I’mjustkindaherenow

she/her, is a minor (yo that rhymes) hunger games fan and trying to write fanfiction call me ello :p

[ellohallohiya]

intro post :)

ello, hallo, hiya! I'm exactly that, call me ello!

this account was originally only thg, but I also have other fandoms I'm interested in, so this will be my multifandom acc

my thg account is: @the69thgames and it's mostly based around my fic

idk what to do in an intro post but here I am ig

[lilboreddev-blog]

reblog if your name isn't Amanda.

[thatblackwatchdouche-blog-blog]

2,121,566 people are not Amanda and counting!

We’ll find you Amanda.

[world-heritage-posts]

world heritage post

[wheezecheese]

I HAVE to reblog this eleven million note post. That’s the most notes I’ve ever seen on tumblr. Also my name is Jade, not Amanda.

[paperlit]

Thinking about how Wyatt Callow is proof that Dr. Gaul’s and Snow’s assertion that humanity’s essential nature is violent (which is part of their argument for the Capitol’s control being necessary) is false. That “What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed… A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. That’s mankind in its natural state.” is false.

I’m sure he had it all calculated. He knew exactly what choices would give him the best odds of survival. He knew that the faster he got out of the initial bloodshed the better his chances would be. He knew that letting other kids die would benefit his odds of survival. He knew exactly what he should’ve done to preserve himself.

And yet, he threw all those statistics and odds, all that reason and logic out the window in the name of protecting Lou Lou, a girl that wasn’t even from his district. He threw it all out the window in the name of helping another human being that was in an unfair situation and had worse odds than him. He knew who the real enemy was; he knew it wasn’t the other kids being taken advantage of by the Capitol just like him.

That is humanity.

[luminarywaves]

Re reading the original hunger games is so funny bcus katniss can literally read haymitch's mind like what. I'm dying of thirst but haymitch hasn't sent me water, that must mean that there's some nearby!! And one kiss is one pot of broth!! Like she even acknowledges that it's strange when she's like oh to peeta this would just be a pot of broth. Haymitch will give her one look and katniss knows immediately what he means and she's right every time

Meanwhile peeta is like your dress really suits you and you look nice :) and katniss is like he's trying to kill me

[arthdoesart]

very late contribution to @hayffie-week 2026 prompts: Fluff + D13 :D (Part 1???)

[alythh]

¡ PASSED ON !

oh Maysilee….you won’t be forgotten as the ont who gave the pin a chance

[modernmusess]

katniss: everyone’s so focused on protecting peeta because they too know how pure hearted he is and believe that he—a boy they’ve never even met before—deserves to survive over them and their friends of literal decades

finnick, to literally everyone else: okay if peeta dies she’s gonna kill all of us and then herself, so hands in, protect bread boy on three-

[cassidyjaneart]

[modernmusess]

the difference in hunger games narrators is so funny to me like this is our starting lineup

katniss: i go to a place and do a thing using a skill. also everyone hates me. oh you want to know more about myself? here are four straight paragraphs just describing food instead.

haymitch: so the baker’s in love with my best friends girl and my girlfriend’s uncle is gay and secretly dating the town window-fixer and she’s actually related to lucy gray and has beef with the mayors daughter who bullied me and her social security number is—

snow: everyone here is UGLY and OBNOXIOUS and TACKY and I Am God.

[i-am-a-fish]

please learn how to code

like, if you're bored today, and not doing anything,

learn a little bit of coding please

[i-am-a-fish]

hi hi hello PLEASE DON'T JUST REBLOG THIS FOR LATER

I know how much you love reblogging posts and then never looking at them ever again. I get it, I really do. but PLEASE

just open one of these links and explore a bit if you're interested

Scratch - great coding program for learning the basics, but so good you can make a video game with it

Codecademy - learn any coding language with lessons

Neocities - literally make a website

it's all free

[i-am-a-fish]

I'm sending wild animals to your doorstep.

[blabberoo]

forgotten confession..

[pinkchup]

this is crazy what, the animation is so smooth

[ellohallohiya]

oml love this

[yeehawpim]

a comic about fix-it fanfics

[ellohallohiya]

Thoughts on district 0 (I think-) the (fanmade) space district 😭?

idk like the other fanmade one?? like the astronomy district from Jabberjay78? or another person and district 0? I know that another person on tumblr made their district 0 medicine. I also technically have my own version of it?

I'm sorry I'm not really sure which one you're talking about, but you can tell me I'm wrong or if you were thinking of something else

on the astronomy district i think it's neat, but it's creation doesn't make sense to be created during the early days of Panem, maybe after the economy can stable. and I technically have my own version of it, but more outreached?? like space tech, satellites, and anti-gravity stuff, calculating if asteroids come, including astronomy

I also have a medicine district, but it's District 14. so I also think that one person on tumblr's district was pretty cool and I liked how they included both research centers, hospitals, labs, and and factories into their district :)

my technical district 0 is the working population for the Capitol tho, it's not really considered a district to the other districts, but inside the Capitol they are nicknamed "District 0"

at the end of reading this I realized you said space district, so... honestly it makes sense it's not really a make-sense fan district, because it originally was made as a joke but fans loved it so much Jabberyjay78 made it an official district in his fanon

[girlyonline4-deactivated2024082]

Reasons why peeta is better than gale!😋😊(politely if you disagree be nice or leave)

1-Suzanne Collin’s is team peeta like stop fighting it’s not like it’s gonna change the story,if the author herself is team peeta 😋

2-peeta would sacrifice himself for katniss and he truly loves her flaws and all proven multiple times one being him taking a beating just to give her bread to eat he was 11,when he joined the careers to make sure they don’t get her what most people didn’t understand was why he joined he didn’t want them to get katniss he wanted to lead them on proof being when katniss was stung by the tracker jackers he told her to run and he also went into the quarter quell just to make sure she’d survive he didn’t have to volunteer but he did

3- peeta is a kind empathetic and generous person diffrent than gale as per said in the books”what I really need is peeta he’s like a dandelion which means rebirth or things get better after bad times” she said about gale”but gale hes kindled with rage and fire I already have a lot of fire”

4-peeta even after his hijacking he didn’t want to hurt katniss but he was literally brain washed and tortured,starved,forced to watch Darius(book) die/get tortured and got tracker jacker and water shock probably and a lot more

5-peeta just wanted katniss to be happy he even said he’d go take care of gale(when gale was recovering from the whipping) unlike gale who got mad at katniss for kissing peeta(to literally survive)

6-gale is terrible person outside of the whole prim/bomb thing gale killed (indirectly) finnick by one he told katniss to go up during the sewer secene and told katniss since Katniss had seen finnick still down there gale said”anyone that’s alive down there won’t be coming up”

7-if gale really cared he would’ve volunteered for peeta in the first games like he said during mockingjay in Tigris basement he said”if I knew I would’ve volunteered” so why didn’t you?

8- gale acknowledged that peeta was forced to say things (during the first interview in mockingjay part 1) then in another interview peeta did(under the hijacking) gale said”I wouldn’t do that not if I was tortured or with a gun to my head” like wtf?😬 dude he knew peeta was forced he knew yet still said that…

9-in the end it was katniss’s choice she married peeta and chose peeta

[ellohallohiya]

I'm an everlark girlie too, but I don't like to think of Gale as a 2D character

1. yeah, I agree with that

2. Gale technically did also risk his life going out hunting with for his family (kind of sacrificing himself)

3. I can see both the dandelion of hope and the fire of rage as equals. Katniss herself says she's the fire (which can be good if used in the right way). and she did say she had enough of it herself, so she needed someone to balance her out, Peeta

4. Peeta almost choked Katniss to death while under the tracker jacket influence, but he did grow and heal and learn to feel safe and loved with Katniss again

5. I think Gale was more disappointed/jealous. but yeah, he understood, felt a bit annoyed and really angry that the girl he's been crushing on for years loves another guy tho

6. hard to read sorry- but uh I think he was warning Katniss in some way. I don't think he rlly cared who was down there even if it was himself, so he does have a terrible sense of empathy for human life. but he didn't rlly do it out of spite or anything

7. Gale rlly did care. if he volunteered, there wouldn't be anybody to feed Prim, her mom, and her own family. they made a deal if either of them gotten reaped, the other wouldn't volunteer, and would feed the other's family. even if he knew and volunteered, Katniss would be angry at him for leaving their families without much food for weeks

8. I think you're talking about movie Gale, he's an ass. in the books he comforts Katniss about Peeta and says he feels bad for him

9. yeah it was her choice to choose Peeta, but idk if that's what makes him better than Gale??

this is mostly a thing where it shows what makes Katniss more attracted to Peeta and attributes that make Gale bad (none of the good)

but I think you only watched the movies? if you can, read the books, they are better

have a good day/night/anytime

[laceylavender]

Gale and Katniss are proof that you can grow up in the same circumstances and still learn to see the world in a different way.

Growing up in famine, abuse, violence, poverty and under control of a corrupt government gave them similar circumstances to grow up in: being the oldest sibling, their fathers dying in the mine, becoming the providers of the house at an early age, losing almost everything to said government. While Katniss developed a sense of empathy for everyone affected by this government (whether they were more privileged than her, or not), Gale developed a sense of hatred and thirst for vengeance because the people that weren’t his people had privileges that no one should have, while his family and his friends were being starved, or killed.

That’s why from an early age (pre-teen to full blown teenage years) he had always been thinking with the mindset of a hunter, only he wasn’t only hunting in the forest for prey and food, he was hunting in the real world and he was hunting his enemies, perpetrators and by-standers who did nothing to stop them, they all fit in the same category for him: the enemy. He grew up thinking of ways in which he could kill them if he could, that’s why earlier in the books he tells Katniss he would kill the Capitol citizens if he could, they were nothing to him.

When Gale sees the Capitol bomb and fire his district and kill his people, then gets evacuated to district 13 and has the opportunity to do something, to be of value and design strategies that can help kill said enemy, he does it. No second thought.

The thing is, both Katniss and Gale were right in certain aspects, especially in those they couldn’t agree on, and for me is easy to see from the perspective of both.

In war it should be common rule to offer the possibility of surrender first, but when your enemy doesn’t surrender and you see your own army lose more and more members, you attack - most of the time these are “last resort” attacks that end in lots of human life lost, but when you still give them a last chance to surrender like they did with the train in 2, it still shows a little glimpse of hope and empathy, that not everything has to be lost to war, and this is the part Gale didn’t understand, because if he paid too much thought to it, the lines would get blurred in his head, it was easier to see in black and white.

Personally, I’m in a grey zone when it comes to both of their thinking, and that’s why as a world with increasing and escalating issues we’ve created mechanisms like humanitarian law, war law, international human rights, etc, etc, we need to draw the lines, this is the playbook Katniss was referring to. What’s too much in war? A bullet to the head? Burying people in a mountain just for the sake of killing them? Where’s the line? Hijacking and manipulating people, stripping them of their consciousness and identity? Sending children into an arena to murder each other? Human trafficking? Sex trafficking? You see where I’m going? This is not about Gale, it’s about war.

Look at history, look around you. What do you see? What do you make of it? And please, use critical thinking. Is it acceptable to kill group B if they’ve killed people from group A? Do people from group B deserve a second chance, although their victims didn’t? Your opinion and reasoning depends a lot on the morals you have, and your own experience with war and abuse, which, if you’ve been lucky enough not to have a first hand experience with it, you should also take it into consideration before saying something. Just think, consider, see beyond yourself, see from different points of you, keep the definition of good and evil close to your hand and take note where they start to get blurry. What do you see?

[ellohallohiya]

yes, exactly, these characters are deep and have parallels to irl people and mindsets. when ppl think of Gale they think somebody heartless and cruel, but when I first read the books I kind of agreed with some of the things Gale said

if where I was raised, like my entire hometown was bombed after being abused and enslaved, I want revenge for all their deaths. I want their deaths to be remembered, mean something. I would go crazy in his position

I think much more ppl would've liked Gale so much more if he didn't (maybe) drop the bombs on Prim. because Prim just so happened to be a victim of his rage. like yes, this was planned by Coin, but Prim just so happened to be one of the people who died by the bombs, who were probably Gale

Gale had killed several nameless ppl with those bombs. if Prim was excluded from the scene, then we wouldn't really care unless Katniss pointed it out and felt immense grief for these people she didn't know (and at this rate I feel like she would mourn more than just them sorry)

but honestly, they're all just victims of war, and it's sad

[impossiblesuitcase]

This You I Choose - part i.

Peeta is rescued from the Capitol, tortured but not hijacked, and 'this would've happened anyway' happens earlier.

When Peeta and I do reunite, he doesn’t kiss me like I’d expected him to. He’s in a stupor, vague and bleary-eyed and can only weakly mouth my name in disbelief. His limbs are rubber as I crash into him yet he wraps them around me all the same. I’m the one to cup his face in my hands, sobbing and angry and so relieved it electrifies every nerve in my body.

The doctors prod at him for what feels like the length of a whole Hunger Games, and I’m waiting for them to leave so I can cry and hold him and I need them to just leave. Leave. 

They don’t. So I pretend they aren’t there.

Peeta doesn’t kiss me. He doesn’t grin or tease like he did without fail in the arena, no matter how dire the situation. He strokes my hair, face slack with awe. He repeats my name, again and again and again like a mockingjay. My questions—interrupted by sobs—go unanswered. Are you okay? What did they do to you? Where did they hurt you? 

So as the doctors are grabbing his arm far too roughly for my liking and forcing a needle into his vein, he squirms something awful.

And I kiss him.

Once, twice, again and again. It’s kiss five that he registers and kisses me back, and then this lasts for a long time but never long enough. Haymitch comes to collect me, tears me from Peeta’s arms so the doctors can experiment on him some more. I thrash, I scream. Peeta does too.

I’m not allowed back in the hospital until the next morning. With no doctors closely lingering, I crawl under the thin hospital blanket and envelop him in my arms. I trace his scars, monitor his crackling breaths and sponge kisses to his lips and pulse points. When I stop, he comes in for more, and I know that we are both administering pain medication this way.

The morphling relaxes him, but I think my touch is much longer lasting.

———

Over the next days I am consumed by Peeta. He is constantly on edge, distrusting everybody except a handful. Me, Prim, occasionally my mother. Even Haymitch is a bad taste in his mouth, and for how little he speaks, we’re all shocked when he summons the lung capacity to scream at him for lying to us in the Quarter Quell.

It ends in whimpering sobs, which only abate as I cradle his head into the wee hours of the morning.

I can’t stand to be parted from him, convinced Snow will turn the corner, laugh at me balefully and taunt from those puffy lips, “Oh, Miss Everdeen, you didn’t truly think I’d let you keep him?” When those nightmares awaken me at night, I do my best to stifle my gasps. I can’t disturb Peeta’s precious few hours of sleep.

Something different now is how often I kiss him. It’s for his sake, I think at first, but I begin to seriously doubt that. When I’m forced to leave his side for meals I swear I feel myself growing weaker if I go too long without my source.

Haymitch relays to me updates on the resistance, their efforts, Coin and Plutarch’s latest strategies. He more than once reminds me that Coin is looking for a Mockingjay, not the star-crossed lovers, and I’m expected to eventually show up to strategy meetings. I ignore him.

Once, when I’m barred from his room by the doctors—citing a medical procedure that cannot be interfered with—I return to my own quarters. Prim is there, stroking that mangy cat, and looks surprised to see me.

“You’re back?”

“Not for long. Just until they let me back into the hospital,” I grumble.

Prim stands and heaves Buttercup up to her chest, who hisses at me as though I’m the one who disturbed his rest. She opens the drawer where my belongings lie; the locket, the stopwatch, the pearl.

“I thought you might want to take this.” She picks up the pearl and folds it into my palm.

I run it around my knuckles. “Why?”

“Haymitch suggested that you ‘give it to the boyfriend,’” she explains. “We thought it might settle him a bit.”

I scoff at Haymitch’s choice of words and look at Prim, expecting a glint of teasing in her eyes. She of all people knows the love story was for show. To protect her, in fact. A byproduct of protecting my sister’s childhood for all these years is that she has the gall of a teenager. She makes jabs at me often but her giggles and grins always give it away. I wait for this now, but her face is as sound as ever.

“What?” 

She looks at me, innocent and unblinking. “You know, to remind him of how things were before he was in the Capitol.”

“You think he’s my boyfriend?” I spit out.

She smiles. “A lot of people think that. I’ve seen you together since he was rescued. Seemed a little more than friendly.”

“That’s no different to how we were in the Games,” I argue.

“Yes it is. No one’s forcing you to do any of it anymore.” Buttercup is glaring at me condescendingly, and I hate the idea that this stupid cat thinks it understands emotions better than I can. “You’re a bad actress, Katniss,” Prim continues, laughing a little. “And you hate being lovey-dovey. Could you have played out that romance thing with anyone else?”

No. But maybe—Gale…and then, I don’t think either of us would’ve thought to play the romance card. We would’ve treated it as one of our hunts, except some of our prey spoke like us. I try to imagine if I’d like the strategy better and I’m struck by a realisation. Gale would have killed. Not just defensively. I remember—just before I was taken to the Capitol for the first Games—he told me that the other tributes were just like animals. Would he have set up snares and traps, sized to fit a child rather than a rabbit? Would he have sought to eliminate our competition? Peeta wasn’t just trying to protect us with the love angle. It prevented us from having to kill.

Would I have been horrified by Gale by the end of the Games?

“Maybe it was for the Games, but I don’t think you could’ve done it if you hadn’t at least liked the person to begin with,” Prim observes.

I gape at my sister and her unabashedness and how she’s right. I think about my own mother; how I reject her every advance and brush of affection. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to kiss and feign endearment for some random boy that I met in the Games, even with survival on the line. I would’ve recoiled instantly and Haymitch would’ve groaned as the sponsors dried up and I’d be dead.

But I hadn’t really known Peeta before the Games. Not properly. How did he make it so easy?

I snatch up the locket, tuck the pearl in the pocket of my uniform. “I’m going to lunch,” I say, despite the hollowness in my stomach having nothing to do with food. Prim bids me goodbye, unfazed by my flightiness. 

After a lacklustre meal of some grey mush, I check the schedule on my arm and finally follow it.

———

“Hey, Catnip.”

I jump back, startled. Even with the telltale nickname, it doesn’t immediately register to me that the newcomer is Gale. As I turn to face him, taking in the amusement in his seam-grey eyes, I scold myself. This is Gale. Whom I’ve been spending almost all of my time with since coming to 13.

It’s only in realising this that I also realise I haven’t seen him since Peeta’s return. 

“Hey,” I say.

“Feeling better?”

I cock my head to the side. “Better?”

“Now that Peeta’s back,” he says, like it’s obvious. “Do you feel like yourself again?”

I’ve been incomplete since he was kidnapped, and I try to determine if I’m whole now that he’s been returned. Almost. He isn’t quite the Peeta that I lost anymore; still, I am not his Katniss from the Seam.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

He gazes at me expectantly. I blink and quirk an eyebrow. 

A chortle rocks his chest. “You’re not going to ask if I’m okay? After rescuing his life?”

Right. Prim, Gale, Peeta. The three people I protect in every universe. “Sorry, I’ve been distracted lately,” I confess sheepishly, scratching my forearm. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

Seeing him again makes me feel steadier. A little more like that girl from the woods. “What are you doing here?”

He taps the tattoo on his arm. “I’m rostered to be here. As are you.”

Weapons training. Trainee soldiers are scattered around the range, some aiming at targets and others being taught the anatomy of a gun by a soldier. No one is shooting yet. With how skittish I become at loud sounds these days, I’ll probably leave when that starts. Gale unstraps a gun from his holster and hands it to me. I fiddle with its mechanisms, trying to recall any of the training on its assembly.

Gale watches for a while and decides to pity me. “Here, let me show you.”

He comes up behind me, my back to his chest. His arms weave around my waist and lay over my hands. Then he manoeuvres them around the parts, removing the magazine and the other pieces I don’t know the name of and leads my hands in a rehearsed dance of reassembling them.

This closeness is nice and familiar. I haven’t embraced him for a while now, but his strong heartbeat reflected against my back reminds me that—even in these dismal bunkers of 13—I can have a piece of home.

With the weapon readied, I graze the trigger and have a sudden vision of it firing against my will. A shudder courses through me. His hands still.

“What’s wrong?”

My head shakes on its own. “Nothing.” But knowing he won’t believe that, I shakily amend, “It’s…this whole thing. We can’t live in this bunker forever. But 12 is gone. I feel like I’m just waiting for this stint to be over”—and to kill Snow, I don’t say—“so we can just go home.”

“Me too.”

“No. I can’t want that.” I extricate myself from him, turning to face him instead. His face is set with hardness as always but his eyes droop with sympathy. “I’m alive. So is Prim and my mother and you. And Peeta was taken from me but he’s back. I have better things to fret over.”

Gale cups my face with one hand and I lean into the touch. “It was home, Katniss. Of course you miss it.”

“I don’t deserve to.” And then I whisper what’s been underlying, plaguing me for weeks with nowhere for the thought to go. “Not when it’s my fault.”

He looks displeased. “Did you drop the bomb?”

I’m starting to think that that doesn’t matter much anymore. That whether you’re at the scene of the crime or being lifted from a broken arena by hovercraft, every thread eventually leads back to the spool. The larking Mockingjay.

“I did, in a way, didn’t I? Doesn’t matter if I was there or not. I practically devised it with every move I made against Snow.”

“Things happen in war, Katniss.” Perhaps I would agree with him, but the roiling in my stomach can’t easily digest this simplification. “You can’t keep hurting yourself. You have to forgive yourself.”

I toss the gun to the floor, loathing the sight of it and distancing myself from him because he’s wrong when his hands still me. His eyes are deep and intent. Then he’s leaning in and I have ample time to know what’s coming. I allow him.

The second his lips touch mine, I flinch. It’s instinct. I have no control over the action.

He pulls away. “What’s wrong?”

“I…” I trail off, unable to find the words. I don’t know what’s wrong.

He considers me for a long moment, then shoves his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “I see.”

“What? What do you see?”

He shakes his head, voice acerbic. “No, no, I knew. But I ignored it. Can’t anymore though, can we?”

“Tell me,” I order, because he’s being cryptic and irritable and I am unable to draw the conclusion he has. It frustrates me just how well he can read my own emotions when I can’t even decipher them myself. I thought it was bad enough from Buttercup, but this is exponentially worse.

“You love him. Peeta.”

The instinct to refute him shrivels up in my chest. It doesn’t ring false. Yes, I do care about Peeta. He’s a friend. An ally. A partner.

“I care about him,” I affirm. “But I care about you too.”

“How?” he challenges.

“The same as him. You’re my friends. My allies.”

He crosses his arms over his chest, frowning. “But that isn’t all.”

I think of when Gale was whipped, laying beneath the cover of ice, and I chose him. Then, as soon as I’d been called for the Quarter Quell, I had been all too comfortable seeking another pair of arms to warm me. Because I was lonely, a voice scolds. Because I’m selfish. 

Am I still lonely now? Yes. Am I clinging to Peeta merely because I need company? Is that why I would have done anything to get him back?

I would’ve killed Snow. And Coin. And if Gale stood in my way….

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Don’t you?” he says bitingly. “Isn’t that the reason you’ve been glued to his hip since the moment he came back?”

“And what’s it to you?” I snap. 

“You know what.”

Because I owe him. As a friend. As I had personally appointed myself to be Gale’s lover. Even if ‘lover’ never came to fruition. Even if he never knew it.

Peeta. Friend. Ally. Partner. There’s something unsaid. For Peeta, partner feels…insufficient. Something is missing.

The hunger coursing through my body. The desperation I felt without him.

“No. That’s not all. Not for him,” I admit.

Gale chuckles ruefully. He reaches out and tucks hair behind my ear. There’s a coldness on his face with the action. “I knew. Since I saw you kissing him on that beach, I knew—it was a foregone conclusion. You’ve chosen him.”

“That’s not—”

“When you were kissing him in the arena, were you thinking about me?” he interrupts.

My mouth opens and closes a few times. “Sometimes. I’d feel guilty about kissing him. Because of you.” 

“Because you wanted to be kissing me? Or because you thought I’d be hurt by it?”

His words—plain, but cutting—stun me. I hadn’t allowed myself to consider it, but isn’t it true? Did I want him in my arms, rocking me to sleep, kissing me and me kissing him? No, I wasn’t thinking of that at all. I felt guilty. It felt like I was being unfaithful to him.

I can recognise that feeling because at this moment he has stolen the kiss from my mouth that is reserved for Peeta’s lips.

All the moments I’ve shared with this boy run past my thoughts and away into oblivion. I think about how I spent years with him, alone in the woods. How at any point my feelings should have developed and appeared. How only now, in war and Games and death, do I feel a longing for him.

If this is over, do I see myself in his arms? When things are good? Do I crave his kisses? His comfort?

Gale leans in and kisses me on the cheek. It’s familial and stirs nothing beneath my sternum. “Told ya. I won’t stand in your way, Catnip.” 

Then he leaves. I have no desire to chase after him though I feel I should. It’s the nice thing to do, the friendly thing. But after this interrogation, I wonder if that’s why I do anything for Gale. Because I fear that if I don’t he will leave me and I can’t bear to lose anyone else.

I listen to his retreating footsteps until the guns begin to fire. I touch my hand to my cheek.

———

I spend a good hour meandering down the halls of 13’s gloomy bunker. My thoughts tick over on repeat, again and again and again. Peeta will be waiting for me and that’s louder than most of my other ruminations.

You’ve chosen him, Gale said, but that tastes like a lie in my mouth. That implies that I have committed to a relationship, and in turn a future, a marriage, children. Anyone who knows me knows I haven’t committed to that, ever. So there’s no choice to make.

Some choices I have made were never choices in the first place. To volunteer for Prim. To ally with Rue. To save Peeta in the Quarter Quell over myself. Those were never something I decided. I would not be Katniss Everdeen if I had chosen otherwise.

I reach the hospital. My feet brought me here unbidden, drawn by the magnetism lying inside. Peeta. I linger by his doorway, listening for his slow breathing. If he’s asleep, I’ll go in. That way I can just look at him. To understand. To decide if Gale is right.

“Katniss?” I hear him call softly.

I enter. He’s smiling wearily, tired but content. “How did you know I was there?” I ask.

“I didn’t. I heard footsteps. I was hoping it was you.”

My arms are crossed over my chest, my stance defensive.

His brow furrows. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I resist.

“Well, then come here.” He holds out his arms.

“What?”

“The most effective treatment for ‘nothing’ is burying yourself in hugs. Shouldn’t you know that—healer’s daughter?”

He must be picking up a bit if he’s teasing me like this, so I go over. I cuddle up in his arms and my skin is electric with his touch. It’s never felt this way before. Not even on the beach. That was hunger. This is safety, my soul fitting back into my body exactly as it should. I have embraced him every day and night since his return, but this ailment is symptomatic only now that I know about it.

I can never leave his arms. I kiss him, just to double-check, and I sigh as I have my confirmation.

I never chose Peeta. Just like I never chose Prim or Rue. It is, what did Gale call it? A foregone conclusion.

It would be against my very being to not need him.

I pull away and he whines, gently. “Hey, I was enjoying that.”

“You can have more.”

He gives me a tired grin. “When?”

I lay my head on his chest and settle in for the night. My mother won’t be expecting me anyway. She’s given up trying to keep me from him. In fact, only two days past Finnick had teased that Plutarch’s query as to my whereabouts was stupid, because I had a new residence in the Mellark room in the hospital. When Prim relayed the story to me I’d been ambivalent about to react. Now, I want to scoff alongside Finnick. Yes, what a stupid question. Where else would I be?

“Whenever you want.” 

Notes

Part two will be up next week. If you want to be tagged in that post, let me know.

@gingerale2017 i know you love everlark ;)

[emilyhenrys]

very kind of some of y'all to add "i love jen's performance tho" when criticizing the hunger games movies and movie everlark cuz i don't <3

[ellohallohiya]

I like the performance in the movies, but it didn't really resonate Katniss' character as it was in the books to me