Prompt 46: Broken-hearted Katniss goes to see a psychic, hoping to get one last message to her departed loved one (Goodbye? I’m sorry? Where’s the key to the safety deposit box?). Peeta is earning his college tuition using his charm and empathy to tell fortunes. What happens when they encounter each other?
Thank You for the prompt Anonymous
Thank You to @everlarkficexchange
Rating T Canon character death.
My name is Peeta Mellark, and I am a Psychic.
Well, at least I’m pretending to be for the sake of my Fine Arts Degree. Mother, being the peach that she is, cut me off when I decided to major in Art instead of Business. Dad stood by and let it all happen as usual. He didn’t even say goodbye the night I left the house for good.
It’s fine. I’ve been getting along great on my own. I’ve got scholarships and have managed to cobble together a few jobs that don’t interfere with my classes but still pay well enough to keep me afloat. I work at a catering company on weekends, an early morning bakery shift two times a week and this job, which happens to be the best paying of the three. Now graduation is so close I can taste it, just one more month and I’ll be done…free.
Earning money using my charm and empathy to tell fortunes as a psychic may be pushing it, but these people all seem happier and more at peace after a reading and that’s how I’m able to stomach the deception. I’ve done readings for widows looking for safe deposit box keys, desperate souls wanting one last goodbye with their loved ones and people that just want a moment to say I’m sorry.
Those are the worst.
Sometimes it’s hard to live with, but name another job that you can pull a hundred dollars an hour? Truth is, this job just fell into my lap….and I’m good at it.
I sigh and settle back into my chair and wait for my next appointment, who will be here any minute. Tidying up my table, I put away the tarot cards I used in the last reading and run a cloth over the crystal ball. It’s just for looks but my boss Haymitch swears it adds to the ambience and make us look more credible.
A soft tapping on the door alerts me to her presence and when I look up, I see a young woman about my age. She’s not very big, nor is she particularly pretty. She’s followed closely by a smaller, blonder version of herself.
They’ve lost someone.
It’s clear by the pain on their faces. I want to tell them to leave, that I can’t help them, that none of this is real…but something stops me. I stand and offer them a seat before starting with the scripted spiel.
“Welcome to Psychics of Panem. Are you ready for me to begin?” I ask, glancing between the raven-haired girl and her sister. The latter looks at me with a shrug but offers nothing helpful.
Silver eyes meet mine and I’m struck. A strange warmth begins to crawl through my chest and I realize I was wrong, so wrong. Her delicate features are shadowed and darkened by pain and those twin moons shimmer with tears. She is…. unexpected.
“I don’t know why I’m here.” She whispers. “I don’t believe in this stuff.”
“That’s ok…Miss?”
“Katniss.”
I look to her sister and she trills. “Prim.”
“Alright, why don’t we get started.”
I relax, and let images and thoughts fill my mind as I try to string together some words that might make whatever these girls are going through, a little easier to bear. But I keep seeing her…just her.
Katniss.
It’s strange. She’s everywhere. I wonder if the guilt is getting to me, but I power through and state what I already know.
“You’ve lost someone. Someone that you love very much.”
“Yes.” She says, and her sister echoes her answer.
I close my eyes again but there’s nothing. Just a picture of Katniss in my head. My eyes startle open when Prim starts to speak.
“I had to convince her to come here, you know, it took me over a year.” Prim glances at Katniss’ hunched form. “She doesn’t think this stuff is real but she’s still spending the grocery money on you.”
Prim must see the horror flash across my face because she’s instantly contrite. “She hasn’t been eating much anyway.” Katniss drops her face into her hands and I notice her shaking slightly.
“I can’t do this. I can’t talk about her.” Katniss mumbles. She pushes back and springs up so quickly, the chair crashes to the ground. My eyes follow the violent swish of her dark braid as she dashes out the door. I realize I’m standing poised to follow, and I look to her sister…who is also upright.
It takes at least ten seconds before I understand what I’m seeing.
Prim did not move her chair, nor did she step away from the table. She just stood, the wood seemingly bisecting her legs from her torso. Looking at her face, I’m caught by her slight smirk before I fling myself away.
Catching a foot on my box of tricks, I land flat on my face. A little yelp escapes before I start army crawling for my life, knocking aside scattered runes and tarot cards. A raspy chuckle trails me as I end up wedged in the corner of the room, drawing knees up close and ducking my face down, blocking everything out with my arms.
I can feel her move closer and the bubbling terror threatening to come out as an embarrassingly high-pitched scream.
“Peeta?” Prim asks softly, clearly afraid of pushing me into heart attack territory. “I thought…I thought you knew. I’m sorry for laughing.”
“You’re a ghost?” I croak, finally peeling my eyes open and locking them on the girl currently sitting crisscross applesauce a few feet from me. She’s just a girl, just a normal girl, she’s right there, sitting and talking.
“Did you think all the people who came to you were still alive?”
Pictures flash through my head. I realize all the people that have come through the door speak only to me, never to each other. Always using me to relay information. Families, husband and wives….and now sisters.
How could I not have known?
I’m dizzy, my head spinning with a myriad of emotions. “But they…you…”
“I guess it’s easy to see only what you want to see.” She says calmly. “But Peeta, you have a gift. You speak, and it brings peace to their souls, so the dead can rest.” Prim offers her hands and I cautiously reach out and guide mine right through them.
“It’s real, Peeta.”
“What happened to you?” I croak, my throat feels raw.
“It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that Katniss is alone, and she’s not supposed to be. She won’t survive on her own.”
“Why come to me?”
She thinks for a moment, looking through the air like it holds the answer to everything.
“How did you feel when you looked at her?”
“Not much at first.” I admit. “But then I saw her eyes.” Leaning back, I conjure her face again. “I felt warm…like she’s radiant as the sun.”
Prim smiles wide. “Yes! You’ve met before…but it wasn’t time yet. And then you were late to class and missed her.”
I instantly remember that day. The only time I was ever late to class and my fumbling entrance was covered by a dark-haired girl handing over a withdraw slip and picking up her paper.
I was too late.
“If you had seen her walk in, you would’ve asked if she was okay. Asked her if she wanted to talk over hot chocolate. You would’ve skipped that class, and you would’ve been there for her through the hardest period of her life.”
There’s a burning in my chest and I feel a wave of despondence take me under. “My mother called that morning.”
“I know. What she said isn’t true, Peeta. You’re worth so much, don’t let her take this away from you.”
All I’ve ever wanted was to be truly valued by someone. To be needed by them, loved by them. Someone I could love in return, without the ever-present fear of being rejected.
Could I have that with Katniss?
“Is it too late Prim?”
“No.” She stares, moving her gaze across a vast expanse I can’t see. “Time works differently here. For me, everything is happening at once, and at the centre of it all I can see you and Katniss. You are going to make my sister happy for the next sixty years. It was always going to be you, Peeta.”
“Katniss can’t move on as long as I am still bound to her. And she holds me in this place, both finite, and unmoveable. But there is so much more for me to see, infinite plains to explore.” She sighs softly. “I don’t belong here anymore, but she won’t let me go.”
“And I can help?” Suddenly, it’s what I want. To help Prim, to save Katniss. Every cell screaming out for me to find her.
“You can, and you will. But just so you know, Katniss is kind of…prickly. You’ll need my assistance.” She rubs her hands together like she can’t wait to get started.
I can’t help but smile at this girl that is gone too soon. It’s too fast, I know, but I believe everything she has said. A veil has lifted and my whole world is coming into focus.
“How will I find her?”
“It won’t be too hard…. she’s standing right outside. Katniss couldn’t really leave, not without the chance to call you a charlatan and yell at you for taking her money.” Prim grins.
“People still say charlatan?” I ask doubtfully.
“Katniss might, she’s an old soul. You’d better use that golden voice of yours to deliver my awesome message, so she’ll forgive you.”
Somehow, I’m already at the door. Prim hangs back, casually leaning against the doorframe like she isn’t a teenage apparition. With a nod to the left, she points me in the right direction.
I look down the street and there she is…Katniss. Leaning on a rock wall, her face buried in her hands. She looks small and sad and I want nothing more than to hold her but as I approach, gunmetal grey eyes flash with fury when they meet mine.
I’m in trouble.
“Are you done stomping around you- you fraud!” Katniss barks.
A vision flashes through my mind. A tough, spritely five-year-old with two braids instead of one, sharp grey eyes and a red backpack that looked almost as big as she was. She walked right up and pushed Thom Baxter for making fun of me. After wiping my tears and runny nose with the back of a fist, I smiled at her and she smiled back. My chubby five-year-old heart burst with feelings for the tiny girl. A day later, I was pulled from class and moved to the private school across town.
It was too soon.
Shaking the memory away, I move just a little closer. Warned that this would not be easy but I’m undeterred. I glance at Prim and she’s watching us rapt, like we’re her favourite daytime soap opera. I can’t help but roll my eyes.
“I want my money back!” Katniss states with the awesome might of a hissing kitten and I swing my attention back to her. She’s shaking and looks like she’d love nothing more than to tear me apart. “You charla-”
“You can have it!” I rush out, interrupting what I know was going to be a scathing attack on my character.
“What?” Her form deflates, seeming to collapse in on herself.
“I’m not going to keep your money, but I still have a message for you.”
She stays silent, untrusting and defiant even with the tear tracks on her face.
“It’s from Prim.”
Her voice is an indignant screech. “How do you know about my sister? Have you been cyber stalking me?”
“No…I…no!” I defend myself frantically.
“So, you’re saying you can read my mind then?” She scoffs.
“Not exactly.” I take a deep breath in the hope that she will follow suit. “Though I suppose whatever is going on with me is similar.”
“Get to the point.”
“I know about your sister because she told me. I can see Prim.” Pointing over my shoulder towards the seemingly empty doorway. “She’s standing right over there.”
“Is this funny to you? Do you enjoy being cruel?”
“Get in there Peeta!” Prim cheers and I spin around.
“Give me something useful then!” I shout in return.
“Can’t! I’m simultaneously watching your children be born.” A laugh, “You fainted, fell right over like a rock!”
My eyes grow wide and I realize too late that I must look certifiable to Katniss, who is now staring at me like I have two heads.
“You’re crazy.” She states a little fearfully.
“I am not!” I defend.
There’s a chuckle behind me. “Quit laughing Prim, you’re not helping.” Throwing the words carelessly over my shoulder.
“She’s- She’s laughing?” Katniss stutters.
“Uh…yeah. She’s kinda cheering me on in a very unhelpful way.” I side-eye Prim and she smirks, giving me a thumbs up.
Katniss just looks at my suspiciously. “She had a very strange sense of humour. What does her laugh sound like? Teenage giggles? Pealing Bells?”
“Um…it’s more like a chuckle. She sorta sounds like an old man when she laughs.”
“Hey!” Prim shouts, offended.
Katniss’s face crumples and tears start to flow as she chokes on a laugh. “It’s been so long since I’ve heard it. Such a weird sound to come from teenage girl.”
Drawn back into this moment, Prim looks subdued and steps closer. “I think she might listen to you now.”
She stands almost directly in front of Katniss, focused on her older sister, hope radiating from her being.
“Prim’s close to me, isn’t she?” At my nod she takes a breath. “I’ve felt her around since she left. She pushed me to find you. I would’ve never had an idea as hairbrained as this. I mean, come on, a psychic? This mess has Primrose Everdeen written all over it.”
Panic wells in her eyes. “I’m not ready to let her go.”
“That’s okay, Katniss.” I remind her as gently as I can.
“What’s the message?”
I meet Prim’s serene expression and repeat after her.
“Fall in love, eat cheese buns and be happy.”
Katniss scowls at Prim’s relayed message and all I can do is grin.
“And what are you smiling about?” She asks, wiping the tears from her face.
The grin on my face is quickly replaced with something a bit more sombre, and I clear my throat.
“You’ve got this Peeta!” Prim says encouragingly, as she tries to muffle her laughter.
“I…um…well, it just so happens I make the best cheese buns in town.”
Epilogue
It didn’t happen overnight. Taking almost half a year for us to grow together.
It started with cheese buns and hot chocolate during my morning break at the bakery. Many late-night talks where I learned so much about Katniss and her life. And, finally feeling safe enough, I began to share my own past as well. Favourite foods, favourite colours, gave way to more serious discussions with Prim hovering at the edge of our periphery.
Then Katniss surprised me at my graduation.
I wasn’t expecting anyone to come, and the thought filled me with a sadness so profound I wondered if this was it…if I was always destined to feel like I was not good enough. But when I saw her in the crowd, those grey eyes caught mine and hope flared to life. I let my eyes fall to the sunset orange dress that hugged her slight curves before returning to her face, just in time to see her smile.
And that was it… I was a goner.
Everything changed after that. Things felt more solid…more real. Katniss started inviting me to her place for dinner and eventually, inviting me to stay after. On those nights, Prim was conspicuously absent, but it wouldn’t have mattered, our kisses and touches were chaste to say the least. Over time, our relationship grew into something so much more than I could’ve ever hoped for.
Then on one, seemingly normal day, I heard Katniss begin to sing. It was soft at first but so lovely, it drew me in like a moth to a flame. She was in the kitchen, chopping and preparing vegetables with Prim looking on and I felt something tense and snap, a glimmering current flowing through the room.
Prim startled but kept her eyes on Katniss. “I’ve missed her singing.” She turned her head towards me with a glowing smile.
“I just can’t believe it… she let me go.” Her excitement is clear as she crows, swaying in her untethered state. “All it took was a few months with you and your delicious buns!”
I feel my cheeks warm and smile back as I watch the girl hovering to ‘hug’ her sister. I am strangely comforted by her humour, it’s something that will not be lost, something I can remember about Prim.
“You guys are gonna do great! Tell Katniss I love her!”
And with one final gesture, a three-fingered-salute… Prim was gone.
Katniss turned, giving me a sad smile before walking into my open arms. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”
“Yes, love.” And I pull her closer.
I had expected more, I guess. Bright lights, tearful goodbyes, and knowing Prim, maybe books flying off the shelves or something dramatic like that.
But I suppose the lack of fanfare suited the occasion. The tearful goodbyes had long ago been spoken. It was strange and ordinary, the gentle movement of someone special leaving the room.
We could only move forward. I kissed the top of her head and promised Katniss that we would have each other, that someday life would be good again.
And it was.
I love her like crazy, and for some reason, Katniss loves me right back. As fond as I am of her scowl, I like her smiles even more, so I stopped asking why and just decided to believe her…to believe in us.
We married on a warm spring day, in a meadow covered with wildflowers.
After, I tripped over a gopher hole and Katniss tumbled down with me. She rolled into my side and kissed me as we laughed, hands still entwined. Our simple wedding clothes streaked with green grass and flower petals, our slightly drunk officiant, Haymitch, looking on with mild disdain.
It was a good day.
When we were settled into our lives, I finally made use of my hard-won degree as Katniss worked to finish hers. And in the quiet times, she encouraged me to use my gift to help others, neither of us knowing where we might be had Prim not been able to deliver the message that brought us together.
Working at Psychics of Panem can be difficult, it can also be rewarding and Haymitch is grateful for the company a few days a month.
Years later, our daughter arrives. Katniss’s final push brought her wrinkled and squalling into the world. Either the sound of her scream or the baby’s wail proved to be too much, and Prim was right, I dropped like a stone. Ending that day with a beautiful baby in my arms, a tired wife at my side and an ice pack attached to my head. It was slightly easier when our son made his appearance, the fears that had plagued us the first time around had eased, leaving only room for joy.
Prim is never far away. Cheerful primroses, lovingly planted by Katniss, line the window boxes of our home and the picture I painted featuring a blonde girl with a quirky smirk hangs proudly alongside the portraits of our children, our family.
This little snippet comes from the one-shot I’m writing for this year’s @everlarkficexchange.
Prompt 63: Katniss and Peeta are teachers. Their classrooms are across from each other so they eat lunch together everyday which leads to some of their students shipping them. Whether they actually get together or not is up to you.
Thank you, @ra3lynn3 for inspiring me this year!
@peetaspikelets Thank you for bringing Six Sentence Sundays back, we really needed them.
I don’t have a name for this yet, and I’m still trying to figure a few things out, but I hope you like what I’ve got so far.
XXXXX
Eating the last of her sandwich, Clove stated, “I have a good feeling about this.”
“About what?” Rue asked.
Clove jutted her chin out towards the teachers’ lounge “About them.” Two pairs of wide eyes settled on her. The surprise and confusion on her friends’ faces made her smile. “Well, look at them, they’re perfect for each other!”
Frowning, Cashmere looked back and forth between her friend and the two teachers who now seemed to be deep in conversation. “How so?”
“Well, they’re roughly the same age,” Clove began, using her fingers to keep track of her thoughts. “They’re both single, and kind of cool, and… I don’t know! They just… They look good together. Don’t you think?”
Silence settled over the group as the three girls watched the teachers interact.
Miss Everdeen was laughing at something Mr. Mellark had just said. Her cheeks had turned a pretty shade of pink, and she was toying with the tip of her long, dark braid once more. The movement slow and relaxed, not anxious like before.
Their food lay virtually untouched on the table in front of them.
Neither one of the girls had much experience when it came to love. They were only 14, after all. But they had seen enough romantic comedies to recognize a spark when they saw one.
Cashmere crossed her arms in front of her chest and sighed, dramatically dropping her chin to rest on her chest. “Yeah, alright, you may be on to something there.”
Prompt 52: Submitted by @567inpanem. “I know what you want. You have money, but what I have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a dream come true for people like you.“ Sexually frustrated trophy wife Katniss commissions artist Peeta who immortalizes naked women after giving them the greatest O of their lives.
RATED E
WARNINGS: Contains explicit sexual content, dubious consent, incest (step-relation incest), age gap, implied underage, explicit language, suicidal thoughts, canon typical violence, shades of dark!Peeta (but really not that bad, some of you will probably laugh at my idea of dark-ish!Peeta), my brain wouldn’t let this go so here we go, all aboard on another crazy ride.
Length: A little over 10,000 words
A/N: While this may have taken a complete turn away from the original prompt, the basic elements are still there. That made better sense in my head. Hopefully it will make sense to you too by the end of the story and you are able to enjoy anyways! A thousand thanks to @stjohn27and @savvylark for pre-reading.
Her father died when she was seventeen. Her mother followed ten months later, on Katniss’ eighteenth birthday. They would starve or worse if Katniss didn’t begin working immediately. A future awaited her in the mines, they insisted.
A future that had killed her father. Drove her mother into despair and their entire family to the brink of desperation. And Katniss couldn’t stand the thought of spending almost every day of her life trapped underground where her father had died.
There were options, of course. A visit to one of the more lonely Peacekeepers guaranteed a handful of extra coins that she could stretch for a month, if Leevy Thompson’s information was reliable. She could hunt and feed her family that way, but hunting full time would look too suspicious. Bring too much attention to the way she flagrantly ignored the laws of Panem.
Katniss was looking for something more stable. More permanent. Prim was only twelve. She had seven Reapings in her future.
She knew that he wanted her. Knew it in the way his cold blue eyes followed her across the town square. Found her after every Reaping she survived. She knew it because he never looked away in shame when she caught him looking. Not even when she was thirteen and still figuring out how to deal with the breasts slowly emerging on her chest or the warm tingling sensation between her thighs late at night or when she’d catch a glimpse of the wrestling team at practice. She knew he wanted her because sometimes when he watched her, he licked his lips as if preparing to devour a feast. His fingers brushed absently over the front of his trousers.
It made her feel itchy and small the way he looked at her, because she knew she couldn’t ask him to stop. He was the mayor after all, and could have anything he wanted.
She could have married Gale instead. He was strong and a skilled hunter. A good partner she worked well with. But he wanted children one day and already had five other mouths to help feed. Their life together would have been a constant struggle.
So the day after she turned eighteen, Katniss put on her best blue dress, walked Prim to school, and instead of attending classes herself, she knocked on the imposing front door of the mayor’s mansion.
“I’d like to speak with Mayor Mellark.”
The maid who answered scoffed and made to close the door in her face.
“Who is it, Gaia?” His voice rang out clear and commanding as it did every Reaping Day when he delivered the speeches touting the Capitol. The same as it did before public punishments. Whippings and beatings and hangings, all of which he oversaw with a satisfied smile and ended with a clap of his hand on Head Peacekeeper Thread’s shoulder for a job well done.
She hated his voice. It made her shudder.
But today it gave her a slim chance at a future for Prim. The maid opened the door wider so the mayor could see her and she tried not to vomit in the perfectly pruned shrubs outside his mansion when he smiled at her.
“Come inside,” he offered the invitation with a wave of his hand.
Gale tried to persuade her not to do it. The second the announcement was made, half the Seam turned their backs on her. She had sold herself into the good graces of the one person they hated almost as much as they hated President Snow.
But it didn’t matter, she told herself. Prim would be safe. He promised her that Prim would never see the inside of an arena. He arranged for Prim to move in with the apothecary and his wife. The couple had no children and were more forgiving of their niece than they had been of their sister. They would train her as a healer and apothecary, and Prim would never have to stay in the mayor’s mansion. Katniss would not be allowed to visit her. It would be…beneath her when the mayor’s wife could afford to be seen by real doctors.
Prim would be safe. Katniss chanted it over and over inside her head as she signed the papers in the Justice Building. Again as the mayor draped a strand of pearls around her throat.
“A wedding gift,” he said.
Over and over as she danced with him in the square. As she posed with him and his three sons for wedding pictures. The oldest son sneered at her, a hatred unlike anything she’d seen before in his eyes.
“Levi. Go get a punch for your mother,” the mayor said after the pictures. “She’s looking flush.”
“She’s not my mother,” Levi snarled but still went to fetch the punch. He was the same age as Katniss and the only one of the three boys old enough to remember their mother – the baker’s second daughter. She had been friends with Katniss’ mother before Lily ran away from town to marry a coal miner named Everdeen.
Rye, the middle son, vanished as soon as he smelled freedom from the posing and smiling of the pictures.
Only the youngest lingered or seemed to offer any sort of kindness to her, his blue eyes curious and questioning, but not malicious. He never knew his birth mother at all. She had died bringing Peeta into the world.
Katniss watched as her husband — the thought made her tense up to keep from showing a physical reaction — ruffled the boy’s curls and spoke with important officials. Peeta stepped away from his father as soon as the touch ended. He moved closer to Katniss.
All for Prim, she told herself all evening long. Through cake and dances and well wishes that no one meant.
At least Prim was safe, she told herself when the mayor led her into the most luxurious bedroom she’d ever seen and told her it was hers. All hers.
At least Prim was safe, Katniss told herself as the mayor then led her to the adjoining room and told her this one was his. Two bedrooms for two people, each room on its own larger than her family’s old house in the Seam. She fumed at the extravagance. But at least she wouldn’t have to actually spend the whole night, every night, with him.
Then he kissed her and bit her lip. Dragged off the brand new white wedding dress, ignoring the sounds of ripping silk as he discarded it and growled that he was going to tame her, make her his.
At least Prim was safe, she told herself as she stifled her cries of pain in the pillow while the mayor slammed into her. Once. Twice. Thrice.
“Fuck,” he said and pulled out. “Touch yourself.”
“What?” she asked, unable to keep from looking at him. His dick was hanging in a curve towards the floor and streaked with a pinkish fluid.
“You’re not wet. Touch yourself.”
She hesitated and he sighed. Disappeared into his private bathroom and she thought perhaps she was off the hook.
Then he returned with two bottles. Pills clanked in one and he tossed one of them back, still watching her as she lay there in shock. He slathered the contents of the second over his dick and started to talk. The things he said frightened her. The things he said he wanted to do to her.
He stroked himself hard and entered her again. A dozen thrusts and then he flipped her onto her stomach. She stared at the door and held onto the sheets as he pounded into her.
Slap slap slap
Each thrust punctuated with a grunt.
At least Prim was safe, she told herself as the bedroom door opened and a wide eyed boy wandered in.
Slap slap slap
The mayor didn’t notice his youngest son watching them, or at least he didn’t stop even if he did. Should she say something?
But then the mayor was shouting in release and the boy was gone.
“Clean yourself up and go to bed.”
She did as ordered and stared out the window. She had known this was part of the deal. At least Prim was safe.
At midnight, she was still awake and heard the blare of a train horn as it left or entered the station. She couldn’t tell. She hadn’t know they ran this late. The Seam too far from the station to hear the horns from there.
The day after she married the mayor, Katniss set about doing something. She needed to do something before she gave in to the urge to claw her own skin from her body. With just her allowance, she now had more money to spend in a month than she’d ever seen before. She took the assistant cook and one of the maids with her and they shopped in the stores in town, then in the Hob. Whispers followed her in her fancy shoes and pearl draped neck. They weren’t too proud to take her money, at least, even if they wouldn’t look her in the eye or they spat on the floor as she left.
She ignored their disdain and their dirty looks and left her companions with Sae for a bowl of stew and a crust of bread. The servants seemed intimidated but did as the mayor’s new wife asked. While they were occupied, she bought all kinds of things she didn’t know if she’d have a use for.
And one that she knew she would.
The liquid glittered in the vial as the grizzled Seam woman explained she’d need a syringe to inject it but it would last for six months at least. It cost most of her allowance, but Katniss handed over the exorbitant sum without hesitating.
“I’ll be back for another in six months,” Katniss promised the woman who gave her a toothy smile.
When she returned to the mansion, she dealt with her purchases and then moved to head upstairs. The door to the office flew open and out raced Peeta, cheeks red and tear stained as he collided with her then recoiled.
“Don’t touch me!”
“That is no way to speak to your mother, young man. Apologize this instant,” the mayor commanded and Peeta’s jaw clenched.
He stared at the carpet as he muttered. “I’m sorry, Mother.”
“Good. Get upstairs. We’re done talking about this. And none of that drawing nonsense!”
It was only after dinner when her hip still smarted from injecting herself with a Capitol grade birth control that she heard the servants whispering and learned what had happened.
“Another fist fight. And the teacher caught him drawing in class instead of taking notes. Again. Mayor Mellark is sending him away to school.”
They clucked their tongues and shook their heads, bemoaning the poor sweet boy for being cursed with such a wretched father.
“Dad, I don’t want to go,” Peeta said just days later, sounding scared and plaintive at the train station.
“You’ll go and you’ll succeed. The Capitol has the best schools available. And hopefully, they’ll teach you some discipline and respect. Make you into a real man. Don’t embarrass me.”
The boy’s lip quivered and he glanced over at Katniss. She should hate this boy for everything he stood for, but as tears welled up in his blue eyes, she succumbed and bent over in front of him to speak to him eye to eye.
“It won’t be that long. You’ll be home for the summer break,” she assured him, surprised when he threw his arms around her neck and squeezed the breath out of her.
Then he picked up his suitcase and went without another word.
Peeta was only gone a month before he came home. Quiet and studious. He spent most of his time in the garden, drawing. But not even the mayor’s sons were safe from the Reaping.
Katniss almost wished it was her, but it wasn’t. Nor was it Prim, and she breathed easy for the space of two minutes. It was the mayor’s middle son that year. He died in the shadow of the Cornucopia, the last victim of the bloodbath at the start of the 77th Hunger Games. He was only fourteen years old.
The day after the Victor was crowned dawned hot and muggy. The Mayor spent all morning sequestered in his office. Right before the mid day meal, he summoned Katniss to him.
She bit back her tears as the room rang out with the slapping of skin and his guttural grunts. She could see the back of a blonde head through the ivory curtains covering the windows. The desk dug a furrow into the front of her hips as he swore and then slapped her ass raw. Her soft whimpers of pain got him hard enough to finish.
When she tried to move away from him, his fingers bit into her hips, holding them together.
“You’re gonna give me another son. I want a Victor. Strong. A survivor like you. Not a milk sap weakling like that pussy out there.” She tried again to get free and he wrapped a hand around her neck to hold her in place. “Don’t move. I want my cum in you as long as possible. Don’t move, baby.”
She tried not to shudder as he whispered about how good a mother she already was to his son. How he wished she had married him sooner. Then maybe she would have had a chance to turn his youngest son into a real man, but he feared it was already too late for Peeta. He pet her back and held her down for almost half an hour. All while she could see that same son through the window, sitting in the gardens. Maybe she could have taught the middle son her illegal skills to help him survive the arena, the mayor growled. When he finally let her go, he told her to be ready to get fucked often.
Several weeks later, long after Peeta had gone back to the Capitol, the mayor stood mid chew from the dinner table and walked over to her. He grabbed her hand and placed it over his hardening dick.
“My cycle started this morning,” she told him. His face contorted in disgust but he dropped her hand and walked away, grabbing his plate and leaving her to eat in the dining room alone.
When her period ended, he fucked her three times a day. He burned through half a dozen bottles of pills from the Capitol to do it.
“It’s only been a few months. Took my first wife a close to a year to conceive each of our boys,” he said as sweat poured down his face and her fingernails dug into her thighs to hold her legs open like he ordered her to do. “Give. Me. A. Fucking. Victor.” He bit out the words as his thrusts stuttered and he came.
A whole year of submitting to him.
She found solace in what she could now that she was the mayor’s wife and her woods were forbidden to her. Most had looked the other way when she was just Katniss from the Seam, but she was pushing it now by frequenting the Hob. Katniss Mellark, Mayor Mellark’s wife had no place poaching in the Capitol’s woods.
Katniss gave away money as best she could and people slowly stopped sneering at her. She renewed her contraband birth control shot six months after her wedding. Prim blossomed under the tutelage of the apothecary. The mayor’s oldest son moved to District Five to begin a career working for the government there.
Peeta called home once a month and reported to Katniss in a monotone voice that classes were going well and no, he hadn’t been in any fights. The reports that came home from the teachers described a model student. Bright, caring, hard working, quiet and well behaved, well liked by all his peers. The mayor grunted in satisfaction whenever he read the reports.
Katniss didn’t get pregnant.
He could have anything he wanted, the mayor, but she refused to give him this. The mayor’s house grew more tense and quiet with each passing month. The servants gave her pitying looks every morning she gently lowered herself into her chair for breakfast. The cooks learned her favorite foods and made sure her plate was never without something she loved. She used her ample funds to make sure the servants and their families never wanted. But she was powerless to protect their children from the Reaping.
Every night, she listened for the midnight train leaving District Twelve, longing to just climb aboard and vanish into the night. But then what would happen to Prim?
One day in early May, Katniss came home from afternoon shopping to the sounds of fucking in her husband’s office. A shrill pitched series of moans and loud thumping. The averted gazes of the staff. She watched curiously from the stairs, looking down towards the office door as the woman left.
“Pass the salt please,” she said at dinner that night.
The mayor smashed his fists on the table and shouted that she could damn well get it herself. He left the room and flipped over a serving tray on his way out.
Everyone ignored the sounds of him swearing and grunting from the conservatory later. Ignored the gardner as she slipped out after the sounds ceased, ducking her head and wiping her mouth as she ran from the house.
The gardner had three daughters all of Reaping age. All pretty blonde girls. Katniss couldn’t fault the gardner for seeking extra security for them.
The door between her room and the mayor’s was locked that night and remained locked.
“He’s infertile,” Helena, one of the maids, whispered as Katniss knelt next to the woman and helped her clean up the shattered crystal decanter, the most recent victim of his rage. “He found out right before your one year anniversary.”
“How?” Katniss asked and the maid pursed her lips to shake her head as one of the butlers passed by them, examining his cufflinks and not bothering to help.
“Doctor told him it’s because the pills he takes to, you know…help him,” Helena told her when the butler had gone.
Katniss could feel her cheeks turn pink as she scrubbed harder to get the bourbon out of the carpet. The pills to make him stay hard.
“Apparently it does damage if you take too many.” Helena squeezed Katniss’ shoulder as she stood when they were done. The touch felt like understanding.
She’d never felt freer than she did in the next two weeks.
The mayor refused to touch her beyond superficial or ceremonial events. In public they smiled, the picture of a thriving Panem family. At home, she listened to the walls echo with the sounds of her husband fucking everyone but her. Desperate to prove he could get someone pregnant. She didn’t want to fuck him. But she didn’t want anyone else punished either.
Year after year dragged on. Children died to the Games, twenty-three at a time. The name Primrose Everdeen never called at a Reaping. Never attached to tesserae.
“There’s a summer program for those interested in politics,” Peeta announced on the phone, around the time he turned fourteen, sounding serious but his voice cracking on a few words. He cleared his throat and asked her to tell his father. “I’ll be home for the Reaping, but then I’ll return here.”
There was always a summer program in the Capitol. But he always came home for the Reaping and stayed until the end of the Games.
Katniss spent hours socializing with high placed District and Capitol officials. She played hostess to them all. The mayor fucked her once every blue moon, just to remind her that she belonged to him. He never stayed hard for long and told her it was because she was no longer tight.
“Your cunt is used the fuck up. Who you fucking on the sly? Huh? Who you fucking on the sly, bitch?”
“The baker,” she said because she knew he wouldn’t believe her if she told the mayor the truth. Told him that he was the only one who had used it. She didn’t want to fuck anyone.
“I’ll have him killed in the middle of the fucking square. What do you want for him? Hanging or firing squad?” He grew harder inside her as he said it and her stomach roiled at the evidence of violence working to arouse him.
“Go ahead. Take your pick,” she said as the mayor finally came.
“You think I won’t? You’re not fucking the baker. You’d be stupid if you were,” he panted over her neck and played with her hair. She shuddered in revulsion and he took it for desire. He stayed on top of her and swallowed one of his pills and when he was hard again, he stood up and shoved her to her knees. “Suck until I tell you to stop.”
The year Peeta and Primrose both turned sixteen, Katniss somehow wound up meeting him at the train station, stunned at how much he had changed in the past year. The boy with the quivering lip was long gone, replaced by a boy — almost a man — who waved at her and smiled warmly in greeting, whose gait was now a confident swagger. He already towered over her and dwarfed her in breadth.
Peeta didn’t really look anything like his father beyond the blonde hair and blue eyes. The shades weren’t even the same. She wondered if his features took after his mother. She hoped they did, but her mental picture of the mayor’s first wife had already hazed over with time.
Peeta’s deepened voice, almost like velvet – so much softer than his father’s – sent strange currents through her as he sat across the table from Katniss, calmly eating dinner and explaining new models of government being debated in the dorm halls at his school.
“That will never work,” the mayor insisted.
“But—“
“No foolish talk at dinner!” the mayor said and Peeta jumped when his father’s fist hit the table.
Katniss kept her eyes on her plate. After dinner, she went for a walk in the garden and ignored the screams from her husband’s window.
“My father’s an idiot.” Peeta’s voice startled her and she jumped this time, heart fluttering as he stepped from the shadows.
“What would you know?” Katniss asked harshly. “You’re still just a child.”
“I won’t be for much longer. And when I’m not, if I’m lucky enough to have a wife like you, I wouldn’t be making love with anyone but her. I’d want her screaming not to please me, but because I’m the only one who can please her.”
She stared at his mouth, the lush lines of his lips as he smiled.
“I’d find every way to make you come and then discover twenty more just because I’d want you completely satisfied.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that. I’m – I’m your –”
“You’re not my mother,” he said, but it wasn’t cruel like the way his oldest brother said it. It left her panties wet. “Good night, Katniss.”
The day of the Reaping, Peeta stood in the square with every other child at risk. She found herself wishing safety for him as well this year.
His name wasn’t called. Neither was Prim’s.
As the Tributes made their way towards the Capitol, Peeta swam in the pool behind the Mayor’s house. His legs and arms powerful as he cut through the water.
Katniss watched him from an upstairs window. Unable to get his words about her out of her head. It wasn’t right. He was too young. He didn’t know what he was talking about, she was sure. Bold words he surely uttered to make himself sound older than he really was rang in her head. Her breasts grew heavy and her thighs slick with arousal with each successive lap he swam. She pressed her palm against the wall and her breath fogged up the window. No one had ever satisfied her the way he claimed to want to. She couldn’t give in to the illicit promise in his words.
He was still a child. And she was married to his father.
She turned away from the window and avoided him the rest of the time he was home. The morning he left, she faked a headache.
Two more years rolled by and Katniss listened to the whispers. Traded at the back door of the mansion with anyone who brought wares she could concoct an excuse for needing. Gale was one of her best suppliers. The mayor of Twelve served wild grown berries and fresh game, wild turkey and squash grown in secret just beyond the fence. Fish from streams in the woods, apples from the trees behind the town square. Guests from the Capitol and other districts marveled at the wild bounty of such a poor district.
Katniss owned shoes for every occasion and dresses to match. She filled the mayor’s closet with clothes made by merchants, the fibers plucked in secret from the woods around Twelve by Seam hands. Homemade remedies for sickness, old glass containers painted and dusted with shimmering powders, and rough hewn sculptures she claimed were art filled their shelves. In a way they were art, a story of desperation and starvation carved into loose bits of scrap wood.
She bought secrets with each purchase. Whispers of discontent. She followed dinner conversation assiduously, seeking the clues of arms and Peacekeeper movements. Signs of unrest in other districts. She felt she might burst with the information, not knowing where to turn with it or what to do as it built up inside her. She read the mayor’s Capitol papers and watched the news feeds, dutifully giving him highlights and reserving her analysis for herself.
The summer after he turned eighteen, Peeta came home for his final Reaping. Dinners were stiff and formal, the mayor holding tight to his anger at his son as Peeta touted the theaters, the arts and the museums of the Capitol and how bringing some of that culture to Twelve could help the people.
“They do not need art. Art is a distraction from labor.”
“Or art could be a form of joy that gives the laborer hope.”
The mayor stood abruptly at this. “Watch your tongue, boy.”
Peeta’s eyes flicked over to Katniss and dropped to the table as a smile played around his handsome lips.
“My apologies, father. I only meant that such hope would give them a reason to work harder.”
She managed to avoid Peeta for two days until one night she found herself hungry and walked the dark hall towards the kitchens. She ran into him there and he offered to cook for her while she sat and they talked. Words flew between them as fast as his hands worked and she soon found herself laughing, enjoying this easy version of him.
He told her about school and his classmates. The districts he’d been to on holidays with their families or on school outings. The beauty to be found in their world, hidden beneath the ugliness. The potential for the world to be beautiful again. He didn’t say that exactly, but it’s the foolish hope she heard in her head as he talked. Maybe their world could be good again, but so much would have to change first.
She watched his clever fingers as we worked and ignored the tightening in her belly when he licked them clean with a sensual smack. He caught her looking and smiled. The midnight train horn echoed through the night.
“When he told me to watch my tongue, do you know what I was thinking?”
“Peeta,” she tried to warn but he persisted.
“I was thinking that I’d like to watch my tongue working in and out of your wet pussy.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she whispered.
“Then teach me,” he whispered back. Heat curled in her belly and her body craved.
She left without eating and lay in bed, tossing restlessly until morning.
The next day, she saw him in the garden, sketching again. He really was quite talented. The mayor grumbled at him over dinner for wasting time on useless frivolities when he could be courting a wife of high position in the Capitol, engaging in politics, working to improve Panem, or a hundred other more important things.
That night, Katniss tossed in bed, once more unable to sleep. She could finally stand it no more. She ambled down the hallway, thinking she’d take a bath to relax herself, but was too absorbed in her thoughts to notice the shaft of light under the door. She walked in without knocking and came to a halt, gasping at the sight that greeted her.
Alerted by the sound, Peeta turned in the glass walled shower to face her and a smile slowly curled his lips up. She swallowed and her hand flew to her neck as she watched him. She couldn’t look away. Couldn’t tear her eyes away from his body. Toned and muscular with water running over him. His hair hanging over his ears and eyes, straightened and lengthened with the weight of the water saturating the normally curly locks. Blonde curls scattered over his chest, a dark trail of them leading her gaze down. Down to where his hand worked his stiff shaft in a steady rhythm. His teeth parted on a heavy breath and his lashes fluttered and still she could not move or look away.
“Shut the door, Katniss,” he said, barely audible over the sound of the water. She did as he said and leaned back on it as their eyes met. His hand pumped faster and his unoccupied palm flattened on the glass separating them. Steam curled through the air and he moaned softly right before his cum splattered across the shower door. Thick, milky white streams of it.
They stood there as he continued to pump himself. Until the last spurt coated glass and his shoulders heaved. Then he smiled and, still holding his cock with one hand, trailed two fingers of the other through his own semen, gathering it on the pads and offering it up to her.
“Want a taste?”
Her hand grasped wildly for the knob and she fled. Fled to her room where she paced and tried to quench the fire burning in her belly. But it was no use.
Katniss laid down on her window seat, dropped her hand to her navel and caressed, thinking of his fingers and lips and his intense blue gaze. His fit body and his charm and what it might feel like to have his face and his tongue between her legs. Her fingers in his hair. Slowly, her fingers traveled down her body, down to tug up the hem of her nightdress, over quivering skin as her thighs dropped open and her breathing grew ragged.
She ached for him to touch her as she’d never ached before. It made no sense. He was a spoiled, entitled Capitol brat. She should hate him with every cell in her body. But she came with a few frantic swipes of her fingers and the idea of Peeta’s tongue between her folds. She came hard and curled into a ball as the spasms wracked her body.
It was only as she lay there in the afterglow of release that it occurred to her. All he said was to shut the door. She could have left and then closed it. But she had stayed.
She had stayed because she had wanted to witness his pleasure. She wanted to take pleasure in watching him.
The shame of what she had done kept her in her room for five days until she had to leave it for the Reaping.
Prim was safe. Safe for real at last.
When Peeta left for a fancier school in the Capitol, one of higher education, Katniss braved taking him to the train station. He smiled at her and hugged her close, whispering that she’d be in his thoughts while he was gone.
In the autumn, Prim married the shoemaker’s youngest son. He moved into the apothecary and began training with her to take over the business eventually. Katniss was not invited to the toasting. But at least Prim was safe. By spring, Prim was pregnant and Katniss knew she would stay with the mayor, if only to keep that child safe too.
The next time Peeta came home, he was twenty and sporting a line of stubble on his jaw, his normally impeccable suit recklessly disheveled. Top buttons undone, tie loosened and swinging free, sleeves pushed up and his shoes scuffed. A hard edge in his blue eyes.
She followed him when he snuck out at night, telling herself it was because she didn’t want him to get in trouble with his father. Even the mayor’s son was subject to curfew.
She expected a trip to the slag heap or a shack in the Seam, a clandestine tryst with a woman.
Instead she watched him lean against a pole of the fence surrounding the district and light a cigarette. Trees grew close to this section of fence and cast shadows obscuring her view. She almost missed the papers passed through the dead wires into a gloved hand.
She left after that as Peeta stayed to finish his cigarette. He came home smelling of cheap perfume and smoke, with his clothes even more disheveled, a shirt tail hanging out and a smear of makeup on the collar, his hair messed up.
She stood there as his father lectured him about propriety and breaking curfew, about setting the example for the district as the mayor’s son, but while the words seemed harsh, the tone was proud. And once again, Katniss didn’t miss the handoff. This time it was a box of prophylactics. Capitol grade protection given to the mayor’s youngest son with a cheeky smile and a dirty wink. A pride and relief that “maybe he is just like his old man.”
Peeta entertained at dinners, making all the overprimped visitors laugh loudly and talk longer. Katniss held back a scowl at how easily he got them to open up, how deftly he flirted with both men and women alike. How easily he slid away with them to “show them the gardens.” But she guessed it was because Peeta was just like them.
Only he wasn’t.
Peeta treated everyone with kindness and respect. Dignity. From the diamond laced ladies of the Capitol to the lowest coal miner begging in the streets of District Twelve.
He snuck out at all hours and returned acting drunk or recently fucked, his footsteps loud and disruptive in the late night, but each time she followed him, all he did was walk along the District perimeter and smoke or disappear into The Hob well after the black market had closed down. Sometimes he wandered to the train station at night. She hid in the shadows and watched him laughing and conversing with the train workers, leaning against the back car and casually smoking a cigarette. Other nights, he played cards with Thread and some of the other Peacekeepers. She couldn’t stomach the sight of them laughing and talking boisterously.
And she couldn’t catch him with any women, try as she might. Or men. Not so much as one desperate Seam girl sucking his dick for a meal. There were the Capitol visitors who returned from the gardens flushed and bright eyed, but Katniss could never quite catch him in the act.
Katniss needed to know what Peeta was doing. It was consuming her.
She watched as he left with his father one day, carrying baggage and headed to the train station. The mayor had business in the Capitol and asked his son to see him off. He’d be gone for two weeks, and Peeta for at least an hour, giving Katniss plenty of time.
“I’ll take care of that, Meredith. I’ve got some energy I need to burn,” she told the maid and took the cleaning supplies from her hands. She ignored the profuse thanks as the woman hobbled away, her pregnant belly hindering her movements.
With a deep breath, Katniss entered Peeta’s room and set aside the supplies to quickly search his drawers. She grasped behind the furniture or up inside the drawers. Between the mattresses, she found half a dozen sketch books filled to the brim. Images of people from all walks of life, from the Districts, the Capitol, and everywhere in between. There were even some of her and the skill with which he captured every face took her breath away. Stunning landscapes and blindingly accurate portrayals of birds, animals, and plants. His father mocked him for his art, but Katniss wondered if he would if he knew how talented his son was.
In the bedside stand, she found nothing suspicious except an opened and half empty box of condoms. She dropped the box, scattering the foil wrapped packages as her gut squeezed in pain. Falling to her knees, Katniss gathered the items.
Her eyes flicked up as she tried to stand and she froze. Slid a hand beneath the bed and discovered a slit cut into the bottom. Reaching her hand inside, her fingers lit on an envelope. Her heart hammered in anticipation as she slid it loose. Leaving the condoms scattered, she stood and opened the envelope. Palms sweating as her eyes scanned the contents and her brain tried to deny what they meant.
“What are you doing searching my room?” His whispered words made her jump and spin. His fingers closed around her wrist and she stared up at him, struggling to gain her freedom. Peeta’s grip on her tightened, became almost painful. He smiled at her and her pulse fluttered, her skin vibrating beneath his hold.
“Let me go.”
“I can’t,” he said and the wavering note of desperation in his voice called to her.
Katniss did the only thing she could think of in the moment. She rose on her toes and pressed her mouth to his. His lips went pliant in seconds. Her fingers wove through his curly hair to grab hold of something steady as her entire world disintegrated.
Peeta was a rebel. A spy. A traitor.
As the pieces clicked into place, she fell back on his bed, dropping the damning evidence and taking him down with her as he moaned around her tongue and discovered her mouth with his. Her greedy hands searched under his clothes for skin. And her nails scraped over it when she found it.
“Do I have to fuck you into silence?” he whispered into her neck.
“Peeta, we can’t,” she whined, and yet her hands still grasped at the fastenings of his trousers.
“I locked the door. He’ll never know.”
They shed their clothes down to their underwear then he knelt on the floor and tugged her ankles until she was splayed before him, legs dangling over the edge of his bed.
“Fuck I can’t wait to taste you, Katniss. I’ll bet you’re delicious. Forbidden fruit always is.” She grabbed hold of his duvet and stared up at the carved and gilded ceiling, her breath raspy as his touch grazed her over her panties. “Soak these panties for me. Soak them with your need. Look at me while I touch you.”
Katniss lifted her head and their eyes locked together as his fingers stroked and pressed and his lips whispered kisses and words of longing and need to her thighs. She moaned and he shushed her. There were still servants in the house, after all.
When her panties were good and soaked, he slid them from her body and she tore off her bra, fondling her own breasts for him and pinching her nipples as heat settled firmly between her thighs.
“You are magnificent. You should be worshiped by someone who can appreciate how incredible you are,” he murmured and shoved her panties in his bedside drawer then shucked his own underwear. Katniss bit her lip to keep from groaning at his cock. Straight and thick, impossibly hard and embraced with coarse golden curls.
She wanted his cock but instead she got his mouth. He knelt again and inhaled deeply the fragrance of her arousal before latching his lips to hers, his blue eyes focused on hers, daring her to deny that she wanted this. That she needed him. She squirmed at first, a stranger to the sensations of a mouth there, but his wriggling tongue and insistent fingers soon had her writhing desperately against him. Then coming and pinching back a scream of relief.
“I’m gonna make you come like this again, Katniss,” he promised and draped her limp legs over his shoulders. “I’m gonna make you come like this until dinner.”
Peeta refused to relent. Refused to let her go. Making her come with his tongue pressed to her clit, inside her lips, then again on her clit with his finger slicked in lube and teasing her ass.
He did things to her she’d never dreamt possible and made her both curse and praise his Capitol education. As the sun sank lower, he finally stood and smiled down at her.
“Stay there. Please,” he said and with two dozen harsh strokes of his cock, he came all over her belly. When he was done, he gazed at her in wonder and gasped out two words. “A masterpiece.”
She lay there, soaked in sweat and his seed, her breathing harsh and her body exhausted yet still needy for more. She bit back disappointment as he put his shorts on and offered her bra to her.
Instead of taking it, she swirled her fingers through his cum and sucked it down her throat. His jaw dropped and she shrugged. “I wanted a taste.”
“Fuck,” he whispered and she stood, taking his undershirt from his hands and using it to clean herself. Then she dressed and slid out the door to go take a shower, hoping he couldn’t see the way her legs wobbled with weakness.
They didn’t speak during dinner. Not a word. But when he snuck out to the train station that night, she followed him. She watched him lean against the caboose and smoke a cigarette as he talked to the crews. When he finished that one, he lit his second and asked the crew about a new sign. They all looked in the direction he pointed, but Katniss watched him. Saw him affix something beneath the rear platform of the train car.
He waved good night shortly after and crushed his cigarette out as he left the train station. She cornered him and pushed him into the shadows.
“You’re a rebel spy,” she whispered and he grinned then turned on her so that his body shielded her from view, trapped her against the wall. Trapped her right where she wanted to be.
“And you’ve seen too much. How can I persuade you to keep this pretty mouth quiet?” He trailed his thumb over her bottom lip as he spoke.
“Kiss me,” she said and met him as his mouth descended towards hers. Their teeth clashed and pain radiated through her skull at the contact, but she refused to stop.
She wanted him. She wanted him for herself and since she’d turned eighteen and married the mayor, she had nothing she could call her own.
She wanted Peeta to be hers.
Her hands pushed at his jacket. He pulled her legs up and around his waist, pressed himself into her groin so she could feel his erection on her clit. He rocked his hips and swallowed her moans as they kissed. Then his lips trailed forbidden fire down her throat.
“Fuck me, Peeta. Fuck me hard and deep. Oh fuck I need you to fuck me right here,” she whispered as his hand ran up her thigh, up beneath her dress to the apex of her thighs. She twisted and thrust herself towards his fingers, desperate to have his touch on her aching nub.
“You want me to use my fingers or my cock?”
“Oh! Both,” she gasped and clung to him as his fingers entered her. One finger and then a second as she whined and bit into his shoulder.
“Fuck yourself on my fingers,” he urged and she rocked her hips, caught his thumb on her clit and cried out. He kissed her to silence her and then the train engine fired up, the loud noise covering the sounds she made as she came. And then their relieved moans as he entered her.
The second she felt his coarse hair on her lips, she moved. Rolling and rocking and unwilling to give an inch as he drove into her and she sang quiet praises at how well he filled her. How much he pleased her. He fucked her as the train warmed up. As the wheels squealed when it began to move. Her body arched and bounced and then sprang loose. She clung to his shoulders as her release rocked through her and coaxed his out of him too.
“Fuck, Katniss. I can’t stop wanting you,” he moaned in the dark. Right before the midnight train blared it’s horn.
They had two weeks. Two weeks of fucking in the closets, behind the Hob, in the middle of the night when the rest of the household was fast asleep. Katniss even risked taking Peeta into the woods so she could fuck him by the shores of the lake where she often fished as a girl. But it wasn’t all fucking.
She told him everything. About watching Prim grow from a distance and not being able to be a part of that. She told him about missing her sister and the longing she felt for her woods every day that she breathed. The desire she kept in her heart to watch their world burn so she could finally be free.
She told him everything. All the pent up knowledge of years of hunting with her father, how to survive in the woods. She spilled out years worth of gossip. Who was loyal to the Capitol and who was lukewarm, and those who were too eagerly loyal to not be hiding something.
They entertained together in his father’s absence and people remarked what a fine young man and model son he turned out to be, a line she taunted him with when she was grinding her pussy on his face later that night. He responded by throwing her off of him and then pounding her to a mind numbing orgasm with his cock buried inside her lips and his hand over her mouth to stop her ecstatic squeals from getting too loud.
“I’m a terrible son,” he whispered in her ear, his breath hot and his voice soft as she came.
He spoke about his brother who died in the games and the blows his father would strike his sons to discipline them, always on the back where no one could see beneath the fine clothes. He told her about the many faces he wore. The masks used to extract information and secrets. The mayor’s playboy wastrel youngest son with a talent for art and politics but no real ambition. Skilled at seduction and kissing secrets out of bored Capitol socialite wives. Women who needed a good fuck and an incredible orgasm and couldn’t find it in their marriage bed. Women who posed for him so he could draw them, after he’d made them come.
“As a souvenir for them to remember me by,” he explained with disgust in his voice. Then he told her it all started with his classmates’ mothers.
“Seduce me. Show me your best moves,” Katniss teased and he chuckled.
“Thought I already did.”
But he kissed her and reached for the pearl necklace she’d discarded on the bedside table when she’d shed her clothes. Peeta told her to get on her knees and she did so, eager to suck his cock, something she’d discovered she could take great pleasure in as long as it was Peeta’s dick in her mouth. Instead, he knelt behind her and threaded the pearl strand between her thighs. He slid the pearls over her panties, back and forth, the ridges created by the string of orbs catching on her clit. He did that and whispered to her about her spirit and her strength and how she inspired him. He whispered that she was his everything.
He teased her to the brink with the pearls and his words until she was so wet her panties stuck between her folds and her nails bit crescents into his thighs as she held him in place behind her.
“Now fuck me. Take me how you want me,” he told her and held the pearls in place as she lowered herself onto his cock so they rubbed over her clit and slid between her folds as she rode him and came with stifled moans, making the pearls slick with their sex. After, they lay in his bed as late into the night as they dared, listening to the midnight train leaving.
The mayor returned. Katniss rebuffed all of Peeta’s veiled advances and innuendos, constrained by the presence of his father. Peeta grew sullen. Her heart ached. Burst with pain, deprived of his touch. She wore the pearls every day and fingered them to seek strength.
The masks suffocated and chafed, but they continued the ruse. Peeta snuck out at night to send messages and information off to contacts in other Districts. They played their parts, entertaining their guests and gleaning every whisper of rumor and every drop of truth they possibly could.
The entire happy family took a holiday tour of the Arenas and Katniss tried not to show her disgust.
Then to the Capitol where she saw in blinding oversaturated hues just how deep the Game went. She saw it in a mirrored window as Peeta whispered into another woman’s ear, his words making the woman blush and giggle. Then they disappeared for hours. Bile rose in her throat when he joined her for breakfast the next morning.
“You were out late last night,” she sneered and the mayor laughed, commented on his son’s prowess with the ladies and Katniss’ overprotective motherly instincts. Peeta smirked at his father and slathered butter over his biscuit. But there was a brief look of pain in his eyes meant only for Katniss.
On the train back to District Twelve, she felt the walls closing in on her. Near midnight, she capitulated sleep and, checking the corridors, made her way to Peeta’s compartment, locking the door behind her. She slid a hand over his mouth to keep him from making a sound and woke him with a whisper. His body jolted and a knife glittered in the moonlight. He stopped himself right as the blade reached her throat. It nicked the pearls still draped around her neck and never reached her skin.
He dropped the blade and she dropped her hand.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
They whispered the words to each other on repeat as their bodies rocked with the motion of the train and the clanging bells as they raced through an unknown district covered the sounds they made as they both succumbed to euphoria.
“I fucking hate this,” she whispered as she lay on top of him, spent but unwilling to leave just yet and knowing that she must.
“Only a little longer and then we’ll be free.”
She slipped away in the early morning and cried into her pillow until she needed to rise and dress.
“It’s disgusting. What do they hope to gain?” the mayor said to his son as they shared a drink and watched the news reports from the Capitol. Rebels had taken control of Districts Eleven, Four, Eight, and Seven. Additional Peacekeepers were on their way to all other Districts. All officials were on alert to capture spies. Katniss watched from the doorway as Peeta brushed off his father’s concerns, placated him with assurances that the might of the Capitol would overcome. This was only a minor setback.
Fire danced on the screen, mesmerizing her. Hypnotizing and beautiful. This was how the world looked when it was burning.
The pair was so engrossed with their conversation, they didn’t notice Katniss in the doorway behind them. Or the change to a report on wanted spies and traitors. A technology genius and former Victor from District Three who had vanished. A pair of stylists from the Capitol and the famed film director, Cressida.
They were still absorbed as the screen switched to a grainy, shadowy picture of a man in a train station, identified only as The JabberJay, a suspected spy and rebel conspirator from the Capitol, real identity unknown. A breathtaking sum offered for any information that would lead to the man’s capture.
She held her breath until the picture changed. Her knees wobbled in relief that the mayor hadn’t even noticed his son’s back pictured on the television.
“You need to be more careful,” she urged at the back door as he slipped out into the night.
“I’ll be fine,” Peeta said with a smile and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be back before midnight.”
She couldn’t sleep. She paced and then wandered to the kitchen for a glass of milk. It tasted sour on her tongue as she waited. She sat by the window in her room and let her head rest on the glass as the midnight train blared it’s horn and still no sign of Peeta.
Katniss contemplated her options. She had no idea where to start looking for him. She’d put herself at risk if she just wandered the district aimlessly. And if she found him, she could put him in even more danger than he already was. It was better to wait and trust that he could take care of himself. He’d been a spy for years and knew what he was doing.
She woke stiff and unrested, and she stumbled from the window seat, downstairs to a household in uproar. The mayor shouting instructions to have the District turned upside down. His youngest son had disappeared.
That night, the mayor told Katniss to dress in her pearls and pretend nothing had happened.
“You tell everyone that Peeta went back to school early,” he growled and she nodded as she sat at her vanity to apply her makeup. She understood the game. She nearly gagged when he placed a hand around her throat to force her to look at him in the mirror. “My son is not a traitor…understood?”
She swallowed beneath his grip, her skin pushing into his and her windpipe constricting under the hold. “Our son is not a traitor,” she croaked.
“Good girl,” the mayor said and released his hold.
For weeks, she played the game. She knew the rules now since Peeta had told her everything he did. She walked late into the night delivering the packets Peeta used to. At first, she had no way of knowing if they fell into the right hands. But she smiled at dinners and fabricated stories about Peeta’s education in the Capitol, oozing charm and loving happiness for her husband.
She paid visits to Thread and the Peacekeepers under the guise of concern for her missing stepson and the future of Panem, but really to gain their trust through gifts of food and drink in a well crafted helpless rich wife act. There was no word or sign of Peeta but her visits were never fruitless.
At night, she listened for the sounds of the midnight train and held onto her memories, once more wishing she could just climb aboard one and vanish into the night.
But she had a new purpose now.
Months passed and she grew angry in secret. He left her here. If they’d caught him, they would have paraded him in front of a crowd and executed him publicly, gruesomely. Made an example of him. Which meant he’d left her. Peeta left her here to suffer and probably to die. At least, she would die on the inside without him.
Winter arrived and she contemplated ways to end her life. She had no one left. Peeta had lied to her and then left her. Used her. She was certain of it. He had seduced her and used her for the information she could provide. Worst of all, she had fallen willingly into his arms, had believed it was all real. Just like one of his Capitol lovers.
They lost District Six and then Ten to the rebels. Nine and Five were tenuous at best. Thirteen came out of the shadows and Katniss wondered if theirs were the hands reaching through the fences to grasp hold of the information she and Peeta had possessed.
Winter turned to spring.
Or maybe Peeta had been killed in quiet. Maybe Snow couldn’t risk such a high profile, publicly known traitor. The son of Twelve’s mayor, a favorite of Snow’s, a man who could have had everything and anything he wanted. Who else might begin to question the Capitol if he had betrayed them?
She had kept her shot to prevent pregnancy current for eight years, but in that moment of weakness, for the first time ever, she briefly wished it would have failed her. Just once. Then she’d at least have a piece of Peeta to love. The moment passed and she remembered that she couldn’t bear to bring a child into this life. Not even Peeta’s.
Katniss sank into her bath water and cried with her face hidden beneath the scented bubbles. It would be better if he were already dead. So she told herself that he was gone forever. At least he was free that way.
The longer Peeta stayed missing, and the worse things became for Twelve, the easier it became to convince herself. The mayor was angry enough in public for both of them. Punishments increased as the mayor desperately tried to hold onto Snow’s favor, and Katniss took more risks with what she revealed to the rebels.
She shook her head and agreed with the mayor’s disgust at the reports of assassinations, sabotage, derailed trains carrying Peacekeepers or supplies, many of which Katniss knew were at least partially her fault.
Her fault.
The words made her smile in secret. At night when she touched herself and bit back cries of Peeta’s name. He had left her, either by design or by death, but she still wanted him. She could understand him now. Even though he was gone.
Reports of new spies appeared on the news feed. They called her The Mockingjay and wherever her information aided the rebels, they painted the bird they named her for in red. As the months dragged on, the Capitol bled fear, the stench of it replacing all their honeyed perfumes. They whispered her name – The Mockingjay – over dinners, clutching their jewels and bemoaning what would be lost next.
Feeling the noose tightening, the mayor begged his friends in the Capitol to shelter him, just until this little rebellion was quelled. But fear is a powerful weapon, as is rumor. And everyone knew that Twelve’s mayor was close to being replaced. No one had space for him and his wife.
The year Peeta would have turned twenty-one, there would be no Reaping. The night before it was scheduled to occur, the mayor’s wife paid a visit to the main power substation and left two baskets of treats with the Peacekeepers guarding it. The baskets contained four bottles of cold beer laced with sleep syrup. Enough to knock them out for an hour. On her way out, she dropped an apple packed with explosives and a timing device. Dropped it at just the right spot to roll where she needed it to go.
Gale had helped her build it, his eyes dark and suspicious when she’d asked for it. She couldn’t tell him what it was for. She couldn’t put her old friend at risk if it failed.
She had sent word to the rebels weeks ago. Telling them in code what their window would be. Now it was up to them to take advantage.
When she was done, she went home to soak in her tub. Afterwards, she put on her pearls and satin robe over her nightdress. She braided her hair and waited.
District Twelve burned that night. Rebels swarmed over the deactivated fences and gunned down Peacekeepers in the streets. Screams rent the night.
The mayor barricaded himself in his mansion with his wife, holding several of the maids hostage at gunpoint. It wasn’t enough. Rebels and Seam and Merchant alike overpowered him and forced him to his knees on the front steps. They dragged Katniss out the door behind him, kicking and screaming. Fighting for her life. Putting on a good show because in reality, she welcomed death by now.
As someone held a gun to her bent head, she reached up and twisted the pearls around her fingers so the last thing that went through her brain before the bullet would be thoughts of Peeta.
“Stop!” Katniss risked looking up at the rebel in all black as he approached the steps, a familiar swagger to his gait. Her pulse stopped in disbelief. “Not her.”
“She’s the mayor’s wife.”
“No. She’s The Mockingjay.”
Katniss heard the mayor yelling obscenities at both of them as Peeta stepped into the light and smiled at her. She didn’t see the mayor struggling against his captors as he tried to get to her, her eyes too busy taking in Peeta – healthy and whole and alive and safe. Here, with her.
She heard the crack of the rifle butt on the mayor’s skull as Peeta ordered the rebels to let her go. She barreled down the steps and flew into Peeta’s arms, barely flinching when the rebels lodged a bullet in the mayor’s skull, silencing his furious tirade.
“You’re alive. You’re back,” she sobbed and he bent his head so that his lips just touched her neck, right above the pearls, and warmth spread through her. It felt so impossibly good to be in his arms again.
“I’m sorry I stayed out so late,” he whispered and she laughed as the rebels torched the mansion behind them, the flames crackling high into the midnight sky.
[Promt 88]:I love soulmates fics ! Anything with Everlark being soulmates and finding each other -finally :) thank you ! - anonymous
Written By: Mega-AuLover
A/N: this monstrosity you can thank @xerxia31 for. There were several Soulmate Prompts and the one I wanted was taken by another author, whom I personally stalk, but she was talking about a wedding and I thought a wedding no…soulless mindless Zombies..I think I made tea come out of Xerxia’s nose :) but seriously thank you for saving the life of this story. To my beta who I have a serious writers crush on @alliswell21 you and I both know how much awe I am in over your writing skillzzz.
Rated: T
PART ONE - ZERO HOUR:
They were known as the living dead. Zombies created by the Capitol who didn’t find their true love. Katniss Everdeen watched one of them from her window, walking slowly, a mask of indifference on its colorless face. He was followed by Darius, one of the nicer Peacekeepers.
She glanced down at her arm, the cause of such a creature, was the tracker embedded under the tattoo they had to get printed on their arm. It was a control measure put in by the Capitol after the war.
At the age of twelve, all children received a tattoo with their initials and age. It was the first step to show the ever presence and dominance of the Capitol. At 18, they were brought to the school yard to be outfitted with their trackers.
The tracker remained silent until they met their soulmate. When you met your soulmate, the tracker would glow showing their initials for exactly 8 hours, in which you had to connect with your mate and register with the local magistrate.
The magistrate were the only ones with the authority to remove the tracker.
If you missed the 8 hour window, the kill switch would activate. An electrical discharge was sent from the tracker directly to your brain, a sort of modern day lobotomy.
Everyone strived to find their life partner, afraid of becoming a poor soulless creature, just as her sister, Primrose, called them.
Primrose was right, the mateless walked the earth with no purpose other than to do the dangerous jobs the Capitol assigned them. They blew up the caverns in the mines, tested new machinery, the lucky few became slaves to a Capitolite or wealthy member of the society. They were kept far away from the regular folk and guarded by Peacekeepers.
“Hey Catnip,” Gale knocked on the window pane bringing her out of her thoughts.
Katniss smiled at her friend, hunting partner , and soon to be in-law. This morning both families were overjoyed about the nuptials She waved him inside. “Hey Gale.”
Gale was twenty six, tall and very good looking. There were rumors about his prowess in the bedroom, though she didn’t care much about the stories.
He entered the room, and filled it. He was a little over six feet tall, one of the tallest men in The Seam. “So Primrose finally got you to wear a dress.”
Katniss grimaced,”It’s like putting lipstick on a pig, Gale.”
Gale chuckled. “You should see my dad, he didn’t want to wear a suit, but you know my mom.”
Hazelle Hawthorne was a force to be reckoned with.
“Vick wanted me to give this to Prim.” Gale extended the package he held in his hand.
“Thanks,” she took the package from him. “I’m sure whatever Vick cooked up, Prim is going to love it.”
Everyone thought Katniss was going to be Gale’s soulmate, but it was never meant to be. Katniss was thankful that the odds were in her favor.
“I can’t believe my baby brother is getting hitched before me.”
When Vick turned eighteen the previous day, no one was surprised his tracker showed Prim’s initials. The entire Hawthorne clan came to the Everdeen home, to confirm Vick’s initials showed on Prim’s arm. Both families ran to the Seam magistrate to have the trackers deactivated and removed. Katniss had been so happy to see the darn devices removed from Prim and Vick’s arms.
Because they were from the Seam, they needed to fill out the wedding certificate at the Justice Building on the other side of the in the Merchant quarter.
“Me either. It’s insane that Prim’s all grown up.”
Gale laughed, “Yeah , Rory and I have been ribbing on Vick all day with the older woman bit. It’s just funny that even though Prim’s like two years older than him, she still manages to look younger.”
“You Hawthorne men look old, or have you forgotten that when we met in the woods, you were 14 but looked like you were 18. I mean right now you look like you can be someone’s grandfather. Now that we’re talking about it, you’ve looked like a grandpa since the day you turned 16.”
“Hardy, har, har,” Gale snickered, pointing to his tracker, it read 26. Gale had worn his tracker for the past 14 years. A constant reminder that the Capitol owned him.
“Well you can’t help it old man,” Katniss joked back.
“Old man? you’re practically an old lady yourself. How old are you? 24? that’s ancient by Seam standard’s.”
Gale was right, no one in the Seam waited this long. There was only two occasions where a person never found their soulmate.
“Maybe you and I are the new Goat Man and Ripper.”
“Well I do know my way around a distillery, and you do have a Goat.”
“Lady does not qualify as a goat, she’s more of a pet.”
“Remember when you bought Lady for Prim?”
“You mean with the money we got from the stag I got with my arrow, that you claimed you shot?” Katniss crossed her arms over her chest.
“I still say my arrow was the one that got him.”
“Gale you and I both know you’re no marksmith. You can’t shoot down a full grown bear standing 20 yards away.”
“Man those were great good old days.” Gale wistfully uttered, his days were now spent in the mines.
So much had changed since she was a child. She looked behind her to see the empty rocking chair. It reminded her of harder times.
According to many, becoming soulless was the worst fate someone in Panem could have. But Katniss had seen a different kid of desperation.
She had seen what happened to soulmate when their love was taken away. Her mother had found her soulmate in a man from District 12’s Seam side. Fate brought them together and for a long time they were happy, until he was taken away by illness.
“How is your dad feeling?”
“Good, if he could stay away from Haymitch and Ripper’s liquor. My maw says he drives her insane, he says she drives him to drink.”
“Your mom then says drive, what drive, we don’t even have a car.” They said together. It was an old joke between them.
Gale’s father had survived the great illness thanks to her mother. The Hawthorne’s were lucky. Many were not.
Katniss was eleven when the great epidemic filtered through District 12 and beyond. It affected the Seam the greatest especially those poor souls loveless creatures. When her father became infected, her mother, a healer, tried everything she knew to help save him but her father was too far gone. He died shortly after the diagnosis.
Her mother never fully recovered.
“Listen I’ve got to go. I’ll see you in less than twenty minutes. Who knew someday you’d be my sister.”
Katniss shook her head, “I guess somethings are meant to be Gale.”
She closed the door and from her vantage point she watched him flirt with Mrs. Andrews. She was glad they were not a match, she and Gale were too alike. They were more like siblings then lovers.
Her mind swirled with images from the past. The constant hunger, the near death, the death of her father, and the loss of the care of her mother.
It became very clear no one cared about dying children, or the sick people of The Seam. The Capitol was more concerned with its own plans. They tightened security around the wall that was erected after the great rebellion was neutralized. The wall cut through the land separating the privileged and the poor. The vendors lived in the Merchant Quarters and the workers and the poor lived in the ghettos.
In District 12 they called it the Seam. In District 2 Darius a Peacekeeper said the ghetto was known as the Dungeon.
“Katniss.”
Hearing her sisters words brought Katniss out of her thoughts. She turned around to see Prim dressed in white. “You look beautiful.”
“Never as pretty as you.”
“Oh here, Vick sent this to you.”
Prim blushed as she reached for the box. She opened it and gasped. “Bread! real bread for toasting!”
“Bread?” Katniss wondered where Vick had gotten it. There wasn’t a bakery in the Seam, it wasn’t allowed. But once a month. The Baker sold his goods outside of the gate door, but most of the time the bread was stale. Gale would trade with him, when they got a good haul. The last time she’d tasted fresh bread was when that boy had given her bread./
“It’s still warm Katniss,” Prim touched he bread reverently.
“Can I smell it, “ Katniss asked recalling smelling the scent of freshly baked bread. The smell of fresh crust and flaky interior had never left her.
“Sure, do you remember the last time we had fresh bread Katniss. It was a miracle. We were so hungry.”
Katniss recalled how empty their stomachs were on that hollow day.
Her last resort was to sneak into the Merchant side and rummage in trash cans for food. She found nothing and as she was giving up, a boy appeared by the window. He nodded at her then a few moments later a commotion from within the walls of the house.
She remembered hearing the painful cry of a child, before the door of the back yard opened. It had been the blond boy who’d seen her through the window. He had a welt on his face and his big blue eyes held unshed tears. But his chin didn’t tremble as he ran out and gave her two loaves of burnt bread.
Katniss had never been able to forget that boy. She’d never seen him again. However, no matter what the Capitol did to divide them, in her heart she could never forget that boy.
That single act of kindness gave her the strength to carry on. To remember her father’s generosity, his dexterity, and his abilities to hunt. Katniss looked down at her wrist, the glaring zeros poised to begin at any moment.
“It was a miracle, Prim. And today we have another one. Vick and the rest of the Hawthorne’s will be here at any moment. Why don’t you go get mother?”
“Don’t worry, Katniss, someday you’ll find your soulmate.”
Katniss hid her grimace. “Don’t worry about me little duck, today you’re going to sign the official paperwork, precisely at 1:00 in the afternoon and we’ll have a toasting afterwards.”
“I know! I’m so happy!” Her sister couldn’t contain her joy. She was as bright and as delicate as the yellow flowers she was named after.
“Katniss don’t forget your pass.”
“Don't’ worry. I will not forget.” Katniss put on the long sleeve jacket that went with the dress. Katniss was shorter than her mother so the sleeves reached the tip of her fingers, she didn’t mind, she was always cold. She was glad it had pockets.
PART TWO - RACE BEGINS:
Prim turned to their mother, “Isn’t it a great day for a wedding mom?”
Their mom slowly nodded. “Yes dear.”
It really was a breathtaking day, there wasn’t a rain cloud in the sky. It was warm, with a pleasant breeze. It was a the perfect day for a wedding.
“It’s really happening,” Prim squealed when she saw Vick arriving.
Tears gathered in her eyes, as she watched her sister take in Vick in his suit. He was handsome, as handsome as the rest of the Hawthornes. He was tall like his brother Gale, but his eyes were kinder. His smile softer, and unlike Gale who sported a beard and mustache, Vick always had a five o’clock shadow.
“You look amazing,” Vick softly said taking Primrose’s hands in his.
“Thank you for the bread.” She offered.
“Every bride should have fresh bread on her wedding day.”
“Okay, everyone time to get moving,” Hazelle, Gale’s mom interrupted the tender moment between Prim and Vick.
“Yeah some of us are hungry,” Rory shouted.
“When aren’t you hungry?” Gale muttered.
Katniss chuckled. She wondered how long Gale and Rory would go before one tried to hurt the other.
As they made their way through the Seam, many stepped outside to softly hum the bride’s song.
This was a special time in a young person’s life when the future seemed limitless.
Katniss was the curmudgeon trailing in the back with the full knowledge that life was filled with more hurt than good.
As they approached the wall, the streets became busier since it was the day the merchants sold their wares to the inhabitants of the Seam. Everywhere Katniss looked there were men, and she was filled with dread and panic as she saw two young people looking at their trackers as they time slowly ticked down.
The tracker would automatically start when she was near her mate. She took deep even breaths as she followed the wedding party.
When they arrived at the wall, the sun in the sky indicated it was noon. Katniss heard Rue’s song being of the giant clock-tower as it struck twelve. She’d never seen it but she heard it all of her life. On a cold winter’s day the bell could be hear in the Seam, it chimed on the hour.
They stood long in the long line waiting patiently to go up into the small wall border crossing outpost. They moved slowly until they reached where the gate was between the Merchant and the Seam. Katniss kept didn’t really look around but the smell of bread caught her attention.
The baker was at the wall, with a tall man with curly blond hair. They looked alike, Katniss assumed he was the baker’s son. He reminded her of the young boy who had given her the bread. When he looked in her direction, Katniss swiftly looked the other way.
“Peeta, please give the lady her bread,” his father admonished.
Katniss glanced at him once more when his attention was turned to the woman in front of him. He was broad shouldered, his arms were muscular, and his hands were large but they were careful enough to gently hand the woman her bread. His actions caused her to smile.
“Next,” the Peacekeeper called out.
“Come on Katniss,” Posey, Gale’s baby sister called.
Katniss joined the group as they were allowed in the building. Prim was ahead of them with Vick.
Her sister had her hand linked with Vick, as they spoke with the Peacekeeper. “State the nature of your visit.”
“We are getting married,” Vick’s deep voice boomed. “Our trackers were removed yesterday by the Seam Magistrate.”
The Peacekeeper checked their passes. “Congratulations on your nuptials, may the odds be in your favor.”
“Thank you,” Prim gushed.
One by one they went through the checkpoints. They were all in a festive mood as they entered past the checkpoints and headed toward the Justice Building. Katniss paused at the looming clocktower, it’s shadow cast the town square in darkness. When they arrived they discovered their appointment was set back a hour.
The small party waited in the lobby of the building waiting to be called to sign the paperwork. They had all of the time in the world.
“Only fifteen more minutes before we’re married,” Vick said quietly for Prim to hear, but Katniss overheard it.
Her sister gazed up at Vick and her pale blue eyes shined with happiness. Katniss swallowed as she recalled the harshness she had to experience. Their mother Lillian stood just feet away, a pale shadow of the woman she’d been.
Katniss shuddered the at the prospect of becoming someone like her mother. It was why she’d decided to not interact with men. She didn’t want to find her soul mate. Her mother Lillian, had slowly come back from her depression,but there were days she returned to the rocking chair.
In the beginning, her mother spent months in her rocking chair simply existing, without words, vacantly staring out into the void. Katniss barely got her to eat or bathe. At age eleven, Katniss had become an adult, taking on the responsibilities that were beyond her years. She tried, but with the illness no one opened their doors to orphaned children.
“Everdeen and Hawthorne,” a young woman called out with a clipboard.
“Yes?” Prim stood up.
“Thank you for your patience. As a reward, you’ve been selected to have a wedding ceremony by the Head Magistrate.”
Only a few received this honor. It was fitting that it should be Prim and Vick. “Thank you,” Prim whispered.
“This way, please.”
Everyone followed the woman into the Head Magistrate’s office.
The head magistrate was a woman with mile high pink hair and an outfit that had white doves all over it.
“Welcome, welcome.” The woman stood and she had the strangest shoes Katniss had ever seen. “I am Head Magistrate Effie Trinket.”
“A pleasure ma’am,” Vick nodded.
“Oh my, you are a tall one,” Effie said as she looked up at Vick. Her eyes scanned all four Hawthorne men. “You certain are a handsome lot.”
Gale grinned, and Katniss rolled her eyes.
“Are we ready for the ceremony?”
Prim eagerly nodded.
“Good you stand here my dear,” Effie instructed Prim and then turned her attention to Vick, “ and your beloved over here.”
All the attention was on Primrose and Vick as they solemnly stood before their families and the Head Magistrate.
“Dearly beloved we’ve come together to witness this woman, Primrose Everdeen join this man, Vick Hawthorne, in the sacred bond of marriage.” Addressing the groom and bride, she asked, “Are you ready to take the vows to uphold the laws of marriage as decreed in the statues of Panem?”
“We do,” Prim and Vic said united.
“Do you promise to keep the other in health and in sickness. To stand by the other in good times and harsh times?”
Katniss watched Gale’s parents exchange loving looks. Her mother turned pale. Katniss lowered her head and glanced down at her shoes, tucking her hands in her jacket’s pocket.
“We do,” Prim and Vick replied.
“The by the power vested in me, by our beloved President, Corilanius Snow, and the Country of Panem, I now pronounce you, husband and wife.” Effie Trinket joyfully exclaimed, “You may kiss the bride.!
Katniss looked away as Prim and Vick kissed.
“Now if you could please sign the certificate.”
Katniss watched as her sister wrote Primrose Everdeen for the last time. It was a bittersweet moment. She was losing her sister to someone else. Albeit it was to Vick, and he was moving in with them, but things were changing.
Maybe she should start thinking of it as gaining a brother, instead of losing his baby sister.
“Who are the two witnesses?” Effie Trinket asked.
Katniss stepped forward with Gale.
Gale signed first and handed the pen to her. Katniss took the pen, and pushed down her sleeves. Smiling she glanced up at her friends and family as she poised to sign her name. But everyone looked shocked and ashen. Katniss frowned.
Her first instinct was to search for Prim to make sure she was alright. Prim’s eyes were wide, her face pale. Her sister had clamped her hand over her mouth and was pointing to her arm. Katniss glanced down at herself, that’s when she noticed the timer on the tracker had begun it’s count down.
Everything in the room became still as it suddenly dawned on Katniss, her race had begun.
Prompt 45: I answered your oddly specific craigslist roommate ad as a joke and now we’re living together… [submitted by Anonymous]
Rating: E
Summary: Under duress, Katniss advertises for a new roommate. The first person to respond is practically perfect for what she wants. He’s also a total stranger.
__________________
“Good morning.”
I jump and spill coffee down my front. Sputtering and shooting daggers from my eyes, I turn and face the source of the deep voice that startled me out of my early morning funk.
“It was,” I say wryly, “until someone scared me, and I spilled coffee on my interview outfit. What are you doing up so early, anyway? I expected to have the kitchen to myself.”
“Baker hours,” he explains with a shrug. “When I was in high school, I used to help my dad get the dough prepared for the morning loaves.”
“Your dad’s a baker?” I’m reminded again how little I know about this man, Peeta Mellark, my new roommate.
“He was, yes,” he answers with downcast eyes and crosses to the coffee maker.
“Retired?”
“No,” he mumbles. “Dead.”
“Sorry,” I murmur, but he shrugs again.
“No way for you to know.” He motions to my stained shirt and says, “You should change. Don’t want to be late for your interview.”
I open my mouth to reply but snap it shut quickly. He’s right, this stranger who now shares my apartment. I need to go. I need this job, so I can’t afford to be late.
I rush to my room and frantically paw through my closet for something clean, unwrinkled, and at least somewhat professional. I grab a dark green shirt and tuck it into my black pencil skirt. Taking a quick glance in the mirror, I smooth down my thick braid and slip on my black flats. I have exactly two minutes to get out the door before I’m pushing it with traffic and other unexpected delays.
“Good luck,” he calls as I hurry through the rooms and head to the door.
I send a thank you over my shoulder but don’t stop. I barely know this guy, and I don’t have time to make small talk so I can spare his feelings when I have a job at stake. I’ll talk to him later, I think as I make a beeline to my car and drive to Panem Manufacturing for my meeting with Mr. Heavensbee.
“Please let me get this job,” I breathe. “Please, please, please. Let something go right today.”
****
Peeta slips through the front door later that night, so quietly I would have missed him if I hadn’t been curled up on the couch staring at the blank space right above the TV. I haven’t moved since the early afternoon when I returned home after my interview and immediately changed into flannel pajama pants and a faded gray sweatshirt my best friend gave me from his days as a college football walk-on.
I don’t say anything, and Peeta nods as he crosses to his room and closes the door. I’m not sure why I’m disappointed. I’m certainly not in the mood to talk to anybody after the reception I got from the head of sales at the factory. Even if I do get the job, it’s going to be tough to get excited about working with such grumpy employees who seem to care about nothing except a fat bottom line for the company.
I’ve barely finished the thought before Peeta rejoins me. He’s changed into threadbare jeans that cling to his powerful thighs and a soft navy t-shirt that makes his bright blue eyes even deeper than they already are.
“What are you watching?” he asks and picks up the remote to hit the info button.
“Nothing really,” I mumble. “Just have it on for sound. Feel free to change it.”
He plops down onto the cushions, only a couple of feet away, and glances over at me. “Any suggestions?”
“Whatever is fine,” I assure him. “I’m not really into too many shows.”
He flips through a few channels until he lands a local station. “News okay? I try to stay up on current events.”
“Fine.”
We sit in silence for a while as the anchor relates the day’s events with gravity laced with a touch of humor. On the first commercial break, he turns to me and asks, “How was the interview?”
I want to answer him, but the words stick in my throat. I’m probably not going to get the job, and months of unemployment stretch before me, taunting me until I feel like I’m going to vomit. When I don’t answer, he reaches over and puts his hand on my forearm and gives it a comforting squeeze.
My skin tingles when he pulls away, and I stare at him for a few moments before he turns back to the television. With his eyes facing forward, I study him carefully. He’s got a strong jaw that frames an attractive face with full lips, a slightly upturned nose, and startlingly blue eyes. His shoulders are solid atop a torso that would make most girls drool. His legs stretch out in front of him, and he crosses his feet at the ankle as he slouches on the couch. He seems to know exactly who he is, and I suddenly realize how insanely attractive he seems, this man who also lives inside my small apartment. It’s almost tiny with his muscular body crowding against mine.
He answered an ad I placed on Craigslist. That’s how he found me. My best friend Gale and I were drunk one night, and he teased me about both the empty bedroom in my place as well as my own vacant bed. He dared me to advertise for someone to share both but to put it in one notice. He didn’t think I could or would do it, but I woke the next morning to a splitting headache, enough regret for four lifetimes, and a voicemail message.
“Hi, Katniss,” it said. “My name’s Peeta. I’m new in town and saw your post online. I’m a guy, in case you couldn’t tell from my voice. I’m quiet and neat and am good at making beds. I can bake, which is what I’m guessing you meant by putting stuff in the oven, and I’m ready to move in right away. I’m starting a new job, and I haven’t had time to do anything more than check into a hotel. Temporary is fine, if you want to give this a trial run. Let me know when you can.”
Too embarrassed to explain anything, I returned his call immediately, and we’ve been living together for the past two weeks. He’s been true to his word so far. We’ve barely interacted, but now…
“Do you have to work tomorrow?” I ask suddenly, and he jumps slightly. I blush at the realization that my question was overly loud, but I stare at him until he shakes his head.
“No, I’m off tomorrow. Why?”
“Do you drink?”
He nods, and I bound from the couch to grab a couple of bottles of booze and some shot glasses from the kitchen. When I return to the living room, he shoots me a quizzical look, but I simply pour him some vodka and nudge it toward him.
“It’s been a shit day, and I could use some company,” I offer in explanation and throw back my head. I relish the burn of alcohol down my throat.
Three shots later, I’m feeling a lot more relaxed. Peeta’s tolerance is clearly higher than mine, but I don’t care. I’ve got a half-smile on my face, and I’m sure whatever I’m saying is fascinating. He nods along and mixes something for me that tastes a hell of a lot better than the vodka shots. I take the drink from him gratefully and let my fingers graze against his for longer than necessary. His eyes darken but otherwise acts like nothing happened.
I learn a lot about Peeta through the haze of alcohol. His job at the local newspaper as a photographer helps him fund his true love of art. He’s hoping to find a studio in town and get back to smearing paint on canvas as soon as possible. He’s from a small city several hours away and has two brothers whom he adores, a mother he hates, and a father who passed away from a massive heart attack a few years prior. He hasn’t dated in a while, and he admits with a sheepish grin that he’s a little bit frustrated with his social life.
“What about you?” Peeta asks and points his shot glass at me. “I’ve been talking for the past hour, and you’ve done nothing more than sit there and drink what I’ve given you.”
“And you’re very good at that,” I compliment him as I snuggle into the blanket that’s draped over my shoulders. “I haven’t been this relaxed in a looooooong time. Not since Gale and I…”
I trail off, and Peeta leans toward me. “Since you and Gale what? Gale’s that guy who was here the day I moved in?”
I nod, and he hands me another drink.
“We’re not together, you know,” I say firmly, but the effect is ruined when I hiccup.
“No?”
“Nope,” I insist and take another sip, hoping it will help me speak normally. “We’re best friends. Have been for years. Now that he’s a cop, he looks out for me. He ran your info before you moved in. I had to know you weren’t a serial killer or something.”
“Oh, good,” Peeta quips. “Seems like my juvenile records are still sealed then. He didn’t find the triple homicide conviction from when I was thirteen.”
Laughter bursts from me, and I admire the humor in his blue eyes. “You’re funny,” I tell him, and he smiles, pleased with himself.
“I try.”
“You’re very good-looking, too,” I add and clap a hand over my mouth.
“Thank you,” he answers, completely nonplussed. “So are you.”
“Noooooo… I’m not. I just look better with alcohol.”
“Well, I’ve had a lot of it,” Peeta reminds me, and I nod along with him.
We settle into a comfortable silence. The TV is set to a movie channel now, although neither of us are paying any attention to it. We’ve been too wrapped up in each other to care, and I suddenly have a craving for something a little more intimate.
“That t-shirt looks really good on you,” I tell him, and he rolls his head to the side to look at me under eyelashes that won’t quit. They’re incredibly long, so long they should tangle, but somehow, they don’t.
“It’s nothing special,” he drawls, and I fight the urge to reach over and run my hands across his chest.
“Looks pretty special to me.”
I’m slurring at this point. I know I’ve had too much to drink. I know I should stop, but the feeling of complete abandonment, total freedom to do and think and speak as I please, is as intoxicating as the liquor. Peeta doesn’t seem to mind, either, so I hand him my empty cup and watch as he fixes me another.
This time his fingers slide over mine as I take the drink from him. He stares at me as I raise the glass to my mouth and run my tongue along the lip. I swallow and watch as his eyes slide down my neck and down my body to the way my thighs stretch my flannel pants.
“You know that oven thing wasn’t exactly a request for a roommate who bakes,” I say.
“It seemed kind of odd,” he answers, and I laugh. The sound’s throaty and scratchy, and he shifts uncomfortably. I don’t miss him covering his crotch with a pillow and grin. Maybe I’m having some sort of effect on him.
“And yet you answered the ad.”
He nods slowly, and his eyes grow misty and unfocused. “Something told me to. I don’t know what it was, but I felt a pull when I read it, and now here we are.”
“Here we are.”
“Half-drunk and sprawled on a couch together.”
“In a mostly dark apartment.”
Our eyes lock for several seconds, and then things happen so quickly I can’t think. He scoots across the couch and catches my face in his hands. His lips find mine, and my mouth opens under his. He’s solid muscle under that cotton shirt, and I twist my fingers in the fabric, tugging and pulling as he kisses me so thoroughly my head spins. His breath is hot against my skin, and I struggle to hold in quiet moans at the feel of him against me.
“Katniss,” he groans against my neck, and I rake my fingernails up his back.
I don’t want to think. I don’t want to listen to the voice in the back of my mind telling me I’m being really stupid. I don’t want to be responsible or smart or cautious or anything that stops me from taking this man’s clothes off and running my hands over every inch of his warm, sculpted body.
Peeta’s not showing any signs of stopping. His mouth moves over my exposed skin, and his hands paw at my shirt. His palms burn against my bare back, and I arch into him.
“You smell amazing,” he murmurs as he runs his teeth along my collar bone. My skin pebbles, and he grunts as I shift underneath him and his hips bump against mine. I don’t hesitate to wrap my legs around him and thrust upward.
Our simultaneous moans sound like music, and he rocks against me. I respond in kind, and I kiss him as we dry hump like teenagers in a backseat. He’s hard, deliciously hard, and he’s found exactly the right spot that sends shivers of pleasure rocketing through me. I try to stay quiet, but, before long, I can’t stop the cries that gather in the back of my throat.
“Peeta,” I pant. “Fuck, this feels good.”
His response is to fumble at my waistband and slip his hand inside my pants. My back arches as he teases my entrance, and he holds my gaze as he slides his fingers into me.
“You like that?” he asks, his voice gruff.
I give up on remaining coherent and clamp my legs around his hand. I chase the heat coursing through me and urge him to keep going. He curls his fingers inside me, and I throw my head back and scream.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” I chant, the word becoming increasingly louder as he drives me to the edge. “Keep going. Keep going.”
He presses into my leg repeatedly, and I’d feel sorry for him if I wasn’t so caught up in my own haze of sexual tension. He’s hard as iron inside his jeans, but it’s his hand working magic between my legs.
“Ahhhh,” I wail as the string finally snaps after several minutes of frenzied torture. My walls contract around him, and he continues to pump and curl as I thrash and shake. My climax ebbs into waves of molten metal. My skin burns and my blood boils, and nothing feels better than what we just did together.
He’s trembling in my arms, and I realize it’s taking every ounce of his strength to hold back. I will my arms to move and tug his shirt over his head. His chest—oh my hell. It’s gorgeous, solid muscle and incredibly broad. I push him off me and frown at the way his fingers glisten from my arousal. He’s been remarkably generous to me, a practical stranger, and I want to return the favor. Not that it won’t be amazing for me too.
It takes a few minutes to extricate myself from him, and he doesn’t protest at all. He’s a gentleman, I realize, and that makes it even more gratifying to grab his hand and pull him down the hall after me to my bedroom.
He closes the door behind us and draws me into his arms. We kiss for several minutes, and then I pull back and stumble toward my bed. He’s rumpled, his hair askew, and his cock straining against his jeans. His chest heaves, and his eyes are dark and glow with desire.
“Come join me,” I offer, and he crosses the room quickly.
The next several minutes pass in a flurry. Our clothes fall to the floor, and he rips the foil packet I hand him from my bedside table. We exchange a mumbled conversation, and then he’s inside me, pumping and grinding so hard I have to bite my lip to keep from screaming.
Peeta’s so enthusiastic it’s hard not to be completely caught up in our coupling. He’s got incredible stamina for a guy in a dry patch, which allows him to shift into new positions every few minutes. If he wasn’t so smooth, it would be jarring, but we change from missionary to cowgirl to reverse cowgirl with almost no pause in pace or intensity. The man’s a master.
I’m bouncing on top of him, back arched, eyes closed, when he grips my hips roughly and slows his thrusts. I wish I could see his face, but I’m facing the other way. Instead of his closed eyes and parted lips, I study the way his feet scramble against the mattress and his thigh muscles bunch and contract as he pumps into me.
“Peeta?” I pant, but his name comes out as a question. I can’t think, and I’m trying not to. I just want to feel—him inside me, the way my blood sings in my veins, how alive I feel.
“I’m almost there,” he grunts. “I’m trying to wait, but I can’t much more.”
I chuckle in disbelief. He’s trying to hold off, to make this last longer, to make me feel better. I glance over my shoulder at him and pull his hand around to rub my clit. My fingers interlace with his, and we stroke together as he shouts and falls apart.
The world shatters around me when I climax, too. The feel of him pulsing inside me and the condom filling with his ejaculate. His thick fingers wrapped around my smaller ones and covered in moisture. His inability to remain quiet as his orgasm shoots from him. My abandon as I buck on him wildly. Too much. Everything. All I can comprehend is these random sensations. No coherent thoughts. Nothing but us and burning heat. I’m on fire.
Finally, I slump into a heap beside him, and he leaves me by myself for several minutes. I assume he’s cleaning up since I hear water running in the bathroom, but I’m too exhausted to do anything other than float on a cloud of post-coital joy and alcohol-induced stupor. I’m still drunk, and my limbs are heavy.
“You okay?” he asks softly, and I startle. I nod, and he crosses to the bed. “Can I help you up?”
My cheeks burn, and I wonder how awkward this is going to be in the coming days. I can feel his hesitation as he offers me his hand, and I take it and stagger to the bathroom. After several minutes, he knocks on the door.
“Katniss? Can I get you anything?”
“I’m fine,” I answer, choking with emotion. I splash water on my face and wrap a towel around myself. The thought of emerging from the bathroom and standing in front of him naked is too overwhelming.
His face is a mask of chagrined kindness when I finally emerge. He’s fully clothed, but his cheeks glow pink, and he can’t stop twisting his hands together. He’s trying hard to pretend he’s under control, but he’s failing. I can tell he’s uneasy.
“Uh, hi,” he mumbles awkwardly, and I grip my towel harder.
“We saw each other naked,” I blurt and immediately regret it. Peeta stares at me, unsure what to say, and my face burns with humiliation.
“You look good that way.”
“So do you,” I admit and duck my head to avoid his gaze. He extends my discarded clothes to me, and I turn my back on him to redress. He pretends not to watch, but I can see him in the mirror. He can’t stop himself from sneaking a few glances as I tug on my sleep pants and ratty sweatshirt. At least the gray material matches my eyes.
“Look,” he finally says when I’m redressed and facing him again, “this is awkward as hell, but I’m not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy every second of that. You’re sexy, Katniss, and you are amazing in bed. I’m not a prude. I’m a grown man who’s new in town and in between girlfriends and really enjoys good sex. What happened tonight doesn’t have to again, but I won’t be upset if it does. We do live together. We’re both single adults. If you want to uh…go to bed with me another time, well…all you have to do is let me know.”
And with that, he sweeps from my bedroom and marches down the hall. He unmutes the television, and I hear glass clinking. It takes several minutes before I follow him and rejoin him on the couch. He sloshes some liquid into a glass and hands it to me. We sip together as time passes. At midnight, he says goodnight and heads to his room.
I wake a few hours later, sweaty and unable to get back to sleep. It’s no surprise that Peeta’s door is unlocked when I test it, and it’s not shocking he welcomes me into his bed with unbridled enthusiasm. I wake the next morning cradled in a stranger’s arms.
Prompt 6: Desperate petite Katniss takes a job jumping out of a cake.
Thank you for the prompt @567inpanem
Thank You @everlarkficexchange for giving us another week to fulfill more prompts!
Completely unbeta’d so all mistakes are mine.
Rated: T
This is the dumbest idea she’s ever had.
Replaying the moment that had delivered her to this fate as she sits in the dark. Hoping beyond hope that she makes it through tonight with her dignity intact.
Prim was in her first year of Med school and though she had a full ride scholarship, books weren’t covered. So when Katniss opened the credit card bill, you know the one for school expenses and emergencies only, and saw a two-thousand dollar balance she nearly keeled over from shock. Who charges five hundred dollars for a single book? Christ.
Her panic and desperation drove her to do something rash, like ask her friend Johanna if she had any job openings.
Johanna runs a high burlesque troupe in the city. They do weekend shows at a club downtown but they also do special events. That’s where the real money is. Birthdays, corporate parties, and lessons brought in more than half of Johannas revenue. She had immediately put Katniss to work. Sewing skimpy, glittery costumes, building sets and bartending for these events kept her busy enough. But tonight things had gone terribly wrong.
Glimmer, the troupe’s singer, called in “sick” after her new boyfriend surprised her with a trip to Rio, leaving Johanna in a bind. When she pulled Katniss aside and offered her an extra two hundred bucks just for singing Happy Birthday…there was no way she could refuse.
So that’s why she’s quieting banging her head against a thick plyboard wall muttering to herself. In ten minutes, she- Katniss Everdeen will be launching herself out of a four foot tall birthday cake. Yep. You heard that right. A giant, glittery, white birthday cake that she had made for props a little less than a month ago. Carefully piping on “frosting” with a caulk gun, painting and glittering until she was exhausted and sparkling like Edward Cullen on a sunny day.
How did she let Johanna talk her into this?
She reached up absently scratched her boob. How can such a small costume be so itchy? Johanna had to dig deep into her hoard of lacey corsets and sequined panties to find something that would fit Katniss’ tiny frame. All and all she didn’t hate the old school red rhinestone corset with matching booty shorts that Johanna had touted as vintage Cinna.
The outfit was a lot less revealing than most and when Katniss looked in the mirror her first thought- She was on fire. When the rhinestones caught the light they sizzled and flashed, the effect was dazzling. Not to mention the artfully placed padding turned her small B cups into overflowing C’s.
But that confidence had faded a soon as she was loaded into the cake. God, could she really pull this off? Katniss had a more than decent voice, it was dance steps she was worried about. A thirty minute dance lesson does not a dancer make, and sexy had never been her thing.
She took a deep breath. It was going to be fine. This was nowhere new the hardest thing she’s ever done.
Then the cake started to move.
Masculine cheers erupted as Clove and Johanna wheeled her toward the main table where the birthday boy had been seated. At the knock knock queue, Katniss took a deep breath and started counting down. Five, four, three, two, one.
Bursting out the top took every bit of confidence she had. Avoiding making eye contact, she starts to sing. Her voice never wavering as she shimmies down the tiers before lowering her stilettoed feet to the floor, praying to whatever god is listening that she doesn’t fall on her face. Katniss stands slowly and runs her hand up her side as seductively as she can manage, swaying her hips, carefully walking through the dance steps.Then, when she can put it off no longer, struts to the Birthday Boy, dagging one hand over broad shoulders as she circles him. With one last Happy Birthday to You, she sits delicately in his lap as a chorus of cat-calls and cheers erupt from the audience.
Katniss stiffens, feeling a thick arm move to gently cradle her waist. She whips her head up to tell him hands off!
Instead, she’s left gawking at a familiar set of wide blue eyes.
Peeta Mellark, her highschool crush.
“Best Birthday Ever.” He mutters before clearing his throat. ”Hi, Katniss.”
Prompt 17: Saying i love you at the wrong time. [submitted by @xerxia31]
I was late for this lol! but this is my submition to this project
“ Katniss was dancing with Thom when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The voice was familiar, and she turned to see a brilliant blue to his eyes that she had seen before. He had a buzz cut, but she could make out a rusty blonde shade to it. ”
A/N: Thank you, thank you so much to @mega-aulover , @norbertsmom and @marzgaperez for helping me with their mad beta skills and as a result you can actually read this piece
++++++++
“Come on Kat, don’t be sad. You’re graduating today. It’s a good day,” her sister tells her.
They are looking at their reflections in the mirror. Katniss is dressed in the blue gown that belonged to her mother when she was younger. The dress is a little short, but otherwise, it still fits the way it did four years ago. Her body hasn’t changed much.
He’s the only thing that is missing to make the picture complete. Today could’ve been like prom all over.
Prom was when Katniss realized that she was in love with her best friend. They had been best friends since age 5, she never felt that way until that moment, when Peeta held her in his arms as they slow-danced.Dammit if she doesn’t miss him right now.
She never even thought about not having a date for prom. Having a boy best friend canceled that out, right? Like having a built-in plus one, familiar and comfortable. No awkward waiting for someone to ask you to go with them. Nevertheless,when Peeta asked her, she felt relieved. She laughed a little bit. He was so dramatic about it. A Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup tied to a balloon on her desk. Then she found a sunflower on her locker at the end of the day. When she got home, she found a candy ring on her door and a note underneath it that read, “Prom with me? P.” She called him immediately.She felt giddy with excitement like she had never felt before. It ended up being one of the best nights of her life and the first time she had danced with someone other than her dad.
It was in that moment that Katniss knew she loved him. When she looked into Peeta’s eyes, she thought about everything they’d gone through together, including her parents divorce. The night her mom and dad sat her down and told her, they said that they were just too different, she ran away. Katniss went to the only place where she felt safe, to their hiding place in the woods. Peeta knew where she was, having gone to the woods with her so many times. He held her and let her cry without a word.
There were times that she returned the favor for him. No one knew about his mom’s abuse, and subsequent admission into a mental hospital when they learned about her mental condition. Katniss had been there with him that one and only time he went to visit his mother, to say goodbye to her. Katniss was amazed at how he forgave her. She wouldn’t have been able to do that.
They were each other’s first kiss at twelve. It was awkward to say the least, it was sloppy. All those nights calling each other on the phone to do homework and just talk, a lifetime worth of memories together. All of these were the moments that led up to Katniss seeing her best friend in another light.
But after prom, reality hit.
The memory made her angry. Peeta came to her door and announced that after he turned 18 he was going to enlist in the military because he wanted to do good by his family. Upon hearing this, Katniss wanted to cry and scream. She was ready to grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him, to tell him that she needed him, but … no she could never do that. His light is too bright for her to be selfish and not let the world see it. She had to let him go, so she turned her back on him.
At first, he wrote almost every single day, telling her about his training and the guys in his troop, his older and sometimes rude commander, and the food. After a few weeks, Katniss relented and wrote him letters as well.
She told him about her college life and how Prim got Buttercup and how she hated the thing. She also told him that her mom was dating again, and how she wasn’t talking to her mother.
However, as the months passed by, the letters became so far between that she was surprised when she got one. After a year, there were no letters at all. And four years later, when she still hadn’t heard from Peeta,it hurt just as bad as when he left for the first time.
She wrote one last letter, and she was the most honest she’d ever been, her last attempt at salvaging their friendship. It might not have been the right thing to do or the right place, but she needed him to know. She wrote down those three little words “I love you,” with a shaky hand.
Glancing at her image on graduation day, Katniss reminds herself that today is all about her, not him. After all, she would be graduating college and getting a job. She was moving on with her life, and Katniss could almost be happy. Almost.
“Yeah, you’re right. I won’t be sad anymore,” Katniss says to Prim, and she means it. Almost.
The ceremony was a blur, but the after-party was fine. She danced and drank with her friends and Prim. At one point, Finnick and Annie disappeared for awhile, only to return with a severe case of sex hair.
Katniss was dancing with Thom when she felt a hand on her shoulder. The voice was familiar, and she turned to see a brilliant blue to his eyes that she had seen before. He had a buzz cut, but she could make out a rusty blonde shade to it.
“Kay-Kay?” he asks, calling her the nickname he gave her when they were seven.
“Peeta?” It’s such a dumb thing to say because it’s obviously him, but somehow different. He’s taller and bigger with the shadows of a couple of tattoos and dog tags around his neck that she can see though the plain white shirt he has paired with his uniform pants.
“You didn’t think I would miss your graduation, right? I’m sorry I’m late, but I’m here now.”
Thom is gone when she turns around to apologize to him for basically forgetting about him.
She turns back to Peeta, and he extends his hand out to her. she dismisses his hand and throws herself in his arms, looping her arms around his neck and she begins to cry a little bit harder when she feels Peeta holding her tightly to his body.
“ It’s ok. I’m here now.” he said to her hair and even thought she knows he most likely to return to his life after this dance, she is choosing to live in tonight, she has a million and one questions for him but right now he’s here.
Prompt 98: Peeta is pining for Katniss, but is about to give up because he can’t figure out a way to get her to notice him and he is being pestered to marry a merchant. He also thinks Katniss is already with Gale. Somehow, he ends up following her or he is already in the woods when Katniss shows up. Katniss, believing she is alone, pleasures herself. When she is finished, she says Peeta’s name. Of course he realizes that he needs to pursue her. [submitted by Anonymous]
Rated: M for sexual situations. In-Panem, canon divergent, takes place prior to the 74th Hunger Games reaping. Possible trigger warnings are allusions to abuse, and while his intentions are pure-ish, Peeta’s actions veer a bit into Peeping Tom territory (I assume the prompt may have made that apparent).
Incredible gratitude to @javistg and @xerxia31 for hosting this event, and a heaping extra scoop of thanks to @xerxia31 for the betaing and free therapy. Writing hasn’t been easy for me lately and fandom events like this are inspiring. Thank you, lovely ladies.
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The first time Peeta ever came while he was awake, he was fifteen and sitting in history class.
When he was ten, his mother had gathered him and his two teenage brothers into the laundry room to stare at a sheet with a patchwork of yellow stains. She had yelled and pointed and accused them of being filthy animals. His brothers snuck looks of barely concealed hilarity at each other, but Peeta had no idea what was going on and was slightly terrified. At the end of the tirade she screamed at them to get out of her sight. As her youngest turned to leave the small room to trail after his brothers, she grabbed his arm and spun him to face her.
“Promise me you’ll never do that. Promise me you’ll have some self control,” she demanded, loose wisps of her straw-colored hair escaping her severe bun in her fury.
“Do what?” he asked, afraid to know, but also hoping he could muster whatever this request required.
“Touch yourself like an animal.” She breathed in sharply through her nose and clamped her jaw so he could hear her back teeth grind together.
That seemed easy enough, he happily agreed. He was rewarded with a tight lipped smile and ruffle of his curls as he passed through the doorway.
A few years later, he learned what a horrible mistake he had made. His body had awakened in ways he could never have anticipated. Most notably of which was his dick’s frequent hardening at the slightest provocation and its need to be touched. His mother was right, he was a filthy animal, driven to rut and rub against anything that would relieve some of this constant, dizzying yearning.
But a promise was a promise, so he did his best to deny the urges, the demands of his own flesh. And while there were a few wet dreams, that nocturnal euphoria left him pulsing in confused release and terrified of his mother’s ire. It took all of his willpower, but he didn’t touch himself.
This became a more Herculean task when he was fifteen and Katniss Everdeen was seated in front of him in History class. For an entire hour at the end of every school day, he could stare at her, sometimes even catch the sharp scent of the mint leaves she often chewed.
Peeta had spent untold hours staring at the ragged end of her braid as it snaked down her slight back. But this particular day, which was unseasonably warm and stuffy, they were watching a film on the ancient projector. He and Katniss sat in the row against the wall, closest to the window, so the natural light was filtering through the multitude of small tears in the curtains. Her body was angled towards the window, giving him of a view of her profile.
The heat and the incessant ticking of the projector as a spooled the film from reel to reel, the drone of the Capitol narrator cast a dream-state over the room.
He was already half hard as he traced the column of her neck with his ravenous eyes. Her skin was dark, flushed and dewy with a light sheen of sweat. He wanted to lick the length of her neck, burrow his nose into the hollow of her throat. By the time he got to her braid, he was so hard, his cock was pushing against the fly of his pants. He shifted in his seat, trying to find a position that made him feel less cramped, but didn’t require him to move any farther from her.
His greedy eyes traveled down the length of her braid. His fingers itched to run it between his fingers, to feel the smooth woven rope give way to the roughness of the fringe at the end. He wanted to make a paint brush out of it and watch the paint trail its mark across the paper as indelibly as she was marked across his heart. He wanted to feel the whisper of it against his overheated skin, his lips, his chest. In his imagination, he ran it up the sensitive underside of his rigid cock. The pleasure shot up the length of his dick, causing him to gasp and double over onto his desk.
Katniss twisted around her seat to investigate the sound and ended up only inches from his face. He fell headlong into the silver of her eyes as he pulsed and came and shook. He gripped the edge of the desk until he could sit up.
“You okay?” she whispered. That was the first time she had ever addressed him directly. Even through the post-orgasmic fog and creeping terror, he longed to hear his name from her lips.
He nodded rapidly, terrified that she could see exactly what had just happened to his body all over his flushed face. She turned back around slowly and he glanced down to see the wet spot blooming across the front of his pants. Holy shit, he didn’t even know such a thing was possible. What he did know was that he had to get out of there before the bell rang and everyone else figured out what had happened.
Shoving his pencil behind his ear, he slid his notebook off the desk and held it strategically in front of his crotch. Walking stiffly, he shuffled to where the teacher was sitting in the back of the room and said he felt ill. The teacher, obviously as undone by the heat as the rest of them, barely glanced at Peeta as he waved him away.
As he turned to quietly ease the door closed, he caught the flash of her quicksilver eyes, felt her stare like the slash of a knife.
Rather than trying to clean up in the school bathroom, he hurried home. Once he’d made it upstairs, he changed his clothes and did his best to rinse his shorts and pants, the memory of those yellow stains on the sheet from years before making his hands shake. What would his mother think of him if she knew he’d soiled himself at school? He suspected this would be an even worse offense than the sheets had been. Would she consider it a broken promise? What would she break in return?
He lay the damp clothes out under his bed and hoped she wouldn’t notice.
As he returned downstairs to the bakery to start his shift, he couldn’t seem to keep his mind off of Katniss. He seemed incapable of being so close to her and not physically reacting. Why did she have that effect on him? He wanted to hold her and keep her safe, dote on and worship her, defile her with his unquenchable lust for her all at the same time. It made him feel deranged to want all of these things at once; to want her so badly. And he was nice. Ask anyone! He was pretty sure that no one in the entire district would call him a sex fiend.
To settle himself, he forced his mind out of the gutter and it landed on one of his favorite fantasies, lovingly imagined so many times it had worn a deep, smooth groove in his mind. He and Katniss, married for a year or two (long enough for them to be in the same room without voraciously ripping each other’s clothes off, that was another fantasy altogether, but not his very favorite), working side by side at their own kitchen counter. She was humming absentmindedly as she prepared two cups of mint tea. He watched her contentedly as he kneaded dough for their dinner, glancing over her shoulder at the last rays of afternoon sun drenching their small garden. He closed his eyes as that intoxicating wave of warmth washed over him, what it would feel like to know she was his.
The truth was that none of it mattered. His stomach bottomed out as he reminded himself that Katniss Everdeen didn’t know, or care, that he was alive. But the memory of her eyes watching him leave the classroom just hours before made him wonder if just maybe, she wasn’t as oblivious to him as he’d always thought.
His father was standing in front of the pantry, rubbing the back of his neck when Peeta came downstairs the following morning. Peeta joined him, standing side by side staring at the cold cellar, and looked over at his father questioningly. They were nearly the same height now. Mellark men weren’t particularly tall, and Peeta seemed to be following suit, starting to fill out horizontally through his chest and shoulders rather than gaining any more height.
His father glanced over at Peeta and whispered, “I really want some bacon for breakfast.”
Peeta nodded sympathetically as his stomach growled. Bacon sounded incredible, but Mrs. Mellark only allowed them to eat the rashers on Sunday mornings, so there was no point it dwelling on what couldn’t be.
Peeta and his father both started when Mrs. Mellark asked loudly what they were doing staring into the pantry and why they hadn’t gotten started on breakfast. Mr. Mellark apologized to his wife and looked pensive as he glanced over his shoulder at her.
“I was thinking of making one of those marzipan cakes that Mrs. Sprucewood enjoys so much,” he mused.
Her sharp blue eyes shot up to his father’s face and she asked, “Do we have enough butter?”
“That’s what I was just trying to work out.”
She licked her lips, already tasting the extra income Mrs. Sprucewood could provide. “What if you used our family’s butter ration too?”
“That could work,” Mr. Mellark mused, “‘but what about our breakfast? How will I fry the eggs?” He looked so perplexed, Peeta wanted to kick him for overselling it.
Mrs. Mellark moved in front of him, taking a mental inventory of the cellar. “What if you fried up a rasher or two of the bacon and used the grease?” she asked as if it was her idea.
“That could work,” Mr. Mellark mused, “but what about Sunday?”
“Well,” his mother said, a small smirk playing on her lips, “if you do your job right with the marzipan cake, we’ll have a little extra for some more bacon.”
Peeta watched incredulously as his father bopped his mother’s nose playfully, “You’re so damned clever, I knew there was a reason I married you.”
Mrs. Mellark pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes slightly at the compliment, but instructed her husband to get started on breakfast all the same. Mr. Mellark shot Peeta a sly wink as he grabbed the bacon and danced to the stove.
Shaking his head, Peeta got started with the morning chores as the sizzle and pop of cooking bacon filled the kitchen. His father might be an evil genius.
“Oh, and have Peeta deliver the cake to the Sprucewood’s. The daughter is a year behind him in school and could make an advantageous match,” his mother called over her shoulder.
Peeta suppressed the small thrill of fear that made his scalp prickle at his mother’s words. He’d figure out a way to explain that he was actually going to marry Katniss Everdeen as soon as figured out how to say two words to Katniss without spontaneously orgasming.
He sat at the lunch table picking at the stale roll he’d brought for lunch. As usual, Katniss sat in the corner with Madge Undersee. Without meaning to, his eyes were drawn to her like relentless magnets. It felt like a sickness, this pointless need for her. Like his brain was impervious to the continual feedback that she didn’t want him back, didn’t want anything to do with him. Madness, he thought. The very definition of madness. But he stared at her anyway. He sat up straighter, reveling in the strength of her body even from across the room. He wanted to internalize that defiance, to take her into his own body so her rigid spine would support him. Fuck, he wanted her so badly, in so many ways.
He must be defective. He’s always suspected. His mother’s disdain, his brothers’ indifference, his father’s feeble love that offered no protection. But that he could love Katniss so completely and she didn’t even notice, he must be worthless. And he tried to hate her. He really, truly did. But instead he burned for her. And after awhile, he stopped fighting his devotion. It was pointless not to love her.
By the time he turned sixteen, Peeta had given up trying to keep his promise to his mother. It was clear that she hated him regardless of whether he tortured himself by denying his base urges. He might as well take what little pleasure he could find. Though he was careful to always hide the evidence in a colored rag.
Besides, it would have been impossible to deny the riot of need that Katniss continued to inspire in him. That year, Katniss’ body had changed in ways that were impossible to ignore. Her slight frame had gently curved and swelled to perfection. And while the boys in his class couldn’t stop talking about Delly Cartwright’s colossal tits that swayed and bounced hypnotically, Peeta considered Katniss’ smaller, but shapelier breasts the absolute ideal.
Everything about her was tantalizing, she was mouthwatering. Literally, his mouth would water when she was anywhere near him. It was a strange response, he realized. But then he started to imagine all the ways he could taste her. What would those dark red lips taste like? They were always a little chapped. Would they taste of mint? Or the skin on her neck? And he tried not to even let the thought enter his mind until he was alone or even better, in the shower, but what about her nipples? He had seen the hard points poking through her thin shirt on cold days when her sweater with its missing buttons refused to stay closed. He had to pull his own sweater down low to hide the instantaneous reaction that had sprung forth at the sight of those tight buds. What color were they? Would they taste sweet (he imagined strawberries) when he ran his tongue around the peak or sucked one into his mouth. That image was enough to send him over the edge after a stroke or two of his hand.
One afternoon as he worked with his brothers to unload the flour sacks into the storeroom, his oldest brother made an off-handed comment about what pussies Peeta and Rye were. Rye responded with that gesture, the one where he made a V with his fingers, his tongue waggling at the juncture and for the first time Peeta realized what that vulgar symbol stood for. And because he was a depraved teenage boy, and the two things he craved most in life were food and sex, he became obsessed with the need to taste Katniss Everdeen’s pussy.
Once the idea had taken root, it was all he could think about. He spent his days adjusting himself to try to hide his perpetual hard on. He had seen pictures of naked women, but girls’ bodies were so secretive. What wonders lay between those lower lips?
He pretended to be sick one day at lunch, hunching slightly and holding his stomach as he shuffled away from his friends towards the office. But veering down the hallway, he ducked into the library instead. He found the book they had used for Health Class in 6th grade and shoved it into his bag unnoticed.
That night, as he poured over the rudimentary sketches of the female anatomy that seemed drawn for the sole purpose of confusing him and making sex unarousing, he tried to understand what fathomable wonders could lie in Katniss’ underwear.
Quickly, he lost patience with the confounding books and began to draw.
Over the next several months he drew Katniss Everdeen incessantly. Admittedly, it started with some exceptionally risque imaginings of her naked, beckoning, pleading from the page for him to defile her in all the ways he had spent years imagining. But when he closed his eyes at night, he always saw the same image, the view of her from his seat in history class. He became an expert in the graceful curve of her neck extending up from the frayed collar of her sweater, thick braid snaking over her delicate shoulder, her daydreamy profile, chin rested on fist as her luminous gray eyes stared at the world beyond the glass, like a tethered hawk.
It was amazing how close to her he began to feel. While only a small handful of words were exchanged between them, his time spent drawing every real and imagined detail of her face, her posture, the defiant set of her shoulders made him love her more.
On a Saturday in late spring, he was just finishing the intricate piping along the edge of a cake for Rooba the butcher when he heard the two quick knocks that signaled Gale Hawthorne was at the garden door. Gale had a way of making even a knock sound like aggressive, like he was just barely restraining himself from putting his knuckles through the door. Peeta’s older brother was in the same class as Gale, and despised him. But Peeta suspected that had more to do with the fact that Rye had sullenly reported that he’d recently seen Gale and Elsa Fairborne enjoying the slag heap.
Peeta knew that Gale had lost his father in the same mine accident that had claimed Katniss’s dad. He had watched Gale arrive at school trailed by his eerily identical younger brothers and with his tiny sister perched on his shoulders. He knew it couldn’t be easy to have to help to feed all those mouths without a business, or a legal one anyway. Despite this, Peeta could never fathom how Gale could look so chronically pissed. If Peeta got to spend his days with Katniss Everdeen, got to see the veil of wary distrust clear from her eyes when she looked at him like it did when Katniss glanced up at Gale, Peeta wouldn’t be able to force the euphoric grin off his face for anything in the world.
Peeta’s father slid the hot tray onto the countertop and, glancing behind him to make sure that the door to the front of the bakery was closed, opened the back door. Peeta adjusted the pastry bag, squishing the icing to toward the tip, knowing he wouldn’t be able to pipe without his hands shaking when Katniss was so close. Even the sight of her left shoulder tapering down to her small hand resting against the door frame made his heart flutter.
As usual, Gale did all of the talking during the trade, but as Peeta’s father shifted to exchange the bread for the squirrel, Peeta glanced up and caught Katniss staring right at him. He felt his pulse ratchet up to a post-sprint gallop as she held his gaze. When she looked away, he watched her cheeks darken with what must have been a blush under her olive skin. And then she and Gale were gone.
Peeta grabbed the garbage, making an excuse of needing to dump it in the bins in the back garden, though he needn’t have bothered, no one was paying attention to him anyway. He dropped the garbage bag and placed his hand directly over the spot where Katniss’s had been a moment ago, feeling for any vestiges of her warmth, certain that her touch must be seared into the wood. As he reached for the trash bag, his breath caught as he saw that one of Katniss’s gloves had fallen out of her hunting bag and was nearly hidden in the shadow of the stair.
He grabbed it, hurrying into the garden with his treasure. Standing with his back against the smooth bark of the apple tree, he examined the glove. There was a hole in the tip of of the index finger and he ran the rough wool along his lips, a thrill running through him as he imagined her soft fingers ghosting over his lips. His father’s call to hurry in to finish the cake startled Peeta into shoving the glove down the front of his pants. Needless to say, he frosted the remainder of Rooba’s son’s birthday cake with his raging hard on pressed between the workbench and the ghost of Katniss’s hand.
He slept with the glove under his pillow, waking frequently to grope for it and reassure himself that it was still there. Grateful that he had the following morning off, he planned to sleep in a bit. But before the sun had even considered rising, the sky barely shifting to a slightly lighter shade of darkness, it occurred to him that Katniss might need this glove. That even thought it was nearly summer, the wool might serve another protective purpose against something other than the cold. Without allowing himself to reconsider, he dressed as quickly and quietly as he could before creeping down the stairs and out the garden door.
While Peeta was intimately familiar with all manner of pre-dawn bakery endeavors, he had seldom been outside in the dark. And while he knew where the Seam was located, he’d never actually been to Katniss’s house. He knew that Katniss’s little sister had a goat and hoped that information would be enough to go on. He kept to side streets and shadows as he edged his way through town until the cobblestones gave way to the rutted dirt roads of the Seam. There was just enough moonlight for him to make out houses and he kept the impenetrably dark mass of the forest looming up to the west. Winding his way through the unfamiliar narrow pathways of the Seam, he stopped every 50 feet or so and listened. But it was actually the smell, a warm scent of bedstraw and livestock wafting over the acrid smell of coal smoke that permeated the early morning air. He followed his nose.
Once he’d found her house, he planned to leave the glove hanging over the porch railing where she would be sure to see it. But as he approached the porch, a candle flared to life just inside. Peeta stepped back into the shadows of an adjacent house when he saw her through the window. He’d imagined this scene a million times and couldn’t believe he had been given the gift of seeing her, illuminated by candlelight, moving about her home.
He watched her. Like he always had. But not like others did, or at least not for the same reason. They wanted something from her, wanted to possess a piece of her, consume her beauty like a decadent cake gobbled up in huge, messy bites. He just wanted to be beside her.
For as long as he could remember, his deepest wish had been to be on the same side of the door as her. Not for lecherous reasons, though he wasn’t immune to the lust she inspired, but sexual desire was not his chief motivation. It just boiled down to an overwhelming feeling that he belonged in there. With her.
Sometimes he actually felt resentful that she was so stunning, because that one fact, the geometry of her delicate features in such a pleasing arrangement, reduced his certainty that they belonged together to something common. But in his heart, he knew this was something more, something greater. Something true.
Seeing her like that stirred something in him. Stirred. Like a tsunami in a snow globe. More like it had twisted his soul into a new shape. This is where language failed him. He didn’t know words strong enough to accurately represent this certainty that they were meant to be together. Even more perplexing, it appeared that she did not understand this, did not know it in the same sure way he did. But acknowledging that this sentiment could be one sided sent this entire enterprise into stalker territory and it was too pure and magical for anything as coarse and mundane as stalking.
Realizing that the fact that he was pressed against her neighbor’s house watching her through the window was difficult to construe as anything other than stalking, he took a step forward to return her glove as he had intended. But just then, the candle winked out and Katniss appeared seconds later in the doorway. His breath caught as watched her move silently and swiftly across the road and into the meadow.
He looked up into sky, which moments ago had been a dark bowl flecked with stars, but had since lightened enough for him to see Katniss’s movement through the grass. He took a deep breath and plunged into the meadow in her wake.
By the time he saw her silhouette slip under the fence, he felt powerless against following her. He struggled under the fence and crawled about fifteen feet to a patch of thick underbrush. He was outside the fence. He was sweating profusely and his heart felt like it was trying to jackhammer it’s way out of his chest. Glancing around wildly, he realized with a blinding flash of panic that he had lost Katniss. He could see the fence in the early dawn light and was just about to crawl back to it when he heard a small scraping noise up to the left.
He had seconds to decide whether to retreat home like the coward he was or find the courage to follow her into the unknown. He knew Katniss could never be with a man who didn’t possess the bravery necessary to face the forest. He swallowed down the fear and hurtled himself into the world of nightmares.
He spent the next few hours with his blood fizzing with barely contained terror as he repeatedly lost her in the forest. He had thought that the sun rising would be his salvation, that once he could see the threats that surrounded him that he’d feel less frightened. But he quickly discovered that it never got light in the forest, just less dark with more shadows. When the fear of being lost and seconds away from being devoured by some rabid creature overwhelmed him, he’d hear a distant explosion of frantic wing beats or a dull thud of what he could only imagine was an arrow hitting wood and he’d stagger blindly towards it.
Despite that he’d never been so petrified in his life, he couldn’t deny that the world beyond the fence was magical. The enormity of the trees, the morning sun illuminating the leaves like stained glass, the air so crisp and clean that his lungs ached. The green was so vibrant he could smell it, some sort of ancient fragrance that simultaneously soothed and frightened him.
It had been ages since he last heard Katniss when he noticed he was shaking and there were little arcs of light obscuring the edges of his vision. He honestly had no idea how long he’d been in the forest, it was eerily timeless. He forced his mind to focus on the rays of light slanting through the trees at a steep angle and wildly guessed it must be just before or after noon. He hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink since dinner the night before. He was starving and queasy at the same time.
Closing his eyes and taking deep breaths, he forced himself to listen. He didn’t hear anything and was starting to panic in earnest again, when his addled brain deciphered a familiar sound, running water. His swollen tongue throbbed at the promise of something to drink and he followed the sound and gratefully noticed the transition of pine needles to mud under his feet as he stumbled towards it.
When the underbrush opened into a small pond fed by a trickling forest stream, he fell to his knees in relief. Cupping his shaking hands he gulped down about a gallon of water until his thirst abated. He rolled over into a patch of moss and scooched under an overhang of berry brambles. Despite the fact that he needed to be back at the bakery any minute and that he’d likely die out here, he gave into the security of the mossy den, cooler and softer than his sweetest dream of a bed, and drifted off.
When he awoke what felt like seconds later, he was on high alert, instinct forcing him into complete stillness while his senses took inventory. There was a small splash to his right and he rolled carefully onto his stomach and scanned the pond. And there she was, floating on her back in the pond like a wood nymph. He dug his fingers into the ground and he blinked several times to clear his vision in a bid to convince himself this was real. He was just about to call out to her when she flipped over and dove under water, the long expanse of her bare legs trailing behind her. He swallowed hard and glanced over to see her pants and the leather jacket she always wore hanging over a nearby rock.
He watched in helpless indecision as she emerged from under the water surface and pulled herself up on the mossy bank. She was wearing a sodden undershirt and dripping pair of underwear that, despite their drab color, stood out starkly against her olive skin and left little to his rampant imagination. He couldn’t help noticing the dark ring of her areola through the translucent fabric.
His eyes traced the column of her slender leg up to the slight swell of her ass, he watched in awe as she leaned down and slid the wet fabric off over her left, then right foot before standing and whipping the wet undershirt over her head. He swallowed thickly as he watched a naked Katniss Everdeen squeeze out and lay her underwear over the same boulder that held her pants.
She wrung out her dripping mass of dark hair before walking over to a patch of moss illuminated by an ethereal sunbeam breaking through the canopy. She laid down no more than fifteen feet from his warren, a mosaic of leaf shade dappled with sunlight shimmered across her body.
He felt lightheaded as he took in the dangerously erotic sight of the expanse of her gorgeous body glittering with water droplets like diamond facets in the sun. He tried to break her into sections to dull the impact of his wildest fantasy appearing like a gift before him. He took in the small swells of her breasts tipped with dark rose-colored peaks. He watched the droplets run down the gentle slope of her stomach to pool in her navel.
He knew he should be ashamed, that watching her like this was a violation. But she looked so natural, so perfectly right laying naked and glowing in the forest like the woodland faeries he’d read about as a child. Maybe it was just the all-encompassing awe in the face of her beauty, but he couldn’t seem to muster any shame. She was a living piece of art.
Just when he began to suspect she’d fallen asleep, she reached up and scratched her neck. He was transfixed by the way the movement of her arm caused a slight bounce of her breasts. He watched in dry-mouthed astonishment as she ran her finger tips down over the gentle swell, bringing her other hand up to palm her other breast.
She ran her fingers around her nipples until they were as stiff as raspberry gumdrops and just as mouthwatering. Swallowing hard, he followed her left hand as slid down her slightly concave stomach to push between her legs, one knee falling to the side to make room for the circular movement of her fingertips.
With a mix of trepidation and wonderment, he realized what was happening. His cock, already rock hard, had apparently figured it out before his brain. One of his wildest fantasies was playing out before his eyes. As if his desire had been so fervent, so potent, he had brought this magical dream into reality. Or maybe he was still dreaming and he’d wake up with a wet spot decorating the front of his pants. He decided not to care, refocusing his attention on the exquisite impossibility of seeing Katniss pleasure herself.
Her breathing had accelerated, her lips were slightly parted as the speed of her fingers increased. He’d never been so aroused in his life, which given his lush inner landscape, was saying something. When Katniss pulled her other leg up allowing her knees to butterfly out to the sides and her back to arch off the ground, he couldn’t stop his body from rocking forward. The give of the groundcover and soft soil allowed the tip of his dick to slide out of the waistband of his pants. He bit down hard on his lip to keep from groaning at the sensation of the soft, cool moss replacing the feel of rough fabric on his aching cock. He could already feel his body straining to come, but he refused to allow his own need to cause him to miss even a second of this. So he gritted his teeth and closed his eyes to center himself.
The breeze shifted and he caught the scent of her. His eyes shot open and for one dizzying second every muscle in this body clenched in an animalistic need to possess her, to bury himself in the body of the girl he wanted more than anything. He wanted nothing more than to find a home in the cradle of her strong thighs, his head pillowed on her sporadically clenching stomach. To close his eyes and rest there forever against the warmth of her skin.
He pressed his flaming face in the fallen leaves and took slow deep breaths of the damp earth to steady himself. As desperate as he was for this to never end, his heart was beating so frantically that feared it might give out. She was driving him to the brink of sanity.
The small sound of Katniss’s gasp whipped his head up. Blinking away the tears swimming in his eyes, he watched her legs tremble, her feet planted and her stomach clenching hard, the gentle circling of her fingers having given way to frantic rubbing.
He fixed every detail in his mind, her long toes digging into the soft ground, the mole just below her right breast, the ropy strands of her midnight hair fanned out around her head, the dark flush of her chest and the graceful arch of her neck. It was the most staggeringly beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
When her pleasure peaked, he was staring at her mouth, the glistening red of her parted lips. His body was strung tighter than a bow string, and her couldn’t take his eyes off of her. If he hadn’t seen it in addition to hearing it, he never would have believed it. As she came, she gasped one magical word: “Peeta.” The hoarse, whispered cry sent him careening over the edge, like his name on her lips commanded his body’s pleasure. He surged forward, digging his fingers into the soil as he rocked with the force of his orgasm. His chest heaved with the effort to stay silent, his entire body quaking with bliss.
As he came back to himself, he watched Katniss collapse in a boneless puddle, her delicate nostrils flaring with her ragged breaths. In that moment, he wanted her more than he thought possible. His chest cracked opened with the need to lose himself in her endless gray eyes, to gently caress her face, to lace his fingers through hers. He’d never wanted anything more than he wanted to belong to her in that moment.
But as usual, she didn’t even know he was there.
Katniss got up and crouched by the pond. She rinsed her hands and splashed a handful of water to rinse between her legs. For a second, Peeta swore she looked right at him, his heart leapt to his throat. Instead she stood abruptly, glanced over her shoulder and strode quickly to the rock and began to dress in her damp clothes. Each piece of fabric that stole a piece of skin from his vision was a travesty (a knife in his heart). He was losing her piece by piece.
Turning to pick up her hunting bag and bow which had been tucked behind the far side of the rock out of his line of sight, Katniss took one last look around the clearing before cinching her satchel over her shoulder and silently disappearing into the forest.
Peeta tentatively placed his palm on the softly undulating surface of the pond, trying to feel the ghost of a connection through the waves that she had set in motion. Even though a voice in his head was screaming at him to follow Katniss out of forest, he knew that if she discovered him, she would consider his voyeurism, however accidental, a violation. He’d sooner be eaten by bears than inspire any semblance of shame or embarrassment in her mercury eyes.
He stood, swaying slightly from lightheadedness, unsure if it was from hunger or emotional exhaustion. He tucked himself back into his pants and rinsed the soiled hem of his shirt before setting off for home. Somehow, he found his way back to the fence line in what seemed like about half the time.
Walking across the meadow, Peeta felt like a different person. The gnawing hunger and shimmery exhaustion couldn’t touch him. Even the promise of his mother’s fury at him for arriving so late for his afternoon shift rolled off his mind like rain from an oil cloth. With those two breathy syllables, Katniss had reordered Peeta’s world. If she had thought of him in a moment like that, even by accident, there was hope for the future he’d always dreamt of.
Pulling her glove from deep within his pocket, he couldn’t believe it had only been a handful of hours since he’d left his bed to return it to her. For one brief moment, he held her glove like he was holding her hand, then he placed it on the top step of her porch and turned towards the bakery.
Peeta could feel his certainty retreating with every step he took toward town. He summoned the echo of her soft cry of his name like a revelation. He knew that whatever came next he would follow Katniss Everdeen anywhere, no matter where fate led them, they would go there together if she would allow it.
