A/N: Thank you to everyone who has favorited or followed and huge special thanks to those who took the time to review, it means so much. Reviews are love, and they help with the writer's block, for sure! This part is kind of short but I had to try and get the creativity flowing again and shorter seemed better for that. Anyway, I hope you enjoy... if that's the right word. This fic has plenty of triggers and lots of adult themes, so is really for mature readers only :)
Every little boy thinks he invented sin ~ John Steinbeck
Dust rises around the wheels of the wagon until it almost seems like the vehicle is floating on a cloud. Cato will not be back tonight, he will stay over at the Heavensbee's, smoking, drinking and thinking he is entering into deals and discussions with other gentlemen. He is playing the plantation owner, the new patriarch: founder of the next dynasty to control this land.
He can be whomever he chooses behind their bedroom door. She hesitates to call him a monster, for this implies a lack of choice, a man rotten from the outset, deformed and immune to his environment and its pressure to conform. A monster knows nothing else. He can be no better.
Katniss lets the net fall back across the window. She looks back at the unmade bed. Ladies sleep in the afternoon. She sinks down on the bed and falls back onto the pillows, the smell of the washing powder reminds her of Cato pressing the cushion over her face, the edges of her vision growing black.
The days are all the same, and the nights, the nights, are unpredictable. She waits for Cato to fall asleep, he is a heavy sleeper, and she goes outside, walks in the orchard, past the gin-house, alone. She never feels alone inside the house. It is part museum, part prison. She is watched by generations of Calhouns, in their portraits, in their heirlooms, in every fabric and carved piece of cedar.
Katniss has never needed company, but she had Gale, then. Here she finds herself passing the kitchen and listening at the door for a moment to the strident tones of the cook and the inventive swearwords she uses to chivvy her girl into action. It almost sounds normal.
There is a meeting of momma's Bridge club, tonight. Katniss cannot play Bridge but it is obligatory that she attend. The thought makes her very bored, and extremely tired.
On the ornate chest of drawers there is a photograph of Cato and his younger brother, Sulla, when they were young boys, frowning in overalls and holding guns. Cato has a hand on Sulla's shoulder, holding him back. Katniss has barely spoken to Sulla, he returned to his school in the Capitol shortly after the wedding and there is little of him in the house, no boots by the back door, no horse of his own in the stables. Cato's gift to her was a horse, a chestnut mare who is barely broken and this is the way Katniss likes her horses, a little wild, hot and unpredictable. Perhaps it was a message, that he considered her unbroken. He is doing his best to break her.
Katniss undoes the front of her silk gown and lifts up her chemise. She examines the bruises on the insides of her thighs, the purple hue edging to green, the bite mark that threatened to become infected until she asked her mother for a remedy under the pretense that a maid had received a dog bite. It won't heal well, the edges are ragged and the skin is raw and shiny. It will scar. At first she didn't fight, she gritted her teeth and stared at the ceiling but the less she fights the more violent he is. He overpowers her but she does not make it easy.
She hears a knock at the door and pulls her gown back around herself and tightens the belt. It is Momma, also clad in her silk afternoon robe. She smiles distantly and sits down on the velvet bench by the dressing table. Her hair is down, black and streaked with bands of silver; it is thicker than it looks when pulled back in a chignon. The air in the room is tight, powdery and dusty with afternoon heat and Momma's eyes travel from Katniss' feet all the way up to her face and she takes a deep breath that seems to further compress the room so that prickles of sweat sting Katniss' hairline.
"Show me," she says.
Katniss presses her lips together, her mouth dry. Slowly, she opens her gown and pulls it up to reveal as little of the top of her leg as possible, enough for Momma to see a bruise. The older woman doesn't flinch, her angular face barely moves. Maybe she can see through walls, maybe she can read Katniss' mind, she shudders inwardly at the thought.
"Men are all the same," Momma says.
Gale is not the same; her father wasn't the same.
"They need to remind us of their power, and that is the only way they can do it. You can't withhold your body from them, but there are other ways to be powerful." She pauses, folding her white hands. "And, that is why we play our game."
"Bridge?"
Momma smiles like a crack in a china plate. "No, dear, not Bridge."
Peeta's skin is scrubbed clean and he looks down at the stained vest and shorts he is wearing. Thresh and Castor are similarly attired but seem unconcerned with their appearance. They have been here before; in the bare anteroom attached to the ladies sitting room, bare apart from one picture on the wall. Peeta looks at the oil painting and the woman's blue eyes glare back at him accusingly.
Haymitch waved away his questions, shoving him towards where Thresh and Castor were already washing themselves down with a bucket of water, digging under their nails with a file. Peeta couldn't think of a single reason why three slaves should be summoned to the house without Haymitch when the master is away. The others know, they whisper amongst themselves, but nobody tells Peeta anything even when carriages arrive and women step down. Perhaps it is charity, he thinks, something to do with the Welfare for Slaves, although Peeta has never really seen any evidence of it before in the district. Before he became a slave he wondered if it was something invented by the Capitol, a non-existent charitable enterprise for people for whom the state affords no protection.
It sounds like a party. He can hear women's voices through the wall. She might be there. The door opens and a woman he doesn't recognize with hair piled high on her head beckons them forward. They step into the room, into velvet opulence, and it feels like they're about to be sacrificed.
Women sit, some leaning forwards in their seats, their faces lit palely by candlelight. It is silent and Peeta feels their eyes boring hungrily into him. She is there, by the master's mother, but her gaze is directed on the ground. Peeta senses Castor and Thresh step away from him and he sees them slip their arms around the waists of two tightly corseted women and fall into the shadows in the corner of the room. This is the cue for the lull to break, it glitters in lines through the room and Peeta is taken by the hand and pulled down onto the sofa. It is surreal and he is acutely aware of the way his clothes smell, of sweat, and dirt.
Mrs Calhoun stands as Peeta tries to sit at a discreet distance from Katniss. "Pray silence, please," she says, her arms in her silk gown raised in the air like the wings of a butterfly. "This is my daughter-in-law's first meeting, hence there are two boys circulating the room, and this boy…" She gestures at Peeta to stand. "Is offered as her first piece. Katniss."
She snaps her fingers and Peeta feels the breath in his mouth sour as Katniss stands opposite him, her face flushed and her jaw clenched.
Every face in the room is turned to watch them, even the woman who has Thresh's face buried in her cleavage. Peeta's eyes sting in the candlelight as it flickers, his palms are wet and he presses them against the sides of his legs.
"Katniss," Mrs Calhoun repeats, her voice sharp.
Katniss steps closer and Peeta feels he will stop breathing as she reaches out and takes one of his hands. Her eyes tell him nothing, they are clear and unfocused as if she exists outside of this moment, outside of this room, as if she can see something else. She leans forwards and presses her lips to his. His stomach rolls and Peeta can hear his own heart drumming in his ear, the blood rushing, his mouth trembles under hers. He is kissing her. He parts his lips slightly and feels her tongue brush across his: she tastes of outside.
He doesn't see Mrs Calhoun prod Katniss in the back with the end of her cigarette holder and he withdraws, not believing he has just kissed the master's wife in a room full of other women.
"Do not stop," Mrs Calhoun says.
The door opens into the hallway and she presses their hands together, propelling them in front of her at the head of a line. The women follow them up the staircase, laughing, their drinks sloshing onto the carpet.
Katniss stares resolutely ahead but her hand tightens around his as they reach the landing. Peeta's bare feet sink into the antique rug. She knows what is going on, and he doesn't, although it is becoming clearer. The door of one of the guest bedrooms stands open. They walk into the room and Mrs Calhoun pushes the door closed behind them.
Peeta keeps hold of her hand as she turns to face him and sees that her lips are trembling. She starts to undo the stays at the front of her gown and he feels heat rise into his face.
"S-stop," he says. "Why are they making you do this?"
"It's a game."
"A game?"
Katniss nods. "We have to play."
He can feel the pulse in his groin as she closes the space between them and presses her mouth against his, insistently, and he reaches up to push her away. She nips his lip and he loses the feeling in his hands, feels the blood drain from his face. Peeta squirms at the thought that he has had more than one dream about this very moment ever since the first day he saw her. This can't be happening to him. Her hands come up between them without their mouths parting and she pulls open the front of her gown, he feels the shake in her fingers and wants to stop her.
Peeta has never kissed a girl.
He has never seen a woman naked and when Peeta pulls away he feels faint as he looks down at her cleavage, her gaze dipped to avoid his.
"I don't think we have to do this," he stutters. "I can't do this."
Katniss looks up and her gray eyes appear like the flat surface of a puddle. Her pupils are oddly dilated and Peeta catches her arm as she slips to the floor. He helps her sit against the chest at the end of the bed.
"Miss, are you all right?" he whispers, suddenly aware that the women might be listening outside the door.
"No," she whispers back.
Katniss wakes the next morning in the guest bed, the boy is gone from where he slept beside her on the floor and the blanket she gave him is neatly folded by the nightstand.
She will have to tell Momma that they had sex. She will have to attempt to make up details for the other women. The thought makes her feel sick. Katniss' mouth feels dry and the room spins above her, she doesn't know if these are after effects of the alcohol or the pills. Momma insists she takes the pills, for sleep, for nerves. Her own mother would suggest a hundred natural remedies for anxiety, distrustful of anything that comes from the Capitol, but the pills are the least of Katniss' worries. It is more than nerves. She feels as if she is losing her mind, and not only that, her monthly cycle has stopped.
The previous night exists in her mind in fragments; even the boy's face is blurred. She can't remember what she said to him, what she told him, and fear stirs against her chest, unfurling its spidery legs. Katniss shudders.
She spends the day in her bedroom with the door locked. Nobody disturbs her.
The help have the afternoon off and Katniss flicks back the drapes to watch the maids and cook linking arms and beginning their walk down the long driveway.
She could visit Prim and her mother, tomorrow. She thinks about changing out of corsets and petticoats and pulling a loose cotton dress made by her mother over her head; the smell of dust and sunshine in the fabric. Katniss thinks about it but she knows she won't go. The thought of riding in the carriage away from the house makes her sick with anxiety. Why? Is that Momma's pills, too?
Cato will be home in a matter of hours. He will smile and kiss her cheek and she will feel that strangeness in her stomach, that flicker of hope that perhaps it will be different; perhaps she is wrong, or crazy.
Perhaps she is crazy.
Katniss thinks of Emlie Foot, who, consumed with fever, told Katniss that the madness would get her, too. That in madness there is no home.
Emlie, like so many women from the seam, lived with a violent man who expected her to be both pregnant, and scrubbing the kitchen floor, year in, year out, and for a decade she obeyed. She had a child for every year of marriage until she reached double figures and decided enough was enough. It was late for an abortion but Emlie had tried anyway, with the help of her aunt and dirty implements, and the child had been born and quickly died leaving Emlie with blood poisoning that made her skin green. Prim was confined upstairs whilst the woman raged on a cot in the corner of the kitchen near the stove, their mother tending to her through the night. Katniss thinks of how her mother did not try to save the baby. It was so small. Katniss saw its heart beating through translucent skin. Her mother placed it in a blanket and laid it in a basket. It didn't cry.
Emlie lived, and she left home. Katniss remembers seeing her waving goodbye to the children, nine little figures, barefooted, flanking their aunt – leaving madness behind.
What must it have taken to do that? At the time, Katniss wondered why Emlie had not left sooner, now she thinks she understands.