Disclaimer: I do not own the characters, story, or have any ownership of the Hunger Games
a/n: this'll be updated at random. I wrote this one a couple months ago but I'm posting it now so I can keep it in the back of my head to write. vignettes of hijacked visions, no specific order to any of them. violence, sexual themes, and probably other trigger warners will apply, once I write more. I have a couple ideas but any suggestions to visions are welcomed.
He sees the rain out of his window, pounding onto the ground with a strength that he thinks he can feel, even inside, even by the ovens. His mother's voice cracks like a whip but he pays it no mind, like he always tries to not, and goes back to the ovens to check on the bread.
Distantly, he is aware that this isn't real. That he's in the time of his childhood but as he looks at his hands, he sees that he's grown up. He's stuck somewhere on some plane between both times, but it doesn't matter. There's bread to bake. There's a mother to scream.
And she screams and yells out the door, into the rain. Words pick up in his ears, the word Seam coming forth the most. Seam, Seam, Seam filth, Seam trash.
Peeta Mellark steps away from the ovens and looks past his mother to see a girl of dark hair and made of bones huddling underneath the nearby tree. She seems to flinch with every rain drop that hits her, and she looks on the brink of death.
Peeta Mellark is in love with this dying girl.
He turns back inside after his mother, trying to dart away from the girl's eyes looking into his, knowing it'd be too much. So he goes back to the ovens, to the warm, hot, dry, ovens, and drops the bread to the back so two loaves burn.
His mother smacks him upside the head and he wonders which way is up and which is down for a couple of seconds.
Feed them to the pigs, she tells him, yelling, screaming. No one worthwhile wants it.
No one. No one worthwhile.
He makes his way out to the rain and steps over across his yard to the girl underneath the tree. There isn't lightning, but it suddenly seems like out of the corner of his eye there is something light, or shining, or something, but he isn't sure what. But he still presses on, because he wants to, because he has to, because he is in love with the girl huddling underneath the tree and the rain is trying to wash her away.
He lays the bread down in her lap. She stares at it for a bit, almost as if frozen and disbelieving. Distantly, the boy named Peeta Mellark thinks that this isn't how it all happened.
The girl on the ground, the mutt named Katniss Everdeen suddenly looks up at him with a fire that stops the rain and all he can feel is the hate, hate, hatred she has for him when all he wanted was to make sure she didn't die. A bow and arrow suddenly appears in her hands and he isn't sure where it came from, but that barely matters because she has it pointing to his chest, to his heart (fitting, really), the string pulled back and taut.
He doesn't know how, but they are both naked underneath the tree. Not that he has time to look at her body. Not that he has the ability to. He's trying not to die.
She growls, actually growls, as she stares him down as if sizing him up. She is. She snarls out words. "I don't want your food." She pulls the string back tighter. "I want your heart. I want to pierce it with my arrow and claw it out of your skin. I want to devour it and taste it as it still beats it's last bloody beats. I want to watch the life leak from your eyes. I want you dead, Peeta Mellark. I want your heart."
"You have it," he responds – stupidly, foolishly – and a wolf smile invades her face.
"Yes, I do." And she lets the arrow go, four others trailing along behind it just to make sure he feels it all, the pain and the death because he deserves it, deserves it, what a worthless man.
His vision is hazy as he stares up and he can see Katniss over him now, can feel her clawing him. He sees her bloody and he realizes that it's his blood as she laughs in triumph.
"You will never win," the words swirl in his head as she comes closer to him and his eyesight goes hazy with in and out of black. She kisses him and he tastes his blood, and she bites his lip and there's more of his blood, always his blood, nothing ever from her. He thinks maybe he should scream out to someone, to anyone, maybe just voice his one last thought –– I never was trying to win, win what? –– but it's too late as it all goes black and Katniss Everdeen's eyes stare at him and laugh as he takes one more breath.