A/N: Eh. Not my best, but I wanted to write this. Definitely not what really happened. Just me writing this all on one purge. Not much plot. Lots of fluff. -Taryn
04: Gift
Katniss opens the door, not overly surprised to see Haymitch standing there.
He's sober. And she tries not to scowl; recently she's liked him much better when he's drunk.
"You broke that poor kids heart," Haymitch accuses.
"What do you know about hearts?" she snaps and moves to slam the door. She can't even remember why she'd opted to answer it. She knew Haymitch had watched the whole event yesterday. She felt Haymitch's eyes on her within town as Peeta approached her for the first time in months since his return to the district. She knew Haymitch was the man who went after Peeta as she ran from him; after, of course, refusing to hear his words.
Haymitch lurches forward and tosses the door back until it is out of her hand, slamming against the back wall. She makes to simply run upstairs, but it stopped by Haymitch as he says, "Did you even hear what he said?"
"Yes, I heard," she says, stiff and awkward.
"And you heard him say he made something for you?"
"I don't see why that's going to matter..." she stumbles. "He also told me that he thought we shouldn't..." Katniss turns away from Haymitch. She shouldn't have to tell him all that went down the day her and Peeta actually spoke after the war. How she had invited him in, minimally, the hint underscoring her words, and he refused her. Or maybe that was too harsh. He simply said that space would ensure that it was the best decision for both of them. Space, so he wouldn't hurt her. Space, so she wouldn't make a mistake. Space, that kept them apart for five longs months, that she spent almost entirely inside, staring out her kitchen window, at the house next to hers.
Haymitch doesn't ask for these details, rather, he says, "He made something for you." And then he is gone.
Made what? she finds herself wondering.
For three long, quiet days she wonders.
Then it becomes too much for her and she finds herself on her front porch, leaning against the railing. Night is emanate around her. The chorus of crickets and a distant nightingales crying to the silver ring in the sky. Already, she doesn't want to move past the first steps to the lawn.
She is thinking about Primrose when she turns away and means to return to her bed.
A clashing sound draws her back around.
She knows it came from the house next to hers. She can hear shouting. The sound of things being thrown around. Something shatters. There is only one light on and its an upstairs window.
Katniss compresses her lips and stands where she is, eyes trained on the window.
Part of her feels and urge to go to him. He needs help. He's sick. An episode has taken over him and she wonders what triggered it. She wonders if he might be hurting himself; and aches in her chest at the thought.
It's stupid to go over there. He might attack her. And it's the middle of the night. For all she knows he could lunge at her and kill her with his two hands before she could scream. Not that screaming would matter. The only other participant of the Victor's Village is a dunk old man who is probably passed out at this late hour.
Another piece of her, the louder piece, knows he wouldn't hurt her.
She doesn't realize she's holding the railing in a death grip until they're white in their blood constriction.
Something hits the window. It splatters and leaves flecks of something across the smooth, transparent surface. From her distance she knows it liquid, but not the color, not the thickness. All she knows is it beads and rolls down and nearly covers the entire pane.
She's off her porch, jogging, before she knows. The night is warm but the sun is long gone, leaving it to the pale moonlight to illuminate the short path between their houses. She feels her uncertainty full force as she continues to walk. It is stupid. Maybe he doesn't need her. Perhaps she's the last person he wants to see.
Yet, she feels.. she feels. And that's all she can focus on as she walks barefoot through his front lawn, feeling the grass between her toes for the first time in months.. breathing in the fresh air as though she has not breathed in years.
She's been imaging what it would be like to do this for five months sitting at her kitchen window and she's glad it's actually happening. If only she were coming because she knew he wanted her, not because she thinks he needs her.
Once she reaches the front door to Peeta's victor's house, she glances back to her house with nervous eyes, then opens the door, and holding her breath, slips inside.
For a moment it is only blackness, and it disturbs Katniss so much that she actually moves further in the house, hearing Peeta's voice, needing the reassurance of his presence. Then she shakes herself, listens to the stream of curses from his mouth and she leans toward the wall, fingers searching for the light switch.
Within a heartbeat soft lights glows from overhead. They does not flare suddenly into life, but gently pervades the dark with their luminescence, as dawn lightens the land toward the end of night.
Her first impression as the lights slowly intensify is one of space. And Katniss is bewildered.
Peeta's house used to be the same in structure as her house and Haymitch's, but it seems he's been doing more than sitting around and sleeping in the past five months like herself. Walls that were in her house are missing in his, torn down. She finds herself standing in a large entryway, where he's made the living room and front room and the office room into one oblong vestibule.
For a moment, she wonders if he's done that because he, too, felt the house was suffocating at times.
Then she notices the floors, that have been painted over. The bland wooden panels are obscured by a mask of vivid blue, gold, and scarlet tessellated patterns. They're bright to the eyes, but not offending, for they are deeper, richer than the colors of the Capitol. Something about the design.. it seems completely unnecessary and silly, and just like Peeta. Interweaving in alternatively dancing vines and pools and swivels of shapes, that if one looks hard enough they can become many different things. A butterfly, whisking across the ground underneath your toes. Twisted, gnarled trees without branches, just ten thousand fingers splaying outward.
If Katniss squints she can see figures twirling around between the scarlet and gold outlines.
The walls are similarly taken over, and are what she finds most enthralling. Everywhere, every little piece of his house, even the ceilings, painted. There are bright scenes and shady ones. On the ceiling of his entry way is a thicket of trees, and about them, seeming to actually flutter and jump from the mortar are mockingjays.
Her eyes are impossibly wide. She feels a hint of fire in her cheeks, wondering, is this what he made me? All these paintings?
Upstairs, there is a soft thud. As though someone has just thumped to their knees.
She feels more of an urge to go to him, as she flings herself up the stairs.
The upstairs is just as destroyed. All of the rooms aside two separate ones (a bedroom and bathroom, she muses) have been spared from the huge open area of the second story. Katniss can't help but pause to appreciate it; the openness, the cool air.
She sees him of course, the first thing her eyes are drawn to. He is on the floor, his hunched over back to her, his face in his hands. Everywhere, just like the downstairs, is painted and full of color, of life.
Just not him.
Katniss takes a small step forward, assessing the damage he's done. There is spilt paint nearly everywhere, adding even more flecks of color and stripes of paint on the pictures or masterpiece. The window I'd been watching is soaked in a coating of blue paint, as smooth as the curl of a flower petal, as bright and soothing as pale sunlight spilling through a window. Below it sits an empty, toppled over bucket of paint.
Then, inevitably, her eyes stray to above his head, to the wall her kneels in front of.
A mural covers the whole of that one wall. This one is of people, though, opposed to all the others. People she recognizes, too. People, like Finnick, and Annie, and Prim, and Boggs, and the old man who whistled in District 11, and Cinna, and Katniss feels the darkness open up inside her, clawing at her spirit, trying frantically to pull her back inside her own shell within her.
She must have made a noise. Some mewl of agony as she overlooks the picture of Primrose. So perfect. So realistic it's like staring at her little sister in life. The smile wide and impossibly honest and the blue eyes dancing with life. A life that is gone.
She must have made a noise, because Peeta stiffens, and turns his head and is horrified to see her.
Peeta is bathed in paint, so when he stands some of it drips from his fingers to the floor. She stares at that. The green little blots that fall onto a picture of a horse; something she's never actually seen in real life. She thinks about those hands. What they might do to her; wrap around her throat? And almost irritatingly, she thinks about how it was those hands that painted all these beautiful things, how gentle they must have been as he stroked the length of Thresh's jaw, or encircled the eyes of Annie's, making them that perfect sea green...
"I.." Peeta starts, haltingly. He shakes his head and stares at me, looking pale. He is embarrassed. He is nervous. He is afraid. "How long have you.."
Not long. She wants to say that, but her face remains expressionless as her eyes dance from his hand to his face. "You were shouting," she says, demurely.
He laughs, relieved, she thinks, and shakes his head.
"I didn't mean any of that, what I said," he tells her.
"Doesn't matter. I didn't hear."
There is a long awkward silence as he stares at her, and she stares beyond him. "You came," Peeta finally says, decides, rather. There is reveling in his voice. "I thought you wouldn't."
"I wouldn't," she says, keen on being honest. She watches it hit him. As if her words were actually a blow. "But you were shouting."
"You were worried?" he asks.
She gives a slow, lumberous shrug of her shoulders. As if to say, I dunno.
Silence. Katniss is distracted by the mural again. Now that he's moved she sees around Primrose's feet is the ugly cat, Buttercup, tail tucked around her ankles. Sitting on Annie's hip is her son, reddish bronze hair seeming to actually to shine. Somehow he's captured the anger in Jo's eyes as she leans into a tree. Most of the paint is still wet; he painted this today, and in fact has not finished it. At the end, there is a figure half finished, but a blanket of paint has been thrown over it; angrily, in frustration, something.
She knows who it is because there is only one person that seems to be missing from the entourage.
The knowledge sinks past her layer of indifference, through skin and bone, and it sticks, sharp in her soul. How fitting, for Peeta to have thrown a bucket of black paint over himself. Completely blotting him out of the mural, a roil of darkness, poisoned, in-perfected by the touch of the blackness.
She finds her voice. "Is this.. is this what you made for me?"
Peeta doesn't seem sure what to do; he seems startled by her voice and question for a moment, then he collects himself and glances around. "All of it? Mostly. I just.. had to change something. In my head.. when I arrived everything was still dark and scary sometimes.." he pauses. "I had to do something with my hands and time. It's hard not to get lost in my memories.. or false memories.. so most of this is due to boredom, at the beginning. Then I thought I could make it somewhere safe and pretty, like that song.. the meadow song you sang for Rue. I remember seeing that on a propo." He runs a hand through his hair, leaving streaks of green and red paint in his tresses. "So now.. it's sort of my retreat from everything that people expect of me, or fear from me, or consider me."
Another pause.
His blue eyes on her. "But, yeah. For you."
What people fear of him, or considers him?
Katniss stares at him, and he makes a face. "You think all of this is a stupid, don't you? You think I just wasted all of this paint and my time.. and I ruined a perfectly good house with my mess. And my tantrum.."
"Do I?" she asks, barely opening her lips.
"I don't know, you tell me," he replies.
No other answer could have made her more sure of herself.
She wants to know what made him snap. Self loathing, possibly. She knows what that feels like. When she thinks of Primrose, just pink mist of a bomb, her ashes curling underneath the flames of the fire. She hates herself for breathing and eating and living. Except where she lies still and stares at a ceiling, Peeta throws things in his anger.
Katniss isn't about to bring it up.
She distracts herself by paying more attention to her surroundings than him. She wants to tell him that she loves it.. adores it, but won't. What does he want from her? What does she want from him? Her thoughts stray to the dark areas as she nears the bedroom. Peeta hasn't moved or spoken, but as her fingertips just touch the door frame he stirs. "That's my favorite," he says. "The ceiling."
Katniss eyes him, then peers into the bedroom.
Peeta continues talking, "I like looking at it before I go to sleep. It makes my dreams.. a bit better, normally." He winces at the last part. I can change that, she thinks, suddenly. I can take away some of your pain, like it used to be, like you used to do for me. She pushes away the thoughts and focuses her eyes.
His bedroom is the brightest, with lots of orange. It seems intimate, although not claustrophobic, and the ceiling, Katniss can't help but agree with Peeta's favoritism to the art. He had painted it a deep-blue and patterned it with pink and scarlet flowers rioting amid soft gray-green leaves. Primroses and daises and poppies were among the floral arrangements, jumping out. Beautiful and Katniss feels a little embarrassed for staring at it a moment too long.
She gives her head a shake and notices the air here is better tasting than her house— warm, slightly humid, and sweetly spiced., freshly baked treats, lingering in the air.
For a moment, she's ravenously hungry, then Peeta asks, "Do you like it?" Timidness is clearly making his voice taunt and she sees his face is equally strained and hopeful.
She loves it. She loves the openness, the paintings that draw her mind away from the present.
"Why?" she asks. She makes a small gesture with her fingers, not lifting her arm from her side, but Peeta sees it and turns his head to gaze at the wall behind him, full of the faces from their past.
Peeta turns back to her and shows a sad smile. "I wanted to paint them," he whispers, "because I thought they deserved to be somewhere safe and pretty, too."
"That's.." she tries to say, chokes and begins again, "They do."
But not yourself? she thought. And she makes another gesture with her hand. It's involuntarily. An instinct. A warm prickle behind her eyes continuing to strengthen as Peeta's eyes fly from her fingers to her face, uncertain.
She makes the beckoning gesture again, weakly.
And Peeta comes. He nearly bounds the distance between them and when his arms slip around her, the tears well out of her eyes and she curses herself for letting them fall. She didn't want to cry.
But it felt so nice to slip into his chest. To feel his breath in her hair. Safe and warm and impossibly good.
"Thank you," she whispers into his chest. She means it. She can't not thank him for this gift. She won't wait another five years to do it, only when it's too late.
She won't wait five months again, even if he's the one who decided he wanted the space.