ToastedTHG: Giving-Katniss-Bread Fanfiction
This is a bit of a cheat, sorry! Collins’ version is so perfect that I was stumped to recall reading any fic version before - and then I suddenly recalled that I’d written one, sort of, some time ago. Here’s the opening of Katniss’s dream from the end of Ch 9 of When the Moon Fell in Love with the Sun, where she relives pivotal interactions with Peeta, with herself in bird form...
I dream of a bird – or rather, that I am a bird. A small, drab, brown-black thing, not unlike the blackbirds I made a pie of on my last night at home. It’s sundown in the very dead of winter, and I’m huddled in a crook of a battered apple tree, nosing hopefully with my beak through some nuts and seeds left behind by a squirrel. I find nothing but empty hulls and give a weak chirp in despair. There’s no food to be had, here or elsewhere in the woods. I’ll be dead of cold or hunger before the sun rises.
I hear a whistle from below – birdlike, yet not a bird – and cock my head at the bizarre creature suddenly standing beneath my tree. The body of a white bear – a young bear – and a human head? No, it’s a boy; a boy dressed in a white bearskin. A strong, stocky boy with pale yellow curls and cheeks turned pink by the cold. His gloved hand proffers a rounded brown object twice my size. He smiles up at me through the branches. His eyes are blue as a winter morning.
“I’ve brought you food,” he says, and his voice tugs at me strangely. “Please come down.”
My small, keen eyes flicker suspiciously between his smiling mouth and the thing in his hand that might be food. The boy is enormous compared to me, and I’m very weak. If I leave my perch and fly down to him, he could break my neck with two fingers. If I trust him, I could die.
If I don’t trust him, I will.
“I’d never hurt you,” he beseeches softly. “Not ever.”
A quick death is better than a slow one, I reason. I shrug my feeble wings and hop from the perch, but I’m too weak to flutter and fall like a blind, featherless hatchling – only to be caught securely in mid-air, cupped in the boy’s gloved palm. I wait for his fingers to close around me, to crush my hollow body or twist my neck, but he only smiles the wider – he seems almost ridiculous with delight. “Hello there,” he says, as the townsfolk do to their old friends. “Would you like some bread?”
He crumbles a bit of the brown thing and sprinkles it in front of me, along the heel of his hand. It’s faintly charred, like the branches the coal miner burns for heat in the little house by the lake, but it smells good. Like autumn’s bounty and the pleasant decay of bright leaves beneath its last burst of sun. I peck curiously at the crumbs. There are bits of nuts – rich, nourishing nut-meats – and small brown fruits, shriveled but very sweet, and in-between are tiny flecks of something new but warm and hearty – is that bread? The thing the boy mentioned? He smells of it, I realize. Of the food in his hand, and of bear.
The boy makes no move to stop me from eating more and, ravenous now, I snap up bite after bite, beating the pieces that are too big against his palm to make them smaller. He laughs, a gentle rumbling sound, and rubs the too-large pieces between his fingers, breaking them down for me. I feast on burned bread with nuts and raisins from the blond boy’s hand. It fills me with warmth and wholeness and life.