009. Build a Treehouse
The next time Katniss sees Peeta without his crutches is when he's shrouded in a royal blue robe, identical to the one she's wearing, with a cap and a tassel. Watching her best friend walk—or limp, to be more specific—across the stage to receive his high school diploma makes her burst at the seams with an emotion she's only known in the company of her sunshine boy. It's a strange cocktail of pleasure and triumph, neither of which are too familiar to Katniss, and it almost feels like sunshine. Golden, warm, contagious.
She's lying in his bed that night, belly flat against the wrinkly comforter with her chin angled toward him. He's on his side, propped up on an elbow, his baker's hands gently combing through the remnants of her braid. She hopes he doesn't notice the goose bumps puckering at her flesh with his contact.
"What are we going to do, now that school's officially over?" he croons, his voice brushing over her skin like velvet, ribboning around her ears. She sighs.
She shrugs, too. Taking to silence, as usual; he shouldn't expect much more from her.
He dips his head down, his breath trickling through her hair. "We need to add some excitement into our lives."
"I think we've had enough excitement these past two years," she mumbles back flatly, because they have. Biopsies and chemotherapy and radiation and near-surgical experiences have poisoned both of their lives with enough melodrama to last a lifetime, and Katniss would much rather lead an existence of mind-numbing tedium than anything close to what they've been through.
After all, wondering if her best friend was about to die for month after month made Katniss realize that, sometimes, monotony can be a beautiful thing.
He smiles sadly at her when she says this, his thumb hooking around a lock of her hair like a fishing line before leaning to press his forehead to hers. She lets her eyes flutter closed. She loves when he does this—when he domes them into their own little world, where nothing matters but the thoughts pulsing in their temples and the way their breaths curl into one—and lets the tension resting on her shoulders dissipate, because she'd rather be here with him, now, then mired by notions of the past or future.
"So, I'm guessing it'd be a bad idea to suggest we entertain ourselves this summer by robbing a bank or setting fire to the school," he whispers, out of the blue, the flatness of his tone jolting her from her trance.
Her eyes open and she blinks once, twice, before the humor twinkling in the blues of his irises elicits a sharp giggle from her lips.
"You're not funny, Peeta," she laughs, smacking him playfully.
The way he smiles makes his dimples hollow gently into his cheeks, and she loves his dimples, nearly as much as she loves the notion that this criminally charming boy is smiling at her.
"I don't have to be funny if I'm going to be a juvenile delinquent," he toys. When she rolls her eyes at him, he shifts his weight over the mattress, the springs underneath them squealing like pigs. "But, in all seriousness… it's our last summer together, Katniss. We might as well do something mildly thrilling."
Although he doesn't speak it, the tacit while we still can reverberates against the corners of her mind until she tastes bile rising in her throat. She's been ruthlessly skirting about this reality all semester, tip-toeing around the subject as if it's a snoring monster she doesn't want to wake. Of course, both she and Peeta—like all their classmates—have resolved what they'll be doing next year, and just thinking about it hurts as much as it would to belly-flop onto a board of thumbtacks.
She and Peeta won't be together in the fall. She'll be working toward a bachelor's degree in Environmental Sciences at the University of Pittsburg (thanks to the FAFSA, Katniss managed to receive almost full tuition in financial aid) while her sunshine boy stays behind in Panem, two hours away. It frustrates her to no end whenever she's reminded of the fact that, for the first time since they were five, they won't have continual access to the other.
She won't be able to flit on over to his room when she can't sleep, and she won't be able to curl up with him beneath his duvet, and she won't be able to fawn over the way his voice and her silence mingle so well.
She used to ask him, week after week, why he wasn't going to school in the fall; his reply was far more elementary than she knows the truth is. She assumes it's because his leg still causes him too much trouble, and it would be a pain to venture so far from home; she assumes it's because his brothers are gone, and his father is a broken engine by himself; she assumes it's because the Mellarks have spent so much on Peeta's treatment that, with student loans and tuition rates at what they are today, he estimates it'd be too much of a burden; she assumes it's because Peeta's afraid. He used to be fearless, before the cancer, but now he's constantly calculating his movements, measuring his time, wondering when—or if—the cancer will return.
Whenever she asked why he wasn't going to school, he would tell her with a sweet smile, "It's not on my bucket list."
After a while, she learned to stop asking.
But the memory triggers something, and she flips onto her side, Peeta's fingertips ghosting from her braid to her bare shoulder.
"You know, we've only done one thing on your bucket list."
He smiles at her, and she thinks to herself, Good. Now we can avoid the topic of college again.
His palm cups around her arm, tracing absentmindedly up and down from her shoulder to the corner of her elbow, and something inside her stomach twists. But it's not unpleasant. She finds herself biting down on her lip, as she often does nowadays with Peeta; whatever he ignites in her is certainly foreign, and she still has yet to detangle it, but she doesn't hate it. It perplexes her, and she likes it.
"We don't have to do anything else on the list," he tells her, and then adds, "If you don't want. I mean, I'm not exactly pressed for time at the moment."
"So? You've got to have at least something interesting on that list. Skydiving, elephant-riding, parasailing…"
He shakes his head. "The list is incredibly boring. And it has to be done in order, so that makes things a little complicated."
"I can do complicated," she shoots his way, rolling onto her back. He does the same, and when their shoulders brush, she finds herself instinctively lacing her fingers in with his, as if it's something they do every day. Fire shoots up her arm the second their palms align, electrifying her system and smoldering at the juncture of her thighs. Her heart drums violently.
Although he doesn't retract from the contact, she hears a small sound of surprise burst in the back of his throat, and it eases her nerves just enough.
God, she still loves confusing him. Refusing to look at him, she imagines the deer-in-the-headlights look that must be plastered on his features.
"I can also do boring," she adds quickly, ignoring the violent blush that blossoms in her cheeks. "I love boring."
Because boring isn't so boring with Peeta.
She feels his hand pulse on hers. "Well, I love spending time with you, so I guess I could give it a go. The next thing on the list is…" She can sense his frown, and she finally cranes her neck to look at him, her gaze sketching over the crease between his brows and the slight pout over his lips in a way that is so adorable and signature to Peeta. "I think it was to build a tree house, if I remember correctly."
"That could be fun."
"I'm sorry it's not skydiving or elephant-riding or parasailing… I know how into that type of shit you are."
"I think I'll survive." She winks at him, and he chuckles.
His fingers wrap a little more snugly around hers, and it makes her stomach do handsprings. "Good, because I definitely can't do this alone. I know, I know—I should be using my extraordinary masculinity to get the job done, but I don't think that'll be enough."
"And here I thought you were the Incredible Hulk," she teases.
"Yeah, but what they don't tell you is that the Incredible Hulk has a bad knee." He taps her on the nose playfully. "Most of his super-strength, in fact, come from his sidekick. She's short, always wears a braid, scowls about ninety-seven percent of the time. You may know her."
Katniss rolls her eyes. "That's quite a glowing description."
She feels his fingers slide from the gaps between hers, and she feels something in her chest plummet when his heat is momentarily replaced by a gush of cold air, but almost immediately, she realizes he's pulled his hand from hers so he can wind his arms around her body, folding her into his chest like a rag doll.
"Are you sure you're up for it?" he asks her, his voice ruffling in her tresses, the humor fizzling from his tone. "Don't feel like you have to help me with this. I don't want you feeling bad for me."
If there's anything Katniss has learned about their friendship, it's that neither of them deserve pity. Peeta introduced her to Pity's beautiful sister, Compassion, when they were only eleven years old, and since then, she's never wanted to know any other sentiment.
She wants to give Peeta what he wants because she cares for him. Not out of tastelessly-sprouted sympathy.
"I want to," she tells him quietly, unsure of how exactly she should convey her emotions to her best friend; then again, when has she ever been talented with expressing herself well? Even in the company of Peeta Mellark, the boy who knows nearly all her secrets, she still has the emotional grace of a drunken frat boy. She's hopeless when it comes to communicating her feelings.
His fingers braid through her hair, holding her head underneath his chin, and she can't help but think how perfectly they fit together, as if her body was fashioned explicitly to suit his. He's knit around her like a sweater, warming her, and she never wants to shrug herself out of his hold.
"Well, I doubt this will be that great of a commitment anyway," he begins, a bit of a chuckle lingering in his voice. "I mean, how difficult can building a treehouse be?"
Apparently, extremely difficult.
The easiest part is convincing Mr. Mellark to help fund their project, and the hardest part is literally everything else. It takes very little cajoling to appeal to Peeta's father's sympathetic side, and so by noon the next day, Katniss is walking beside Peeta as he hobbles around the hardware store on his crutches.
They know very little about building a treehouse, and even less about the materials needed to do so, so they enlist the help of one of the store employees—a man by the name of Beetee—and Peeta's brother, Hans, who's home from college for the summer.
Katniss, Peeta, and Hans begin by scouting a tree in the woods arched around the Seam. They find an old oak with a bough wide enough to accommodate the weight, and it's a safe distance from the ground, so they easily settle on this tree. Within the hour they've returned to the hardware store, listening to Beetee prattle on and on about what type of wood would be the sturdiest and which nails they should use and the angles at which they need to hammer the planks together and a myriad of other technical suggestions that breeze right through Katniss's head. It takes several trips between the shop and the woods, and a sizeable chunk of the money Mr. Mellark contributed, before the three musketeers find themselves with the materials they need all rounded up at the base of the oak.
Hans takes to sawing while Peeta works on sanding the strips of wood. Katniss, for the most part, is the designated climber, flickering from the undergrowth to the branch to hammer the planks to the trunk and the branch of the tree. The trio easily finds their rhythm, working dexterously below the canopy of leaves, shards of sunlight puncturing the shade and warming their necks. Katniss can tell Peeta's struggling out here, as the outdoors have never been as relaxing to him as to her, so after about an hour of sawing and sanding and nailing, she offers to grab the boys some lemonade.
She's surprised when Hans offers to come with her.
As they trek through the underbrush—Katniss easily glides along the forest floor while Hans inelegantly stumbles over the uneven terrain, because apparently, heavy-footedness runs in the Mellark family—she can feel the tension between her and the older Mellark, his jaw popped as if he's about to say something. Typically, Katniss thrives in silence, but the anticipation is making her chest burn.
When they reach the edge of the tree line, he plants his feet.
"Katniss—"
She pivots to face him, an eyebrow cocked as she studies him. Elements of Peeta are painted all over his features; she sees him in the floppiness of his hair, although Peeta's is tainted honey-blonde while his brother's is a little duskier, like butterscotch; she sees him in the sharp jawline, in the broad shoulders. She almost sees him in his eyes, although there's something about Peeta's gaze that's one of a kind, because although Hans bears the characteristically blue Mellark eyes, his don't glow the same.
But there's still a friendly, welcoming residue in everything Hans is, and she knows she likes him, even if he's not Peeta's shadow. He sports nearly every stereotypical middle-child trait, with his dignified shyness, his subtlety, his poise. And, like Peeta, Katniss knows Hans is inherently kind. Hence, his willingness to help his little brother with their project.
"Yes?" she replies simply.
He lifts and arm to scratch at the back of his neck, his eyes dutifully avoiding hers. "I—ah, I wanted to thank you."
She feels her brows knit together in confusion. "What?"
"You're good for my brother," he tells her plainly, out of the blue, his cheeks flickering a dark red. "You've always been good for him, really. When Mom left, and when he was sick…" He shakes his head. "I don't think he would've made it through without you. I really don't."
Well, at least the boy's blunt. Her heart rate is spiking between her ribs and she hardly understands why; all she knows is that the pulsing is uncomfortable, the burning in her cheeks nearly painful.
She's never been talented with receiving praise.
She expects Hans to start walking then, but he remains frozen in place, and the discomfort tugs at her muscles even more sternly. "I feel awful, really." He surprises her when he chuckles. "I've always known how much he cares about you, and I've never tried to get to know you. But I should. I mean, since you're going to be around a while—"
"—but I'm going to college in the fall," she blurts out, although it sounds petty the moment she leaves it hanging in the air.
Finally, his eyes meet hers, and he offers her a bit of a shy smile. Even though he doesn't possess Peeta's pincushion dimples, there's still something about his grin that reminds her of Peeta, and she feels herself calm slightly at the familiarity. "You're still going to be in his life, though."
This, she doesn't dare dispute.
"Of course."
His smile widens. "Then I think we should be friends. You know, for Peeta's sake."
She offers him a slight grin, melting down her stiff guard into something that can be molded and shaped however she so needs. She'll do anything—climb mountains, traverse rivers, even go as far as wearing a stupid prom dress—for Peeta. Even if that means being civil with his older brother.
But, of all the people in the world Katniss has contended with, Hans is certainly not the worst. If that boy is even one-tenth of what Peeta is, he's already earned her respect.
"Of course," she says again, extending her hand in a silent truce.
By the end of the second day of construction, she is able to stand with the two Mellark brothers and admire the product of their teamwork. If she would've listened a little more intently to Beetee's suggestions, maybe the roof wouldn't be slightly lopsided, or there wouldn't be slender gaps between some of the planks in the walls, but it'll suffice.
"And that's a wrap, kids," Peeta says, swiping the back of his hand across his forehead coated in a sheen of sweat.
"And it actually looks semi-inhabitable," Katniss laughs.
When she looks to her side, she notices Peeta leaning against the trunk of the tree for balance, smiling at her with a mixture of amusement and some other emotion she doesn't quite understand, but it causes her to blush anyway.
"It could use a little color," he adds airily, his eyes not leaving her.
Hans throws his hands in the air in an expended expression of defeat. "And this is where I stop being of any use to you guys."
"Thank you, Hans," Katniss says almost immediately. "For everything." She awards the middle Mellark brother a shy smile, which he's rightfully earned; he shouldered the most strenuous sector of the labor, since Katniss has always had weak biceps and Peeta had to keep off his knee. In return, Hans tosses an equally coy gin her way. She wonders if he's capable of much else. She's branded him the turtle of the Mellark family, never stretching far from his shell.
She doesn't realize that Peeta is watching this exchange, his eyes narrowing slightly; he steps closer to Katniss automatically, hobbling a bit on his bad leg—the poor kid can't bring his crutches to the woods—before pressing a hand to the small of Katniss's back.
She jumps a little at the contact.
"Katniss, if you don't mind, could we go back to the hardware store?" He points his attention directly to Katniss, blatantly disregarding his older brother's company. "I want to get some paint."
"Yeah, of course." She tries to wipe the confused frown from her features, but there'd been a gravel-darkened resonance in Peeta's tone that seemed so off, and it pegs her even after he's turned away.
They venture back toward the Seam, carrying their tools in their free hands, and when Hans deviates from the pair to head back to the Mellark residence, Peeta hardly offers his brother more than a curt, "Bye." Katniss thinks it's odd—had Hans done something to irritate Peeta? Her mind spins back, assessing his temper over the past few days; today, maybe he'd been a little quieter than usual, and now that she thinks about it, his patience has been growing thin, but… why?
She shakes her head and opts to ignore it for the time being. She's too exhausted to play detective.
As the sun begins its decent toward the skyline, she lays herself out over the sanded planks that line the floor of the tree house, her eyes raking over the ceiling as Peeta tips it with one final brush stroke. The entire expanse bares a deep sapphire sheen, peppered with silver and gold flecks and swirls of deep violet and indigo. It's a simple portrait, but it's stunning nonetheless.
Peeta has painted them a sky.
(He told her he'd bring those glow-in-the-dark star stickers some other day. She smiled.)
Her skin is sticky from a long day's work, a few stray tendrils of hair that have wriggled their way from her braid plastered to her temples and forehead, and she has splotches of veneer freckling her old t-shirt. She's sure she looks like she's been to hell and back, but as she lays over the smoothed floorboards, she couldn't care less. Especially when Peeta looks away from his artwork to meet her expression, gifting her with one of his charming smiles, all her thoughts nearly evaporate.
"How does it look?" he murmurs, running a hand through his sweaty curls. "Hideous? Revolting? Uninspiring?"
"I was going to say 'beautiful,' but whatever." She can't help but grin. Since they cooped themselves up in their newly-assembled safe haven, his mood has recovered immensely.
He chuckles. "A beautiful painting for a beautiful girl."
"I look like fucking Godzilla. Don't even talk to me."
He, of course, doesn't oblige, and she's thankful for that. "You look like you've run the mile, but then again, so do I. That's what happens when you slave away under the sun for a full day." He dips his brush back into the paint canister before lying beside her. "Or under the stars, I guess."
"They really are beautiful stars," she muses quietly, and through her peripheral vision, she catches him tilting his head to study her.
A comfortable silence floats in the air above them, buzzing with the chirps of birds and crickets; he eventually focuses on the ceiling like she is, bowing his elbows out as he rests his palms underneath his head. She loves moments like this with him almost as much as she loves listening to his rambling oratories. He makes both silence and noise into something welcoming.
The sun is sinking low, towed in by the greedy horizon, golden fragments of sunlight bleeding through the cracks in the treehouse, and for a moment, their worlds are glazed in honey-warmth, and she scoots closer to her sunshine boy. They're both sticky and sweaty and freckled with paint, but she doesn't mind, and by the way his arm readily hooks around her shoulder, she knows he doesn't, either.
She's just about to doze off when he rouses her with the rumble of his voice.
"What do you think of Hans?"
She blinks a few times, startled slightly by the question, but her answer isn't difficult to piece together. "I like him. He's really shy, but he's kind, and he really cares about you."
Peeta doesn't respond, and his silence digs into her skin like talons, leaving a throbbing ache in its wake. Since when does the boy have nothing to say?
She steals a glance at him to find his chin set, jaw strained with pressure. His very unlike-Peeta mood has returned full-force, and although she's certain it has something to do with his brother, she has no idea what on this earth could trigger this sort of reaction.
"What do you think of Hans?" she finds herself prodding him back with, her diction sharp.
He frowns. "He's my brother."
That's hardly an answer, and she knows he knows it. Exasperated, she quickly disentangles herself from Peeta's arms, bringing herself to the edge of the treehouse with her knees tucked into her chest. He's jolted upright, too, alarm settling in his features by her sudden absence, and if she wasn't so confused and irritated with him, she'd find his reaction amusing. Flattering, even.
Still, his temperament is grating, and she finds herself hissing, "What's gotten into you?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Spare me the fucking ambiguity, Peeta. Something's bothering you. It's been pissing you off all day—don't think I haven't noticed."
"I'm not pissed off," he contests, bringing his palms to his face, his fingers rubbing circles into his temples.
"Then what are you?"
Tension wracks through his body. "I'm just… I don't know. I'm confused, I guess."
"Peeta." Her voice is flat. "Stop flirting around whatever it is you're flirting around and just get to the goddamn point."
His hands pull at his face as if his cheeks are made of silly putty, the strain of his fingers turning his cheeks a variety of reds.
"Do you like my brother?"
"Of course," she responds almost immediately, but when his hands fall from his cheeks with a deliberate slap against his knees, and his blue irises have turned into an acrylic mesh of tangled emotions, she realizes that his question had been a little more multifaceted than she'd taken it to be.
"Oh—oh," she stammers, her cheeks the color of a traffic light. She nervously swats the hair from her face, her eyes picking a spot on the floorboards and intently focusing on just that, until her stare has grown so intense she's worried it'll blaze a hole straight through the wood.
"I mean, you two have started talking more, and I've noticed that you smile at him a lot, and you blush when—"
"—Peeta." She shakes her head fervently, assaulted with a whirlwind of emotions—confusion, surprise, irritation, fascination (the boy's always been perceptive, but never have his premonitions so blatantly misled him)—and left dry regarding any device to sort through them. She can only silence him, allowing the quiet to hopefully lessen the chaos, but it still lingers in her head with no promise of fading.
After a few seconds have passed and her anxiety hasn't even begun to wane, he presses his palms to his eyes again, offering her a soft but implausibly genuine, "I'm sorry."
But why is he sorry?
Katniss untucks her knees from her chest, crawling over to Peeta where she sits on her ankles directly in front of him, her eyes boring into his until their gazes lock.
"I don't… I don't like Hans like that," she tells him honestly, watching as the tumult in his eyes begins to pacify. She doesn't understand why Peeta would think she could "like" his brother beyond simple appreciation; she doubts she's even capable of romantic feelings of any kind. Whatever she feels for Peeta has manifested so fully in her chest that it leaves no room for anything else. She's capable of friendships beyond Peeta, but as made clear by her relationship with Gale, too much of her compassion and attention is directed toward her sunshine boy, prohibiting her from rationing it out elsewhere.
She wishes Peeta knew that. That he was aware of how devoted to him she was.
Peeta lets out a sigh, his gaze falling from hers in some expression of shame. "I really am sorry, Katniss… I just thought there was something going on."
"Why would it bother you?" she quietly inquires, cocking her head slightly.
He looks up to her then, his frown infecting his features with muted pain, and he reaches between them to shyly grasp her fingers in his palms. "I love my brother, I really do. He always looked out for me when my mom was around, and when she was gone and Dad became so quiet, Hans really stuck with me. Whenever he wasn't at school, of course. Really, he's a wonderful guy, but… you deserve better, Katniss. You deserve the entire fucking world handed to you on a silver platter, and it's not that Hans wouldn't be good to you, but he's not enough."
Katniss has always had a bit of a short fuse, and while she could easily take his comments as some form of flattery, she feels rigidity shocking through her system. "Then who would be enough?"
He surprises her with a light chuckle, his hands pulsing against hers. "I don't know. It was meant as a compliment, not a sentence to a life of celibacy."
A thread of a thought weaves though her mind—would Peeta consider himself good enough for her?—but she yanks it out almost immediately, before it can do any real damage. She refuses to even momentarily entertain the thought of her and Peeta being together, because they're just friends, and that's how it should stay. There's no way Peeta could ever want her like that.
When she doesn't say anything, he lifts his hand from hers to cup her jaw, bolting their gazes together. Half of her adores the way he touches her, as it's never possessive but affectionate and honest, while the other half of her hates that he toys with her like this. She's eighteen, her body operates on hyperactive hormones, and her best friend is impossibly charismatic.
She remembers how much easier things were when she was the one to always confuse him, while nowadays, their roles have practically reversed. It's flustering. Katniss needs to always be in control.
"Let's not argue," he tells her quietly, his voice thicker than syrup, and it wraps around her, roping her closer. "I never meant to upset you."
"I know," she mumbles back, because she does. Peeta would never intentionally hurt her. He'd rather swim through a sea of razorblades than cause her any pain, because Katniss is his world as completely as he is hers. He sometimes tells her that the two of them are soul mates, not necessarily with a romantic implication but in the sense that they're meant to be companions in any paralleled galaxy, over any wrinkle in time, forever, always. It's always been them, and it'll always be them. Even if twenty years down the road, both of them are married and have started families hundreds of miles apart, she'll still be his best friend.
Forever. Always.
They spend their summer up in their tree-lodged sanctuary. Peeta paints the walls of the treehouse, too, splashing the planks with greens and yellows and periwinkles until they're surrounded by a field of dandelions. The baby blue on the horizon he's illustrated fades darker as it rises until it melts into the night sky overhead, until the sunshine boy and the lunar girl are captured in a world of both night and day.
He brings them blankets and pillows and lines the walls with books and paint, so the two of them curl up in a pool of fabric. She reads, he paints, they share bags of trail mix and pitchers of lemonade, he tells her stories, she laughs, and life is simple.
Neither of them want to face the reality that things will be changing so soon and so dramatically, so they don't. They pretend that their bliss is infinite and that time has no bearing on their little world.
Until the end of June, at least, when Katniss's mother sits her down to say that she and Prim are moving at the end of the summer. They're running away from this suffocating town that reminds her too much of her deceased husband every day, down to Florida, where Mrs. Everdeen's found a job at a hospital and the saline humidity may just clear her head. Because, now that Katniss is going to college, they don't need to stay.
Katniss isn't afraid to yell at her mother.
"What about Prim?" she hisses, the chair squealing against the tile as she pushes it behind her, rising to her feet.
"Prim's young. She will adjust. It won't hurt her like it would've hurt you." Her voice is an octave lower than her daughter's, airy and calm as if Katniss hadn't just screamed in her face.
Every inch of Katniss's skin is tingling with rage, and she digs her fingers into her palms until a sharp pain is shooting through her body, but the anger doesn't abate. "She's fourteen, Mom! All her friends are here! Her entire life is here—you can't just rip her away from that!"
"She will adjust," she justifies, her voice even quieter this time.
Katniss's head is pounding, low but deafening like a timpani, and wants to tug at her hair, or scream, or shoot something. She elects to not waste her breath on her mother and grabs her shot gun, bolting out the door and into the woods.
She flicks her mind off, refusing to think about a word her mother had said as she stalks deep into the underbrush. The woods are alive today, birds twittering from every branch. She sees a squirrel here, a rabbit there, and she cocks her gun and fires at a small creature, but she misses.
She never misses.
Her head is pounding, void of all thoughts but teeming with noise and pressure. She's slightly dizzy, but she fights the vertigo and crouches to the ground, gun raised as she lies in wait for the next target.
It's only a few moments before she hears something rustling the leaves behind her; she tilts her head slightly, listening to the uneven gait of the creature. It sounds wounded. Significantly.
And it's venturing straight toward her.
Katniss is quick, intent on catching the animal off guard rather than ambushing it, and her finger hooks around the trigger as she whirls around to train her gun directly on her victim.
She almost has a heart attack when she sees him.
"I don't think you want me on your dinner table tonight," Peeta warns, throwing his hands in the air, his body still in line with Katniss's gun.
Even though she's staring straight at her best friend, her body is frozen in place, and she can't seem to pull her gun away. It's not as if she's even considering shooting the kid, but her mind is pulsing, blank but thunderous, and she can't move.
Peeta's hands lower. "Katniss?"
Almost immediately she drops her gun to the brush tickling her ankles, but her body remains as rigid as a metal pole. He says something to her—she sees his mouth move—but she doesn't hear a sound.
Suddenly, the boy with the golden curls folds the distance between them, his arms wrapping around her just in time for her to crumble, and she drapes herself over his body like she's nothing more than a flimsy strip of fabric. His grip on her only tightens as she begins to empty choked sobs into his neck.
"Katniss, please tell me what's going on."
He doesn't have to do much coaxing. She tells him everything, anyway.
"My mom's leaving. She's taking Prim, and she's leaving."
He walks her to their treehouse, fighting the pain in his leg the entire way just to help support her weight. After they've climbed the ladder they both collapse onto the blankets, and he wraps himself around her, his palm sweeping in soothing circles over her back.
She manages to choke out her key fears over this arrangement—that she'll hardly see her sister anymore, that she won't have a place in Panem, that she'll hardly get to see Peeta, that she won't even have a home—after which her words melt into harsher sobs, and she cries and cries and cries.
And then she listens, because Peeta begins to fill the void with his redeeming voice, just as he always does.
"Prim loves you, Katniss," he begins quietly, his lips brushing over her eat as he speaks, triggering goose bumps to pop up over her flesh like weeds. "She loves you as much as you love her, so neither of you will let yourselves grow distant. You won't be able to see her every few weeks, but you can write her, you can call her, you can have nightly Skype dates, if that's what it takes. Things may get harder, but you're strong. You'll make it work." His voice laces around her like ribbons of honey, sweet and warm in its intention, and it steadies her breathing a little. "And you're always welcome here. I'm going to need to see you all the time, you know. So you're always welcome to stay at the bakery over weekends or breaks from school. I'll be here. Just because your family is moving… they're not taking your home with them, Katniss. Your home is where you make it." The encouraging peppiness in his timber wavers, superseded by something far more genuine in its sonority as he murmurs, "I can be your home. You've always been mine… the bakery just feels like any other building until you come crawling through my window."
She manages to cough out a curtailed laugh through her now fading sobs.
"Just because your family won't be here, that doesn't mean you're not welcome. I'll even sleep on the floor so you can have my bed if it means you'll come to visit all the time. But come back, please. Don't stay away for too long."
It's the first time either of them have really discussed what will happen in the fall when Katniss goes to UPitt, and she finds that there's something oddly consoling about the exchange. She's been dutifully avoiding the topic of his absence from her life for so long that the entire notion had morphed into a dark beast: immense, consuming, suffocating in its grandeur.
Now, it seems manageable.
It'll be hard. But they'll be okay.
She nuzzles deeper into the crook of his neck, and she feels his lips press gently to the top of her head. It sends shivers tingling down her spine but she tries to ignore it; she'd much rather concern herself with his company rather than with irrelevant thoughts regarding how he feels about her. She decides she'll probably never know exactly what he feels for her, but that's alright. She just needs him and every pleasure that entails, devoid of the complexities.
Peeta continues to murmur consolations to his lunar girl, his fingers toying with her raven braid, his lips brushing over her skin. Although it doesn't happen immediately, he eventually manages to calm her tempest, lulling her into a state of self-possession, where her tsunami become small ripples, where her typhoon fades to a breeze.
She wonders what she'd do without him.
She prays she never has to find out.
The lunar girl blinks once, the entire month of June shattering into July. She blinks again, and July withers into August. When she blinks a third time, August begins to shed its feathers, and suddenly, time is slipping too far, too fast, the sun setting on what she'd grown to know as normal.
She fears what her new normal will become. The old normal was simple, predictable, even pleasant at times. The old normal was breakfast with Prim, drinking lemonade with Peeta up in their treehouse, going to a movie every so often with Madge or Delly or Annie, scaling the tree on the side of the bakery to twist herself in with Peeta under his duvet.
The new normal may be drafty dorm rooms, lonely café outings, shallow friendships, empty bank accounts. Only Annie will be accompanying Katniss up at UPitt, serving as the single element transferring from the old to the new normal; otherwise, she's leaving everyone behind. Prim, Madge, Delly, Gale, her mother, her teachers, her classmates.
And, of course, Peeta.
When it's her time to embark on whatever this new normal may be, her family's measly bungalow is suddenly reduced to nothing but empty walls and chipped paint, cardboard boxes littering the floor. Even though the Everdeens never had much, Katniss lived her entire life under this roof and she'd be fooling herself if she said she wouldn't miss it. These walls had seen her take her first steps, heard her first words. They'd known her father.
Which is how Mrs. Everdeen is justifying her departure—there's too much of Mr. Everdeen still lingering in this house, in this town—but Katniss thinks her mother is being completely ridiculous. If Katniss were to lose the love of her life, she wouldn't do everything she could to erase his memory. She can't even begin to understand why Mrs. Everdeen would want to forget the man she'd loved more than life itself, the man who was tall and broad-shouldered and courageous and gentle and good and could make the entire world stop its rotation when he sang.
Then again, Katniss knows she's incapable of understanding nearly anything her mother does. It's not that Mrs. Everdeen is cruel, or selfish, even. She's just so wrapped up in her own persisting grief that she simply forgets there's life beyond her pain. That she has daughters who have needs of their own. But how she manages to so devotedly overlook her own daughters' wellbeing is beyond Katniss, and she resents her mother for it. She supposes she always will.
The night before Katniss is set to leave with Annie for the university, she crawls into Peeta's window to find him hunched over his desk, face in his hands. A slightly faded piece of paper rests between his elbows.
"Peeta?"
He starts, his hands jolting to cover the sheet of paper, his face flickering to meet hers. Even in the dark, she can see his irises are red-rimmed, his golden curls tousled.
Oh, god.
"What—what's wrong?"
He tugs open one of the drawers of his desk, sliding the paper in quickly before wiping his hand under his nose and sniffling. "Nothing. Just… God, there's so much left on my bucket list."
So that's what'd been on his desk.
"You're never going to let me see it, are you?" she implores softly, taking a step toward him.
"Not as long as I'm alive."
Her heart suffocates. He shouldn't say things like that to her.
He slides back in his chair, standing up as he rubs his eyes. She can't tell if he's been crying or if he's about to, but he's dutifully endeavoring to hide whatever distress he's in. He even goes so far as to force a halfhearted smile, but Katniss can see right through it. She can always see right through him.
Neither of them are particularly gifted when it comes to hiding things from the other.
"Peeta, please tell me what's bothering you." She angles her head up to him as she closes the gap between their shadow-sheathed figures.
He lifts a hand to swipe a few stray strands of hair behind her ear, and she shivers. "There's just a lot going on right now, Katniss. I'll be fine."
"I don't have time to wait for you to get fine on your own. Let me help you. Let me listen." After all, listening to Peeta has always been her forte.
He limps over to the bed, placing himself at the edge of the mattress; his knees are open, and he pulls Katniss between them, his hands bracketing her hips. Her camisole hardly covers her midriff, and while decency has never been an issue with Peeta—they're just friends, after all—she finds herself squeaking out a tiny gasp when the warmth of his palms splays out over the skin of her waist. The heat travels directly to the juncture of her thighs, and she tries so hard not to squirm.
Katniss hates her bodily responses to Peeta. Her mind knows better than to let his touch arouse her, but clearly, her systems don't.
She blames it on her hormones. It's nothing else. It can't be.
"I was doing some research earlier," he begins, his voice thin, "and I found some studies showing that with the cancer I had, especially when it doesn't end in surgery, the recurrence rates are…"
He doesn't have to finish. His silence tells all.
"And you've always been here for me, no matter what I was going through, but now—" He lowers his gaze. "I don't know what I'm going to do without you. If something happens, if I get… get sick again… and you're not here—"
"I'd come back," she hisses, her hands moving to cup his jaw and tilt his face back up to hers again. "I'd be at your window in a heartbeat. I'm only two hours away."
Under her palms, she feels his jaw tense. An achingly long silence ensues before he finally lifts his head to look at her once more. And then he speaks again, in a voice so soft she can hardly hear it, but it still wrings her heart all the same.
"I can't sleep without you, Katniss."
Her eyes are stinging. She swallows hard.
"There were nights where you didn't come here—where you didn't crawl through my window to lay with me—and I'd lay awake for hours. I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to feel obligated or pressured, but now it's all I can think about. How I'm going to be here, alone, waiting for you, waiting for the cancer to come back, waiting to do the next thing on that stupid bucket list of mine—"
For the first time, she wants to silence him; she can't stomach his dialogue anymore. It claws at her flesh, pulling her in every direction, transmuting her mind into a labyrinth of tangled emotions she can't even pray to navigate, and she needs it to stop.
So she leans in, pressing her lips to his forehead, feeling the heat and the sweet taste of his skin beneath her mouth. His hands tighten their grip on her waist in reaction, and she hears a sharp intake of breath drag through his lips, but he doesn't say anything.
When she pulls back, her mouth is tingling and her head is throbbing and she's not quite sure exactly why she just did it, and maybe she should regret it, but she doesn't. She chooses not to. There's not enough time left for her to wallow in shame.
"Don't wait for me," she whispers through the dark, although every inch of her body prays he does. "You don't have to spend your time worrying that you'll get sick again. You can distract yourself with something—or someone—else. You can find another person to help you knock things off your bucket list, who can help take your mind off the cancer."
"But that someone else isn't my best friend."
Her chest tightens. "You can find a new best friend."
It's what would be best for him. He deserves someone better than a girl two hours down the highway from him, who will prohibit him from knowing anything beyond anticipation. He needs to move on, no matter how painful it'd be for her.
She never deserved him, anyway.
His thumb gently swipes over her skin, leaving a cool tingling sensation in its wake.
"But that new best friend isn't you."
For a split second, she has an overwhelming urge to close the distance between them and just kiss him, finally, after so many years. But a moment later the gravity of that thought crashes down on her, and she's absolutely horrified with herself.
She didn't just think about kissing her best friend again, did she?
She tries to cover it up with a joke. "Peeta, if you keep talking much longer, I'll drop out of school before I even begin just so I can stay home with you."
"That's the plan," he chuckles, but his eyes are still red, his smile sad.
She shakes her head, leaning down to press her forehead to his. "I'm already missing you, Peeta."
"Me, too."
"I'll come back to you."
"Every day."
"Every month."
"Every week."
She decides it's no good to argue with him, so she wriggles from his grasp and crawls over his bed; he soon joins her, coiling his arms around her after tucking them both in underneath the comforter.
They lay in silence for a while before she murmurs, "You know, you could always enroll at UPitt."
His fingers gently yank her hairband from the end of her braid, carefully towing through the pleats until her hair is loose, webbed over his pillow. "I need to stay home, Katniss."
"Because 'going to college' isn't on your bucket list?" she prods humorlessly, predicting his reasoning before he can suffocate her with it. If she hears that one more time—
"It's because I don't belong there." His tone steals her breath, and she finds herself stilling in his grasp. "Dad needs me here, Katniss. And my treatment was enough of a financial burden on my family. I'm not going to waste more of my dad's money on a degree I'm not going to use."
"You could do such great things." Her voice is small, but sincere.
He doesn't respond. She knows he's aware she's right, but this is Peeta's decision. She must respect it.
After a few moments his grip on her tightens, his nose nuzzling against her temple, and she feels warmth trickle from her core to the tips of her fingers and toes. She curls deeper into his embrace, taking the time to memorize his feel and his scent. It'll be things like this that she'll miss the most when she's away from him.
"Katniss?" His voice splits the quiet after quite a long while.
She tilts her head up slightly. "Yeah?"
"Can I ask you a favor?"
She nods. "Anything." And she means it.
She feels his fingers brushing over her bare shoulders, sweeping down the length of her arm, over the crook of her elbow, before they find hers and lace together with them. She feels his palm pulsing on hers, and it makes her throat thicken.
"Can you sing for me?"
It's practically a godsend when Katniss gifts the world with her song. Even for Peeta, she'll rarely parade her voice, but at the moment, she knows he needs it.
So she parts her lips and sings him the Valley Song.
He often tells her it's the song of hers that ensnared him when they were five. She doesn't remember that day well; she recalls bits and pieces, like that awful faded red gown her mother had dressed her in and the cookie that the chubby five-year-old Peeta had given her. She remembers him calling her pretty.
But she knows he remembers much more than she does because he reminds her of it constantly. How she'd sounded like a bird, how he thought she was cute, and how he needed to be her friend or he was convinced he would die right there in that very classroom, because he'd never heard a song so beautiful.
So she sings it for him now, again. Although her voice has since matured, growing fuller and more steady, it's still as pure, and she feels him trembling against her as he buries his face into her thick curls.
When she's done, she feels him press a soft kiss to the outer shell of her ear, and she fights off a shiver.
She realizes it's late, and that her stay is most likely expended, so she reluctantly begins to pull from his hold, but his arms don't relent.
He whispers to her hair, "Stay with me."
She tells him, "Always."
She doesn't leave his bed that night.
A/N: You guys are seriously making me want to change the ending of the story I had in mind, so who knows how this'll turn out.