i'll count your every kiss as a victory
December 3
It's a new national holiday, Plutarch explains. Victory Day.
The day after the bombs went off. The first day of freedom for a new, liberated Panem.
And we'd love to have your support on this, Peeta, we really think if the public sees –
He hangs up the phone.
.
At dinnertime, he lets himself into the house, a loaf of bread tucked under his elbow. She is not in the kitchen, or the living room, or the bathroom. He's not surprised, not really; just frustrated by how predictable she's become, this girl who could bring him to his knees with a kiss and nock an arrow towards his heart in the next breath.
He finds her cross-legged on the floor of the closet in her bedroom, soft rays of sunset streaming in through the windows. After a moment he crouches down and sits beside her.
"We don't have to do anything," he says. "It can be just a normal day."
Katniss lifts one hand and scratches at her cheek; he doesn't even know if she heard him. If she's pretending she didn't hear him.
There is no normal day, he knows. Not the ones where she disappears within herself, locked up in some mental jigsaw puzzle of should have would have could have, trying to fit together the pieces that could never add up. But also not the ones where she seems okay. The ones where she lifts her mouth in a half-smile when he slips through her front door for dinner. Where she curls her lip in disgust when Haymitch barrels inside, a bottle of wine half-empty in his hands.
Not the ones he wishes he could live over and over again: the morning, a few months ago, when she woke up and lay still beside him and then brushed her lips against his, light as the wings of a moth, while she thought he was still asleep.
The day last week when he kissed her in the kitchen, and she let him, opening her mouth beneath his until the oven beeped loudly behind them.
They still haven't spoken about that day.
Peeta scoots back a bit on the floor, letting his head tip back against the wall, cushioned by chiffon, velvet, the luscious fabrics that Cinna had draped and cut and sewn for her body.
He sits with her until they both fall into sleep.
.
It was one week until he was let through her front door, four until he was let into her kitchen, seven until he was let into her bed. Seven weeks and two days, to be precise. It's his own national holiday now, etched into his past.
.
When he wakes there is a moment of panic. He's somewhere small, and dark, and it's like the place where they did things to him that – he can't think about it. Because those thoughts aren't shiny. They're real.
His arms spasm out from his sides and he hears Katniss suck in a breath, somewhere to his left. His chest is pounding like a sledgehammer and this is the moment when it will burst, he's sure of it this time, and he meets her eyes in a sliver of moonlight and then it just stops.
This is the peculiar thing about Peeta's brain: that the same gray eyes, the same olive skin and thin lips, can trigger his heartbeat in completely opposite ways, like a flip of a coin. A year ago he was landing on tails when everyone else bet on heads. Now he looks at Katniss and feels his muscles relax, his pulse slow down, like she's a human shot of morphling straight to his bloodstream.
She doesn't get it, though. She's staring back at him wide-eyed, like he'll pounce if she so much as breathes. "It's okay," he says, embarrassed by how loud and unsteady and not-okay he sounds. "I'm okay."
Katniss blinks and then looks down. "What time is it?" She sounds like she hasn't spoken for days, but he'd been here for breakfast this morning, and they'd made pancakes and talked about how strange it was that Haymitch's geese had never flown south for winter.
They're too dependent, she'd said with an odd twist to her mouth. Peeta had felt the words tighten in his chest, though he knew she didn't mean anything by it.
"I don't know." Peeta leans out through the doorway, balancing on one hand. "Moon's out, though."
"I'm hungry," she says in a quiet voice, like it's something to be ashamed of. It's the way she talks about a lot of things, now. Like she should just suck it up, because hey, Katniss, at least you're not dead.
.
They make dinner. Bread baked in the oven with butter and garlic dug up from the backyard, and rabbit meat that Katniss fries on the stove. It feels like a secret, their midnight meal while what's left of the rest of the district sleeps.
Peeta feels Katniss' eyes on him every time he handles the knife, and he wonders if she will always look at him and see the boy who tried to steal the breath from her lungs; never the boy who only wanted to coax her heart out from its cage.
December 4
In the morning she's gone, off hunting what little prey still creep through the snow-dusted forest.
Peeta wakes up hard and aching, like he does most mornings, and he takes his cock in his hand, thinking about the way a few of her stray hairs had clung to his lips when they'd lay down on the pillow last night. He always feels guilty doing this in her bed, when she's gone, but when he does it here he can close his eyes and still smell her on the sheets.
He has eggs and toast waiting for her when she returns. She stamps the frost off her boots by the door, and he can tell from her scowl that she hasn't brought much home from the woods. Not that she needs to – the trains are always on time, bringing grain from 9, beef from 10, vegetables from 11. Greasy Sae's granddaughter brings eggs every Sunday from the chickens they keep in their backyard. Katniss always tries to give her money or bread, but the girl just smiles and shakes her head, and leaves with nothing.
He eats seconds while she scarfs down her eggs. Peeta doesn't feel guilty about the food; after all that they've been through, the one thing they deserve, undoubtedly, is the food.
"Catch anything?" he asks when she starts to slow down.
"Just a squirrel," she mutters. "I'll give it to the cat."
"I like squirrel," he muses.
Katniss looks up at him, and he sees that today won't be a good day. "You eat it, then."
.
When the doctors finally released him from the Capitol, it was with a suitcase. Mostly bottles and bottles of medicine, and some clothes. He had nothing, after all – Tributes enter the arena with one token, and he'd even left without that.
There was a daily calendar in the suitcase, too, to help him keep track of his medication. He'd taped it to his refrigerator and he looks at it now, the oven heating up beside him. "Victory Day" is in two weeks.
Peeta pulls the flour jar forward from where it sits at the back of the counter, measuring out six cups. He pulls yeast from a cupboard, mixes it with warm water from the tap. The movements are familiar, comforting, and he's thankful that this, at least, is not lost to him.
Katniss was the one who'd explained the bombs to him. How Gale had dreamed them up. How the rebels had been the ones to drop them. How Snow had said as much, laughing at her, spittle and blood on his lips, surrounded by roses and thorns. He never lied to me, Katniss had muttered.
"Who knew?" he'd asked, and Katniss had only shrugged. Coin, obviously, but as for the rest? Everyone. No one. Someone, because Coin couldn't have made it happen on her own.
It was why she'd killed Coin, she'd told him. Why she voted in favor of one last Hunger Games: to gain the woman's trust. He'd mulled over that for a few days, and accepted it, though he could still remember her gray eyes in that moment, the hard line of her mouth. He's still not sure she's being completely honest with herself, though that's nothing new from Katniss.
Now he wonders if Plutarch had known. His specialty was pomp and flash, not bullets and bombs, but all the same: he was important. He had to have known. And now he's calling them on the phone, asking them to celebrate the day that most spent clearing the city of bloodied corpses, sweeping up bits of bone and burnt skin, or clinging to life in a hospital bed.
For a man like Plutarch, orchestrating the whole thing, safe in a bunker – of course it felt like a victory.
For the rest of them, though. It just felt like endless, endless death.
December 5
There's a phone message waiting for him when he arrives home after breakfast.
"Peeta! It's Plutarch Heavensbee again. So sorry we were cut off the other day – I'm having an electrician out on the next train to take a look at the phone lines you have out there in 12, it's simply unacceptable. I wanted to talk to you some more about this Victory Day event we're planning. We're hoping to get all the victors on board…"
Peeta stops listening, but he lets the recording run to the end.
December 10
A package arrives, addressed to the both of them. It's from Effie Trinket.
"We don't live together," Katniss mutters, sounding irritated, but Peeta says nothing. (He wants to live here, and practically does; but he's afraid of what she'll say if he asks.)
She opens the box anyway, and finds a note lying on top. I thought you two could use some decorations! Everybody's doing it this year! xoxo Effie
"Decorations?" Peeta repeats. His heart stops for a moment – it must be something for Victory Day. Katniss pulls away a layer of tissue paper, revealing rows of shiny, golden baubles, metallic hooks at the top.
"I think it's for Christmas," she says, lifting one carefully.
Peeta blinks; he'd forgotten it was nearly time for Christmas. Hardly anyone celebrated the old holiday in District 12 – some elderly women, mostly, who still clung to the traditions they remembered from their childhoods before the Dark Days. They'd burn white candles in their windows in the last few weeks of December, and Peeta remembers peering out through the bedroom curtains when he was young, staring at the lights until his vision swam, like he was staring at a miniature sun.
There's more: a wreath of fake pine needles, dotted with plastic red berries; a length of little clear lightbulbs; two large red socks embroidered with their names. There's a deep green tablecloth, run through with threads of gold – at least that's pretty, Peeta thinks.
"This is insane," Peeta snorts.
"This is Effie," Katniss corrects him, and when she laughs he wants to wrap his arms around her and feel it rumbling through her. But he only grins and plucks one of the gold balls from the box.
"You should wear these as earrings," he says, earning another laugh.
Katniss pushes herself to her feet, taking the tablecloth with her. "I like this," she says. "But I don't even know what I'm supposed to do with a giant sock with my name on it."
"Take mine, too," he offers.
"A matched pair," she says, and he catches the flush on her cheeks just before she turns away.
December 13
They leave for the woods early, bread and cold meat and carrots tucked into the knapsack that Peeta carries on his back.
She's taken him out here before, but not in winter, and he finds it's much tougher to navigate with his prosthetic when there's frost on the ground. Peeta stumbles on a patch of ice and she grabs his hand for balance, and doesn't let go.
After thirty minutes Katniss stops, chewing her lip as she looks up at the gray sky, lost in thought. "I don't know if we should keep going," she finally says. "It's kind of far, and…" She trails off, but he knows she means, and your leg.
Peeta squeezes her hand. "I want to keep going."
She looks at him. "Alright. But no complaining."
"I wasn't," he laughs.
By the time they finally reach the little cabin, his knee is aching and raw, but he doesn't say a word. Katniss leads him inside, dropping his hand, and looks around the single room in silence. There are memories here, he realizes.
"My father used to bring me here," she says. She breathes in, as though she'll say more, but nothing comes. "Let's build a fire."
.
Eventually she admits that she'd brought Gale here, too, before he was whipped in the square and the world started to fall to even more pieces. It's where he'd led what was left of District 12, after the Capitol's attack. Peeta tries to imagine the scene, hundreds milling about, desperate and dirty and hungry. He can't really quite picture it; after all, no one he'd grown up with was there.
They sit close by the fire, and when her head drops onto his shoulder he wraps his arm around her side, drawing in her warmth.
.
It's near dark when they arrive back at Victor's Village. Peeta's leg trembles slightly with each step, and though he tries to hide it, he knows she can see the limp. Knows she feels responsible for it. It's almost like a twisted sense of narcissism, he's thought more than once, the way she takes on every burden, trails every bad moment back to herself.
He drops the knapsack on one of the kitchen chairs. "I'm going to go home and take a bath, but I'll be back," he says. "Do you want to warm up the leftover stew?"
"You can take it here," she says casually, unlacing her boots by the door. "I have some of your sleep clothes upstairs."
Peeta stares at her, but she seems not to notice, her eyes determinedly focused on her fingers as they tug at the laces. "Okay," he finally says. "I'll, um. I'll just be a minute."
"Okay."
He glances back when he's halfway up the stairs. She's watching him. Her eyes dart away quickly, and she busies herself with the knapsack, hanging it with their coats by the door.
December 14
She kisses him first, this time.
They're settled on the couch together, a fire crackling in the hearth, Katniss with a novel in her lap, Peeta bent over the memory book, pen in hand. Nothing unusual, save the twinkle of the little lights Effie had sent, which they'd strung haphazardly around the room.
Peeta feels her fingertips on his chin and then her lips, warm and dry against his own.
When she pulls back her eyes are still closed. Peeta brushes his knuckles across her cheekbone and they flutter open.
"I never thanked you," she whispers.
"For what?"
"Being here," she says. "Staying."
Peeta slides the memory book off of his lap, onto the floor. He leans back in and kisses her, more firmly than before, his hand moving to tangle in her hair. Katniss falls back against the pillow, pulling her legs up to nestle around his hips.
He makes her come for the first time that night, her body wet and warm around his fingers. She falls asleep under his gaze, her shirt pushed up and her pants pulled down, the delicate skin of her chest still flushed. He tugs her underwear back up and smoothes down her shirt, and carries her up to bed, and they both sleep without dreaming.
December 16
The phone rings as they're eating lunch. Katniss ignores it. It rings and rings and rings. Peeta raises his eyebrows from across the table.
"It's just Plutarch again," she mutters, stabbing a piece of sausage with her fork. "His stupid tv thing."
"Do you want to talk about it?" He knows as soon as the words leave his mouth what her answer will be; they haven't talked since that night, really.
It's one of the worst things about loving Katniss: never knowing what's a step forward, and what's nothing at all, like stepping back into your own footprints in the snow. There's a part of him that's been inside of her, now, and he thought it meant something.
"No."
"Alright."
"He said it's to honor them," she blurts out. "Like…like they chose to be there. Like they were willing."
And they were, he thinks, but he understands the distinction. The medics were willing to enter the line of fire. But they never agreed to be pawns.
"I know," Peeta says, unsure what she wants to hear right now. Unsure if she wants him to respond at all.
But then she's crying, shaking in her seat, and he doesn't care anymore that she still can't love him the way he wants. He doesn't care that maybe she never will, that maybe she's incapable of it, because her heart burnt out that day in the city center and now there's nothing but ashes in the cavity of her chest. He moves beside her and wraps her in his arms. She clings to him, choking on her sobs against his shoulder.
.
The phone rings, over and over and over. Peeta tears it out of the wall.
Haymitch would be proud.
December 17
He holds her, sunrise to sunset, and never lets go.
December 18
Peeta half-expects a camera crew when there's a knock at the door. But it's only Greasy Sae's granddaughter, two dozen eggs in a little basket. "Thank you," he says, and she just smiles back, hopping down the front steps back into the snow.
Haymitch is out on his front porch, a bottle of something potent hanging loosely in his grip, though it's barely 9 am. "Happy Victory Day," he calls out, holding the bottle out towards Peeta, as though in a toast.
Peeta shakes his head, though part of him knows that Haymitch's way – to treat it all like a joke – is the only way to get through it with your sanity intact.
When he closes the door he finds Katniss right behind him, silent as ever, still wearing her pajamas. "Who was it?" she asks nervously.
"Just eggs." He holds out the basket for her to see.
Her shoulders slump in relief, and she wraps her arms around his middle, resting her head against his chest. He rubs her back slowly with his free hand, aching to slip it under the hem of her shirt to touch her skin again, to tug on her braid gently and tip her head back for a kiss.
They stand like that until she lets go, yawning. "Will you make scrambled eggs? I like yours better."
.
It is a normal day, or as close to normal as one can ever be in this world of post-everything: post-war, post-hijacking, post-Prim.
They work on the memory book for most of it. It's Katniss' idea, and he agrees. If this is a day about honoring the dead, they will do it privately, carefully, with meaning.
He catches her staring at him at one point, as he's shading in Cinna's cheekbone, and his mind snags on a memory he must have forgotten. The plant book, years ago, before they'd even known about the Quell. She'd been watching him with that same look, her eyes soft and wistful.
His stomach flops a little when her hand comes to cover his on the page.
"The other night…" she trails off, and swallows. "I'm sorry if…if you thought I didn't like it."
Peeta sets down his pencil. "You don't have to apologize," he says softly. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have…I shouldn't have." He shrugs.
But Katniss shakes her head. "No. I'm trying to say…I did. Like it," she says, her fingers curling around his palm.
"You did?" She nods, looking shy.
"It's been…it's been so hard, lately. This time of year." She pauses, choosing her words carefully. "Sometimes I take it out on you, and I'm sorry."
He hugs her, and feels her tense and then melt against him. He presses his face against the curve of skin where her neck meets her shoulder, and thinks about kissing it. Decides he can wait; he can wait forever, if it's for Katniss.
.
But he's glad he doesn't have to, he thinks that night, when she opens up and pulls him close, and it's real, real, real.
December 19
Peeta wakes up happy. His good leg is pinned to the bed by one of Katniss', and her hand is splayed over his chest, as though she's shielding his heart in her sleep. Her eyes blink open not long after his, and when she smiles at him, sleepy and slow, he knows that it will be a good day.
There is another package waiting by the front door, again addressed to both of them, again from Effie. Katniss doesn't comment on the dual nature of the address this time. The note inside says, Merry Christmas! I tried to get in touch but your phone isn't working. Don't open this until the 25th! xoxo Effie
Peeta looks at Katniss. "Want to open it anyway?" She shrugs.
Effie's gift is a photograph in a fine wooden frame: Katniss and Peeta, kissing onstage, reunited for the first time after the 74th Hunger Games. Katniss is up on her tiptoes, her arms thrown around his neck. Peeta's arms wrap around her middle so tightly that his hands practically meet again at her front.
Peeta remembers that kiss, the way it had gone on and on but still not long enough. He'd forgotten the cameras, the audience, Caesar Flickerman hovering a few feet away. The only thing that mattered was the girl in his arms, the girl he loved. Not the girl who loved him – not then – but Effie wouldn't know that.
Katniss studies the photograph with an unreadable look on her face. "You looked so beautiful," she says quietly. "You spent days just dying, in that cave, and then…" She stops, blinking rapidly, her eyes growing wet. "I was scared, but I was so happy, Peeta."
He pulls her in close to his side, and presses a kiss to her forehead. She means it, and that is enough.
.
Peeta goes home that afternoon for a change of clothes. He packs an entire suitcase.
The calendar catches his eye, still taped up on the refrigerator. He throws that in, too.
Thanks for reading - let me know what you think!
Written for the December 2013 "Holidays in Panem" challenge - giant props, as always, to misshoneywell! 3
The title is from the song "Victory" by Janelle Monaé, which is beautiful and fits the story well.