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The truth is, it doesn't matter to Katniss that she chooses Peeta's home as her own. She suspected, and she was right, that it wasn’t too different from hers in the Victor’s village. The same pillars and bones that lurk in her home ravage Peeta's hallways. But Peeta's home is not clogged by Snow's rosy scent, and is not clogged by the memories of Prim in the corners. So she goes to him. His house. Her home. Permanently, as they grow back together.
But she will not let go of her house.
It's no use to rip the scab open each time she passes by the empty house that once housed her, her mother and her Prim—, and the countless others who breached the door of death, some crossing over, some staying behind, pale, silent and ghostly. The people who were once District 12 were returning, living, and it wasn't right, or moral, or fair, to withhold a house to herself, not when it could hold another family. Victor's village is not endless. There are twelve houses, and six are occupied. Families have arrived, with some taking to the comforts of the village while some chose to rebuild their lives at their old estates, the Capitol at their beck.
But what does that fairness or morals and justness matter to her? All she wanted was to protect her sweet sister. She does not let go. It's the final trace of her existence and she cannot stand to see it blemished or written over. She does not let go of the house. Even if Snow's stench is beginning to disappear. She does not let go.
So Greasy Sae comes around, like she always did when Katniss remained immobile, going as far to set up shop in her house after Katniss moved two houses away to Peeta's. “An empty house is not good,” she says to Katniss and Peeta, and besides, her granddaughter seemed to like it enough there. The house is never too empty for long periods at once. There’s always soup or stew. When Greasy Sae tells Katniss to have some, she brings Peeta and Haymitch along. Soon the others in the Seam, Town and the Victor's village are flocking to Greasy Sae while the Hob takes its time to become a central market.
Katniss also dares to say it: Greasy Sae's the one who vanquishes the stench of Snow's roses from the house with her steaming broth. Made of the same once-upon-a-time illegal game.
Over one such bowl of hot rabbit stew, spices with chives and paprika and turmeric and who knows what, Peeta asks Greasy Sae, “But what about your counter in the Hob?” District 11 sent the spices over—barriers between districts were no longer strictly enforced. The bread is no wonder: Peeta’s hands are always full of flour, frosting. “Will this be your permanent place?”
She looks pained, Greasy Sae. The Hob had been her whole life. “No.” And that's all she seems able to muster. Katniss is unable to decipher what she's negating for.
“I think I might set up a bakery there,” Peeta says quietly over the noise of Greasy Sae's always-on radio. Katniss nods into her soup. He's told her this already. “We could be neighbours again.”
A year and some more goes by when Katniss finally lets go of the house. Greasy Sae has missed her old place by the Hob, and with Peeta's promise of a bakery, she makes good on setting up shop in the new Market. Thom, now married, arrives with his tall wife to help the old woman, promising her he'd bring more mates to set up the barristers and the cooking stations. Like always, Greasy Sae pays for everything out of her own pocket. She does accept some subsidy from the Capitol. “About time.”
Katniss lets go. Her house is too empty, and it's no good keeping houses empty for long. They say the houses cower and shake with memories if left alone for too long; it lets the ghosts fester and they become unshakable. Soon however, there are cries and laughs filling her old home, and there's smoke from the chimney. Lights and feet dance on the floors. Fire burns in the hearth, the very same that took her sister away. The very same that burned the roses away too. She learns not to flinch or tear her heart at the invasion— because it isn't. Prim isn't somewhere else. She's with her, with Peeta, in their garden brimming with flowers, that sometimes some naughty children in their small neighbourhood pluck and run off with.
But they'll always grow back. That's what flowers do. Flowers, fruits, weeds and seeds. They will always grow back.
Sometimes she wonders if she should have gone back into the house. The steam of the broths and stews and soups that have breathed some life into Haymitch have also trounced every criminal thing out of the house. Katniss has known this for months. But no. She has her home. Unmarried, she was living with her boy who made endless bread. They had toasted long before they were wedded. If they marry, it certainly seems more for an officiating ceremony.
But they do marry. It’s a quiet thing in the meadow, hidden beneath the trees and near the lone stone building that once housed Katniss's and her father's bows, long before her father was killed. The building is a trepid little thing with a small tarp and a tap. There used to be people here, who strung up threads and dried their clothes and then they marched away, never leaving a trace except for their music. Their music would've touched the ones who had chanced them. And that's the only, ghostly trace.
—---
But before the marriage came the cooking. The sacredness of the kitchen. The kindling of the fire. The heat, the hearth and the life. It reveals itself to Katniss in an odd call to her mother one evening, and she hears her say, “You should cook.”
“Cook,” Katniss deadpans.
“Why not?” Her mother's a head doctor of sorts now, in whatever hospital she works at. Katniss has never visited, nor has her mother returned. “Your game is fresh. You know what goes in and what shouldn't. You're medicinal like… me,” she falters. Then, forcefully, before penitence overtakes, “like Prim. Like Baba. Food is nothing more than that.”
“I can't cook.”
“You can't sit around just like that. Just like—” Anger writhes her mother's tongue like a tarp wire, stretched too wide that it hardly waits to snap. Or maybe it feels like it to Katniss. But her mother recovers. “It's not good. I know what that's like, and you can't go on like this. Haymitch tells me what you do. It's—”
“Do you know Haymitch is always drunk?”
“I do, but he is not a liar.” Only an omisser. A narrator. Like he chewed out Katniss to her mother.
She talks some more, and Katniss listens some more in her haunted house, feeling the shouts and snips from the hospital filtering through the phone crowd her reality. They'll all come to her in dreams tonight, taking shapes and making tools for the long line of dead people she has held close. And they'll all die at the hands of these snips and snipes. It's all they ever do.
“Give it a try,” her mother coaxes gently then, returning a final time to cooking. “Don't give it up just yet. I think… you're a natural. And you have him.”
You have him. It's a promise more than a fact. Like the sunrise. Like the meadow. 'You have him.’ Facts turn into promises when they're sacred. Or perhaps promises turn them into facts, forcing it into existence. Even though there's nothing meaningful, the ruse of the memory book and Peeta's efforts towards love and his life take Katniss's thoughts to him; how she swore to protect him.
So she cooks. Hunts fresh game and cooks with Peeta's help. It would've been a joyous moment were it not for the undersalted but overly spicy broth. The meat is cooked through, and the vegetables and leaves thoroughly boiled. The fire that burns this time soothes and tickles her stomach into sufficiency. Some more phone calls to her mother entail other ideas; foods lost to memory, to history, to war are renewed again. Food lost to life, living again. Food is Katniss and Peeta's saviour. They've both stuffed themselves and each other throughout the Games, and long before it too. Peeta saved her from starvation. It's just history helping her live again.
Slowly, the kitchen becomes hers too. And the memory book condenses more additions. Recipes, concoctions, pastes and pastries. The fire doesn't devour the girl on fire anymore. She kindles it now.
But there are days.
It's Katniss who suggests marriage to Peeta. An officiation of their bond. It's little over a year since the unthinkable has happened, and there are no more Games now. The reaping day that would've been comes and goes by, and so does the day when the Victor is crowned mid-July. Winter arrives, and Greasy Sae's soups induct warmth into their growing bodies. When she kisses Peeta one night, in complete darkness save the sharp moonlight streaming through the vast west-side window, it's nearing Spring again. The first break of dandelions will spring in a few hours. It's not fully night; it's nearing dawn.
He finds her in the kitchen, cocooned next to the fireplace that coaxes the hearth. It's a tiny nook, and it helps narrow down the wide world into a containable arena where she can fight, and win. She's gazing into the moon when she hears him. “Couldn't sleep, Katniss?”
“Didn't want to,” she replies, voice quiet.
Peeta says nothing. He never does. Only brews a simple mint tea in a cup and hands it off to her on the small table, then sits down on the warm floor next to her. Steam rises over their puffed breaths.
Then a melody tears from her, an old lullaby she's never heard from anyone before. Nobody has sung it to her, so it's a surprise that she knows how to sing it—just not the words. She stands, walks over to the back door and into the courtyard, away from Peeta, and yells a whistle into the night. Quick, small, and sharp. And the mockingjays, they are not night birds. But some are drawn to the music more than their lives. Perhaps a part of their mates lives in them, that Capitol arrogance and domination. Whatever, it doesn't matter. They pick up the song.
“I don't even remember who taught me that,” she says when she returns to Peeta and melts into his welcoming embrace. “All I know is the melody, and it's haunting me.”
“I know it,” Peeta mumbles quietly. Sometimes he's too quiet. “Haymitch often mumbles it when he's drunk.”
It stops her. She can hear her heart. Yes, it's Haymitch's song. The one… the one Lenore Dove sings to him. One of the many old songs lost to time.
“You.” Katniss turns. It spins her mind, the countless ideas and the unending pool of questions. There's a certainty too. A steadiness.
But before it comes the doubt.
—---
In the early days he arrived back home, Peeta revealed to Katniss that he's been keeping a log. He writes his feelings, his happenings and burdens, and his observations. “It'll help me remember,” he says. She knows what he doesn't say: it'll help him come to Katniss less. Depend on her less. It stings to hear at first, but she's throwing things, self destructing. She knows somewhere in her heart that he doesn't trust her. What could she hope to do for Peeta? She knows he's not the Peeta of the old therebefore.
But Katniss goes to him, even if he doesn't come. Knows that she can be close to him, and perhaps with time, he will come close too. And when she goes, more often than she lived at her house, he started writing hers too. And Haymitch's, and the Hob's.
Haymitch has taken to maintaining it now, in a completely different book, his bleary attempt at productivity and life. But the book is not a diary. She read them; Peeta didn't conceal it away. She's read the brief descriptions of turmoil in his head. Read of the kindling of desires in the pit of his stomach. Aspirations, pains. But something he wrote many long days ago struck her: “From her, I learned to throw things, but it never helps me.”
You can't keep sitting around like— like me.
You could live a thousand lifetimes and never deserve him.
I want one of those poison pills you have, like the rest of you have.
It takes her back to a lifetime ago, before the Quarter Quell, and she recollects a Peeta, radiant, self-sufficient and independent. Strong. Disciplined. Pragmatic and brimming with charishma. Hopeful. Kind. Persevering. Hardly prone to outbursts unless warranted.
She hated them. She hated him, if only briefly, how he cared about himself. His cakes. His bread. His colours and paints. The luxury to think for himself. To know himself so thoroughly, so fearlessly.
His fury ravages through her dreams; statues and chairs flying from his fists in District 11's Justice Building. The pain and betrayal he's swallowed at Haymitch's hands. The grace and the poise of his apologies. How he behaved as a mutt, how the Capitol transformed him into something— someone that did not remember themselves. His respect, his love. Towards himself, and love for Katniss.
I'm learning to throw things, but it never helps me.
So Katniss tries. When her anger comes, she doesn't throw. When fear immobilizes her again, she doesn't run. She has to walk into the nightmarish life that runs alongside her own, where her loved ones grow, but into mutts.
There's no respite. The mutts don't evolve into their older selves. They don't excuse Katniss. They don't degrade. But Katniss survives them. And Peeta is with her as soon as she's back into the arena again. She doesn't run into danger; she actively removes herself from it. She runs to survive, but she knows the Games. Peeta is beside her, always; she knows Peeta too.
When the Games are over, she is back, and no one's dead this time. The arena is almost like the meadow now. It is dug up. She walks on a growing graveyard, but the moss and the weeds grow back again. The fire doesn't burn the houses again, trapping two fiery souls within. She survives, she's the girl on fire. And Peeta shares that fire; but he's there before she immolates with it. She trusts his gentle hands that have shaped memories and loaves, have wiped the tears and shaped her body until the fire is a gentle thing, the hearth of their home.
—---
“Katniss?”
“Did I vanish again?” she asks with a smile, reaching to intertwine her fingers with his. The mockingjays are stopping now.
“Maybe a little. I don't know.” He brushes the hair out of her face and tilts to kiss her lips. A gentle promise. I'm right here, with you. “Did you?”
“I think so. I don't know,” she half-mimics.
Smiles are too easy with Peeta. With the weight that he's put on in the year since he returned home, sweet dimples poke into his cheeks. She prods the one while he brushes his nose against her. “It's okay. I'll follow you. Just don't go too far. Thirty yards only. Your signal.”
She kisses him in reply, hoping to banish the covert sadness away from his eyes. Peeta is strangely disturbed, but he doesn't speak freely like he did before. His words are minced and filtered. Katniss assumes it's from the propos he's uttered at the Capitol's behest that has now settled in his body like poison; or he remembers his behaviour during the hijacking. He's never speaking too plainly as he did before. Peeta is cautious.
She tries weaving a promise into her kiss. It's a weary thing. A burden, an obligation. A debt owed. But she makes them now in the dark, just as they will make them in a distant future. Promises that she intends to keep.
When he runs his tongue across her teeth and deepens the kiss, fire spreads in her stomach now. A different hunger that needs more than it burns. It moves towards her chest, flanked by a thin, strappy chemise under her hunting jacket, and blooms across her back, her fingers and her knees. It's stuffy enough between them that Katniss has to discard her jacket—a movement that brings Peeta's ministrations to a halt.
His lips detach and form the question before his voice can. He's speechless for once, looking at her in eternal awe, like Katniss does when she glances at the cakes he's decorated. It makes her giddy.
She touches his forehead and gently thumbs along his eyebrows, fluttering her touch between his eyes and down his perfect nose. The townskids were their own kind of beautiful, and Peeta more so. His eyes search hers for something she can't name. He doesn't blink, not until she's touching his lips, tracing the shape of them. There's a little cut along the curve of his cheek that she's never noticed before. How did she never notice it?
He speaks against her fingers. “What's on your mind, my apple?”
“You.” It's a simple answer, but it's enough to make him turn away and hide the heat rising to his face in a scarlet blush. But the smile is slipping away just as quickly as it appears.
“Peeta—” She holds him by his jaw, turning to face him fully. “Did you have a nightmare?”
His eyes dance with pain. “No.” He exhales once, and again. “But I did start having one when I couldn't find you…”
“But where would I go?” she says in a whisper. “Let's go back.”
He swallows, but reaches for her hand and brings it closer to his chest, right above his heart. It's fast, like he's been running. “I worry sometimes you'll leave me. Like— like everyone else has.” His father. Brothers and mother. All the incapacity in the Capitol. All their allies. The abandonment in the arena. The slightest worry and pain when Buttercup hisses at him, even though the deer or the whole cats in woods or Haymitch's geese don't.
Their bedroom is just round the corner. Katniss pulls him into it and shuts the door behind them. It's just them, their small life. Truly, only them. Everything that has to bother them will stay beyond the bedroom door. “It's only you and me, now. Here.”
His voice shakes. “I have a nightmare. And it always begins with you leaving. I turn one way and you're gone, and then there's nobody—” A tear slips out. “And I can't follow you. That's the worst part. You'd have already slipped away, and… I think I'll have you, but I'll only have a shell of you with me. I don't want to lose you too.”
You'll never lose me, Katniss thinks but doesn't say. He's speaking freely, or as freely as he once did. She doesn't interrupt.
He falls quiet for a moment more and removes his hands from hers. “You've never lived a life for yourself. If it wasn't for the Games, you'd never have had to pretend with me. You would have lived your true life. Your life.”
“Peeta…” It's everything she's wondered, prodded the wrecks of her mind to pour out in Dr. Aurelius’s sessions, but never once voiced with Peeta. It's not simply because she has no words for it. It's because she fears what Peeta would believe from it. Self-deprecating humour is one thing. Self-deprecation, on the other hand, is Peeta's forte now, after the Capitol. The disbelief. The lack of strength, the crack in his steadiness.
“Why do you think I moved into your house, Peeta?” she asks.
He sniffles. “I don't know.”
“It's certainly not because I adore your cheese buns,” Katniss says. “Certainly not because… because… I love spending time with you. Certainly not…”
“You're doing a really poor job.”
Katniss jams a finger into his burly chest. “Words have never been my thing. They're yours.”
He touches her long braid, his breathing quieter now that he isn't sniffling with what would have been sobs. And then he's using the last ends of it around her nose. Katniss sneezes, which he takes as an opportunity to put as much distance between them as possible. He's wise, this boy.
“You're horrid. That's what you are.”
“That's what I am,” Peeta says with a half-hearted grin. But there is something under his eyes, even from this distance, behind the mask of mirth. Something insidious that he's fighting. But he lets it go.
Soon enough she's tackling him to the soft cushions of their bed, her legs straddling his waist in a fight. But it's hard to continue. It's how Peeta had tackled her to the ground. So she stays clear of his throat and pins his strong arms above him instead. He could throw her off in less than a moment. A year of a steady diet can bring back your weight and your spirits.
“You're doing a really poor job,” he says again, a mischievous glint in his eyes.
“Truly?” she shoots back. “What is a good job then? Is it this?”
She splays her hand over his abdomen where his loose shirt has run up over his abdomen, throwing some of his skin and the burns along the left side of his body to the meagre light. She caresses the hem gently with the tips of her fingers. He shifts under her, and there's a moment of glory, of a sudden fullness against her; the pressure is agonizingly good. He shifts again and it's gone.
“I like that,” he exhales softly. “But I like this better.” Peeta reaches up to her and kisses her, enough for Katniss to loosen her already loose restraint on him. He leans back until Katniss is fully atop him, and he finds purchase along her waist. He doesn't move them an inch upwards or elsewhere, and holds her with exquisite care, kissing her like never before.
What he becomes when he touches her transforms him. Peeta's hungry, captured by the same fire burning away through Katniss's veins. When he opens his eyes as they break apart, they're dark, severe and sharp; all hints of sleep have vanished from his eyes. All her inhibitions desert her. This is their moment. The Capitol will never take this from them. It was never theirs to begin with.
She kisses him wherever she can. She's lost too many days, too many hours, spending in forced indecision and the chaos of surviving the Games. He keeps his beard shaved, so she kisses his cheek and nose, and then she’s kissing his eyes and forehead again. There might be tears streaming down her face, but she doesn't care. She has lost too much. She lost Peeta too. Multiple times. But she has no doubt now. It's Peeta. She will not let him go. She's not naive like she was.
Once she crosses the line and kisses his jaw, the fire in her stomach raptures into flame.
“I want you, Peeta,” she says simply, murmuring into the hollow of his neck. “Do you want me too?”
She doesn't know what she's asking from him, not exactly, but his love is a gift that keeps on giving. “Always.”
He pulls her impossibly close. She feels the steady pressure of his hands in places other than her waist now, around the small of her back, over her ass where his soft fingers dig into her skin. She finds his touch over her ribs, over her shoulders, and shudders when he brushes his little finger down her back, over the fabric, over her spine. Goosebumps burst across her limbs.
“Is this okay?” he whispers. “Tell me if something is not right.”
“If I can,” she lets out a small, breathy laugh.
“Katniss,” he muses, and kisses her throat. “I'd never thought you'd go down without a fight.”
“This is not a thing you'll fight,” she barely breathes out. His hands are warm and deliberate, and his kisses are hypnotic like the sugar syrup he mixes to make frosting. She gasps when his lips move further down her chest, his hands move to grip her waist, touching the hem of her chemise. Then he stops.
“No.” It slips out before she can register what he's asking. “No, Peeta, please.”
He doesn't tug her chemise over her head. Instead, Peeta's lips sink to her skin through the fabric. The heat of his lips spread deliciously through her body, over her chest, down the column between her breasts. A quick moan escapes, and he's back at the base of her throat, nipping the skin away.
She's enjoying this too much. Never a day goes by without Katniss tackling him to the cushions like this. Their kisses a long time ago were all a performance. That had been relatively easy: a mutual truce. You had other people to convince, but what are you when you stripped away all the pretense?
“Katniss. Hey,” he says softly then. From the looks of it, Peeta has been calling her name for a prolonged moment. “I'll sit up.”
“Right, yes,” she distractedly answers. Removes herself and waits until he has dislodged the prosthetic leg and pushed himself higher up to the pillows. Katniss only leans against the bedpost wall, not daring to jump in with him. She turns away when he discards his shirt, and he shoots her a knowing smile when she turns to look back. Finally when he sits up, settling against the wall of pillows behind him, he outstretches his hand. She gladly takes and settles herself as close as possible on his thighs, her own framing his long legs, feeling for that former warmth and finding it, eliciting a keeling groan from him.
They've touched each other before. Nightmares that turned their eyes to dust needed comforting hands, that gradually, slowly, turned into curiosity. A kiss that slipped through to the jaw. A hug that lasted too long. An embrace that pressed their chests together. Fighting through nightmares left their limbs entangled sweetly into each other's, like snares trapping one another. And in the early mornings, nearly an hour before the sun rises—before their sleep can trap them under nightmares again—they spend time untangling each other, touching one another where they haven't touched yet.
It's on one of those occasions: she's splayed atop him, and she's extremely careful not to rouse him awake. But the one morning that she's not, he grips her ankle. Alarmed, Katniss holds Peeta's face tightly, willing for whatever nightmare he has to pass.
“No,” he answers. "No nightmares. But stay. On me. Like this.”
She does. She watches him cover his eyes with his arm over his face, looking somewhat in pain. Then he's saying something. She can't make it out, but she grasps it slowly. Move, please.
When she unhooks her knees from the side of his hips, Peeta's hands prevent her. “No,” he gushes. His eyes flit over like he's embarrassed. “No, Katniss. Move. On me.”
Oh.
That was the beginning of many clandestine touches. She never removed her clothes, and wouldn't allow him too for the longest time, for the same reason that made her pure. Peeta smiles each time but indulges, enough that he's surprised when she suggests he remain only in his undergarments. They touched one another, rubbed against each other in waves of pleasure, and disappeared for nights at once, enough for Haymitch to doubt them when they showed up at his door again.
“Imagine if the mockingjays heard us,” she shudders now, swallowing back a groan of her own, rubbing against him. His hands are right against her hips—tight enough to hold on but not direct her movements. “Not that my nightmares aren't diverse, but that might be the most embarrassing of it all.”
“And yet,” Peeta says painfully, even if a smile plays on his lips, “you're regaling it.”
“Hardly,” she counters. Then shudders. “I'll admit. That's a horrible idea.”
He laughs and his arms circle her waist again. Katniss follows suit, ready to launch her fingers across his back. It's a good thing that she's bitten her nails down to the quick again; the thought of running her nails over his burn marks brings blood to her vision. She'd never let it happen.
“Does that mean you have other embarrassing dreams too?”
It catches her by surprise. “Do you?”
Peeta falls silent at that. A lone bird chirps beyond. “No. I don't.”
Katniss's laugh is bitter. She combs through his hair, one stroke at a time. “They messed us all up very badly.”
“Johanna used to say that,” he said with a distant smile.
“I learned it from her,” she agrees. “But we've learned our desires less from our dreams and more from each other, I'd say.” She runs her fingers down his spine, pushing the pads of her fingers into his defined body, into the smooth ridges of muscle that framed his shoulders. He buries his lips against under her ear, kissing exactly where her insides turn into putty.
“I'd argue otherwise,” he sighs into the space between their desire-warmed bodies.
Can he feel them? The stitches on her fingertips from the early days when she broke things around? Nobody had repaired them, and she regarded some of them nearly damaged. Her bow wouldn't hold itself in her hands sometimes. But all he says is her name. Over and over into her skin, into her ears. He breathes it into sighs and gasps and moans.
“Katniss,” he heaves then, clutching her body like he's holding onto her for dear life. “Do you want to…?”
“I'm not sure,” she admits. She knows sex, and it repulses her. It's more embarrassing than pleasurable, but Peeta has subverted most of her assumptions. “But,” she bites her lip, “you can touch me there.”
It's progress over long months of becoming comfortable being this exposed, this close to Peeta. She's never had to worry about her body. Marriage was a distant dream, if at all. If at all. It buries her once again to think of the past, which brings her Primrose to her mind, into the bottom of the ribcage where she hides her, her name, her being, away from harm.
“If you're sure.”
She nods and lays her forehead against his, stealing a quick kiss. “Never more sure than now.” She needs this as much as she needs him to know that she isn't going anywhere.
Peeta doesn't touch her outright. His movements are steady, slow and teasing throughout her body. He marches his fingertips from the hem of her leggings to the back of her knees and touches her through the fabric languidly, watching her every breath. His big hands rush over her thighs, and it surprises her each time just how bulky they look but how gentle he is with them, when he's caressing her. It takes everything in her to not shake from his touch alone. She digs her lips into his shoulders, trying to bite back a pleasant groan.
Peeta touches her like he kneads his dough—perhaps Katniss has watched him too much to make that inane comparison. He presses into the dips of her skin, taps against the fabric in places like the inside of her thighs, the mount of her knees or the fold of her ankle that make her gasp and fumble like a weathered leaf. Then he rolls the heels of his palms along the back of her thighs, coming to grip the curves of her ass. Sparks dance in each place that he's touching her; he's kindling her embers into something greater than both of them.
“All okay?” she hears him murmur.
Not trusting her breathy voice, Katniss hums her agreement and nods feverishly. She clings onto his neck. Her body is light and also alight. “Don't stop,” she attempts.
“How could I?” he murmurs into the side of her neck, just as he drags his palms from her hips to the side of her waist. “You’re all I ever think of. This is all.” His arms move strangely until she realises he's tracing a V from the side of her hips to the apex of her groin. But the pressure of his fingers—it's unpleasant. Slightly harsh. Katniss pulls away from his shoulder, seeking an explanation.
Peeta's looking at her through hooded eyes, completely clouded over by desire. She feels her heartbeat in her centre, mere inches below where his fingers hover with the promise of his sweet touch. But then it shifts—his eyes are no longer looking straight. His gaze is turns icy, sharp, like it's drilling something terrifying into her—
“Peeta,” Katniss says, and touches the soft dimples hidden on his skin. Slowly the odd cloud, the one that's not desire, dissipates. His fingers and his spine grow limp, and he slouches in a manner so unlike him. So unlike his older self. Pangs of unprecedented weakness seem to often dampen his bones now.
He closes his eyes and leans back against the pillows he's propped up, pulling her with him. She hugs him tightly as words free themselves from his mouth. “I'm so tired, Katniss,” he whispers brokenly. “The tirade in my head is endless, and it grips me at the most inopportune moments.”
Katniss could slide in a joke, but reasons against it. “Did you see it again?” The shiny memory.
At Peeta's exhale, Katniss pulls him closer to her, letting him bury his face into her chest. She threads through his hair, and pats his back, shoulders, mimicking the caresses he does to console her when her nightmares refuse to let her go. It's the same way she remembers mothers holding onto their children when they arrived, bringing death to her home, to her mother.
“I was having a nightmare,” he begins slowly. “And it does start with you leaving.”
“Do you believe I will, Peeta?”
“I believed in it,” he says softly. When his too blue eyes open, they're brimming with fear. “I continued to, for a long time. When I saw you take the pill after assassinating Coin, it didn't make sense to me why I stopped you.”
A horrifying thought. “I was convinced they would kill me for killing Coin. With Prim gone…,” her throat closed up even now. “It didn't make sense why I should live when my one, sole reason, my primrose is gone.” A moment later; “Same as you in the Quell, I suppose.” She shrugs, knowing belatedly that she's overstepped. Nobody needs me.
But he only nods. He understands, and he turns away. “I don't blame you. You loved your sister the most. You still do.”
“I do,” she nods tightly. Her throat is dry. Another question buries the wave of distress that begins to drown her; “Peeta, what are you afraid of?”
“Myself,” he says bluntly. “That whatever I felt was a lie, that I didn't love you at all. And what would I be if I didn't love you, Katniss?”
The Capitol would swoon and cry at Peeta's remarks, but cold, icy dread fills her throat. “You would still be you. Brave, kind-hearted Peeta Mellark. The boy with the bread.” At his silence, she realises that it was a rhetorical question, that he probably wasn't looking for an answer at all. How odd that she still remembers the Capitol in moments like these. Always butting in.
Damage control, she thinks. But Peeta is looking at her with a rueful smile. At that, Katniss blurts, “But it's good that you love me.”
Well, that's one way to ruin a perfect moment. It makes him laugh though; she feels the deep rumble of those vibrations in her veins, in all the places they've touched. As if they were one.
“Do you know what happens when people love each other a lot?” he says. More than anything, Katniss is glad to see the return of the ribald glint. His fingers strengthen up, and the quiet steadiness in his fingers is welcome on her skin.
“I get a feeling you're about to show me.”
“If you agree to it.”
Katniss nods. He's asking this too many times, but perhaps this is how it is. Ask if you love them (protect me, save me, be my sanity), and the answer remains a steady yes.
He exhales, and kisses her throat, jaw and shoulders, never once setting his hands elsewhere but her waist. For someone who thinks Katniss is so pure, Peeta surely is too proprietous. She changes that with her fingertips moving south, down his chest, through his chest hair and below the navel, where she halts just as Peeta all but gobbles her tongue in pleasant distress.
“Katniss,” he breathes quickly, breaking apart to look at her, alarm in his eyes. “What—”
“Is this alright?” she asks simply, knowing it is, but wanting him to say it anyway. She pats his erection through the fabric of his nightpants, feeling his bulge in her relatively smaller fingers. The weight, the tension and, particularly the longing in his eyes is excellent. “Or perhaps,” she wonders out loud as she cups around the seams and stitches that hide his crotch, breaking his self control, bit by bit, “this is?”
“Katniss.” His pupils are blown wide as saucerplates, and so is his mouth. He grips her waist tightly, but she doesn't mind. “Oh—,” his eyes flutter close. “More? Please?”
She shoots him a smile, even though he can't see it. Pulling the elastic of his trousers towards her, Katniss digs her hand into his pants, and finds the length of his penis stretched across the cotton of his briefs. She lazes her index fingers over the tip and swirls it so so, featherlight in her ministrations, but it makes a low, keen moan tear from Peeta's mouth.
Katniss grips the tip then, feeling the pliable muscle yield to her. She feels his knees at the middle of her back now—Peeta’s body is stiff with tension and is almost convulsing. He's trapped her into his body. She's tried to put up a face until now, but the closeness, the warmth, the pressure of the elastic against her forearm as she digs into his trousers—it’s eating away every bit of self control she boasts.
She focuses on that solely. Pulling herself closer, however it is possible, she tugs on the glans, feeling the nerves and bundle of skin along his long shaft and how her fingers dance unevenly across the muscle. His cock is thrums in response; Peeta nearly lurches over—he’s clearly not expecting that from his body. “More,” he sighs. “Katniss. Please.”
She connects their foreheads and nods, swallowing. Her centre is beginning to pool with wetness now. It would be easier to draw his pants and underwear down to access more of him, but she digresses. The general feeling in her hand, surrounding her hand, has set fire to her imagination. The darkness, the size and weight of him in her hands. The taut pressure of his fingers digging into the globes of her ass. She wants to move too, wants him all to herself, selfishly. But she stops. “Do you want me to move up and down?” Katniss breathes.
“Just…” he pauses, teeth grit, then calms. “Can you pull?”
Swallowing thickly, she nods and does as he requests. Making a ring out of her forefinger and thumb, she tugs him under the head of his penis, while the rest of her fingers graze multiple other points across his length. Her ring finger prods a funny crevice where his member joins his body and she pokes it softly. Then she pulls again. Something sticky emerges over her fingers, and makes his underwear moist.
“All okay?” she tries to say. He's perfect against her fingers, full in her grip.
“Yes, yes. Oh Katniss, more. Please.”
She obliges. She grips the whole length of him, or tries to, and tugs him on. Peeta moves along with it, and they're so close. Her centre is touching the inside of his thighs. “Shit, oh—” he keeps saying, and then his rambles turn incoherent, dripping with pleasure. Katniss wants it all over her. She tries to put her wants aside, and continues to massage him, feeling the heat in her belly become nearly uncontainable. She focuses on the sticky, moist liquid, and finds the genius idea in her head to finger the opening. Katniss touches her thumb to the tip and slowly spreads the ooze out. It's nearly akin to what she needs done.
When she presses the opening and tries dipping whatever she can into him, Peeta's control breaks loose. He is gasping and crying out for her. “I need you—agh!” Katniss can only watch in shock and awe, not stopping her movements, but not wanting to miss the miserable glee on his face. She sees his hand then, under hers, over a smaller bulge at the very bottom. He's massaging himself and she feels almost betrayed at the sight of it. You could've told me. I'd do it.
It spurs her on. In vengeance, she tugs downward through the elastic band holding his boxers tight and slips her palm directly onto the skin. Peeta's moans turn briefly into colourful expletives. So easy to unravel you. The gravelly skin is slick with his pre cum, and the moist warmth feels utterly sinful. Tenderly satisfying. She tugs on him gently making no harsh movements—sometimes she dances her fingertips across the length, and sometimes she finds purchase to pull sweetly. The ache in her belly nearly doubles her over. Peeta's fingers dig into her skin through her pajamas, spasming across the skin, gripping and fisting up to hold onto his sanity. He's kissing her neck, drowning out his gibberish praises or curses into her body. Her chest is pressed up against his shoulders. She feels his warm skin acutely, feeling every goosebump on his body electrify her.
When Peeta comes down, he all but flops behind on the pillowcases, breathing heavily through his mouth. Katniss doesn't let go of him. She's hovering over him lightly, hands stuck to his penis. She almost tugs on it like a forlorn puppy, lest he forget her presence.
What? she blanks out. What's gotten into her? A forlorn puppy? Katniss feeling like one? What the hell.
Embarrassment overtakes her audacity and she cleans his cum over his member and tries to pull her hand out. It's a bit of a struggle between the slickness and the fabric and elastic, and the smell—oh, it's overwhelming. It's not bad, but it's unknown. Her hand catches the elastic and she has a bit of a funny tassel with it, not wanting to smear his stomach with the goo on her hand. She then retracts her hand, and sits a bit unsurely. Shouldn't she go wash her hands?
She catches Peeta's eye, who's looking at her quizzically before he reaches her and grabs her face in a kiss. She keeps her hand away, kisses him, but it's half hearted. She wants to go wash herself.
“That was beautiful, and here,” he says when they break apart. He reaches over the side table and grabs some tissues, and cleans her fingers up. He's so careful, taking his time to clean up the whole length of her fingers, gentle and slow. It reminds her of the detail she put into cleaning her prey after her arrow catches them, or the sheer concentration with which Peeta does the flowers or swirls on his cakes.
“We should still wash up,” Katniss whispers. “You're… it's going to be uncomfortable for you too.”
She doesn't dare look up, but Peeta tugs her face towards him anyway. He places his good hand under her chin. “Only to be wet again. What's the point?”
Heat rises up her cheeks. It's hard to look away when Peeta's eyes are boring into hers. The insinuations… she blinks, and bites her lips, but he's undoing them quickly, taking her lips apart in the same consistent concentration he afforded to her fingers. He's kissing her, slowly at first, tangling their dirtied hands together, and then he's biting her lips, her tongue, sending a sweet ache down her spine. The feeling is super corrosive—it makes her brain stutter for many moments.
He then kisses down the side of her lips, down to her jaw, where he pushes her face up with his nose and brings their joined hands to her throat. He mumbles into her skin, his voice clear and soft. “Touch yourself, Katniss,” he says. “Tell me how you want me.”
Katniss swallows thickly and nods, not trusting herself to speak assent. Peeta's hands loosen from their grip and latch to her wrist, his fingers as light as his voice next to her fist. She nods again and loosens her own, feathering the base of her throat. With a single finger, she marches down.
What does Peeta feel? Katniss doesn't dare open her eyes, and Peeta doesn't ask her to. She flutters her touch over the expanse between her throat and the column of her breasts, stopping where her chemise tucks between their fingers. Peeta's loose fingers hover over the swell of her left breast, faintly touching the peaked nipple sheer through the thin fabric between them.
“Can I…?”
“Yes,” Katniss replies softly. And gasps as his soft, pliable fingers press down on the hump of her breast. She lets his hand go and feels the flat of his palm rub over her nipple before he scoops up the lump of soft flesh in his hands and massages the area, springing it up in a myriad of ways that leaves nothing for Katniss to imagine. Peeta has categorically achieved everything there is to do.
“How do you feel?” she hears him ask over the buzzing in her head, her stomach and the agony in her cunt.
“Perfect. Like dough,” she answers softly.
That makes him chuckle. “Like dough?”
“Have you never tried it?” she asks, innocently enough, which Peeta replies by tackling her other breast with the same finality and thoroughness as the former. “It's perfect. I don't want to stop.”
He's fascinated by them. She feels him feel the weight of them in his palms, and the way they yield to his pressure, his massages. But in the face of the rising pressure in her centre, his movements grow boring.
“Peeta..,” she whines. Whines? “Peeta, I—”
She feels him nod and move his persistent fingers over her abdomen, holding the fabric tight to her skin and the shape of her body. If his incoherent muttering is any proof, Katniss understands that whatever words he has to say keep failing him. He touches her hungrily, leaving a volcanic degree of desire in his wake. So little, but it's too much. It's too good.
“Pants,” Peeta heaves. “Take ‘em off.”
She wastes no time. She leans back and raises her hips to slide the elastic down, and in a swift moment, Peeta has already thrown them away. He grabs her ankles, throws them quickly over his shoulders. Katniss locks them behind his head and falls back into the mattress, heaving deep breaths from the sensations, yes, but also the sheer desperation in Peeta's face.
“Relax your head,” he calls out to her. How he manages to talk while he's smoothing over the skin of her knees is beyond her. “Just, let loose. Lean against the side of the bed.”
Katniss blinks. “Huh?”
“Trust me.”
Katniss's upper body practically hangs off of the side of the bed. It stretches her skin, and she gets it. When Peeta finally locks his hands around the V of her pelvis, she feels the tautness in her body. His touch is doubly rewarding. She sighs.
And Peeta—he doesn't touch her simply. He makes it a point to skirt his fingers over her hungry cunt, over the fabric hiding it, and drags it from the bottom of her ass to her centre.
Katniss clenches around nothing, but Peeta doesn't let her. He's still teasing around the edges, and it takes too little for Katniss to moan and scold him. “Peeta!”
“Katniss,” he replies sweetly. Then, without a warning, his fingers stretch inside her. She's forgetting things. It's either that or that Peeta is incredibly speedy—she doesn't feel when the fabric peeled away. Only that Peeta's fingers are perfect inside her, and she wants to stay like that forever. When he had pressed two of them into her, she doesn't know that either.
“You're so good,” she sighs from under. “Peeta, for the love of—ugh!” She clamps down on his fingers before Peeta is relaxing her, moving his fingers gently out, and then all the way in.
“Move, if you want, my darling,” Peeta says softly. And she obeys. She ruts against him, keeping up with his pace while Peeta reaches the deepest trenches. It's hard to find an easy rhythm, but it takes some experimental touching and a lot of, “this okay?” from Peeta until they find the pace that makes Katniss's toes curl, eyes shut and her fingers grip her chest.
He encouraged her keeling squeal as the precipice comes close. He's holding her hips in place with his free hand, tracking the scars on her body, over and under her navel. It's festive. It's too fucking brilliant. The ooze that spills out of her centre is a welcome visitor, but Peeta has no problem reaching for her breasts again, pulling her closer by her hips to fondle the soft tissue under her palms. Has no problem coaxing out another orgasm. Katniss lets him tease her all over again.
—---
He curls up beside her, under the covers, next to her too hot body. Katniss gently brushes his hair and the sweat from his forehead and tucks a stray one into the back of his ear. It's a sexy look, but Peeta's eyes flutter close. He begins to speak.
“Whatever the Capitol did, it did it too effectively. Where I never once doubted myself, my love for anything, I began to rethink it. And sometimes, it convinced me that… that I didn't love you at all.”
She falls quiet at that, but doesn't stop stroking his hair. Peeta continues. “I understood everything. Why we did what we did, why we did it for survival. The practicality of it all.”
“Peeta,” Katniss whispers. “What are you afraid of?”
He doesn't answer. “It’s… part of the reason it took me so long to return from the Capitol. I didn't want to let doubts about love fester and poison my mind.”
“I had guessed that much,” she says in a small voice. “When I trained for the Block in District 13, I think I conquered my impulsiveness. Lack of order-following.”
“If we did follow the rules, I might not even be here.”
Katniss looks up at him, hoping to find a sly smile on his face. But Peeta looks grim and defeated.
“But you are,” she insists instead. “You are here. We defied them all.” And she kisses him fiercely, no doubt bruising his lips in the attempt. But Peeta responds in equal fervour, and they're both lost to the same hunger that overtook them just hours ago. But dawn is breaking, and they'd have to untangle their limbs once more.
When they part, Peeta's voice is a whisper. “You love me. Real or not real?”
“Real,” she promises.
—---
The main door turns with a sharp click at the onset of spring, and Peeta enters, rumbling his coat away and dropping his keys into the little settee by the door.
“Hi,” Katniss says, a small cheer in her voice. It's how she always greets him now. Keeping her back against the warming sunset from the vast west window that broke into a courtyard. A steaming hot cup of mint tea swirls in her hands on the low table in the too large kitchen.
Peeta is a natural. “Hi back at you, my darling,” he says effortlessly.
She smiles. Let sweethearts remain for as long as there are hearts. But to be a darling, the apple of one's eye, is unmatched. Special. Katniss doesn't mind it. She loves it.
“Have you eaten yet? If not,” he pretends to heaven something extraordinarily heavy into the kitchen. “Here it is. Made hot and fresh, only for you.”
Inside the paper bag wafts the smell of a freshly baked meat puff. Aromatic, flaky and utterly mesmerizing. It's Katniss's favourite, right after cheese buns. Well… maybe before that too.
Three months ago, when Peeta's feeding her a piece of meat, he makes the suggestion. To use her game and fashion it some kind of savoury pie. “The best of both worlds,” he says, but Katniss laughs. Not at him. It's a prime idea.
“You sound too Capitol. ‘Best of both worlds’?”
But the mention of the Capitol is never easy for Peeta. He drowns too quickly, and sometimes, he doesn't fight. He's learnt it from her, Katniss is sure. The destructive, careless, irresponsible behaviour. The lure to let it happen, when it happens, to not hold on.
She deflects instantly. “It's not a pie if it's savoury.” She stumps down a boiling piece of vegetable and meat, enough for Peeta to rush with water and let her gulp it down hastily. It's not on purpose, but she cannot stand him lost and broken. Peeta was vigor in person. Joy extravagance. A steadiness. She would never let him walk into the darkness, and she would always bring him back.
“What do you suggest then?”
“A puff,” Katniss says. “Meat puff.”
“How original.”
But it sticks. And it's popular in the districts. Just as it is at home.
“No, I haven't,” she says now sweetly. Some of what is her, of that giggly girl at the interviews, slips into her now. Peeta makes her feel light. “I was waiting for you.”
Katniss shakes her head now, and says something she's never expected herself to say before. “Waiting for you.”
So he comes to her in the sunset, to home, to his darling, dropping a kiss on her lips that she expectantly puts her face up to. “I saddled some of the soup for Haymitch in that container,” she says when they break apart.
“Shall we eat at his place tonight?”
Plans are quick in their home, not a moment to waste. They're off to him most evenings, talking and writing into the memory book. Everything is significant.
—---
The morning of their marriage is a busy one. Katniss watches the Seam boys and Peeta raise tall logs to put up a makeshift tent for the district residents and the guests who arrive to see her wed Peeta. It's mere formality; there's nothing Peeta and Katnisss weren't already engaged in that required them to be married. But she watches the boys and the girls flit about the meadow, launching sheets after sheets of canvas from the tips of the upright logs. It reminds her a little of the wedding in 13—and she turns, hopes that Annie and her two year old son have made it through already. They're the last of her friends to arrive, so she worries.
“One might consider it bad luck to see the groom before the wedding, my dear.” Effie Trinket's voice is unmistakable in Katniss's ears.
“It's good to see you too, Effie. Octavia, Venia, Flavius,” she nods at them, but they all tackle her in a hug. She flinches a little at their weight on her, but welcomes their embrace nonetheless. The three of them continue to sport ridiculous fashion that is so inherent to the Capitol couture, but peeks of their original hair cot the tops of their heads.
Noticing her stare, Venia shoots her a quick smile. "A return back our originality. To keep us grounded," she says.
"Dare I say this looks better than our previous misgivings," Flavius chips. His hair bounced around in a think moat of curls atop his head. Katniss could admit he looked good. Almost like a district kid. "The best of both worlds, don't you think, Katniss?"
Effie comes to collect her and fluff her up for her wedding. “I have the latest styles and makeup kits in preparation. I should hope you still tolerate this woman's nagging wish to doll you up, my girl.” It's a small affair, but the show must continue. Thank goodness Plutarch wasn't tipped off about the wedding.
She stifles a laugh at Flavius' comment, but she agrees. "Did you come by the train?" she asks by way of conversation. "Or the new zip flights?"
Octavia throws her brunette hair behind her. Beneath all the former green, Katniss could never have guessed. It surprises her now normal she looks. How... utterly young. She could easily have been someone from the townside in the district. "The train. We wanted to collect the best gifts. And all the railway stations are connected to the Town Halls now, which live right next to the market. We didn't have to wait too long either!"
You didn't need to get gifts, comes right to the tip of her tongue. But she holds back. She would enjoy their gifts most certainly, although there is nothing so lacking in the districts anymore. It still smarts her to think of the Capitol residents having the same considerations as Katniss, and it takes her a moment to banish the odd thought to the crevices of the dark child that bore such misfortunes. Nursing old wounds did a world of no good. Didn't Katniss know it first hand?
“It's all the reverse with them,” Haymitch laughs from somewhere ahead them, pointing the tip of the bottle at Katniss before guffawing. Katniss only smiles a little tightly. She knows he means well. “First the forced act, then marriage. Then confession, and finally the toasting. Kids these days,” he barfs, and gulps down another whiff of his sweet wine. He reeks of geese shit.
“You know nothing of it,” Katniss quips back.
Haymitch throws his hands up in surrender. “Shoot me if I'm wrong, but one look at them tells you everything, doesn't it?”
“Tells you what?” she snaps at him, but her troupe laughs quietly. “Oblivious as ever,” Octavia and Venia giggle.
"No dilly dallying," Effie calls out where she leads the train of their group. "Bad enough that I arrive here only to find I must babysit your deadbeat of a ment- neighbour, Haymitch Abernathy all over again," she says sharply, though her eyes glitter with mirth in the rising sunlight. When she turns to Katniss, her eyes are misty. "I have had Cinna's- the dresses taken out from his studio, the ones he made for you, my dear. You have quite the selection to make," she says, and then bellows. "And we are quite short on time, so get moving!"
"It's different," Octavia says as she falls in step with Katniss. "It doesn't... feel like the District 12 we grew up watching or reading up."
"I feel the same," she says dryly, to which Octavia stops short, her face slack with worry. "Katniss, I didn't-"
Katniss has to laugh. "We were deprived. When the Capitol pour in the resources, the execution and the vision, I think things can change." It sounds too diplomatic though, and reminds her of the war and the endless pit in her stomach, so she tries to speak of something else.
Octavia beats her to it. "They've changed the names, right? The Justice Building is now the Town Hall. And the markets are always adjacent to the town halls."
She shrugs. "Possibly."
"You haven't kept up?" Octavia asks with a small smile. But before Katniss can answer, Octavia loops her fingers through Katniss' and tugs her along. "I'll brief you. I have been longing to speak to you. There's none in the Capitol that I see who speaks and shares the vision like you do. Or perhaps there are, and I have been holed up in my room too," she laughs sadly.
Katniss glances at their looped fingers, and finds she doesn't mind the idea. "Sure," she says, nodding. "Tell me everything."
Just as the two trailed behind their group, Katniss turns back to the last of the meadow she can see from the Hob. She wanted to find Peeta, but he was already looking at her, his hand raised upright in a majestic wave. His town friends and the new friends from the Seam jump on him in that exact instant, clapping him on his back, teasing him. Peeta is not immune.
She gives him a short wave and slips back to home.
—---
At her home, she finds her mother, her eyes filled to the brim with tears. It takes Haymitch’s—Haymitch’s!—cajoling to finally get her to slightly calm down. Katniss knows it’s not just her marriage that’s pulling her down. It’s the ones that are missing. The ones who will never see Katniss now, and never know the peace that has arrived. When her mother pats her careful hairdo, she pats meaningfully and caresses her cheek. Words would either spill in tears or would just not at all, so Katniss lets herself be held. She imagines the warmth of her brilliant father and her sweet Prim, just as her mother whispers, “They’re here with us.”
“I know,” she whispers.
Annie, her son Tidar, Lime and Pollux stay off to the far end, their eyes shining with their smiles.Pollux feeds her popcorn while Effie reprimands him that he’s spoiling Katniss’s teeth, while Annie keeps wandering around the floors, pointing at things in the house to Tidar and the dresses. Like her, he is attentive and serious, but bursts into easy smiles like his father. Joanna's scowl is less deep than Katniss remembers, but she knows Joanna will find her way to her before she exits the house to rile her up with something bawdy about them. Brainless.
Bingo, Joanna smiles.
—---
In the meadow, the sunlight seeps through the gaps in the canvas domes. The light is a warm fire, heating up everything and everyone's bodies with sheen, sweat and satisfaction. Effie reads something and says she is officiating their marriage, and most of Katniss and Peeta's guests listen courteously. It's how they do it in the Capitol, and Katniss lets Effie have her way. She is a friend after all.
They're all dressed in their fine clothes, her friends, family, her district. They stand proud, backs high and haughty against the sun. It's the fire that brought this district down, but they were the coal miners. They knew what it took to tame or strike the fire. They knew how to shape it. And they blessed her, blessed them, Katniss and Peeta, their children of fire.
Katniss's mother drabs her eye, and in the gentle cup of her hands, Katniss knows she is cradling her Prim and her father. Haymitch puts an arm around Asterid's shoulder, shaking her gently, joyously. He prods her to sing, and her mother does sing a lovely little tune Katniss remembers was what her father sang to her mother on her birthdays. She was happiest then. She joins in, and the world does too.
The crowd finally comes alive when they begin the toasting. They cheer and tease Peeta, and they talk over him loudly, deliberately, and it’s up to Peeta to declare his love for Katniss above all the cheers. It’s a new tradition. Celebrations needn't be quiet anymore. They dance for far too long while belting out tunes on the trombones and flutes and guitars and timpanis. They follow them to their decorated home, banging on pots and pans, and market booms with joy. It's completely out of sync, but Greasy Sae and some of the remaining elders promise her that weddings, a long history ago, were just as noisy as they were now.
—--
In the warmth of their home, now pronounced married, they bake together—kneading the dough, shaping it, and taming the fire to raise the tastiest crust filled with raisins and cashews and bits of salty, dried peaches, grape and jerky.
“You bet we should sell this as bread that promises you marriage,” Peeta jokes.
“I doubt anyone's falling for it, Peeta.”
He slides up behind her, kissing her behind the ear. Katniss shudders at the sudden feeling that erupts throughout her body, but welcomes it anyway. He whispers into her ear, “Correct. The only one falling is me for you.” He tugs at the sundress she had changed into. “And perhaps… this too?”
It's an incomplete life. Joy filters through the cracks that don't disappear at all. Safety, joy, warmth—they all look precarious. She knows they are precarious. There will be work to do. But it's a warmth built through years of crackling cinders. It's a peace Katniss will protect, even if she frays at the thought of confronting the horrors of their past. When it is time. When it is time. Until then, she will tend to the hearth of heart, of her home, and of her district. She will keep the flame of hope steady.
Here it is safe, here it is warm.
Here the daisies guard you from every harm.
Here your dreams are sweet, and tomorrow brings them true.
Here is the place where I love you.
And the sun will rise again, never on a reaping again.
—--
“By the way. Does Plutarch know? Of all of this?”
“Of course he does! Who do you think that camera crew in the back is for, huh?”
That bastard.