TITLE: Seam Eyes
SUMMARY: The night before the Quell, Katniss finds comfort in the last arms she would expect.
PAIRING: Katniss/Haymitch
WARNINGS: M-rating, rough sex.
HPOV
The night before the Quell, I go to try and find her. She isn't with her mother and sister. When I ask, Prim informs me that she spent the day with them, and asked them if she could have some time alone. As soon as they say it, I know where she is.
I go back to the Seam. I grew up here, just like Katniss. Shared a bed with my brother across the room from my mother, just like she did. Thought there was nothing but the mines, knew I'd do whatever I could to protect him. I wasn't given the option for my Games. When the last name came out of the ball, it was mine, not his. And with four names per district, thank god it wasn't him. Maysilee Donner - good god, she was bad enough. And these houses have not changed. Almost all of them once housed a dead tribute. Tonight, the houses are dark. The Seam has gathered somewhere, probably to mourn her. And in her window, a flickering betrays the fact that while she sat there she finally got too afraid to bear the darkness.
I go in without knocking. She does not look up, she does not blink and she says absolutely nothing. If she wasn't expecting me, she has simply given up. Perhaps most shockingly, her bow is on the table before her.
"What if I was Thread?" I ask, which isn't what I meant to say first.
"Then you'd put a bullet in my head and I would get to destroy their Games one last time."
"How'd you even get it here?"
"I brought it from the woods two days after they announced the Quell. Jumped back out the tree. I wanted my mother and my sister to have this piece of me when I'm dead."
"When you're dead?"
"I do not care what it costs you, Haymitch, but you give your all in getting Peeta out alive. I will be dead. They will not allow two victors again and if it comes down to it, it will be me they blow to pieces. Don't let me stand there again with another handful of berries." For a wild, terrible moment, I think about telling her everything. Everything I know, everything I think, everything I am waiting to hear on. But I can't predict her. I can't know what she would do. How she would act, or behave.
She is the riddle I have never solved. In my Games, I solved the force field, I solved how to win the last, desperate struggle. I think about the faint, light scar that's all that's left of my wounds, thanks to the Capitol. But even they couldn't remove the final traces. I wonder if they completely got rid of her burn scar on her thigh. Seeing her in that tree with that wound, having run away from the Careers, I was prepared to give everything I had to get her out, to send her the medicine I knew she needed, even if it took my money to be given illegally to the fund. After nearly twenty five years of watching tributes who had literally no chance and no hope and all but a signed death warrant, she burned. She burned with rage and fire and spirit. She was independent, a fighter, a hunter, her will to live burning white hot. And love. A remarkable capacity to love. All my life, or as much as I remember, every year kids were sent to the Games and every year they normally had siblings who could have taken their place. But it never happened. Until the day a twelve year old girl with an untucked shirt started to walk towards the stage and her sister took her place.
I find it hard to recognise the woman who now stares at a candle flame, apparently uncaring of my presence. I watch her for a long time, and notice that she isn't staring at the flame. She's looking past it to the bow and arrows.
"If I stabbed myself in the throat with this arrow, Haymitch, would you let me bleed to death?"
"What?"
"If I stabbed myself in the throat with this arrow, Haymitch, would you let me bleed to death?" Her voice is absolutely conversational, and from my knowledge of Katniss, I know this is not a good sign. She is ready to do it. I reach for the quiver, and she moves. With cat-like speed, she snatches them from the table, pulls one from the quiver and holds it to her throat. "I know exactly where to stab, Haymitch. I'd bleed to death in five seconds and nobody would be able to save me. What would the Capitol do then? This isn't like the other districts. There's a fifty-fifty chance you're going back in. The other half of my choice is me being dead. There'd be no other victor to take my place. So, Haymitch - if I stabbed myself in the throat with this arrow, would you let me bleed to death?"
"I won't let you stab yourself."
"You think you can stop me?"
"I'm a bit quicker than I was." She stares at me, and while she does, I reach out, wrap my fingers around her wrist and pull the arrow away from her own throat, and point it at mine. "You can stab yourself in the throat if you want, but stab me first. I won't let you be a coward and leave me to watch the Capitol wreck their revenge on the people you will leave behind." We stare at each other for a long time, and I feel my heart throbbing in my chest. Suddenly she's fighting for control of the arrow, trying to pull it back and away, back to her own throat. As we struggle, I seize her other wrist, pulling her and therefore the arrow back to me. She stumbles, bumps against my body and in her shock, she drops her hold on the arrow. I drop it, stamp on it. She stares at me.
Her eyes are exactly the same grey as mine, those Seam eyes that so many people have. And they are burning, burning as she stops staring and starts kicking. I tighten my hold on her wrists and let her struggle against me. And finally, finally I grab a hold of her and yank her to me and hold her while she kicks and struggles and goes limp against me.
Then her head is resting on my shoulder, her arms are round my waist and her forehead is pressed against my neck. I feel her against every inch of me and all I can do is tighten my hold on her. The tighter my grip gets, the tighter hers is, the closer she presses herself against me, until we're moulded to one another. Here in this house, with the light of her candle not even enough to light beyond the table, where the darkness is pressing into our little circle of light as if it was a crowd trying to get as close as possible to an event. Suddenly her hands aren't on my back any longer, they're on my front and they're nudging me away - but only slightly. She locks her hands around my arms, and she stares at me.
"Why are you here?"
"I was looking for you, and guessed at here."
"Why were you looking for me?"
"I don't know." She doesn't take her eyes off my face. Instead, she runs her hands down my arms and takes my hands. She places them carefully. One on her ribs, so close my thumb can feel the gentle swell of the curve of her breast. One on her face, so my thumb can touch her lips.
"I don't have much time left to be alive. My goodbyes to the people who matter are prepared. I don't have much time to be alive, Haymitch. And I have a last request of you."
"What is it?" I whisper, hoarsely. As if I can't guess what she wants. One of her hands is flat over my heart, the other is on my hip, gripping the material of my trousers.
"Take me. Take me so I know I have been taken, take me so I can feel it because I am so numb I cannot feel a thing now. Take me here, where I belong, so you had me where I lived in better times. Take me before I die." This is it, then. The point where I should be a decent man, a good man, and tell her the plan so I don't do this. This is it.
But I don't say it. Because when I open my mouth to say it, she kisses me. She kisses me and it's hard and desperate and needy and she tastes like hunger. So I don't say it, even when she stops kissing me. Because when she stops kissing me, I kiss her. I kiss her as if she really will die. As if this really is the fulfilment of her last request, and not proof that I am a monster.
Cloth tears, teeth scrape my lip, skin yields beneath touches and ragged breaths sound horribly loud in the terrible silence of the Seam. At some point, we went to the floor and started ripping each other's clothes off. Her nails leave red trails as she tears my shirt away, my fingers leave marks as I grip her arms and our teeth each make marks as we bite shoulders and necks to feel something. Her legs wrap around my waist and I attempt to move some of my weight onto my arms, but she stops me. Underwear is removed with shaking hands and I see Katniss Everdeen spread before me like some offering at a banquet, pale and shaking and delicious. My hand finds her in the dark and my eyes seek out hers.
"Are you sure?" I pant the words and my desire hangs in the air between us. She gasps her consent, pulling me down to kiss me, and I slip my finger into warm, wet heat. She mews like a kitten, body coiling down to press into my hand, back arching, breasts offered to me by her movement. I work her to a frenzy, remove my hands, position myself and pause. Pause, in the midst of this, because even though she asked me to take her, I don't know if anyone has before. Find her eyes glowing, try to form my question when all I can think of is how much I want her. But perhaps she senses it, perhaps she knows it, perhaps she can tell what it is I have to ask, because suddenly her hands have found me. As slender fingers wrap around me, I groan, drop my forehead to hers, and she speaks.
"You don't have to hesitate. And please, I need - make it hard." Those last three words are a whisper, a whisper so quiet that if her lips weren't right against my ear, I would miss them. I don't ask who, I don't care who - I simply does as she wants.
I take her without holding myself back. She and I have so much anger and so much hate and so much rage - and here, on the floor of her kitchen, all of it pours out. We use each other as tools to relieve it all. I am not gentle, my fingers will leave bruises. She is not restrained, her nails will have drawn blood and will leave trails down my back. Everything I give, she meets, hips rising to meet mind with every thrust and every grunt of mine is echoed with a moan of hers. As she begs me not to stop, I slide an arm beneath her, pull her pelvis off the floor and change the angle. Her eyes roll backwards, her mouth opens, and I feel her go so tense in my arms I am briefly afraid she is hurt. But then I feel it. I feel her body tighten around me, feel a clutching, sense her heart pounding and I see her face relax. I fall apart above her, drop onto her, feel her wrap arms and legs around me and hang on as she gasps.
It's a long, long time before we move. Before I roll off her and lie beside her in the dark, my breathing back to normal and my heart no longer pounding. She rolls onto her front. I know she's looking at me, even though I stare at the ceiling.
"Thank you, Haymitch," she says, quietly. I say nothing to her. "Look at me, Haymitch." I look at her, and roll onto my side to face her properly. She reaches out, touches my face, brushes back a lock of my hair. She says nothing else, does nothing else. We reach an unspoken agreement to dress, to help restore each other to normal.
We share one last kiss before we leave the house.