Summary: Peeta's subconscious is trying to tell him something, twenty years after the Games ended.
A/N: Everlark. In Panem continuation to Mockingjay. Rated E for explicit language and sex. Contains direct and altered quotations from The Hunger Games novels, which I do not claim as my own. #everlark #marriage #toastbabies #injury #surgery #nightmares #original characters #rehabilitation
Many thanks to papofglencoe and notanislander, who got in on the ground floor when this an elaborate idea and only 500 words. Since then, an entire squadron of cheerleaders, including my fellow CampNanoWriMo cabinmates, have offered support and input, both of which are greatly appreciated.
This becomes our ritual over the next few nights, leg massage and lovemaking until we're both exhausted. It works best for me if I lie down with her on top, though taking her from behind still feels fine on my joints. When I lie on top of her with my legs extended behind me, it seems like I'm adding stress to my joints, so I make adjustments as we go. Some nights we just lie side by side and our bodies wind up connected. Sometimes I bring her up to sit on my face so that she can be on the receiving end as well.
After a few more nights, I open up to her about the nightmare, the pain, all of it while she lies in my arms. She needs to know—even if I do keep the worst of it to myself—that they may not be capable of mending me here in District Twelve.
Her warm body, tucked into mine, freezes when I relay to her how her mutt form still infiltrates my subconscious, but I keep stroking the sinews of her back to calm her. It's been so long since I've had an episode, but I explain how this was different, and I feel her body relax into understanding. In some ways, it's worse than an episode because there aren't any triggers. It's a return of the nightmares we shared between our Games and after the rebellion. They creep into my mind as I sleep, when I'm completely defenseless against them. They went away once; I'll have to figure out how to rid myself of them again.
"Am I hurting you, with all of the sex?" she asks with a timid tremor in her voice as she pulls away to look me in the eye.
"Sometimes, some things more than others," I reply honestly to her as she starts to pick at a thread in the blanket. "As long as you're willing to change it up when the pain starts to get worse, it's fine. It's been worlds better the last few nights with your tender touch to loosen up my tight muscles." I tip her chin to me, trying to bring her eyes back up to mine.
She seems to consider this, her silver eyes somewhere very far away from me. "Have I been making this worse for you?" she asks with a guilty tone.
"No, better, " I tell her, my words finally pulling her eyes back to mine. "I feel so much better afterwards. It's been getting me through the pain of the day, knowing that you'll take care of me later, that we'll take care of each other," I assure her.
"My pain has been getting worse, though. I've always had daily pain where my prosthesis attaches, but over the last couple years, it has traveled higher," I explain, with a vague motion up my thigh.
"So is it your knees, leg, or your hip?" she asks, bringing her hand to my left knee stub and rubbing it again.
My eyes roll back into my head. It feels so good when the damaged parts of me get attention too. "I honestly don't know. That's what I'm hoping to find out from Dr. Mills."
I spend some additional time with the kids the next night. Now that I've opened up to Katniss and put the truth out there, I want to tell them too.
Patrick and I are in the studio, painting the winter scene outside the window. I show him how to mix the paints for sunlight on the snow, something I started figuring out long ago. I teach him to layer all sorts of colors, one by one. He dabbles his brushes in the white, gray, yellow, brown, and black and smears it on his canvas to create his scene. He'll be a better artist than me one day.
"Patrick, you know how daddy had to stop playing tag the other night?"
He scrunches up his eyes and nose, pulling the memory out. "Yeah, Daddy, you sat with a snow pack on your lap the rest of the night."
"Yeah, well Daddy has an ouchie, deep inside. Mom and I are going to go to see Dr. Mills to see if he can fix it, or at least tell us what's wrong," I explain.
"He'll fix you up, Daddy, he's a good doctor. He always fixes me and Cara," he says.
"I hope, buddy, I hope so," I tell him.
"Don't worry Daddy, Dr. Mills is a nice man," Patrick says, and I smile at him. That's both Katniss and Patrick trying to assure me about the local doctor. I'm not scared of him though. It's the others.
We finish up our paintings, and I get him ready for bed. I tuck him in and stifle a grunt when a sharp pain sears across my hips as I lean over to kiss him good night. I limp to Cara's room next, opening up to her with the same story but with more details about my pain.
"The thing is though, they may not be able to fix me here, that I may have to go away," I say. Somehow it's easier to tell her than Katniss, also to gauge her reaction as to how Katniss will take the news, if it goes that way.
She ponders this for a moment, her brave eyes widening with an epiphany.
"You're like a dandelion, Daddy," Cara says brightly.
"What do you mean, sweetie?" I ask, a little taken aback.
"We learned all about them in Science class, since it's nearly time for them to bloom—for the first time," she explains.
"Oh yeah?" I say, dubious about the connection.
"Yes, you have strong legs like their thick tap roots. You're already a golden-topped flower like their first bloom. Then you'll close up—while you're gone—like they do, to develop the seeds, only to rebloom again as fluffy seed heads that dance on the wind. You'll be able to dance again when you get back!" she says with enthusiasm.
"That's beautiful honey, thank you," I say, touched and verging on emotional. I kiss her goodnight and turn off her light. I limp down the hallway to our bedroom, with visions of dandelion seeds floating on the breeze in my head.
"I just heard the strangest, sweetest thing from Cara," I tell her as I detach my prosthetic leg and lie down in bed.
"Oh yeah, what did our brilliant girl tell you?" She asks, her back turned to me.
"That I'm a dandelion," I say.
Katniss makes an odd, choking noise in her throat before crawling over me and smothering me in kisses. I can barely catch my breath before she claims my lips again and again. "You are, you are a dandelion," she utters before frantically ripping off her pajamas and tugging down my pants. I'm inside her within a minute and her hips pop into me at a frenzied pace. She's doesn't explain the sudden need, but I'm too lost in the feel of her to ask for an explanation. All I can feel is Katniss.
We go to see Dr. Mills together on our scheduled day. Sae watches Patrick while we're gone since Cara is at school. I always thought of Sae as old back before our first Games, when she served soup from her stall in the Hob. Life in District Twelve before the rebellion prematurely aged everyone though and she's weathered well into her seventies now. She still loves to help out with the kids and brings her granddaughter sometimes.
Once we have been ushered into an examination room, Dr. Mills and his nurse greet us. We're on good terms after he helped bring both of our children into this world.
"Good morning, Peeta. What brings you in?"
"Dr. Mills, when I made the appointment, I described my concerns to the receptionist and asked that my previous records be sent to you for comparison. Did you receive them?"
"Yes Peeta, your medical records were all classified under President Snow's regime, but Dr. Aurelius was able to send the files applicable to your original amputation after the 74th Games, as well as x-rays taken in District Thirteen and the Capitol during the rebellion," he explains.
"Do those tell you anything?" Katniss asks.
"No, they just provide a baseline. We'll have to do more x-rays today to see what's going on in there to cause this immense pain," Dr. Mills says. "Luckily, our medical facility here is equipped to handle these tasks.
Dr. Mills and his nurse record my vitals and examine my flexibility. It's not good. I can't even get my knee halfway to my chest or bend over to reach my shoes.
Once the preliminary exam is complete, Katniss is asked to wait in the hallway while the techs contort my body on a table to get as clear of a picture as possible on the ancient x-ray machine. I open the door, and the relief on her face is palpable at seeing me again, even though it's only been a few minutes.
"Is it that bad out here?" I ask looking down to both ends of the hallway. "Because it wasn't any better in there, I assure you," I say, motioning behind me and trying to bring levity back.
"I didn't like being separated from you, that's all. We're in this together, we should be together," she says.
We're both nudged into a small conference room once I'm done. Katniss and I wait for the images to develop for a while, hands clasped together.
Dr. Mills brings comes back into the room with a new doctor in his wake.
"It's nice to meet you, Mr. Mellark. I am Dr. Shaw." He pauses to shake both of our hands. "I'm a radiologist, and I've analyzed your x-rays," Dr. Shaw says as he places the black and white images before us on a table. He flips a switch, illuminating the slides from beneath. I've seen a table like this once in District Thirteen, and the memory isn't a pleasant one. It was the first time I sat across from Alma Coin, when she told me about Star Squad 451 and my new role as a soldier for her army. I'm just as uneasy in front of this light board table now as I was back then.
"Well, what do you see?" I ask, reaching for Katniss' hand to put back to mine. "They look normal enough to me."
"Yes, to the untrained eye, it might seem that way. However, look here on the femur head, now versus then. Do you see the deformities here and here?" he motions with a pen.
He continues to point to different locations on the x-rays, but it all looks the same to me. It's hard to see straight at this point with the news he's dropping on us. Deformities doesn't sound good.
"Your x-rays reveal arthritic bone spurs at the hip joint and a flattened femoral head," he explains, and my heart stops. That sounds worse. Definitely very bad.
Katniss and I gasp aloud, and she's the first to speak. "What does that mean?"
"It means, Mrs. Mellark, that something has gone very wrong with your husband's left hip over the last twenty years when we compare his current condition to the old x-rays. My assumption would be that he has been overcompensating with his sound leg to the detriment of his amputated leg, shifting the point of connection in his hip joint," he says, pointing to the x-rays.
Interrupting the maelstrom in my head, Dr. Mills redirects my attention.
"Peeta, have you always had trouble bringing your knee to your chest, or leaning over to touch the ground?"
"No, just recently. The last few years," I rasp. "It's only the last few months where it was really affecting my quality of life. That's when I noticed that I couldn't do all the usual things."
"I see. I'll bet that you were in a fantastic amount of pain with the drop in barometric pressure the last few weeks," he surmises.
I nod absently as he continues, unable to form any more words. My head is spinning, and the room seems incredibly small.
"He has, doctor. He hasn't been able to lean over to tie his shoelaces," Katniss chimes in with her observations. "I've been, um, massaging his hips and legs every night to ease his suffering, but the pain seems to return in the morning."
My face reddens at her description, but it's technically therapeutic, and it breaks me to realize that Katniss has known something all along. She just needed me to tell her.
"That's good, Katniss—that will help loosen his tight muscles and alleviate his pain. Unfortunately, that won't be enough to solve the problem," Dr. Mills says.
I notice Katniss nodding along as well. Her mind is probably whirling too.
"Of course, these x-rays only provide part of the picture of his condition. He will need to have an MRI done to ensure that the bone surrounding the joint isn't dead, but we do not have that option here in District Twelve. He'll have to get that done in the Capitol before replacement surgery," Dr. Shaw adds.
"Do what now?" she blurts out, and I stiffen.