A/n: Hunger Games fic...? I saw Mockingjay yesterday and apparently can't get anything accomplished until I write something about it. Sort of a rough, stream of consciousness/character study peice? I have a lot of emotions about Peeta.
Katniss pregnant is something to behold.
She awes him (still) everyday (perhaps in quieter ways than she once did, year ago), but this is an entirely new experience and a new, gentle, aching sort of awe. Laying a hand on the soft curve of her changing body is like being able to touch the stars in the sky. Something that you could never even contemplate but then suddenly bigger and bright and more overwhelming than you could ever have expected.
Peeta sometimes hears talk (used to hear talk?) from crass men with leering faces who saw having a child with their wives as a way to have hold over them, some way to "stake their claim" or prove that she was his. It makes him sick to his stomach to hear that kind of talk.
He knows what it is like when a person has control over others, knows exactly how twisted and terrible that kind of power makes a person. He is intimately aware of what it like to have a part of another person inside your body, taking control.
But this isn't like that at all. It's not like Snow (he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to even think the word without wanting to vomit) or like those horrible men.
It's like a tiny miracle. A spark of something that is just his and Katniss's and no one else's. No cameras, no interviews, no story to spin, no status gain to be had from it, nothing. A baby that is just theirs. A baby that they will never have to worry about being in any kind of twisted game of butchering. A baby that will know nothing of suffering the way that they have, and Peeta is determined to make sure that the child will know nothing but love and comfort from him. (Katniss will probably have to be in charge of discipline, he thinks. He doesn't know if he has it in him.)
Their baby won't have a cold, distant father or a mother who only pays attention to them long enough to finish yelling. (He will never become his parents. Maybe it's better that his memories of them are skewed and somewhat lost. Then he never has a chance to. One good thing to come of his broken brain.)
He would sit for hours just touching Katniss's stomach and marveling….well, if she would let him.
(Some days, when they are both having good days, and it's quiet and raining out, and they have no place to go… They'll stay in bed together, curled up under the warm blankets. Secure in the solidity of the other's body they just lay quietly and listen to the rain.)
Hope for the future is delicate, like a healing bruise. Aching, more so when pressed, but proof that something has happened.
But this kind of ache and awe is so, so welcome.