interlude o1. Party Crashers
"I don't like this."
Peeta sighs lightly, a good-natured slackness in his features. He should be annoyed with her — this must be the fifth or sixth time that Katniss had made some furtive mention to him with voice or visage that she is not pleased with the growth of what she's come to see as their team. But Peeta handles it all with a breezy grace that makes Katniss' heart ache and her stomach burn. Even if it does absolutely nothing to quell the tension making the hair on the back of her neck stand on edge.
Still, she has managed to stop glaring balefully at Johanna Mason so — progress.
Katniss cannot forget, for one moment, that only one person can make it out of this alive, and that person is Peeta, but she still cannot help the way she clenches at Johanna's entire way of being. At the way she scoffs at Beetee and cannot be bothered to be in earshot of Wiress and her barking laugh whenever Finnick tells her something that Katniss is just out of range to hear. It sets her skin sparking — Beetee's keen eye and quick thinking has already proven indispensable in these Games (regardless of the fact that Katniss had not been able to act quickly enough despite the knowledge he'd handed her), and Wiress has stayed so clever and gentle despite how much she must be struggling with this arena, this Quell. When they are together, Katniss feels that same, insistent warmth that she does with Prim — had with Rue — and Wiress seems kind enough to allow Katniss' caring for her.
She was right to want them as allies; they have given her and Peeta more than Johanna has.
On top of all of this, Katniss cannot fathom what is happening with Johanna and Finnick. They've known each other for some time — not only as Victors but as something closer to friends, maybe. Deep acquaintances, familiar with each other in the way that comes through time and circumstance.
But Johanna is all — hard edges and sharp angles and bitter distaste, scalding anger that Katniss had appreciated on the night of their interviews but now feels more dangerous set against the memories she has of Finnick's face: haunted, lost, worn out and broken in.
Peeta is the one who comes home, she tells herself. But her heart trembles at the thought of straightforward Beetee and clever Wiress and exhausted Finnick pitted against Johanna Mason.
"You're laughing at me."
"I would never laugh at you, Katniss."
She is seized with the strange desire to pull Peeta into her arms at the sincerity and earnestness in his voice. His demeanor is so Peeta — calming, steady, wanting but in that pure way that she will never match in the rest of her short, imminently ending life, that she wants to bask in his clear goodness and never leave. Not until she has to.
"You're better than me," she tells him instead.
"So you're saying you'd laugh at me?"
"No."
They cover a few more paces in silence, Katniss' steps light and quick, Peeta's heavier than even before she tutored him last year, and in this year's training. It must be tiredness and strain pulling at the weight of his false leg. Each uneven footfall muffled in the sand of the beach resonates in her chest. He is injured and tired and this world is cruel but he at least he will live and Katniss can't — will not, will never — forget that.
She still cannot say for sure, if any of them deserve to live. If anyone can emerge from the Games decent enough to merit life. The world certainly does not need her rage and the phantom blood caked into the grooves of her hands and layered under her fingernails. It doesn't need the girl who can fell a person with all the effort it takes to fell a turkey; it doesn't need the girl who, until she breathes her last breath, will only think of her own needs and never anyone else's.
But she can picture Peeta living on for as long as possible — painting the soft orange of sunset, icing cakes, burning bread so that he can give it to selfish, starving girls at the cost of his own safety. She can picture Peeta stubbornly continuing to bloom like a dandelion despite the Capitol wanting nothing more than to grind him under heel.
(Any girl who goes to such lengths to preserve her life isn't going to be interested in throwing it away with
both hands, Snow had told her.)
Whether or not he is more deserving than any other Games-made killer, Katniss will give him the chance anyway.
Low enough that only she hears him, Peeta asks her a question.
"Do you think there's another reason you don't like her?"
Katniss doesn't freeze, doesn't pause. Her answer comes easily.
"I hope not." Her voice feels like a sheet tearing in two, fibers fraying at the ends of her words. She really, really hopes there isn't, because she's had her fill of complicated, inexplicable emotions, and she doesn't want to know if there's another reason she dislikes Johanna Mason beyond the roughness of her personality.
Particularly when it is so clearly similar to her own.
From the corner of her eye, she sees Peeta regarding her profile with his achingly unguarded gaze. For someone who managed to convince an entire nation that their story was true, he is endearingly guileless — and that is what sold it, she muses. He managed to lie so flawlessly and sweetly that it seemed as if his front could only be the truth.
Except.
This is Peeta Mellark. This is Peeta Mellark and she knows without hesitation that he wasn't lying. Not about the things that counted, not about the things that got them through the Games last year, not about the things he's fighting for this year — because Peeta's heart is too big to be contained inside of him. Katniss' self-delusion is thin and weak and vanishes when confronted with the laws that bind this universe together.
As inevitable as their destruction at Snow's hands is the chest-splintering fact that Peeta loves her.
Without thinking, Katniss reaches out. The pads of her fingers tease the inside of his wrist, his forearm, then back down to the heel of his palm. Peeta takes no time in seizing her hand, but as sudden and almost clumsy as his reciprocation is, it is also nothing but gentle. As his fingers close around her, there is a long moment when the world around them sinks into silence; drowning silence, head held under the water silence, leaving only room for one sensation — the point of contact they share.
Katniss squeezes his hand back. I love you.
In some way, this is true.
She just wishes it was enough.
Her life is divided into parts and always has been. The first is easy — her family, father, sister, even mother. Alive, whole, happy; there hadn't been any fear there in the early years, even with the threat of the Games a constant of everyone's reality. Possibly because she was young and blind to what was coming around the bend back then, but mostly because there were three anchors in her life that seemed immovable and immortal.
The second division had emptied her of Katniss Everdeen with the force of a mine shaft cave in and remade her — hollow inside but with an armor so thick and unyielding that it made her less fragile than she'd been before. The empty space that used to be her had now been comprised of two voices — Prim and Gale. Only them, always them. She had not fit well in her outline, in the person that used to be Katniss Everdeen, but there they were: two steady anchors holding firm against a gathering storm.
But now, her life is a maelstrom. Short, violent, dark, confusing, and yet frighteningly clear. The Gale-voice and Prim-voice have curled up enough inside of her to make room for a new anchor. A physical one this time, one that she will keep alive. Her fingers tighten on his wrist, and the heat — familiar, worn, well-versed — is a comfort she luxuriates in.
"I — know how it seems," Katniss' voice cracks ever so slightly, and some vague, still-rational part of her mind hopes that her words are quiet enough to escape the microphones and cameras. "But it's not that. I promise you it's not that." Because she remembers Gale — how he suffers while she plays pretend with Peeta; because he loves her too, and that hurts him. She's not entirely stupid — she knows that Peeta sees Johanna with Finnick and he sees that Katniss has been glaring at Johanna ever since.
But if she has so much trouble putting words to it, then what hope does she have of making Peeta understand?
"Katniss —"
"No." It isn't. Because the sensation that howls through her now is exactly what she felt with Prim. With Gale, with Peeta. On rare occasions, with her mother.
How can anyone think that she has been charmed by Finnick Odair? When they're both about to die and Katniss is dying for Peeta?
She's afraid.
"He saved you." The statement hands like an anchor between them, this one stubborn and dragging. Peeta glances down, but she continues, "He saved you and that means I'd be lost if he wasn't here."
Silence curls around them, knotting around her throat and settling between their joined hands. For a long few moments, they walk without speaking. It's a damning thing, what she'd just said. The confession that Katniss' heart beats for Peeta and not herself — that Finnick had willingly saved the life of a competitor in this Game despite the fact that at some point, only one can be left stand. That this smiling, sunny, crumpled young man had made sure that Katniss hadn't failed. He'd done what she couldn't have, and his presence is a talisman under her breastbone.
Without warning, Peeta squeezes her hand again. His fingertips brush her palm in a soothing, circular motion and Katniss was filled with renewed determination, euphoria, at the fact that he would live. To have spared Prim this fate, and then to die saving him will be the best use of her life she could imagine in these conditions.
Then, he laughs.
That brings Katniss up short.
That open, endearing, earnest expression on his face has parted to make way for the sunshine of his laughter — no, his amusement. His —
"— You were teasing me! Again!"
"I'm sorry," Peeta says, not sounding sorry at all. "I couldn't help myself."
"Peeta!"
"Katniss, I know that you're not falling for Finnick Odair. You don't know how easy to read you are, do you?"
She distinctly does not like this feeling; it's not very different from that night in the Tribute Center, suffering through a day of teasing at the hands of the other Victors, only to find Peeta taking their side. Her lips tug down at the side. Peeta is still chuckling, but he squeezes her hand again, bringing it up.
He doesn't kiss her knuckles, but he does lay his lips against them.
"I am sorry." This time, he sounds a little more contrite. But he is still smiling. "You just looked so — lost in thought."
"Of course I'm lost in thought!"
"And maybe I wanted a little revenge. A prank of my own."
Katniss makes a sound in the back of her throat, but it's not fanged and she doesn't pull her hand from Peeta's.
"... I think you're the only person who'd ever call me easy to read."
"Oh, I don't know about that." Peeta lets their joined hands lower back down, but he doesn't let go either. "But if you want to compliment me, I won't refuse."
"You better not have been drinking saltwater."
Peeta laughs again. Behind them, Finnick and Johanna laugh at something, too.
• • •
note. & we're now updated in 2020. the same reminder from 2013 remains: please remember that katniss, like absolutely everyone, is an unreliable narrator. much love for the reviews & reads!