feeling.
~
At first, Peeta keeps to himself, and Katniss feels his absence more keenly than she has since she returned to Twelve. She could, she supposes, go over to his house-the mansion he lived in after the Games stayed empty-but she doesn’t want to crowd him. She knows how important solitude can be. Instead, he knocks on her door one morning and drags her across the street and into his kitchen. The counters are lined with baked goods, all types of breads and muffins and cakes.
“I’ve been working on this for three days,” he says, beaming like a proud parent. He looks so much like the old Peeta, an innocent young boy who hadn’t been forced to kill and been tortured and had everything taken away from him.
“. . .Why?”
“This much baking, you can’t do it all in one day,” he says, and the twitch of his mouth tells Katniss he’s joking.
“Seriously, though,” he continues, “I thought I’d take it to the construction crews. They’re all on field rations; I think they’ll appreciate some fresh food.” A pause. “Do you want to maybe help me?”
She nods before she even realizes what she’s doing. She hasn’t been able to muster up the courage to go see what’s being done with the bomb sites, but with Peeta there she figures she’ll feel a little more confident.
They walk side-by-side, arms laden with heavy baskets. They haven’t really talked since Peeta returned; hell, she hasn’t even seen him, really. She looks at him out of the corner of her eye. He’s lost weight, and his muscles are nowhere near as defined as they used to be. Bags line his eyes; he must be having nightmares. She can see the ghost of experience dragging his shoulders down; in most ways, this hollow shell of a boy does not seem like Peeta at all.
When Peeta eventually stops, Katniss has to retrace their steps and follow the direction in her head to determine where they are. When she realizes, she sucks in a breath and gets a mouthful of dust for her troubles.
The name “New Seam” implies that it would have improved on its predecessor. This is a lie. New Seam is a leveled field of rubble and debris. Men are scattered throughout the fields, cleaning up the rubble. They remind her of the soldiers from the Captiol, with faces covered in masks (to keep them from breathing in the ash, she tells herself, not because they’re going to do something that might require them) and matching jumpsuits (old miner suits) and no skin visible to the naked eye.
She looks for her house, but everything is the same as far as the eye can see.
She inhales, and can’t help but thinking she is breathing in the ashes of the dead.
Her stomach lurching, she turns and runs, leaving the basket and Peeta behind her.
~
This time, Katniss takes her own swig from Haymitch’s bottle. She has a flash to right after the Quell was announced; who knew she would look back on those days as the good times?
Haymitch waits for her to speak. “Peeta’s back,” she says finally.
“I know.”
It doesn’t surprise her anymore that she is the last to know everything.
“Why did they send us back here?”
“Maybe they thought this was the cruelest way to kill us; make us give into the grief after everything.”
She knows this is the part where she’s supposed to protest, supposed to say that no, they haven’t beaten her, but. But Prim’s dead and Cinna is dead and Madge and Finnick and Boggs and she feels like she’s not even a real person half the time.
“Maybe so,” she agrees.
~
Peeta comes back the next day. “I’m going back to take more sandwiches.”
She isn’t sure why she follows, just that Peeta is light and sunshine even now, and she doesn’t want to let that escape.
She only makes it twenty minutes before she throws up, but that’s nineteen minutes longer than last time. Baby steps.
~
The days pass slowly. She sits by Haymitch and has silent conversations; Peeta teaches her to bake. She ventures back into New Seam, and slowly, painfully she builds a tolerance. The workers love Peeta, and she follows him silently as he moves from worker to worker, bringing them baked goods and catching up on their lives.
One day when she feels particularly strong-or particularly numb, she can’t really tell the difference anymore-she takes Peeta to the meadow. Stories of Prim edge their way out, pushing past her throat and ripping her to pieces in the process. Peeta doesn’t say much, just thanks her when she’s done. But out of the corner of her eye, she catches Peeta looking at her the way he did before the Tracker Jackers: full of longing and love and want.
She looks away, pretending she doesn’t see.
~
Once, a miner came to her mother with a broken arm, and it didn’t set properly. It knitted back together wrong, leaving his arm crooked and bent. It hurt, the man told her mother, and it clearly wasn’t like it should be, but he could use it. That was mattered, he had said, that it worked.
~
“I don’t know if I love him. I don’t know if I can love him.”
Haymitch doesn’t say anything, just waits for her to finish.
“I mean. . . I need him. I know that. I love him in that way, but he wants more and he deserves more but I just don’t know if I can give that to him.”
He shrugs. “Give it time; you’ll find out if you can sooner or later.”
~
One day, the desire to be still completely consumes the small flickering flame that drives her to move, to keep going. It isn’t that she is suicidal-she’s not-it’s just that all of the things begging for her attention don’t seem important enough for the energy it will take to deal with them. It’s warm under her nest of covers, and she needs to get up to go the bathroom and find something to eat, but the outside world is too bright, too cold. She falls back asleep again, instead.
She wakes to Peeta shaking her slightly, that ever-present look of concern on his face. I put that there, she thinks, and immediately wants to go back to sleep to avoid having to deal with the emotions that line of thought causes.
He’s saying something, she doesn’t know what, and she thinks that she was maybe supposed to meet him somewhere today.
“It hurts,” she says, and his face softens.
“I know.”
“Just,” she takes his wrist, traces her thumb over his pulse point. “Just stay.”
He nods and slides his shoes off. He crawls onto the bed, and she immediately rolls over, burying her head in his collarbone. His arm rests around the small of her back, and she feels . . .not safe, but not so adrift, either.
She knows that if it were Gale here instead, he would make her get up, go outside. He would remind her of her hypocrisy, of all the days she complained of her mother doing exactly what Katniss is doing now. And it would work, too; eventually she would crumble under the guilt and start moving again. And that’s probably what she needs-someone to fan her fire and make it blaze again-but it’s not what she wants. What she wants is what Peeta is giving her: indulgence, comfort, someone to cry on. Peeta may not be making her burn brighter, right now, but he isn’t going to let the fire die, either.
~
He smiles, so golden and bright, and Katniss feels something strange in her gut. It takes a moment, but she realizes she wants to kiss him.
~
She visits Haymitch again.
“I thought you said I didn’t deserve him.”
“You probably don’t. But the way I figure, maybe he deserves you.”
~
Part II coming sometime.