One-Shot: The Oldest Loaves Taste the Best

In her admittedly limited experience, Katniss Everdeen has come to understand that it is the oldest loaves that taste the best.

Some might call these breads what they are – stale – but to her, they are weathered. Tested. Sturdy. Hardy. Reliable as the man with whom she has traded them for her squirrel since she was 11. (What she doesn't admit is the profound reminder that stale bread brings her, for it was a stale loaf that saved her and her family from starvation).

All of this is probably why she is therefore so shocked when the man who creates these loaves, the Baker, comes to visit her in the Justice Building after she is Reaped at age 16 for the 74th Hunger Games.

Much like the loaves he barters to her, Mr. Mellark is not what anyone would call fresh. He is not handsome the way that Capitol movie stars are on the Holo. He's her mother's age, yet there are already rugged lines in his face, some of that weathering due to his being married as long as her parents should still be, except that his marriage was arranged (read: loveless. Unhappy). Yet despite sharing a bed with a shrewish bitch for a wife, despite working a profession that is no less slogging than the work performed by the Seam miners down the shafts, Katniss has to admit that, for a District 12 man, the Baker cuts a better figure than most men in this town.

Much of that comes from his truly uncommon quality: kindness. The kindness he has shown in trading with her since she was a little girl. The kindness he shows her now as he sits down beside her on the cushioned settee in this opulent room of the Justice Building and wordlessly passes her a drawstring pouch.

Tugging back on the ribbon, Katniss opens it and stares at the sugar cookies she has often seen sparkling in the Bakery's shopfront window when Prim drags her there to oooh and ahhh admiringly. She doesn't know what to say. She also doesn't know how it is that he is here visiting her, and not his youngest son who has also been Reaped for this thing. Unless he just came from saying goodbye to his boy and decided to let all things be fair?

That's another thing the Baker has always been: fair.

Katniss lifts her face out of her lap to meet his gaze – one that is bashful and awkward. He lifts a large, calloused hand as if to pat her knee where it pokes out beyond the hem of her blue Reaping dress, then seems to think better of it.

"Thank you," she mumbles.

He nods stiltedly. "I'll look after the little girl. Make sure she's eating."

It's about the same efficient economy of words he has used with her in trading squirrel going back years. That's another thing Katniss has always appreciated about him: he is all business-like. No nonsense, much like her. A gentleman's gentleman, if such a thing exists in Twelve. He says what he means, and means what he says. But there is also slight warmth to it, maybe brought on by the ovens around which he's worked, a warmth that his wife has never possessed and that she, Katniss, has not possessed in some time.

The Baker leaves after that. Katniss folds the drawstring pouch of sugar cookies into the folds of her blue dress. Once she boards the train, she is still left baffled as to why the Baker would have used up precious time to visit her, rather than spend every available minute with his son. Her bewilderment festers into something mistrustful, to the point that she debates between pawning off the sugar cookies onto the Baker's son – Peeta – or opening the train window the small crack that is allowed and dumping them onto the tracks. She almost decides on the latter.

Instead, Katniss keeps the sugar cookies at the last minute. Once the train is moving, she eats them quietly alone in her train car.

She is surprised by how gooey and moist – how fresh – they are, melting in her mouth.

Katniss alone comes home a Victor from the 74th Hunger Games, a changed girl.

No, no longer a girl. She has become a woman, but not through the ordinary rights of passage a small-town girl from District 12 might expect to experience.

The loss of Peeta, his death, haunts her. All the more so because of how he announced to the nation on live TV that he was in love with her.

Once they'd found each other in the arena, she hadn't known what to do with his feelings, never mind how she might requite them, if she even did. All Katniss had known was that if she did not, if she didn't at least pretend to return his feelings, they would both die. So, she had given him her first kiss, played lovey-dovey for the cameras. In the end, it did no good. Peeta had died trying to save her, while grappling with the Career boy, Cato, before both boys had plunged over the side to the waiting mutts below.

Katniss isn't sure whether the depression she feels is due to heartbreak. She's still less sure about, if it is heartbreak she's feeling, what it implies about how she might have felt about Peeta. She doesn't know – she didn't have enough time to find out, and now she never will. So, what is the point of dwelling on it?

She still hunts beyond the fence, even though, with all the money she and her family now has, she doesn't need to. These days, though, people stare at her, give her a wide berth as she passes them in the street, over the dividing line leading from the Seam into Town.

Only the Baker doesn't treat her any differently. He's devastated by the loss of his son, to be sure, but he shoulders it stoically. Considering he is going through a grief so terrible there is no name for it – the loss of a child – she has to admire that. What's more, when Katniss now makes sure to peer into his eyes after each and every trade, she does not detect even the slightest bit of bitterness or resentment towards her about what happened to his youngest son.

Even if his eyes remind her painfully of that same son. His are a dimmer blue, but still, they're blue. As blue as a summer sky, only this one has just broken through storm clouds of grey.

Katniss returns home from her Victory Tour that winter to a district in upheaval.

A new Head Peacekeeper has been installed, and along with him, machines of punishment that the district has not seen in decades while under the rule of his more laid-back predecessor. Apparently, in her absence, her hunting partner Gale was whipped within an inch of his life, for some offense so harmless that under Cray, it long ago stopped being an offense.

To Katniss's angered shock and dismay, the new battalion of soldiers also made their iron fist known by going after the Baker's family – apparently, for no apparent reason.

Only upon deeper reflection does Katniss guess why Peeta's mother and brothers were dragged out into the street and shot execution-style. Why the interior of the Bakery burned, hollowing out the structure: the people had been very unhappy with Peeta's death and with it, the death of a Panemian love story for the ages.

To her immense relief, the Baker's life was spared, and upon a crew inspecting the damage, it has been determined that the exterior of the Bakery's structure was not compromised by the fire damage. Interior renovations, however, will take some months.

Peeta's grave is in the Graveyard of Fallen Tributes, on the edge of the Village and which Katniss passes by every day. Mrs. Mellark and Peeta's brothers, on the other hand, are buried in an unmarked, pauper's plot out on the edge of Town. Katniss might never have known it was there if she didn't pass by on the way to her squirrel trade one day to find the Baker standing in that small patch of green, all alone.

Katniss approaches him quietly. The huntress in her can detect the moment he senses her, though he doesn't look up. Wordlessly, she reaches for his hand.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs.

That spring, Katniss's mother dies suddenly, a few days after the Reading of the Card announces the All-Victors' Quarter Quell.

Ironically, her mother's passing breathes new life and motivation into Katniss, despite the complicated mourning she is forced to endure now, all over again. It's all the more bitter because, at least with her mother, Katniss knew where they stood. Katniss is only able to withstand it by looking at Prim. What her life would mean if she doesn't come home this time. Katniss knows that if she dies in the Quell – which is likely – Justice Building housing policy stipulates that Prim will be forcefully evicted from their mansion in the Victors' Village. Orphaned and sisterless, where would a girl of only 13 go? The Hawthornes? Or worse: the Community Home?

Katniss refuses to allow that to happen.

She and Haymitch Abernathy are the only Victors from District 12, so their re-entrance into the Games is guaranteed. Katniss takes it upon herself to have them both train like Careers. Gale gives hunting tutorials, which Prim supplements with seminars in botany and healing.

But it is the Baker who is of the most help, as he brings healthy, freshly cooked meals by Katniss and Haymitch's homes every day, often with a well-worn, melancholy smile.

His deliveries to Katniss's door throughout that spring eventually evolve into the man staying for the dinner he has just brought. He and Katniss will stay up long into the night, talking quietly. Katniss discovers once she gets past his outer shell, he is really quite sweet. As sweet as his murdered son was.

Mr. Mellark's deliveries up to the Village, his conversation, is just payment in kind for all the squirrel trades she has made with him. By the time the eve of the Reaping arrives, Katniss's sense of debt to the man seems to have been balanced. When he takes his leave of her that night on the front porch of her mansion, and she thanks him as Mr. Mellark, he shocks her by telling her to call him Wheaton.

Katniss smiles tentatively at this. Gratitude in spoken word fails her, so she leaves him with a warm touch to his cheek.

At least she had that, for the next morning, she is devastated when Wheaton and Prim are barred from saying goodbye to her. She is hauled straight to the train.

Against all odds, Katniss emerges as the Victor for the second year in a row. She is devastated at the loss of Haymitch, in her own way – for good or for ill, her late mentor was a complex person.

District 12, along with much of the country, feels subdued, beaten down. If there was any talk of revolution, it has largely all but ceased now. Considering there is real evidence to suggest she (and indirectly Peeta) might have fomented discontent in the districts in the first place, Katniss is stunned she managed to win. Stunned that Snow has let her live, allowed her Victory to stand.

Haunted by trauma now compounded, Katniss finds that one of the few solaces in her life – other than minding Prim – is to trade squirrel down at the Bakery. The interior of the shop hollowed out by that fire is close to being restored, so she also makes stops to help Wheaton with the last string of repairs.

She's never really been inside the Bakery before, as all of her trades have taken place out on the cement back loading dock. Wheaton has tried to brighten up the place and even exceed its former glory.

It doesn't change the fact that once it's done, the place will remain ghostly empty, for the widowed father who will live here all alone. Katniss's heart pangs for him. Wheaton is still a stimulating conversationalist, but he still carries that melancholy aura. For a reason she can't explain, Katniss is drawn to it, and to him. She's grown to womanhood as a pretty melancholy person herself, and that was even before the Games.

Perhaps that's why she and Wheaton get along so famously. They've both been through such unspeakable trauma, that only they can understand each other's pain. In each other, they find comfort. Companionship. There are even moments of laughter, such as the time when Wheaton guides her into an seldom-used side alley bordering the Bakery and shows her the delivery truck once used by his family to make bread runs, before the vehicle was impounded by the Capitol government. The wheels are missing from the axles, and both Katniss and Wheaton find this amusing.

Katniss would be the first one to attest that she's never been very good at making friends. Nevertheless, in Wheaton, it is nice to have one.

The next year goes by in a blur. Katniss turns 18 that May 8th, and that same summer, watches as Prim is spared in the Reaping for another year.

More good news arrives when Gale announces to her one Sunday on their hunt that he is getting married, to the Seam's second-hand tailor's daughter. Ordinarily, he would have proposed to his bride immediately following aging out of last year's Reaping, as is customary, but the unique nature of the Quell and Katniss's re-entry made him delay.

Gale's Toasting and reception, on an unseasonably warm autumnal evening, is beautiful.

Katniss hangs back on the edge of the dance floor and watches Prim get twirled about by Rory, the kid brother of the groom. There is something wistful about watching them, and about watching Gale with his new, young wife, even as Katniss tells herself these are not things she's ever wanted for herself. Marriage. A family, outside of her sister.

As the aloof Victor, she doesn't know too many people anymore and no one approaches her, not even to ask her for a dance. She misses Wheaton, the Baker. She wishes he were here.

The man must still be on her mind after she's imbibed more wine than she should have, for before she knows it, she has arrived and is knocking at the back loading dock door without fully realizing how she's gotten there. The liquor has made her head light, and she's tipsy – neither of which explains why there are tears streaming down her cheeks.

Wheaton offers no judgment - only asks questions with his eyes – as he generously lets her in. The Bakery, recently finished in its renovations, is dark, lit only by a few candles.

Katniss bumps her foot against a sack of flour, and Wheaton gentlemanly helps her onto a stool by the front counter. "I'm sorry," she sniffles, feeling utterly pathetic. "I don't really know why I came here." In her heart, she does though – she's missed him.

Wheaton gives her a stale loaf of bread to nibble on, and the gesture makes her smile wetly. She can feel him taking in her blue dress – which she only ever wears to special occasions – and at his silent question, she admits quietly:

"My hunting partner was married tonight." She wipes at her eyes. A silent pause, and then she opens up, tracing circles through some powdered flour on the counter. "I've always told myself I don't want that. But I look at Prim…. She's 14. She'll be grown and have Toasted the bread soon enough. I can't afford to allow myself to belong to a husband too, but I also…." Her voice cracks. "I also don't…."

She can't finish until he sympathetically takes her hand. "I also don't want to be alone."

"You won't be alone," he promises her in a soothing murmur. "You won't ever be alone."

Somehow, in her drink-addled mind, Katniss has enough of her wits about her to wonder just who he made that promise to. Like the promise he made to her to look after Prim after getting Reaped the first time. The line of thought makes her think back to something Peeta told her, during one of those rainy nights in the cave. A story about their parents.

"Did you love my mother?" She has out with it.

She's oddly angered by how his refusal to look her in the eye gives her all the answer she needs. So she isn't prepared for the question he asks of her in return:

"Did you love my son?"

She doesn't want to lie to him. She can't. The glare she sends his way is almost despondent. "Does it matter? We've both cared for people who are dead."

Wheaton sighs and nods glumly. She peers at him, heart going out to him.

"You said I won't be alone." Katniss hears, but doesn't recognize or compute, the…. huskiness in her own voice. "Maybe…. maybe neither of us has to be."

Wheaton lifts his head to study her in bewilderment. He looks like he is about to ask her a question, but Katniss doesn't want any more questions. She just wants to feel. So deciding, she swings herself up onto the bakery's counter. She spreads her legs to twine them about the torso of a shocked Wheaton. Tugging him flush against her, and despite knowing how some of it is the whiskey and wine talking, she roughly grabs his groin in her fist. Her free hand curling about his neck, she pulls his mouth down hungrily to hers and kisses him just as roughly, soundly.

Wheaton has frozen up in her arms. Digging her heels into his toned buttocks, Katniss touches him, fondles him between his legs until she feels his length – against his better judgment – come to life in her hand. As her lips work his open in a hot, messy rhythm, she still gasps with astonishment and need at the moment she finally feels him cautiously kiss her back.

With shaking fingers, she undoes the buckle at his pants, freeing his hard and erect cock, and she strums her fingers with novice skill over his head, encouraging his arousal.

"Come on," she entices him, through a heated kiss to his jawline.

It is also a sharply marked moment when the lonely Baker loses all resistance, even though it's crazy, it's mad, to indulge in this with a girl – a young woman – of 18 who is less than half his age. The eldest daughter of his old schoolmate and one-time girlfriend.

But Katniss's kisses are like the liquor she's gotten drunk off of enough that she would be possessed to touch him, to kiss him. As Wheaton feels his body mold to hers, as Katniss helps him clamber on top of her where she spreads her legs for him, open like a feast upon the counter, a part of himself, once thought dormant, comes alive enough that he can almost trick his mind into thinking he is making out, making love, with Belle, her mother.

Then, just as he is bravely starting to kiss her back, Katniss shoves him off of her. By the dimness of candlelight, the statuesque silhouette of the woman that is Katniss (or is it Belle? Wheaton thinks he's seeing things), come to seduce him, holds out her hand to him. Taking it in his, Wheaton leads her with purpose to the rear stairwell…

They make love down in the Bakery's basement storeroom, by the glow of a single light bulb.

With a deliberate knowledge belied by her un-inhibition from how much she's had to drink, Katniss sexily shrugs off her blue Reaping dress and lets the garment pool to the floor at her feet, to reveal her naked beauty. Wheaton groans with lust and he dares to cup the swell of her nicely developing breasts. Embracing him, pulling him close between her legs, Katniss sinks into his kiss, their mouths joining between breathless gasps, pants, as her hands claw for and grip bare skin, peeling away the fabric to reveal taut stomach and back muscles.

If Wheaton has aged reasonably well in face, he has aged exquisitely in body. Years of working the ovens have kept him well built and strong, like his three sons after him.

It also would seem that he too was an accomplished wrestler in his time, for laying Katniss reverently down upon a spare work table, Wheaton pins her down there as he grinds, jerks between her legs, fucking her. She's a woman, a beautiful one at that, and now past the district age of consent. He ponders from the tone of her moans, rising in pitch as he drives her to her climax, if she has ever been with a man.

Katniss finally cums all around him with a whimper and with a grunt, he follows with ejaculation into her fluttering lower lips not long after. They hold each other like that for a long moment, listening to their heart rates slow, before at last, Katniss squirms against his chest with a whine, pleading to be let up.

He gets off of her, watching dazedly as she pulls her dress back on with surprising dignity, though her back remains to him.

She takes her leave of him without a word – not even a goodbye.

Katniss awakens the next morning somehow back in her own bed in the Victors Village, with both a terrific hangover and with horror, as blips of memory come back and reassemble to form a picture of how she spent last night…. and whom she spent it with.

Confused and mortified with herself, she doesn't know quite what she'll find as she approaches the back loading dock of the Bakery, the morning air now cool and with a light fog hanging about Town in this first hour just after dawn.

Armed with squirrel, she knocks, heart in her mouth. She wouldn't blame him if the Baker – Wheaton – didn't answer. When he does, she can only gawp at him for a moment, shocked with herself and her actions beyond words. She passes the single squirrel to him without fully registering it.

She almost wants him to say something, address the unspoken thing that passed and remains between them. She's not surprised when he doesn't – his mild-mannered nature won't allow it.

"I…. I haven't any bread for you," Wheaton stammers out. "The yeast is still rising on the first batch."

She flushes, glancing down at where her shoes are scuffing the concrete. "You don't owe me anything," she mumbles. What she did with him, what she did to him, last night probably more than constitutes an advance payment on squirrel meat.

Katniss turns to go, but doesn't even take a step before her braid is whipping back as she finds the nerve to face him, to look in the eye this man she took as a lover – her first - not twelve hours before.

"I'm sorry," the words tumble out of her.

She loses her breath at how, to her amazement, his gaze is positively smoldering. "I'm not."

Katniss whimpers, the instinct of prey overtaking her. Time to run. She hasn't even gone ten steps before the Baker has caught her arm.

"Wait! Please…"

She turns back to him, anguished and muddled by feelings, too many feelings, only to feel Wheaton cup her skull in his massive hands, tilt her head back and kiss her soundly on the mouth good morning.

With a purr, Katniss melts into the kiss and returns it with passion. She shivers when the Baker boldly feels up her arse through her dress before dipping lower to grip the underside of her thigh; in response, she lifts her leg high, curling it about his torso in a fluid, intimate motion that tantalizingly opens up her hips to his. She pushes up, lifting, pushing her pelvis against the evidence of his desire for her. They go no further, but by the time they both come up for air, they are panting, flushed.

"Does a kiss for squirrel sound like a fair trade to you?"

Running her tongue over her kiss-swollen lips, Katniss touches his face, runs his thinning blonde hair through her fingers, sizing him up. At last, she bravely nods.

"Yes."

She goes to him with squirrel and with kisses and touches that burn every morning from then on, often before the sun is risen. A squirrel for a long kiss might be fair in her mind, yet when Wheaton soon raises the wager to a squirrel for a loaf of stale bread and a kiss, she at first doesn't complain.

It still isn't equitable, though, which is why kisses soon escalate into bouts of making love. Sometimes, Katniss is spread-eagled in the gravel of the back alley. Sometimes, Wheaton takes her on the cool concrete of the back loading dock. Once, while the Town is still sleeping, Wheaton leads her into the back of the grounded delivery truck, where they have sex violently enough to make the car shake.

To her mind, sex has always seemed like such a base and vulgar act, designed for two people to expend energy better spent elsewhere, such as in feeding oneself sustenance rather than feeding, giving into, one's own carnal needs and lustful desires. But as she bounces on Wheaton's lap, moaning with pleasure, Katniss has to re-evaluate her cravings as a young woman. She's always thought herself something of an expert on hunger, but this is an entirely new kind.

The hunger for a man to kiss her, touch her, fuck her. For this man to make love to her. Katniss rides Wheaton until her breasts, capped with peaked and aching nipples, sway temptingly in his face, before he takes the purple bud between his teeth and sucks, nearly swallowing her boob and making her cry out, let out a shout of pleasure.

At one point, Katniss chokes with shock when Wheaton forces her skull down to his exposed crotch before shoving his cock in between her puckered, upper lips as opposed to her parted, lower ones. She accepts him, takes him in her mouth as deep as she can. She's never given a man head before, never even seen a man's penis - it was dark the first night they fucked in the Bakery storeroom. But Katniss quickly learns how to please her lover, and administers oral sex to Wheaton quietly, until she is rearing forward to hungrily tuck his balls in past her bottom lip and her lover is frantically fucking, canting into her face. She gasps, gargles when he cums for her with a yell, and though taken aback by how much he releases into her throat, Katniss gamely gulps it all down. Her grey eyes are half-lidded as she finishes sucking him off with a parting lick to the underside of his shaft and a kiss to the tip.

Then Wheaton is shifting them both and bracing her against the truck's wall, pounding into Katniss until her knees have turned to weak jelly. The interior of the delivery truck fills with enough heat to gather condensation, the better to obfuscate this crude yet solemn coupling. The windows steam with their lovemaking, and the only sign Katniss leaves of their tryst is when she dreamily slaps a hand against the glass of the window, leaving behind a dewey print.

They see each other in total secret, something Katniss prefers. She doesn't want her sister to know, never mind Gale. She and Wheaton are always careful.

Except for one night, during the Panem Independence Day festivities, when Katniss leads Wheaton away from where her sister and the Hawthornes are gathered in the Square, taking him out beyond the fence to the Meadow. There, she pulls him on top of her, hiking her skirts up, and the tall grasses conceal their copulating bodies as they play the Beast with Two Backs, going at it for a frantic fuck in the flowers.

"Ugh... Huhhh... Uhhhhh... Hmmmmmm... Mmmmmm... Ohhhhhhhhh... Ahhhhhhh... Faster... faster..." she groans out her encouragement. This time, when Katniss goes down on him, she performs oral sex on her partner confidently until he is panting her name. Straddling him, Katniss rides him bareback, before Wheaton flips them both and again plows her into the soil and dandelions.

As he finishes inside of her, Katniss can't help but feel guilty for what she is hiding. This lie she is living – as egregious a lie as being with Peeta may have been, had he lived, except she'll never know. Her conscience is lacerated all the more when Wheaton, almost certainly the result of a Freudian slip, cums inside her while crying the name of her mother.

"Belle…."

It may have started out as a way to make them both forget, live in a dream where they could be with the partners they each were denied, that first night they were together. But Katniss is frightened by the fact that she no longer views their tête-a-tête in that light, as a way to address unfulfilled urges. A release.

Unless she ends it now, someone – likely her – is going to get hurt.

She almost angrily throws Wheaton off of her, holding down the sob in her throat. "Get out of here," she whispers hoarsely, turning her face away with shame.

Wheaton meekly does not reply; he simply does as she wishes.

For a long time, she lies there flat on her back in the Meadow, weeping, the skirts of her blue Reaping dress still bunched up and over her hips.

The Capitol drops the firebombs without warning one morning in deep winter.

Katniss and Prim lead the wave of humanity running from the Square in Town, through the Seam, once it meets them at the hill where Victors' Village sits. People claw at the fence until it is torn down, in some cases stampeded right over, as roughly 800 people in District 12 flee for the woods and what they hope is safety.

It's quite a job for two hunters to feed so many people, but Katniss and Gale manage. Katniss is secretly relieved to find Wheaton Mellark among the survivors, looking haggard, but alive. She turns her face away rather than dare speak to him.

The survivors of Twelve eventually make their way to a no-man's land where District 13 – once thought a myth – rescues them and takes them belowground. Katniss shares an apartment with her sister and helps with the burgeoning war against the Capitol. Some light asking after helps her determine that Wheaton has of course been put to work in the kitchens, making the most of his talents to make Thirteen's cantina fare better – or at least, marginally edible.

Months pass by, but the Capitol finally does fall. Boarding a hovercraft filled with old neighbors from Twelve, along with some refugees, Katniss and Prim head for home.

Katniss is oddly crestfallen to find after a surreptitious headcount that Wheaton Mellark is not among the displaced on their plane.

It is three years later, and it is the day of her baby sister's Toasting.

Prim and Rory Hawthorne hold a fine wedding ceremony at the Justice Building before the small congregation of well-wishers escorts the newlyweds along to the Everdeens' old mansion in the Victors' Village. These two structures, institutions, are some of the only buildings left standing in the razed land of what was once District 12.

Justice Building housing policy has remained much the same where assignments after new marriage are concerned, so Prim will be moving in with her new husband and their in-laws at the Hawthorne place come morning. Eventually, the happy couple will downsize when they want to start raising a family.

Katniss is wistful watching the party around her, proof that her Primmy is all grown up and doesn't need her anymore. She's not helped by the reminder of what resulted the last time she found herself a wallflower at a wedding reception, when she went to the Baker and had drunken sex with him.

She doesn't drink tonight, instead slipping off into the expansive backyard of her mansion to be by herself in the spring air.

The click of the gate latch lifting makes her spin around in her blue dress, startled. She freezes, gobsmacked, once she sees just who is coming through the gate, wheeling an immaculate wedding cake in on a cart.

"Wheaton…." She breathes in a whisper.

The Baker ducks his head in a way that might be bashful. "…. Hello, Katniss."

The ghost of a hardly-daring-to-believe it, elated smile, dawns on her face. "You came home…."

He nods. "Yeah." An awkward silence. "I, uh…. I baked this. For Prim. She tried to pay me with an invitation to the wedding, but I thought it better to just drop it off."

"No, stay!" she invites, really implores. "Please. Prim will be thrilled!" She studies the cake admiringly; it truly looks too good to eat.

Katniss can feel Wheaton appraising her in her blue Reaping dress, then just as quickly avert his eyes when she tilts her head in his direction. They can't look at each other, as though they are two shy schoolchildren.

"You look beautiful," he manages.

She tucks her single, brown braid back behind her ear, stuttering. "Th-thank you."

She starts a little when she attempts to steal a glance at him (he managed to keep his fine physique, even on a Thirteen diet) only to find him gazing at her.

"Katniss…. I have to apologize for how we – how I – handled things. I…. I was wrong…."

"Oh, no…." she pleads with him, expression shattering with empathy.

"I was," Wheaton insists. "Being with you… I projected some of my lingering feelings for your mother onto you, and it was wrong. I took advantage of you, in a way, and even though you're an adult, that was awful of me."

Katniss hugs herself, feeling awkward. "You didn't do anything that I didn't do," she murmurs, mumbles. "We both have blame to share. We both did things to each other." She shrugs. "Besides, it wasn't as though I didn't want it." Her grey orbs fixate on him heatedly with what she doesn't say. It wasn't as though I didn't want you…. because I did.

"Still…." Wheaton awkwardly scratches at the back of his neck, and she's oddly reminded of Peeta in that moment. "Consent aside, it wasn't as though our…. our relationship was aboveboard. You…. you were 18."

Katniss folds her arms over her chest, ignoring how it makes her boobs stand out more pronouncedly. "You were 42…."

"Now 47," he corrects.

"You had a birthday?" she blinks, a hint of amusement in her voice. Several birthdays, actually – the year they were together was a blur, plus the year after that when they were in District 13. And now three more in which her baby sister has grown up before her eyes. Katniss still sometimes can't believe she is already 23 herself. So much time has passed.

She stares at Wheaton. So much time has been lost. She wonders how long he has been back in Twelve.

"My friends tried to throw me a party this last time. I said No. I do not like parties," he admits. He glances past her to the house. "Another reason why I didn't want to overstay my welcome tonight. This is Prim's day."

Katniss's lips quirk into a smile. "I'm glad you came," she murmurs.

The pair gaze into each other's eyes for a long moment. At last, Wheaton speaks:

"I've missed you."

Katniss feels her heart constrict, start to pound. "I've missed you too." A beat, and then: "It's not been easy, being alone. And now that Prim is married and moving out…"

Her rambling stutters to a halt as Wheaton dares to take both of her hands in his own, lifting their clasped palms between them. "You won't be alone," he croons, rubbing his calloused thumbs over her knuckles. "You won't ever be alone."

Katniss stares deep into his blue eyes, taken back to that night they first kissed and made love in the Bakery – the Bakery that is nothing but ash now. She trusts Wheaton will rebuild it.

As she takes a step in closer, Katniss decides: they will rebuild each other. It might be unconventional, to be with a man who is now almost exactly twice her age, but she doesn't care. Gone is the girl who feared love, no matter from who it was offered.

Carefully, Wheaton dips his head close to hers. "Can I….?"

"May I….?" she playfully corrects his grammar.

He smirks. "May I kiss….?"

"Yes." She doesn't even let him finish the question before she closes the last space between them.

They kiss tentatively. And when she draws away, Katniss lets out a shuddering gasp. It turns into a surprised hum, caught off-guard by his passion, as Wheaton now yanks her back into his arms and kisses her even more deeply, and enthusiastically.

Katniss's eyes flutter open as they break apart, staring at him, thunderstruck.

"I'm rebuilding the Bakery, you know." Wheaton dips and brushes his lips along hers again. "My door is always open for you to split time between there and the Village once it's completed."

Katniss gapes. "Come and live with you?" She can't help but sense there is a deeper, more significant question behind this one, and the thought that Wheaton might be…. proposing…. almost makes her laugh.

Wheaton blushes. "If it's all right with you."

In answer, in acceptance, she tugs his mouth back down onto hers and they kiss more passionately.

Katniss gets so lost in the embrace that she doesn't hear the screen door opening behind her.

"Katty, we need you in…..side….." Prim's voice drifts to a halt along with the rest of her, still clad in their mother's wedding dress – the family heirloom. The bride stops dead in shock at the sight of her sister wrapped in the arms of…. the Baker…..

Katniss and Wheaton break the kiss with a startled jerk. "Primmy!" Katniss gasps, dropping her arms from where they had been looped about her lover's neck. "This is…. Wheaton. He's just arrived with the cake. We're…. we're thinking of…. of having a Toasting together."

"A Toasting?" Wheaton chuckles, bemused.

"Not today!" Katniss blurts quickly. "Or next week. But…" And she slips her hand into his with a hopeful smile. "Someday."

Prim glances between the couple for a moment, then smiles softly, almost knowingly. "Welcome Mr. Mell – Wheaton. Come and meet our family."

The bride sashays back inside. Beaming, Katniss laces her fingers through those of the Baker and guides him by the hand into her house.

Only a handful of months later, Katniss's grey eyes are solemn as she stands before the hearth in the rebuilt-for-good Bakery, her new home. She has just come from the Justice Building where, in signing the marriage license, she took a new name: Katniss Mellark.

Letting Wheaton feed her a piece of their Toasted bread, she feels the relief of coming home as he takes her, his bride, in his arms. Gray orbs still solemn, maybe still a little scared, Katniss nonetheless tilts her head and permits her…. her husband to softly kiss her. Her mouth petals open to his, like a flower bursting into full bloom, and arms stealing about each other, they embrace.

As Wheaton and Katniss embrace and kiss, Prim, Rory and the entire congregation breaks out into cheers, and then the traditional District 12 wedding song. As she dances the reel with the man she has married, Katniss has eyes only for her new husband, and the life they will build together.

They might be an unconventional couple. Some might say her husband is too old for her. But in Katniss's experience, she has come to understand that it is the older men, the older souls, who taste the best.