One-Shot: Mrs. Gale Hawthorne
It happens the spring Katniss Everdeen turns 17.
She is walking back across the Meadow with her hunting partner, Gale Hawthorne, following the collection of a really good haul. Here, in their meeting spot, is where they usually part ways after a hunt, divvying up the goods to trade and distribute to their clientele and then, should any remain, amongst themselves.
"I'll make the sale of squirrels to the Baker, Gale," Katniss is prattling on, stuffing the gouged critters into her game bag. "And then we can….. – Ermmmm…."
She lifts her head. She stands up into Gale taking her face in his hands, tilting it back and kissing her deeply on the mouth.
She is completely unprepared, and once again makes a kind of tiny, squawking noise in the back of her throat. Gale presses his lips more firmly into hers, and the sound turns into a kind of curious hum. She doesn't kiss him back, hasn't made the decision to before they break apart, though her lashes have fluttered shut over her flinty, grey eyes.
When Gale draws away, Katniss opens her eyes, blinking prettily. She looks thunderstruck.
"I had to do that. At least once," is all Gale says to justify it. He sounds oddly resigned. No – helpless might be a better word. Helplessly in love, perhaps, and Katniss feels her heart start to race, a little bit in fear and a little bit in…. excitement, maybe.
The latter is what terrifies her the most, enough that long after he leaves, she sits dazed in the Meadow and tries to work through how she felt about the kiss, whether she liked it or resented it.
When Katniss finally does rouse herself to make the squirrel trade at the back loading dock of the Bakery, she is more closed off than is normal, even for a taciturn, no nonsense person like her. The Baker's youngest son completes the transaction, and Katniss finds herself hiding from him how flushed her cheeks are, how swollen her lips seem from Gale's kiss.
The Baker's boy, her classmate in school – Peeta – blatantly breaks the terms of their trading deal by clearly giving her bread fresh from the ovens, but Katniss's mind is still too in a tizzy to care.
Hunting with Gale resumes as though nothing is out of the ordinary. Gale doesn't speak of it, as they check the snare lines, and a paranoid Katniss starts to wonder if he judged locking lips with her to be a mistake. It almost angers her to see how her hunting partner is not giving the charged intimacy they shared any due deference, acting as though nothing has changed when in fact, everything has changed.
She's always eschewed things like kissing and romance, not seeing the practicality in any of it. It is a thing to be avoided all the more so for good reason – love runs the risk of loss, as her mother's destroyed marriage can attest. Mother risked it all, even disownment from her own family, for love, and all it got her was two daughters by a poor, dead miner.
Katniss doesn't want that for herself, and she absolutely does not want to have children – the Hunger Games are an effective enough dissuader of parenthood. Still, she feels the societal pressures all around her ever thus. One of the few freedoms left in Panem may involve choosing who to marry or not marry at all, but the Seam still impresses upon its young ladies the need for marriage – if not necessarily for happiness (that's impossible in a District like Twelve), then at least for survival. "You'll marry," older and wiser women than Katniss have assured her. "All Seam girls marry."
Katniss is patently not all Seam girls. If an Everdeen is to marry, it shall be Prim, her classically beautiful sister – "Not I," she mutters under her breath.
Still, the pressure to keep a spouse and household is encouraged to gird against the encroachment on liberties, which of late has manifested itself in the appointment of a new Head Peacekeeper, one far crueler than the old Head, Cray. Romulus Thread has made it clear he is not a man to be trifled with. Whippings, once thought to be a relic from a time before Katniss was even born, are now becoming commonplace, as are stints in the stocks.
Honestly, it's a miracle she and Gale have not yet been caught poaching on what are technically designated Capitol lands, beyond the borders of the district fence.
It is part of the reason Katniss doesn't allow her or Gale to tarry in the Meadow after hunts anymore, like on this one day where they instead divvy up their wares in the cloaked shadow of an abandoned homestead, dilapidated and being reclaimed by nature.
As Gale makes to leave, liquid courage stirs Katniss's blood, and she rather impulsively seizes the scruff of his shirt and yanks him down to her. Pushing her lips against his, she kisses him roughly.
They break the kiss just as sharply.
…. She likes it, she decides. More or less.
Gale seems thrilled. "I love you, Catnip."
Katniss's grey eyes go big as moons, and she wonders if, in declaring his love for her, he has overplayed his hand. Yet perhaps that isn't in her place to decide – she knows less of these things than most district girls her age, and a tiny part of herself is embarrassed for it.
She doesn't say it back. That won't come until later.
They still talk about the future, such as it is. In Twelve, there isn't much of a future. For the men, it is work in the mines. For the womenfolk, it is keep the house and make babies. The only other option is to be Reaped for the Hunger Games, but only twice has a tribute from the coalfields entered the arena and won it. Only one of these Victors is still alive, and he's a reclusive drunkard.
The Quarter Quell this summer features a twist that leaves all kids of normal Reaping age exempt. At already 19, Gale aged out last year; after this, Katniss only has one more day of standing in the Square to go.
This must be on his mind one day, as walking back to her house and a decent distance away from the fence, Gale drops Katniss off at her front porch with a soft kiss on her lips.
"Marry me," he proposes. "Once you're done with school and have stood for the last Reaping, marry me."
Her heart in turmoil with her principles, Katniss splits the difference and punts, telling him she'll think about it. She hopes he will give her the year until her last Reaping to do so.
The year passes all too quickly, during which Katniss turns 18 – the legal minimum for marrying age under the district law.
She graduates from school, her future largely uncertain, notwithstanding consideration of Gale's proposal hanging in the air.
She stands for her last Reaping, and with relief is not picked – some Merchant's daughter is, which causes quite a stir amidst the Townies. Katniss only knows her by sight and reputation; there aren't many redheads in this district, in the same way as there aren't many bubbly, happy people in this district, and any jackanapes who thinks else is, in her mind, a fool.
Following their final Reaping, it is customary for 18-year-olds to kneel in the Square and propose to their sweethearts. Katniss is speechless, even if she was half-expecting it, when Gale adheres to tradition and proposes in this manner to her.
"I love you, Katniss. Will you marry me?"
He doesn't present her with a ring – that is a custom that only Merchants can afford. But he does offer her, along with his heart and his devotion, a grimy pin, forged in the shape of a Mockingjay. He must have picked it up from the Hob second-hand, at least before Thread burned the place down.
A hand drawn to her mouth, Katniss lifts her eyes to take in both of their families, standing together on the edge of the Square. Primrose's cobalt blue eyes are shining, little Posy is dancing. Their beaming mothers are no doubt mapping out the Toasting in their heads, and surely have been for years, fantasizing about their eldest children joining their families.
Katniss glances down at Gale, accepts the pin from him and allows him to help her pin it onto the bodice of her blue Reaping dress. Smiling weakly, she kisses him soundly.
"Yes."
The wedding of Katniss Everdeen and Gale Hawthorne is one of many in the queue of Toastings that always dominates the late weeks of summer, following the closing of the Games in the Capitol.
This year, the daughter of the Merchant shoe cobbler goes down to a Career's tomahawk within the first ten minutes of the opening gong. Watching in the Square, leaning against her fiancé, Katniss notices how the Baker's youngest son is inconsolable upon her death.
She wonders if the shoemaker's girl was his sweetheart, perhaps even his bride-to-be, and she feels a pang of sympathy for him.
Gale feels no such crisis of conscience – the Seam blood in him, born and bred, won't allow it. They might trade with a few of the fairer folk, at least those who are fair in trade as well as looks, but Katniss knows well her husband-to-be's views on the Townie. She can only hope that, once they wed and Toast the bread, he'll keep those views to himself and well out of earshot of his almost-mother-in-law, who was born and raised Merchant herself before marrying for love rather than advantage.
The day of the nuptials is balmy, almost sticky. Katniss would sooner get married in her late father's hunting jacket, but Mother insists on adorning her eldest girl in the family wedding dress, their one family heirloom. As an inheritance, it may be ill-gotten – the garment was stolen upon Belle Everdeen's elopement to her husband – yet it is tradition in Merchant circles for a woman's wedding dress to be seen as a right of passage, handed down from mother to daughter, if she have any. Someday, Prim will wear the dress.
It is Prim who holds up her sister's train as Katniss is escorted through the district, across the Seam and into Town to enter the Justice Building and stand before the District Justice of the Peace. To be wed in the eyes of the district law first requires the signing of a marriage license.
Katniss affixes her name to the piece of paper, focusing her brain to complete the signature with her new name. Her married name: Katniss Hawthorne. Gale, the man who is now to be her husband, follows suit. Then he lifts his bride's veil and he and Katniss solemnly kiss to their mothers' weeping and Prim and Posy's squeals.
Their families wish them well as Gale lifts his bride onto the back of a rented cart and pulls them to their new home in the Seam, assigned to the newlyweds in accordance with Justice Building housing policy.
It turns out to be the same ramshackle homestead behind which Katniss kissed for the first time the man to whom she is now married.
"I aim to fix it up for you," he vows to her.
Balancing on her tiptoes, Katniss kisses him tenderly. "I'll help you," she assures him in a whisper.
The fireplace is about the only thing in the place that doesn't need fixing, which Katniss decides to take as a good omen for her marriage. Half the Seam is scattered in and out of the house and into the yard, and stoking the poker, Katniss and Gale Toast a bit of bread and share it. It's the most sacred of their ways – no one in Twelve, irrespective of class, feels truly married without a Toasting.
Now changed from her bridal gown into her blue Reaping dress, and with the firelight dancing in her grey eyes, which are solemn, Katniss wordlessly tilts her head, and permits her husband to feed her a piece, and then kiss her.
The bread, and his lips, taste of ash. She deepens the kiss anyway, to cheers. She carelessly tosses her bouquet of dying roses aside, and is amused when Prim is the one to catch it. Her sister then leads the congregation in the singing of the district wedding song.
A final cap on the ceremony comes when a modest cake is brought out. Katniss isn't sure how her mother and sister managed it – only that it must have been for a handsome sum. But studying the patterns on the icing, recalling days when Prim would drag her to look in the shop windows, she knows:
This cake came from the Bakery.
That night, Gale takes her to bed.
Katniss isn't sure what to expect, beyond what they learned in Family Planning classes in school. When Gale rolls her onto her back and pushes her nightgown up over her slim hips, the breath catches in her throat.
She spreads her legs for him and braces herself.
It hurts, as she was expecting, but soon there is a tingling that is not altogether unpleasant as Gale rocks above her, moving about inside her. He wrenches her bodice down to kiss and suck on her nipples, and Katniss groans.
"Errrm….. Urrrrrrrgggg…. Uggghh….. Fuck!"
The bedsprings creak under them. Gale's breathing becomes labored, his thrusts weakened.
When he cums inside her with a jerk and a grunt, Katniss momentarily ponders why she hasn't succumbed to her own pleasure. Perhaps it is not the lesson to be taken from a girl's first time.
All the same, it gnaws on her why she didn't orgasm. It makes her wonder what all the fuss over sexual intercourse is about.
Together, they make the little dilapidated homestead their own. Katniss learns at her mother-in-law's knee how to do the daily washing and how to keep a husband's home more generally.
The week after the wedding, Katniss and Gale honeymoon in secret in the woods by the lake where her father kept his hunting cabin.
That is where and when Gale first floats the idea to his young wife about making a go of living in the woods.
"We could do it, you know. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it."
Biting her kiss-swollen lips, Katniss gently reminds her husband of their families. Gale responds how they will take all of them along – two middle-aged women, and four little ones, ranging in age from 14 down to 6. Katniss doesn't find the scheme practical.
In the meantime, Gale wastes little time in signing up for a position on the digging crew at Abernathy mine, featuring the largest shafts in Twelve and named for their drunken Victor. He means to provide for them both, and though the fear of history repeating itself nearly cripples her, Katniss knows she very well can't stop him.
She kisses Gale goodbye before he leaves for work each morning. She tells him she loves him, and means it. And when he returns to her in the evening, it is fear of losing him that compels her to make love to him in their bed every night, over and over again.
It isn't long before Katniss starts to feel sick and dizzy, prone to fainting spells. Gale takes her to her mother and sister's house, where the Healers discover that Katniss is with child.
Hazelle has been dropping hints anyway about her yearning to see a grandchild, and now it appears she will get her wish.
It still isn't, however, Katniss's wish, but there is little recourse she can take about it. Abortion is illegal under both district and Capitol law, and though her mother claims there are ways to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, all are fraught with danger. Katniss feels she has no choice but to bring her and Gale's baby to term.
A new year dawns. Katniss and Gale agree to continue to hunt on his one day off from the mines, at least until the baby is due.
One cold morning in February, when Katniss is just beginning to show the slightest bit, they are caught.
Gale cops to the charge of poaching on Capitol lands, and is sent to the whipping post by Thread. Clutching her curving belly, Katniss weeps and sobs as the lash cracks down on her husband's broad, strong shoulders.
The punishment dispensed, several able-bodied men swarm on Gale and heft him into a casket's hoist, bringing him to his mother-in-law.
One of the men who volunteers for this living pall-bearing, to Katniss's surprise and gratitude, is Peeta Mellark.
Gale recovers in his and Katniss's bed over a period of several weeks. He still receives his pay from the mines, but it is a pittance, and he works all the harder to get back on his feet before the Foreman declares him unfit for work. Katniss nurses her husband tenderly, her frocks becoming tight as her chest expands, her breasts ballooning with a mother's milk.
Their baby, a girl finally arrives red-faced and screaming, one oppressively hot day in August, days ahead of the first anniversary of Katniss and Gale's wedding.
Katniss is descended from the Covey people on her father's side, and it was their custom to name their daughters after the plants of the field and the colors of the rainbow. Katniss's own maiden name, before she became a wife, was Katniss Magenta.
After some discussion, she and Gale decide the baby deserves a name reflective of the Hawthorne bloodline, but they still compromise, to a degree: Gale selects a classical name for the first, and Katniss a name of nature for the middle, derived from the birds of the air.
Despite being three-quarters Seam and one-quarter Merchant (on her mother and grandmother's side), blonde hair, blue eyes and fair looks shine through in Emma Finch Hawthorne. Gale seems less miffed about it than he might be otherwise, if it wasn't his baby he was staring at in rapture; Katniss chalks up the genes to both the baby's grandmother and aunt.
Nursing her baby at her breast, Katniss feels a terror as old as life itself. Crippling love fights to overwhelm this instinct, yet it only compounds the fear. Gale holds his girls and promises they will want for nothing.
Thread's law and order is growing worse every day. Crackdowns, floggings, stockades, and even a hanging or two.
Gale collects his pay down in the mines, then comes home and makes love to his wife in their marriage bed. Katniss has grown much more accustomed to sex, to her husband's attentions; she's even been brought to orgasm a few times.
In the afterglow post-coitus, Gale tells her of how miners have been talking down in the shafts.
"There's a group of us," he states.
Katniss sits up in their bed, searching his eyes and stricken. "An uprising?" She whispers it like a prayer.
At this, the flinty steel in Gale's eyes dims, just a bit, and they dart over to where their daughter is asleep in the hand-carved bassinet at the foot of their bed. Before marriage, before children, uprising would no doubt be his aim. But he has a baby now – they have a daughter now. Risking Emma Finch by taking up arms against the government is out of the question.
"Remember what we talked about? On our honeymoon?"
Katniss nods, grey eyes expanding.
"But how would we….? You say there's a group of you. How many would…?"
She's shocked to see her husband shaking his head gravely. "Too many, including both our families and… and the baby. The Justice Building would notice. But two, three, four men slip the fence, it might be weeks before anyone notices we're missing. The head of my digging crew is one of us; he'd see to it that the liaison forges the account books so we'd still collect our pay…" He caresses Katniss's cheek. "You'd still collect it. The baby and you would be provided for. If worst comes to worst, go to my mother's house, or yours."
Eyes welling with tears, Katniss hugs her husband around the neck. "When…. When would you leave?" she sniffles.
"At the first frost," he sighs. "It would be much harder for Thread or any of his Peacekeepers to follow us overland. And we'd cover our tracks."
Cupping his face in her hands, she kisses Gale deeply.
"I'll come back for you, Catnip."
"You'd better," she lashes him with her sharp tongue, even while covering a sob. A pause and then: "…. I love you."
Gale departs well before first light one cold December morning. Katniss wakes up to find his side of the bed cold and their daughter wailing for her morning milk.
Gale and his compatriots may have been smart to have someone on the inside at the mines cooking the books so a lack of pay wouldn't account for their absence, but before long, headcounts at the mines do.
The young Mrs. Hawthorne receives a visit from Thread and his Peacekeepers, inquiring after her husband's whereabouts. Emma Finch at her breast, Katniss denies everything, knowing anything. She learns that three others are missing, along with her husband: Leevey Matthews, Bristel High, and Thom Borden, son of the Miner Foreman.
She is careful not to venture anywhere near the fence for several weeks after Thread leaves, fearing that she is being watched. Her mother and sister and in-laws ration whatever they can spare, but it is a brutal winter and food is scarce.
Even just collecting her husband's pay, despite the subterfuge being largely pointless now, is fraught with risk: the coin has to change hands several times just to reach her, from the liaison accountant who's been cooking the books, through family and then laundered through neighbors. Even with this, there is very little in the way of food to buy. And it isn't as though Katniss can leave Emma Finch for long periods of time even just to make the trek into Town and possibly buy foodstuffs and other perishable goods. She supposes she could pass her daughter off to her mother and sister, or her Hawthorne in-laws, but that's asking a lot, of Hazelle in particular, who still has three little mouths to feed.
Emma Finch is teething, and now at great risk of becoming malnourished. Her mother feels just as weak.
One overcast morning, when everything seems at its most bleak, and Katniss is reduced to tears as she tries to pump breast milk for her little girl, there is a knock on her door.
Sniffling, she drags herself to the front door and opens up to find the porch deserted. The only clue remaining is a basket at her feet, filled with bread and cheese and milk – real cow's milk, not the goat's milk Prim sometimes brings by from her pet goat, Lady!
Katniss doesn't know who left the basket – whoever it was has fled. But in her wildest dreams, she would have never expected it to be a man with eyes as blue as a summer sky….
Months pass. When March rolls around with winter refusing to release District 12 from its iron grip, Katniss starts to grow deeply worried about the fate of her husband. He should have been back by now, or sent for her. At least sent her word….
Rory, her oldest brother-in-law, is growing stir crazy, nearly frantic. He damn near sends his mama to an early grave one morning near the tail end of March when he ducks the fence and goes for help. He's gone for more than half the day, visiting his brother's wife and his niece with news around dusk.
He made it as far as Katniss's father's hunting cabin, where she and Gale honeymooned. Though fading, there were signs that Gale and his conspirators had been there.
Katniss feels a noose constrict around her heart, even as it thrums with the tiniest bit of hope.
She commissions Rory to go farther afield, giving him a crash course in tracking and teaching him how to mark his way as he goes. She'd go with him, but she can't leave the baby.
Filling a rucksack with food, Rory goes AWOL from the district for several days. Even if he doesn't find Gale, he promises to find a way to bring back game, damn the Peacekeepers, and damn the consequences! Katniss fears for her brother-in-law, and wishes she and Gale had taught him more about hunting.
In the interim, the mysterious food baskets continue to appear at her door.
Katniss hears the mysterious benefactor sometimes, but even if his tread is loud and heavy, he is nonetheless surefooted and quick, always vanishing well before she gets to the porch. At one point, she attempts to get Primrose to stake out the porch and lie in wait for the…. whoever-it-is, but her little sister falls asleep and only wakes up to footsteps moving away in the distance, their owner as elusive as a ghost.
Just before dawn on his fifth day away, Rory makes it back into District 12.
His scouting report is grave.
Outside of slight indentations that might be remnants of footprints, he discovered blood. Whose it is, he doesn't know, but he also found tufts of fur, which he's brought back.
His sister-in-law inspects it: it's bear. Bear fur. Was there an attack? Was her husband's party set upon by a bear?
Possibly, though there's no way of telling how long ago the attack was. Rory seems to suspect it was "recent," but that could mean anything from last week to a month ago.
Whatever occurred, neither the man she loves nor his fellow travelers are seen or heard from again.
It isn't until summer that Katniss dares to chance the fence again and search the woods herself, leaving Emma Finch with Primrose. Her daughter is starting to make sounds approaching her first birthday. While there, she encounters two ex-pats from Eight who claim to be fleeing an uprising. Desperate, Katniss asks after the four fugitives from Twelve and describes her husband.
The women, Bonnie and Twill, tell her a tale of how they came across a quartet of skeletons, meat still on the bones, about 100 miles from here. That was six days ago.
Katniss, now a widow, falls to her knees with a wail and weeps.
Also that summer, Katniss finally catches the person who has been slipping her food dead to rights.
She sets herself upon the scoundrel, letting one arrow go wide as he attempts to flee and then holding him at arrow-point.
It is night, and the streetlamp is lit; by its glow, Katniss recognizes that her benefactor is none other than….
"Peeta?"
Caught, the Baker's son nods.
Realizing that it is he who has been feeding her and her daughter for months (because of course it is; she remembers well the bread from when they were children), Katniss is too speechless to demand anything except:
"Why?"
Peeta gulps. "You were in trouble." He appraises her, as if searching to see if her form is still waifish. It still is, somewhat, but less than if he hadn't been feeding them. At the very least, she has lost all the baby weight from her pregnancy, though her chest is broad, and her body still sports some womanly curves.
Katniss glowers at him. "I didn't ask for charity."
"I know. But you have a daughter. If you refused it for yourself, I know you wouldn't refuse it for her."
His mention of her daughter leaves her struck dumb – not only that he has apparently kept tabs on her enough to know she has a daughter, but that he would be concerned about her welfare. A Townie favoring a now-dead miner's family would be viewed by some, especially in the government, as very, very suspicious. The only thing even more suspicious would have been if Haymitch Abernathy, the Victor, had been the ghost delivering food – and that was a theory she had kicked around, so enduring was the mystery.
At the very least, Peeta might have known that she was married, as she thinks back to her Toasting cake – one which, now that she considers it from a new angle, she suspects he baked himself.
Katniss lowers her bow, feeling indebted – and also regretful for being so short with him. "I should…. I should say thank you," she sighs, trembling, breathless.
"You don't have to," Peeta assures. "I… I know that since the disappearance of your husband…"
Katniss feels her breath hitch with emotion, and she glances away so he doesn't see her cry. "My husband is dead," she informs him woodenly, brokenly.
She notices how his face falls, shattering for her. "Oh. I'm…. I'm sorry."
She shrugs. "It's not your fault." A beat, and then: "Any more than it was your fault you lost your girl."
"My girl?" Peeta quirks his mouth, bemused.
"Delly Cartwright, the shoemaker's daughter. The one who died in the Games two years ago?"
Peeta frowns. "Delly and I were never together."
This takes her by surprise. "You still came apart when she died, didn't you? I saw you, in the Square."
Peeta exhales heavily. "Yeah. I did. Thank you for the reminder."
Bizarrely, she panics, for fear of having offended him. "No, I – I mean…. I know what it's like, to lose someone like that. I'm so sorry you had to go through that."
The empathy in his deep blue eyes… eyes as blue as a summer sky… catches her off-guard enough to freeze her where she stands. "I'm sorry you had to…. too."
She scowls at him for this. She doesn't need his pity. Rather… "I have to repay you some way!"
Peeta takes a moment to think about it. "Well… if you're that insistent on making good your debts, how about going for a walk sometime?"
Katniss frowns, eyeing him leerily. "I don't do walks," she states flatly. "I have a daughter to raise."
"Conversation, then?" Peeta haggles. When she still appears wary, he smiles at her. Katniss is startled to find that she rather likes his smile. "I promise, I won't run away when I drop off the food baskets."
For a moment, Katniss appraises him, sizing him up. She unconsciously tugs at the hem of her blue Reaping dress, glancing down at her feet.
"I've never been very good at making friends."
"That's OK. Lucky for you, I can do most of the talking for both of us."
She smirks weakly at this.
So begins – well, continues - a process in which Peeta comes by with a basket of food once every couple of days. Katniss isn't sure how he has been justifying for months shuttling valuable foodstuffs to her, and Peeta doesn't explain himself beyond, "I've learned to be sneaky around my mother. She won't miss a pastry here and there, but any more than that…" he shudders.
Katniss thinks this might be why the bread he brings by is no longer fresh, but rather just ahead of growing stale. She doesn't mind – that is actually something she prefers, going back to making her trades with his father, at the back loading dock. He's being careful…. and Katniss has to admit she admires him, is even grateful to him, for putting himself at such risk for her. For her little girl. She can't even begin to contemplate the number of district charity laws he's broken alone, not to mention possibly incurring his mother's wrath.
In return, she engages him in conversation, as best she can. Coming from her end, it's mostly stilted – even Emma Finch is more verbose, who is now past her first birthday and is slowly but surely forming words. Katniss feels her heart do funny things when she sees Peeta engaging with her.
Peeta tells her about life in the Bakery. He's due to inherit it once his parents retire. This fascinates her, considering she always thought the eldest son in a Merchant family stood to inherit the family business. Except Peeta's eldest brother is married to the undertaker's daughter, and Rye – his middle brother – doesn't want it.
Katniss almost feels bad that she doesn't have many topics of conversation to regale him with in return, as they stand on the porch with Emma Finch playing at their feet. She could talk about Gale, but doesn't want to go there – she's still grieving her husband, and besides, the man she married and then lost does not seem to co-exist well in her mind with the man standing before her now.
Thankfully, regarding her taciturnity, Peeta is patient, if also persistent. "See, Katniss, the way the whole friendship thing works is you have to tell each other… the deep stuff."
"The deep stuff?" Katniss smirks. "Uh-oh, like what?"
"Like…. what's your favorite color?"
"Well, now you've stepped over the line," she deadpans with a sniff.
Peeta chuckles. "Seriously, though, what is it?"
She studies him for a moment. "Green. What's yours?"
"Orange."
She snorts. "Like Effie Trinket's hair?"
"No, not that kind of orange. More like… more like a sunset kind of orange."
Sunset. It seems to suit the man. Katniss unconsciously licks her lips.
"OK. I ask the questions now." A long pause while she works up her nerve, to ask:
"Why didn't you ever get married?"
It takes Peeta an equally long moment before answering her. "Never found the right person."
"So, Delly Cartwright wasn't the right person?" Katniss folds her arms over her chest, her cleavage accentuated by the frocks she has taken to wearing since she wed – mostly hand-me-downs from her mother and Hazelle.
It almost incenses her at how Peeta laughs this off. "Why does everyone think that Delly and…? – You know, Katty, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you were jealous – and of a dead woman, no less!"
"J-jealous?" she splutters, flustered. "Why… why would I be jealous?" A beat, and she lurches to change the subject. "And hang on, did you just call me 'Katty.'?"
Now it's Peeta's turn to flush. "I've…. heard Prim call you that sometime. 'Katty girl', too. Friends… friends have pet names, don't they?"
True. They can. From the time they met, thanks to an unfortunate garbling which he then misheard, Gale had called her 'Catnip.' And while they had been friends, that friendship – and the pet name along with it – had progressed into something more, striking a different tenor.
Katniss isn't sure what Peeta using a pet name for her might mean, or portend, at least as it pertains to the state of their friendship.
Peeta glances at the sun. "I'd better go."
For some reason, Katniss finds she doesn't want him to leave, but she watches as he kneels and pats Emma Finch on the head. "Bye, Emma Finch."
"Pee!" The little toddler shrieks – her attempt at saying his name. She's still working on getting out the last syllable in 'ta.'
Peeta just smirks at the child's mother. "Talk about a pet name. I feel so honored to be associated with urine…"
Katniss makes a face, even while fighting back a smile. "Try Catnip."
He laughs. "You liked it, though."
"I liked it a whole lot better than the alternative: Catpiss, while we're on the subject of discussing excrement around my eighteen-month-old daughter."
Peeta barks out a laugh at her wit. "And on that note, I bid you adieu, Katniss. Good evening."
She swallows hard, watching him take his leave down the dusty road. "Good evening…"
Raising a toddler doesn't leave Katniss with too much time on her hands. But in the moments of quiet, when she's in the shower or when Emma Finch is down for her nap, the widow Hawthorne has plenty of time to think.
Something is shifting between Peeta and her, and she doesn't know what it is, exactly. Only that she's never felt this way about anyone before – anyone other than her husband. It frightens her, a little, and still so soon after Gale's death.
Last week, she had insisted that Peeta stay for dinner, rationalizing that he deserved to share in the meals he delivered. While Emma Finch bopped in her high chair, her mother and Peeta had talked for hours.
He hadn't left until late, well after dark.
When her… friend isn't with her, Katniss makes a point to pay a call on both sides of her family. Emma Finch needs to have a relationship with her aunts and uncles and her grandmothers. Katniss is careful not to discuss Peeta around any of her family.
She should have known better that just because she has never talked about the man bringing her foodstuffs doesn't mean others in her orbit haven't noticed his comings and goings.
"I heard from Greasy Sae that she saw the Mellark boy leaving your house late," Hazelle floats to her daughter-in-law one evening, as they sit by the fire mending holes in Rory and Vick's trousers, while the boys and Posy play with their niece. "Care to explain what that's about?"
Katniss wills the fire's light to hide her blush. "There's nothing to explain."
Hazelle shrugs, picking at the stitching and embroidery. "I daresay my son would be quite sad if he were to know a Townie was paying a call on you at all hours of the day and night…."
Katniss sets down her sewing. "Before or after he turns over in his grave?" At Hazelle's blinking, she plows on, ignoring how the children have paused in their games to watch the exchange between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law grow testy. "Gale's been gone almost two years, Hazelle. You were there, at the funeral when we finally held it."
"Hmm. So was that Peeta Mellark. Did you invite him?"
"No. He offered." And it is the truth – he had offered. He'd even offered to stay behind and watch Emma Finch so Katniss could mourn alone, if that was what she'd wanted.
"I saw the way he looked at you, and your daughter." There is something in Hazelle's expression that suggests she thinks this is almost predatory.
Katniss's eyes narrow. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying, if you're not scared for yourself, aren't you scared for Emma Finch? At least just a little? I mean, he's a man. A strange, large Townie man…"
Katniss is shaking her head, lips pursed in admonishment even as the rest of her face goes slack with horror and disgust. How dare she even insinuate that Peeta…..!
"Shame on you."
"Pee-ta! Pee-ta!"
Emma Finch meets Peeta at the screen door of their house late one, unseasonably warm autumnal evening. She's just past 3 years now, and talking incessantly, though some of her pronunciation remains garbled.
Katniss smiles warmly as she lets her friend in. "Come to stay for dinner?" The question is rhetorical, and teasing.
"If you have a place to spare," Peeta presents her with his food basket.
Katniss kneels down next to her daughter, the skirts of her sundress billowing out around her. "Finch," she uses the shortened, pet name for her little girl. "Set another plate for Mr. Peeta, will you?" She scampers off to do so.
Left alone, the adults regard each other almost shyly.
"How… how are you?" Katniss breathes, feeling hot. She has the sudden urge to fan herself. Peeta is dressed handsomely in a pressed shirt and slacks. He fills the ensemble out well.
"Work is busy. My mother's a… witch." In the nick of time, he finds another word that ends with '-itch,' as Emma Finch reappears and starts tugging on his pant sleeve. "Same old, same old."
Katniss lifts a hand to her mouth to hide a giggle, even as her heart goes out to him. "I'm sorry. Your mother sounds horrible."
"She'd be worse if she knew where I was. She still thinks I take long walks through Town after we've closed up shop."
Katniss, for one, doesn't want to think about how Miriam Mellark might react, if she found out otherwise.
Dinner is a lively affair. Emma Finch starts rambling animatedly to Peeta about seeing a mockingjay from her bedroom window this morning. At least, that's what Katniss thinks she says. They'll have to work more on her phonetics; maybe Prim could help….
All too soon, it is time for Peeta to make his way back across the district to Town. He leaves Emma Finch with a parting gift: a flower stem.
"It's for you."
Emma Finch giggles, poking at the flower as her mother cranes to get a better look.
It's a dandelion.
The little girl hugs Peeta around the neck. "Buh-bye, Baker Man!" she waves from the stair as she scampers up to bed.
Katniss locks her gaze onto Peeta, brokering no argument. "Don't go away. I'm gonna put her in bed. I'll be back." She tucks Emma Finch into bed, her body quavering all over, before flying back down to meet Peeta on the porch.
She's nearly in tears as she ponders him almost in wonder, and he notices. "What is it?"
"I… I…." She wipes at her eyes. "Just…. thank you." He doesn't know what that dandelion means to her, what it means to her daughter, and she is afraid if she tries to explain herself, she'll die of shame.
"She's a good kid, Katty girl…"
"It's not just that. I – Thank you. For…. for caring enough to see we didn't starve. For risking everything to make sure we didn't. Thank for…. for the bread, when we were kids! Just… thank you!" She's weeping quietly now, and, suddenly overcome, she yanks his face close and kisses him furiously, deeply on the mouth.
She swears she feels Peeta kiss her back after a moment, though she can't be sure, as a moment or two later, she draws away, mortified and her face on fire.
"I shouldn't have done that," she whispers. "I…."
"Katty…."
She turns away, not entirely willingly. "Good night." Retreating into her house, she splashes cold water on her face before lying in her and Gale's bed, listening to the cicadas and thinking:
Oh, Snow's Roses, what has she done?
It can't be more than an hour or two later when she thinks she hears a rapping at the door. Drawing her nightgown around herself, Katniss pads downstairs to the front door and opens it to find Peeta, breathing hard and filled with adrenaline, standing before her.
"Hi," he rasps out.
Katniss swallows hard, her throat dry. "Hi." She fatefully makes her decision. "Come in…."
She holds the door open for him. When he doesn't move right away, she takes his hand and, with purpose, guides him inside the house, closing the screen door behind them….
She goes to bed with him.
Trembling with exhilaration and need, Katniss and Peeta embrace and kiss languorously, frenetically, heatedly. She pulls his shirt over his head. He touches her with calloused, massive hands that burn her skin, and when his palm at her waist dips lower to cup the flesh of her rear, Katniss audaciously guides him to grip her thigh as she lifts her leg to hike it over his hip.
The couple falls back onto the bed Katniss once shared with her husband. Katniss squirms with desire as Peeta bunches up the hem of her nightdress and rolls it back over her hips.
She isn't wearing any undergarments.
Gazing into his eyes as blue as a summer sky, her own orbs having long since darkened from their piercing gray to a lustful black, Katniss wordlessly spreads her very wet legs for him.
Peeta kisses her lovingly as Katniss, cupping his erect length in her fist, guides him to her entrance.
He buries his face in her breasts, kissing her pebbled nipples as she gasps. He rocks against her, making her want more and more and more.
Once upon a time, before this wonderful, beautiful man came into her and her daughter's lives, she thought she was something of an expert on hunger, but this is an entirely new kind.
His thrusts against her grow short and weak.
Her breathing becomes labored.
Her hands fist the bedclothes until her knuckles turn white.
Her toes curl.
She cums with a happy cry of shock.
All through the night, they make love.
Peeta is long gone by the time a thoroughly deflowered and ravaged Katniss awakens the next morning, to her daughter asking why does Mommy have no clothes on? She tries to ignore how her heart has now plunged into her stomach, accompanied by a sting of betrayal.
Katniss showers quickly, then dresses Emma Finch and takes her to her mother's to play with Auntie Prim. Unmoored, she runs for the fence and the Meadow and treeline beyond, tears threatening to spill; they are kissed by the crisp fall air.
She needs to think, and for that she needs her woods – her woods which she hasn't been in for so long, not since just after Gale was confirmed dead. She could give a damn if Thread and his goons catch her!
Katniss is pacing the Meadow when she suddenly hears a loud and heavy tread, making her wheel around.
When she catches sight of Peeta, studying her with concern, a sob threatens to break free and she elects for a Flight response.
"Don't run, don't run, don't run!" Peeta calls desperately, sotte voce, intercepting her before she can break free of him and make for the woods. She thrashes and kicks for a moment as he holds her against him, before losing all fight and coming apart on his shoulder.
"You left!" she hurls the accusation at him. "You left and I was afraid you…. you wouldn't come back….! Like…. like him…."
"I know," Peeta croons, rubbing her back. "I know that now. But I was afraid. I shouldn't have been." Taking her by the arms, he leans her back so he can look her in the face. "If you're still upset with me, you can tell me to leave and I promise you'll never see me again, but I have to say this: I love you, Katniss Everdeen. I have since we were five years old, and I heard you sing in music assembly."
She hiccups. "Hawthorne." For some reason, she feels the need to correct him on her married name. Then: "Wait: did you say you've loved me since we were five years old?"
"Yes," he states, earnestly and apparently quite sincere.
She eyes him skeptically, lips pursed in bemusement. "And for all that time, even after I… I was married… there's been no one else?"
His stare could set fire to this whole Meadow. "No one else."
She gapes at him, stunned. Peeta takes it as an opportunity to take her face in his hands and kiss her deeply on the mouth. With a moan, Katniss gives in, raising her leg to his waist and pushing her hips up to keep them pressed against his.
But then she flashes back to another kiss she shared here, with another man, and with a squeak, she wrenches free. "Mmmmm… My…. my daughter!" she cries, thinking of her only reminder, all she has left, of Gale. "I have a daughter! I…. I can't be…. I don't have time to… fall in love…..!"
"I know you need to think about her, and her needs," Peeta states understandingly. "I do too. I love you. And I love Emma Finch." He dips in and kisses her again, and Katniss lets him, leaning into it.
Katniss runs her hands through his blond curls, searching his face for anything less than devotion and finds nothing. "You…. you love me?" she whimpers. "You love us?"
Peeta nods.
Katniss takes a deep breath.
She leaps.
"OK."
Flinging her arms around his neck, she kisses him back soundly, passionately, and her eyes droop closed with pleasure. Peeta kisses her back, and they embrace.
They mate there in the Meadow, the tall, tall grasses concealing their copulating, jerking bodies as Katniss melodiously pleads with Peeta to fuck her harder…. harder…. faster…. faster…
Panting into the soft curve of her neck, the swell of her breasts, Peeta says "I love you."
Arching her spine into him with a plaintive moan, Katniss says it back.
After they've both achieved release, they hold each other, naked and sweaty and spent.
"Will you marry me?"
Katniss looks at Peeta judiciously when he proposes. When Gale died, she silently vowed that she would never love again. Certainly, she would never remarry – not with a child in the picture. Yet here is a man who has waited for her, has provided for her when he had no reason to. A good and decent man who loves her. Loves her daughter as though she were his own.
She bends down and kisses him tenderly. "Yes," she whispers against the seam of his lips. "But if we have a Toasting, you can't ever leave. I…. I wouldn't survive it."
"Understood," Peeta beams. "Then…. you'll allow it."
She nods solemnly. "I'll allow it."
They marry in the Meadow, following the signing of a marriage license at the Justice Building.
Katniss is solemn and at peace as, in her mother's white wedding dress once more, she and Peeta exchange rings and vows. Smiling with happy tears, she proclaims for all bearing witness, "I love my husband."
They then kiss to applause, only for Emma Finch to almost mow them both down with unrestrained ecstasy.
The actual Toasting, they hold in Katniss's house - their house. Peeta has moved his belongings in over a period of several weeks, once he had worked up the nerve to inform his mother that he was getting married to a Seam widow. His mother had promptly disowned him. Peeta assures his bride they'll be OK – they have each other.
Once Katniss has changed into her blue Reaping dress, she and Peeta Toast the bit of bread before the hearth. Her grey eyes soft and content in her choice, Katniss tilts her head back and permits her… her husband to kiss her. There are dandelions in her braided chestnut hair, as well as in her bridal bouquet, and in a bit of déjà vu, when she tosses it aside to embrace her husband, Prim is again the one to catch it.
As a final cap on their wedding day, Peeta surprises his bride by presenting her with his wedding present to her: a cake he baked himself.
"OHHHH! Snow's Roses, it's a vision! But how did you….?" Katniss flits over to the masterpiece happily. "You didn't! You shouldn't have!" Her eyes are sparkling with emotional delight.
Peeta's arms encircle her. "Do you like it, sweetheart?"
Beaming, in answer, Katniss reaches up to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him soundly.
"Oh…. darling, I love it! I love you!"
Mr. Cartwright strikes up a reel on his fiddle, and Katniss and Peeta Mellark dance at their wedding. As the reception is winding down, Hazelle Hawthorne takes Peeta aside.
"My Katniss doesn't make decisions like this lightly. She must really love you. And… I can tell you love her, and my granddaughter. You love Emma Finch like she's your own."
Peeta nods. "She is my own," he declares.
From that day on, Hazelle never again has a bad word to say about her daughter-in-law's choice of husband.
That night, with their daughter asleep in the next room, Katniss and Peeta make hot, raw, passionate love, the sweat from their bodies cooled by keeping the windows open, which Peeta prefers when he sleeps.
Holding each other in the afterglow, Katniss clutches at Peeta and begs him:
"Stay with me."
He promises: "Always."