“I can't get your songs out of my head, or your hair out of my room"
Was listening to 'things i wish you said' by Sabrina Carpenter yesterday and this line just really struck me hard and before I knew it I wrote this lil ficlet of CF Peeta in his feels a few nights after the victory tour...
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Another restless night. The third in a row since they stepped off the train back into twelve.
He woke with a start and like a reflex his hand had shot to the other side of the cold bed. Her side.
But it isn't hers. This bed only belongs to him. Nothing is “theirs”. Not back here where everything is real.
He proposed to her just a few days ago. But that’s not real.
What’s real is a fate that a younger version of him might have seen as a blessing. Marry the woman of your dreams or die.
They’ll probably both die anyway. Likely soon based on the terror behind her eyes that last day.
Death might be easier than pretending.
He wonders if the sham marriage will come with a marriage bed. Just for sleep. He needs to sleep. And it seems he can no longer find it alone.
He reaches for a pillow, gathers it in his arms. As if it was her.
How had two weeks created such a need? That its absence was now so debilitating?
14 days of pretending. Almost as many nights of…something else. He doesn’t want to try and put words to it yet. Ever, maybe. The feelings are more than enough.
It’s hard to explain what went on in that sleeping compartment. Because it was nothing. And still it was everything.
And he misses it. More than he’s ever missed anything.
Alongside his sleepless thoughts plays a song. He’s not usually one to have a tune in his head. But it’s been back there for days now.
It’s origin less than 100 hours away. Hours that could be years for how distant they seem now. Her head on his chest. A gentle hand drawing figure eights on his collarbone.
A quiet song on her breath. Comfort meant for him. Wordless humming that reverberated through to his bones.
He didn’t know the song. But wished he could hear the words. Kept himself from asking her to sing louder lest it break the delicate spell.
He attempts to focus only on the notes in his mind. Trying to hear her as if she were here in this room. But it only makes the longing for the real thing worse.
She isn’t even far. Just a hundred yards across the snowy green. He wonders if she’s lying awake now too. Listens hard in the stillness of the night for the faint whimpers that often come before she wakes with a scream.
But there’s only silence. Loneliness.
The moonlight through the open window catches a tiny glint on the fabric just in front of his eyes. Deep black against the faded green gingham.
It shouldn’t be. She’s never even been in this room. But she’s still here. Brought right to his pillow like a dandelion seed carried by the wind.
A single strand of her hair. They seem to keep popping up somehow.
The first one on a shirt from his suitcase had made him smile before he could stop himself. The facade of their star crossed love not yet fully washed from his subconscious.
The second, he spotted floating gently across the tile of the bathroom floor like it had just fallen from her head as she brushed it in the mirror.
Like a ghost of the version of her that stood so close when they brushed their teeth together in the tiny train bathroom he could feel her hip bone pressing into his thigh.
He’s tried to ignore the others. But tonight, in this fitful haze it feels important. A reminder of a sacred space where she got close enough to leave a trace.
He tries to pick it up but it does not lift clean off. The long, shiny black strand is somehow woven itself through the fabric like it was always a part of it. The way she is stitched into his skin now.
Tied together forever, but she will never truly be his.
A tiny fragment of the hair that had laid right under his nose just the same as they danced surrounded by strangers as it did when she slept in his arms. Hair that somewhere under the strong scent of capitol shampoo still smelled of the meadow on a spring day.
In the daytime it’s a little easier to keep the wall raised. Between his true feelings and the falseness that has become his entire existence.
Here in the dark he allows the small pleasure of his memories to wash over him. To recall the shape of her in his arms. Cold, bare toes on the calf he can feel. The shiver from the contact somehow reaching the phantom one he can’t.
So he falls into his idiotic routine. Conjuring her divine voice in his head. Quieting the jabberjays that squawk insecurity in his psyche. Tries to find sleep listening to her singing and saying all the things she never will.
Fandom: The Hunger Games Trilogy
Prompt: Grave
Rating: Everyone
Word count: 100
Characters: Finnick Odair and Annie Cresta
Requested by: roseofsinnoh
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Annie dropped to her knees by the simple marker that read “Kai Zubiri – forever loved” and gently laid a spray of blue curls there. The wildflower had been her grandmother’s favorite. She stared at the splash of brilliant, deep blue against the sandy grayish soil and gray-green scrub grass as a shadow fell over the grave.
“She would’ve loved you,” she said to the man blocking the weak winter sunlight.
“What makes you say that?” Finnick asked, crouching down beside her and laying a warm hand on her shoulder. She covered it with her own.
Fandom: The Hunger Games Trilogy
Prompt: Shatter
Rating: Teen
Word count: 129
Characters: Finnick Odair and Johanna Mason
Requested by: briarrose
Genre: angst
An insistent ringing woke them both and Johanna pushed Finnick back down as she slipped out of bed. “Just the phone,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
Instead, Finnick watched her silhouette, limned in candy-colored moonlight as she picked up the receiver and leaned back against the window of her Capitol apartment. He stretched lazily and shifted into the pool of warmth she had left behind, but then she made a sharp sound and dropped the phone and he reached over to switch on the bedside lamp just in time to watch her shatter. He was out of bed and by her side in less than a breath.
“Jo?”
“They’re dead. That mother fucking bastard.” Her dark eyes met his. “I wouldn’t play his game so now they're dead.”
Annie traces the schedule on her arm with the tip of her finger, but she doesn’t feel the lines and shapes of it; all she feels is skin. Her breakfast grows cold in front of her as she picks at it. Everyone tells her she has to eat. Some of them joke about how bad the food is, but after weeks – months? – of barely anything at all, of just enough food to keep her body alive, at least until the last few days before the rebels came for them, Annie thinks the food here is wonderful. It’s just that there’s too much of it.
Finnick was gone before she woke. Peeta’s friend Delly came to their compartment at seven and took Annie to get her schedule for the day and then to the dining hall for breakfast, but she left a few minutes ago. She had a schedule to follow. Annie takes a bite of cold scrambled eggs and returns to tracing the lines on her arm. Annie has a schedule, too, but she isn’t following it.
“Annie?”
Her finger stills on her arm. She blinks hard once, twice, stares at her plate. It takes a moment to orient herself again. She’s in District 13. The Capitol and its terrors are thousands of miles away. They can’t touch her here. They can’t hurt her anymore.
Someone sets a tray across from Annie’s and slides onto the bench. Annie forces herself to look up. “Katniss?” The girl smiles at her, the expression almost as tentative as Annie feels.
“You don’t mind if I sit here, do you?” She looks as though she really will leave if Annie asks her to. Annie relaxes.
“No.” She doesn’t say anything else, but that doesn’t seem to bother Katniss.
“I’m supposed to be with Doctor Aurelius right now, but…” Katniss shrugs and takes a bite from a piece of bacon before continuing. “I’m hungry.”
Annie smiles at her and nibbles at a piece of toast. They sit there in silence for a few minutes while Katniss finishes her breakfast and Annie plays with her food. She knows she has to finish it – waste isn’t allowed in 13 – but it’s hard when she isn’t sure her stomach will accept it without a fight.
“Annie, I was thinking…” Annie jumps. She had almost forgotten Katniss was there.
“About what?” she asks.
“Well, you and Finnick are getting married.” Annie smiles and closes her eyes, wanting to hold onto the sudden warmth that fills her for as long as she can. “I’m going back to District Twelve this afternoon. They want me to film a propo or something.” Katniss meets Annie’s eyes. “I guess I could look at my schedule, but I was thinking maybe you could come, too?
“The Victor’s Village there wasn’t damaged in the bombing” – Annie fights the urge to cover her ears – “so all those dresses Cinna designed for me are still in my house. Maybe one of them could be altered for you to wear to your wedding.”
No longer fighting the urge to cover her ears, instead Annie fights the urge to cry.
