Summary: AU. Post Mockingjay. Peeta was rescued from the Capitol at the end of the war. After Prim's death, Katniss has no one left to be strong for… except the broken boy they send back home. Role reversal. Katniss heals, Peeta mends.
You learn that it doesn't matter in how many pieces your heart has been broken,
The world doesn't stop for you to fix it.
"Don't worry," Coin says. "I saved him for you."
They ask me if I want to see him. They say he's been asking about me, that he mumbles my name in his sleep. Like a pledge, a prayer. Katniss. Katniss. Katniss.
My mother brings in a puff of bleach and rubbing alcohol in the stale white room. Words small and neatly-spaced like a schoolgirl standing up for a presentation in front of the class. I say nothing. Her words echo back at her, hollow and sterile, and I count the minutes until she leaves. Five.
Plutarch, reminding me of what a sensational propo it would make. The girl on fire and the boy with the bread, reunited at last. What hope it would give the districts. His voice is too bright and vibrant, sucking all the cool air out. I curl on my side so that I do not have to see. Dr. Aurelius tells me Gale is in Two, mopping up Peacekeepers and I suppose that's the only reason they haven't sent him up to me as well.
Haymitch is the last. I lie with my eyes closed, only half-playing dead. I take the shallowest breaths, wishing I could still them altogether but they've hooked me up to a dozen shiny tubes, they have a constant watch on me. Not before Snow, I think. The Mockingjay should be the one to fire the last shot of the war. He doesn't ask me how I'm feeling, if I want to talk, if it hurts.
"If it were you," he says, blunt as ever, "the boy'd be here all day, everyday, as long as it took. Hell, he'd probably be sleeping outside your door." You could live a thousand life times and not deserve him. He leaves without saying anything else, as though the sight of me, my forehead and nose just barely peeking out of the sheets, disgusts him.
I get up. I twist the singed hanks of my hair into a semblance of a braid. I slap water on my face from a basin, shuffle into a white robe hanging from a peg and the soft pair of slippers at the door. I walk, holding the walls, but I walk. A girl in the rebels' battered grey uniform, gun slung easily at her bony hip, follows me. She is only a little older than me, with a soldier's deadened eyes and an old woman's sunken cheeks. When I pause, uncertain in the gleaming white hallway, she leads me. Her hand on my elbow is gentle.
I wonder if they have cameras trained on my room, on his. I find that I do not care.
There are more guards at his door, bigger and brawnier. A circle of doctors with pens and clipboards, of course they're here.
"I'm so glad you could come." Finally, he does not need to add. Dr. Aurelius, soft and round like a meringue, takes me aside for a moment. "He's not himself," he reminds me, "he doesn't say much but we can see that he gets confused. We still don't understand the extent of damage, the experiments they conducted on him were novel and all the notes destroyed."
"But he'd want to see you, Soldier Everdeen," the girl at my side says shyly. I wonder if she's swallowed the lies like sugar pills, the ones from the games, the interviews, the tours, the propos. From her misty-eyed smile, I'd say so. "He says your name all the time."
They lead me to a one-way glass window and I look into a room as cool and white as mine. But his looks less like a hospital room - someone has arranged a pot of paints on his desk, sticks of charcoal. An easel set up in a corner, streaks of oily red and gold and orange running wild all over the painting, the colors too violent for such a room.
"Painting appears to help. He's always calmer and quieter when he can focus his mind on it."
Baking, I think. That would help. Frosting. Tigerlily cookies, pink and yellow flowers for cakes. But I don't say anything.
Dr. Aurelius natters on. "We will be monitoring you for your safety, not that there seems to be anything to fear of course. You are not his first visitor, but I believe seeing you might give us some insights into his condition."
I give a small shrug to indicate that I do not care either way. The boy in the paper robe, sitting cross-legged on his bed with a sketchpad, is not the one who was Reaped. That boy could lug a hundred pound sack of flour across the room like it was nothing. This one is all eyes and jutting bones, even the pencil too thick and heavy for his bony fingers it seems.
I push the door and shuffle inside. At first he does not look up, does not even seem to hear the door banging shut behind me. I try to reach for the words. I feel a fluttering in the hollow at the base of my throat, as though all those trapped words are ready to rise up anyway, force themselves out even if I am not ready for them. I screamed when they said they hadn't taken you. I bit Haymitch. I was so afraid for you. There wasn't a day I didn't think about you.
But that wouldn't be real. There were those days, my shallow breaths not even stirring the thin sheets they shrouded me in. The moment drags and drags. I speak for the first time in days, months, centuries, my voice rusted and quivering from not being used for so long. "Peeta."
He looks up, a tremor in his fingers as he sets down his sketchpad. In a move almost too fast to follow, he lunges across the room. And then his fingers are around my throat and my world shatters again.
You realize that you are your best friend,
And that you can do do anything, or nothing.
Somehow they cobble me up before the execution. I wonder how they expect me to shoot straight, stiffly bound up to hold my half-healed ribs in place, rising from my bed for the first time in a month only for today.
I watch the City Circle fill up, the faces glimpsed momentarily on the enormous screens that have been set up around the mansion. I catch snatches of some I know - Gale in his uniform, straight as a soldier, his face a blank slate. Peeta, small and limp and shaking, between a pair of guards. I wonder who's idea that was. Haymitch, looking distinctly green as he squints in the sunlight. Shades his eyes and curls his fingers around the neck of an imaginary bottle.
I expected the bow to feel too large, too clumsy against my bruised body and in my unaccustomed hands but the memory is in the muscles. My hands and my eyes remember from the days when starvation was only a shot away. On the balcony, Coin does not quite rub her hands together but she still manages to look incredibly self-righteous. Picture-perfect for the moment too, her eyes and hair and suit all the same grey.
They bind Snow ten yards away from me, over his heart the rose that I had picked and Coin had probably placed herself. Gale once told me that it should be the same as shooting an animal, shooting another human an in cold blood, and I had vehemently disagreed. But he was right. A squirrel would be harder.
The bow braced against me, I watch the white rose on his lapel turn red. I turn around, marching down the steps at the side of the verandah, but Haymitch catches my arm before I can slip away within the warren of rooms. "Not so fast, sweetheart," he says, his breath sour on his face. "Coin wants to see all her victors." What, another propo? I think wearily but I suppose it might be quicker to just get it over with. I could shimmy out of his grip, I could run but not too fast with my body in such bad shape. They'd catch me.
She sits us down around a round table and asks us a question they must have asked seventy-six years ago. Maybe around the same table, I muse. Coin knows the value of a good symbol as well as anybody. Enobaria is the only one to say yes. Even Peeta and Annie Cresta reach far back enough in their broken minds to refuse. When Coin turns patiently to me, I stare at her and a hot, insistent part of me wants to say yes. But I think of Prim, of what she would say and how she would look at me, and before the tears can fill my eyes I say, "No. Never." She nods.
Afterwards Haymitch takes me aside and tells me I might as well have painted a bulls-eye on my back. Gale catches me before I can disappear, holds me in place by curling his hands around mine. Tells me they're sending him to One soon, that it's going to take a while. "Wait for me, Catnip?" he asks me, hope so absurd and unshielded in his eyes.
I nod and he takes that for acceptance, pressing his lips to mine before I can recoil. "I'm sorry," he whispers, his fingers reaching up to touch my face, but I am already gone. "Katniss, wait!" he shouts behind me but he doesn't know my hiding places. I curl up in a silver bathtub in a yellow-papered bathroom, my head between my knees and a day later, wake up with my neck on fire.
Dr. Aurelius wants to know what I want to do. I could stay in the Capitol, but I'd have to make a decision regarding it. I can't stay in limbo in the president's mansion forever, if I wish to say a place will be found for me but I have to agree and sign my name to a contract. Do I want to go to Four with my mother? Perhaps I might like to go to One for a change of pace. Or Eleven...
"I want to go home."
"Katniss," he says gently. "There is nothing left of your home."
I shrug and then I clam up.
They let me go eventually, they have to. Haymitch takes me back, sets me in a rocker before the fire in my empty house. And then, satisfied that he has done all that he can for the night, he leaves to get drunk on the liquor from the hovercraft.
I find an old shawl draped over a chair, forgotten all those months ago when Gale dragged my mother out from the house. Waiting so long. I rub my fingers over the fraying edges, the diamonds knitted on the good, thick wool. The color is muted, fading and it smells of nothing but that it is a comfort. It reminds me of nothing - not her or her, either.
It starts snowing. It stops snowing. The phone rings and rings and in a quickfire fit of rage, I throw it out of the window. The snow melts off the ground. Greasy Sae tells me that spring is in the air, asks me if I can smell the snowdrops. But I am mute. I will never open my mouth again because what else is there left to say?
Haymitch thumps over to my house and we eat a greasy, meaty broth in front of the fire. Afterwards, perhaps for a change of scenery, he slouches in the armchair and drinks moonshine from the bottle and tells me Peeta is coming back. I don't ask but he shrugs and tells me all the same. "No need for a Mockingjay now," he says reasonably, "and really what other place is there to put him in, now? They say he's cured. Of a sort."
Maybe she's not hoping for anything in particular, just for matters to take their course, to check another thing off her lists and make it go away by forgetting about it. But somehow I find that I don't care. There are worse ways to die than with Peeta's hands around my throat. I know them all because I see them in my dreams every night.
Haymitch seems to read my thoughts the way he always does. "I used to dream about this when you were being your old pestilent self. Him snapping your neck for me." He smirks and holds up his bottle in a mock toast. "Well, this should be fun."
I don't see him for a week. For a week I lie under the sheets, my windows shut against the world and my hair leaving grease-marks on the pillows. Haymitch comes and tells me that he never pegged me for a coward. I roll on my side and pay him no attention. But then Greasy Sae prises open the windows on a day that I actually manage to fall asleep and the mockingjays wake me. She's right, spring is in the air. Snowdrops. Lavender. Crocus. I can hear her simple granddaughter singing from the kitchen. Its a love song, one that my father taught me.
The girl who strips before the mirror is not the girl who was Reaped either. Smaller and more shrunken, her flesh mottled grey and pink, white and olive. A tender tapestry of burns and scars. This is not a girl who can hunt in the forest for hours, drag her kill back and trade it in the Hob, walk back home and cook and at the end of the day, play with her sister, sing her to sleep. This is a girl who can barely walk. If she ever had a pretty face, a sparkle in her eyes that made a boy's head turn, that is gone too.
Somehow has left a pair of scissors in the bathroom cupboard, by accident or oversight I have to suppose. Or maybe they've all stopped caring at this point. I pick them up and snip. They are small and not the sharpest, it is slow-going but in the end there is only a dark fuzz where there were matted, singed hanks of hair. With my face naked and vulnerable without a curtain of hair, I see my mother in it - the eyes wide and oddly vacant, the half-parted lips murmuring secrets to herself. Soldier Everdeen, I think and then I let the hot water run and let it wash away all that's left of the girl. It burns. It cauterizes.
It is noon by the time I lace my boots up and walk across the street. Someone has set him on a rocker the porch, with a blanket over his lap. I wonder if the Capitol has paid for a housekeeper for him, as they must have Greasy Sae for me. I wonder if its someone I know, someone from the Seam or the Hob who's come back, or if its an Avox with no further use in the Capitol. Haymitch has said they haven't sent a doctor with him but that he's supposed to have therapy sessions with Dr. Aurelius over the phone.
Just like you, he'd reminded me pointedly.
He's holding a piece of paper, a pen too. I walk all the way across and stand before the porch steps, my hands stuffed in the pockets of my father's old jacket. I wait. He's almost vibrating as though he's ready to launch himself on me. Just like a cornered animal.
Once I took Prim to the forest with me, I want to say. We saw a doe and her fawn. They were so beautiful and we were so still and quiet, they didn't move though they were so frightened. And then Gale shot them.
He shoves himself out of his rocker, so violently that he sends the paper and the pen flying but instead of coming at me, he flings himself all the way across the porch and snaps the screen door shut behind him. His fingers tighten till they turn white on the mosquito-net lattice of the door, his eyes huge and dark as he stares at me across the metal. Still I don't move, careful not to spook him.
"Your hair." This is the first time I hear his voice from his own lips in almost a year. It doesn't sound like Peeta at all, Peeta's voice was never so cold, so hard.
I touch my hand to the fuzz on my scalp, feeling oddly defensive. "I cut it."
His own flops into his eyes, so long that I wonder that no one thought to trim it before they sent it out of the Capitol. Must be the fashion then. "Well you never were pretty," he snorts. "What's looking like a skinned rat to you?"
I turn right round, more angry than hurt now. How dare he. Even if he rushes out at me now, I have my bow and arrows. I'll take him down and I won't even fill sorry for him. The Capitol turned him into a mutt, hijacked him they're calling it but they made him one of their own. The doctors can say he's almost cured, that he's so much better but that's not true. That thing inside Peeta's house is not my Peeta, sweet, gentle Peeta whose only fault was being too good. But instead of crawling back into my room and between my sheets, I turn right for the forest, stomping all the way.
I never pegged you for a coward. Haymitch's words needle me more than they should have. What can that old drunk have to say to me that can hurt me now?
I shoot a rabbit, a pair of squirrels. Its not much, the old Katniss would count it a poor day and worry about what to eat, but its more exertion than I have seen for months. I'm too tired to be angry after skinning them and stuffing them in my game bag. So tired that I curl up on a flat, sun-warmed rock beside the lake and fall asleep. When I wake up my cheeks are cold and wet and the sky is the dark purple of larkspur.
I crawl under the fence and go back, past the empty streets. First I go to Peeta's dark house and I drop the bag with the squirrels on his porch, thumping hard on the door several times before I go away. I am almost home when I hear the scrape of a door, an arm reaching out of the darkness and taking the bag. Squirrel was always Peeta's father's favorite, his favorite. Fry it up and it'll be good, I think and I want to tell him so badly. Forget tell, I want to run across the street and march into his house, cook it for the both of us. Peeta is not a cook, he's a baker and I wonder if he remembers how to cook for himself, if he's eating. Maybe this is how Haymitch feels about us. When he's coherent.
But I wait on my porch till the door clicks shut and a light turns on in a room. Two squirrels wouldn't be enough, I think. Peeta needs to eat better. I'll get up early tomorrow, I think, and drift inside my own house. Without turning on the lights, I slurp up the cold bowl of greasy broth Sae has left on the counter for me and march up the stairs. Tomorrow I'll go hunting for real.
A/N: So I reposted this, changing it slightly. In this version Katniss doesn't meet Snow before the execution because she's in the hospital the whole time so she doesn't figure out about Gale or Coin.
I was inspired after going on a marathon of beautifully-written Everlark fanfiction and listening to the Mockingjay soundtrack - anyone else have Hanging Tree on loop? So, umm, if its not really clear - the rescue mission did happen and Annie and Jo were picked up, but Peeta was kept somewhere else so they couldn't get to him. He was rescued at the end of the war and without coming into contact with Katniss, the doctors had no idea how violent the hijacking was or how he'd react since he seemed normalish away from Katniss-triggering stimuli and of course there was no one left who'd conducted the actual experiments on him.
This is going to have a bit of dark!Peeta. I wrote it because I was a little frustrated at how Peeta went on being resolutely good and heroic for Katniss, even after he'd been through as much as her. So I decided to turn it around, when Peeta was too weak to take care of himself, just sort of giving up like Katniss did in the books. In this fic he can control his violent tendencies towards Katniss, just barely, but he's still bitter and confused since no one has really walked him through it like the squad in District 13 or his old friends did in the actual books. So he's suspicious and scared of her, just patched enough that he's not violent all the time to her and then sent away. So Katniss has to be Peeta for Peeta - in her own Katnissy way. I hope I didn't make anyone OOC, haven't written THG fanfiction in ages so all and any criticism is appreciated! Oh and reviews are love, of course :)
The quotes are from "After a while you learn" by Veronica Shoffstall.