One-Shot: Oh, Joy! Oh, Rapture Unforeseen!
When Katniss Everdeen is 11 and…. 7/8s years old, her life is saved.
Half-starving in the rains of April, she witnesses the Town baker's youngest son get walloped by his cruel mother for the crime of burning two loaves of bread.
Burnt loaves that soon become soggy, when they are tossed into the muddied street as soon as the Witch goes back inside.
Like a rat, Katniss scoops up these Merchant leftovers. Yet as she turns to flee, she takes one indebted glance back at the young man – Peeta – and something churns in her gut. She cannot leave.
Doubling back, she takes the boy's hand in hers while with her other arm, she cradles the burnt and damp loaves against her chest.
Katniss guides Peeta halfway across the district and into the Seam, to her mother. The resident Healer has been close to catatonic since the death of her husband down the mines three months earlier, but the sight of a patient seems to temporarily invigorate her into providing treatment for the brutal shiner around the boy's eye.
As Mrs. Everdeen and a young Prim dutifully treat their patient, Katniss places the bread in their meager icebox, unable to look at the young man who gave them to her.
A debt owed, and a debt repaid. She didn't let it linger. That will be better for them all, in the long run.
When Katniss is 12 properly, she receives her first kiss.
It is actually what is known as a Reaping Kiss, a common superstition in District 12. Legend has it that if you and a partner share a kiss on or just before Reaping morning, you are both guaranteed not to be picked for the Hunger Games.
The day of her very first Reaping for which she is eligible dawns hot and humid, the sun's rays beating down on the school play-yard. It is officially the last morning of classes, a half early-release day, to prepare for the Reaping in the Square at 2:00.
Katniss is off by herself, keeping a watchful eye on her eight-year-old baby sister, when suddenly an electric shock goes up her arm as someone catches her wrist.
She turns, sucking in a sharp breath and finds herself gazing into deep, impossible pools of blue. Those eyes…. eyes as blue as this summer sky….
Before she can say a word, Peeta Mellark is tugging her into the closest shade. He drags her to, and then pushes her up against, the base of this statue and suddenly he is kissing her, kissing her and Katniss gasps in utter bewilderment. The sound parts her lips as she feels the kiss unintentionally deepen; she shudders violently as she feels Peeta's tongue slip between the split to dance and play with hers.
Whether it is out of shock or an illogical, lingering sense of debt, Katniss holds the Reaping Kiss. She and Peeta embrace and kiss in the shadow of their very first Victor, carved in stone.
Katniss can still feel the tingle of his mouth on hers, even now, months after she escaped the Reaping, her first of seven to come.
She's never believed in superstition, yet she feels quite certain that in pushing his lips onto hers, Peeta Mellark has saved her life again.
All throughout the next year, she stews over the embrace that she did nothing to discourage and possibly even became an active participant in. Her first kiss, more or less stolen from her and yet still, she will sometimes dart her tongue out over her lips, trying to decide how she felt about the kiss, whether she liked it or resented it.
Resentment wins out, if for no other reason than now she feels it is one more thing she owes him, when she had thought her debt had been repaid in full. Even then, the feeling is weak.
In her elder sister's thoughts, Prim is unknowingly not helpful. Katniss's baby sister has taken a liking to some Capitol show on one of the few local channels that their beat-up television picks up. Katniss doesn't really follow it, except to see that it features a young woman – a new one every week – blowing kisses to some men and bestowing kisses on others. All the while, these men will jockey and push each other out of the way, as if these kisses really can be caught.
It's as if they actively wish to become diseased, stealing such kisses from this prancing peacock of a young woman. A thought makes Katniss blanche. What if she is diseased, from the Reaping Kiss the Baker's son gave her? She should have long stopped believing in what her classmates would have called cooties when they were little, and yet Katniss can't help but feel that she was given – and even unwittingly took - something that wasn't hers.
Anger fuels her to show up on the back loading dock of the Mellark Bakery, in the rear alley behind their shopfront, at dawn the next morning.
As she has hoped, Peeta is the one to answer the door, blinking at the stormy look on Katniss's face.
"Here!" she snaps, frustrated. Grabbing his skull and yanking it forward, she kisses him bruisingly on the mouth good morning, their lips popping as they break apart. Katniss's steely eyes flash. "Take it back, why don't you?"
A dazed Peeta just gawps at her. "I…. I don't…. what?"
Katniss growls. "You've been driving me mad all damn year over that stupid….. Reaping…." She's spluttering, she's not making sense.
So why is Peeta gazing at her as if she is? Making sense.
Her incoherent rambling trails off mid-sentence as Peeta suddenly turns her in the back wall of the Bakery. Unconsciously, Katniss's grey orbs flit down to the boy's lips. At her back, the bricks are kissing her skin.
And then Peeta is kissing her lips, returning her kiss, and she gasps.
Fireworks. They peal in her mind with an almost mocking triumph as Katniss feels her arms loop languidly about Peeta's neck without her brain telling them to, and she's kissing him back.
In the interim, her game bag slips dreamily from her palm and spills open, forgotten at her feet, as the Seam healer's daughter and Baker's son embrace.
Here she is, an aromantic at best, making out with a boy – a large, handsome Townie boy – as if they are far older than their mutual 13 years would suggest.
Katniss and Peeta finally, sensuously break apart, gasping. Katniss's breasts are heaving under the bodice of her blue Reaping dress as she gulps for air.
From then on, she and Peeta Mellark are friends.
At least, that's what Katniss tells herself. For do two people who are only friends really develop a tradition of sharing a chaste peck on the lips good morning in the gray light of dawn, at least when his mama and Gale are not around? Katniss is the first one to admit that she's never been very good at making friends, so she wouldn't exactly know. Then again, at no point has she ever made a habit of kissing her hunting partner, and she definitely didn't do so when Gale and she first met; she was too frightened of him.
Thankfully, Peeta seems to understand her reticence. "The way the whole friendship thing works, Katty girl, is you have to tell each other… the deep stuff."
"The deep stuff?" her grey eyes twinkle, ignoring for the present the pet name he's insisted on using for her over the better part of this year. "Uh oh…. like what?"
"Like…." and Peeta smoothly steals his arms about her waist. "How do you best like me to kiss you?"
"Well, now you've stepped over the line," Katniss deadpans. Though she does have a preference: closed mouth…. most of the time - kissing with tongue makes her feel icky. Prim would be horrified to hear that. That Little Duck is 10 going on 25, and insists that when she's old enough to date (which will be never), she is going to kiss the way those Capitol stars kiss in the movies.
And one other pet peeve of hers, which Peeta has learned enough by now that he always makes a point of asking her. "Katty…. can I kiss you?"
She lifts a matronly eyebrow, correcting his grammar schoolmarmishly. "May I kiss you, please?"
Peeta steps into her, hovering quite close, and Katniss's lashes grow lidded. "May I kiss you, please?"
She nods dumbly. "Yes, you may." Her reply is breathless and then his mouth seals over hers and they wordlessly embrace.
The summers pass. As Katniss and Peeta grow into teenagers, she decides that whatever they have, it long ago went far past the point of mere friendship.
Courting is embarked upon without any discussion, and really doesn't change much. Peeta is discreet, which Katniss appreciates. She doesn't want her family to know that she is seeing him, particularly not Prim with her penchant for gossip. And especially not Gale – the two men (her hunting partner and her…. her lover) have never co-existed well in her mind. And she and Peeta can never, ever let his mama find out. The Witch, as she is called behind her back, hates anyone Seam with a passion.
They're 17, and it is the year of the 3rd Quarter Quell, a solemn, higher-stakes edition of the Hunger Games. It is also the 75th anniversary of the Capitol's victory over the district rebels and on what is known as V for P Day (Victory for Panem Day), there is a pomp and circumstance fireworks display for the district citizenry.
Mandatory Attendance requires Katniss and Peeta to stand in the Square with their families at first, but then both of them steal away and meet in the Meadow just beyond the fence.
Katniss recalls fondly the first time she brought Peeta out here. It had felt like a big step, showing him part of her world, but he had enjoyed it. He had brought a pencil and sketchpad with him and she had sat and watched in awe at how he is such an artist, drawing all the beauty that he sees – beauty which seems to include her, and at a disproportionate amount at that.
Katniss and Peeta are gazing up at the exploding colors and shapes in the nighttime sky, when he suddenly chuckles.
"What?" she turns to him, bemused.
"Nothing. I just wish I could freeze this moment… right now… and live in it forever."
He gets schmaltzy like this sometimes, but for once Katniss doesn't giggle or chide him. Instead, she murmurs, "OK."
He turns to her, smiling, and the smoldering look in his blue eyes steals the breath from her lungs. "Then you'll allow it?"
Katniss nods dumbly. "I'll allow it," she whispers.
Unconsciously, they are both leaning in. When he is a hair's-breadth from her, Peeta suddenly asks:
"What's your favorite color?"
She nearly snorts in his face. "You just thought to ask me that now?" Her chuckle falters at how impossibly close he has drawn, and Katniss gulps, her throat dry. "Green," she hisses breathlessly; a moment later, a flash of green from the fireworks illuminates her lovely face. "What's yours?"
"Orange," Peeta smiles, the same shade electrifying his face.
Now she does snort. "Like Effie's hai-? – Hmmmmmm…"
The question dies a peaceful death in her throat as Peeta's tongue slides down it, the kiss deepening into something carnal, something desperate. Katniss and Peeta have kissed like this plenty of times, perhaps more than she would care to admit, and yet this – this is the first kiss that makes her want another.
Closing her eyes, her mouth molded to his, Katniss suddenly and boldly swings her thighs into Peeta's lap as she gracefully moves to straddle him. She settles over his hips and a throaty chuckle bubbles up around where their tongues are still grappling for dominance. Hiking up the skirts of her blue dress, she takes Peeta's hand and guides it to touch her. His fingers palm her sex, and canting into him, Katniss lets out a breathless moan.
"Huhhhhhhh…"
Peeta slips a finger, then two, then three, into her wet slit, and throwing back her head, Katniss begins to ride his palm. She rocks insistently into his digits until, with an astonished cry, she is brought to whimpering orgasm, her juices exploding onto his skin.
The couple goes no further that night. But from the way Katniss and Peeta lustily gaze into each other's eyes, their eyes black with desire, Katniss swallows hard as it dawns on her that it is only a matter of time before they are truly intimate.
It is the next summer. They are 18.
The moment a ragged cheer goes up from their grade, now free of the Hunger Games forever, Katniss shivers with delight as she feels the oven-warm presence at her back. Without even having to turn around, she lets her secret boyfriend take her by the hand and lead her with purpose into the rear alley behind the Bakery. Rounding the corner of the building, Katniss's face is already illuminated in a blinding smile before Peeta is spinning her about in his arms and kissing her breathless, maneuvering her back into the white husk of a vehicle.
As they have been doing for the better part of a year, Katniss and Peeta make love in the back of the Bakery's impounded delivery truck. It was once owned and used by Peeta's grandfather, and has seen better days. But for the purposes of illicit tête-a-têtes, it does the job nicely enough. At any rate, Katniss decides it is damn place nicer to have sex than say, the Slag Heap, where most other district kids their age go. She and Peeta have gone for rolls in the Meadow grasses sometimes too, despite it being dangerously out in the open. One of these days, she will have to sneak him into the woods proper to show him her daddy's hunting cabin and the lake.
The wheel-less axles of the truck rock dangerously on the cinder blocks onto which the car is mounted. Steam has gathered behind the windows, now only diffused when a sweaty, soft hand slaps onto the pane before dreamily falling away, leaving behind a dewey print.
Katniss bounces up and down in Peeta's lap – her preferred position. The bodice to her blue dress wrenched loose by nothing less than her lover's teeth, her womanly breasts now hang free like apples and sway temptingly in Peeta's face, her tits jiggling. When Peeta draws one aching bud in between his puckered lips and suckles, Katniss nearly screams.
"Huhhhhh… Uhhhhhhh… Errrrrrrr…." She rubs against him harder, faster. Hooking her one leg higher, curling it about his torso at the back of her knee, she rides him furiously until all her limbs seize and she cums. Katniss utters a curse. "Fuck!"
Peeta is still hard and yearning for completion, so rising languidly off him, Katniss drops to her knees before his swollen member. Licking her lips, rearing forward, she takes him in her mouth. She swallows him nearly whole into her throat, her tongue lolling out to lick the upper reaches of his shaft; eventually, she is able to tuck his balls back behind her puckered lips. Performing oral sex on him quietly, Katniss's grey eyes are hooded as she works, methodical, even solemn until she feels the man's semen coat her esophagus.
Releasing him, a ring of Primrose's cheap lipstick ringing his cock in the only sign that she has been with him, Katniss tenderly tucks Peeta back into his pants. When she rises off her knees, she glances up….
….. and draws both hands to her mouth to hold in a gasp as she beholds Peeta presenting her with a ring.
Unconsciously, her eyes fill with tears. Marriage is the last thing she has ever wanted for herself, she's told Peeta this, and yet, her heart thunders in her chest.
"Katniss Magenta Everdeen…." Peeta rasps hoarsely, still in awe of her and how she can make love to him. "Will you marry me?"
Silence for a heart-stopping moment. Katniss lowers her hands from her mouth. Her expression appears pained.
"This is the last thing I expected…" Her gaze darts askance, towards the door of the truck where beyond, they both know, many kids their age are conducting proposals like this in the Square, in full view of the Justice Building, as is custom.
Glancing back and seeing Peeta's face falling, Katniss takes a deep breath and takes his hands in hers. Plucking the ring from them, she examines it judiciously…
…. Then nods.
"OK….. Yes!"
Peeta's blue orbs bulge. He is aware this is a huge step for her. "Yes?"
Katniss nods again. "Yes."
An ecstatic Peeta leaps to his feet; taking her face in his hands, tilting it back, he kisses her deeply. Katniss smiles into his lips.
"Shall I put it on you?"
Katniss shakes her head, slipping the golden band into the folds of her blue dress. "I have to tell my mother first." She cocks an eyebrow. "You have to tell your mama." Somehow, they have been dating in total secret for the better part of…. four years? Five? and their families have yet to find out.
Peeta winces. Katniss cringes back in sympathy for him.
"How do you think she'll take it?"
Peeta barks out a bitter laugh. "Not well."
Biting her lip, Katniss sways in and kisses him sweetly. "I'll tell Mother and Prim tonight. Check back in the morning?"
He chuckles. "If I'm alive in the morning." Her heart constricts at how it sounds more serious than she would ever entertain.
"It'll be fine." A beat and then: "…. I love you."
"I love you too….. fiancée."
Katniss is floating on clouds when she arrives home at her family's little shack in the Seam.
She is startled to find all the Hawthornes waiting for her. Two years ago, the pair of close families had held a celebratory dinner to praise Gale's release from the Reaping. Within several more years, there will Snow willing be another for when Prim and Rory, Gale's brother, age out.
"I thought our potluck wasn't gonna start until sundown…." Katniss murmurs, fingering her engagement ring in her dress pocket. For some reason, she resolves to keep it hidden for the present.
Her mother steps forward. "That's not all we're celebrating." At Katniss's confused expression, Primrose finally has out with it:
"You and Gale are getting married!"
Her little sister more or less squeals this, but as she and little Posy start prancing at the feet of the adults, Katniss's mouth drops open. "Wh-What….?!"
Hazelle, Gale's mama and the local Seam laundress, steps forward. "We've always said that you and Gale make a fine match. And we know it is a little unorthodox in these here parts, but arranging betrothals is not at all uncommon for this district…"
Katniss gapes at her. "Yeah – in Town!" She watches as Gale's lips secretly upturn into a smirk. Peeta has ranted to her about this Merchant practice often, in which most parents will pair off their children, mostly in the interest of forging new business alliances. Inheritance laws are well fleshed out in Twelve, and can carry serious ramifications, particularly for the richer elite.
"And you are from Town," Mother reminds her eldest daughter. "Well, by blood, anyway. You and your sister are half-Merchant, from my side of the family."
If it were possible, Katniss has steam coming out of her ears. "So, if you hadn't run off and married Daddy for love, would you have sold me off once I was of age?" The implication rings clear: Mother could elope, marry for love, yet she, Katniss, cannot.
Gale steps forward, sheepishly. "Catnip…. Come on….. It's what's best….."
Katniss is speechless. One of the few freedoms in Twelve was having the choice of who to marry or not marry at all. Now even that is being taken away from her. All out of some fantasizing dream their mothers have had of wanting to see their eldest children Toast the bread together.
Prim's shining eyes are faltering, and she is looking concerned. "Katty….?"
Stewing, Katniss knows she can't have her little sister begin to suspect anything, or wonder why she isn't enthused about essentially being gang-pressed into an arranged marriage with her hunting partner and best friend. Taking Gale's hands in hers, she holds his gaze, no nonsense.
"Fine. When shall we go to the Justice Building?"
The next morning is Saturday.
Gale will be down in the mines, as he has been for the past two years since finishing school. Katniss takes on their hunting trails and checks the snare lines alone. Bagging two squirrels as a pretext, she steals into the rear alley and up the back loading dock.
The metal door has barely opened before she is in Peeta's arms and he is kissing her, kissing her, and for a moment, Katniss allows herself to forget, that yesterday was some dream that morphed into a nightmare.
"Hmmmm….. Mmmmm…" Katniss squirms in her lover's arms and they break apart with a POP! "No!"
Peeta lets out a nervous chuckle. "What's wrong? Morning breath? Or did you eat one of those squirrels before coming over here?"
She doesn't rise to the jousting teasing the way she otherwise would, and she sees his blue eyes dim even further.
"Katty girl….?"
"Peeta….!" she cuts across him abruptly. She bows her head. "I'm engaged."
Peeta chuckles again. "Yes, I'm aware. To…."
"No! …. To Gale. I'm marrying Gale." She glances up at him. "I love Gale."
Dead silence. Peeta is gawping at her and looking so betrayed, her heart howls in protest.
"Wha….?"
"It wasn't my choice!" Katniss grinds out with frustration, eyes glancing about furtively.
She recognizes understanding dawn as he nods, though a part of him still appears bewildered. "Why?"
"Our mothers have always fantasized about Gale and I getting together, so of course my mama decides to go back to her Merchant roots for once in her life!" Katniss rants, half to the sky. "Gale and I got shanghaied into becoming engaged. The Toasting will be at the end of the summer."
Peeta sighs and stuffs his hands in his apron pocket. "And you're just going along with this? Didn't you tell them that….?"
"Mother sprung this on me before I could! What was I supposed to say?"
"The truth," Peeta blinks.
Katniss lets out a mirthless laugh. "And do you really think Gale would have taken that well? He hates most everyone Merchant!"
"No more than how much my mother hates everyone Seam!" Peeta counters.
"Speaking of which, how did she take our happy news?"
"She didn't," Peeta huffs. "If it's any consolation, I've been betrothed to Delly Cartwright."
"The shoemaker's daughter?" Katniss blinks. She and Gale have sometimes sold her father pelts from their game. The Townie cobbler is often in demand to play his fiddle at Toastings.
Her mind races. If Peeta goes through with the arranged match, he'll stand a better chance of inheriting the Bakery from his parents, even though he is the third born. But his eldest brother has already married into another prominent Merchant family, and the middle brother, as far as Peeta has told her, doesn't want the responsibility.
What would happen if Peeta tried to defy his mother and declare his intent to marry the daughter of a poor Seam healer? He'd get cast out, that's what would happen. He would lose his family business – the one thing (other than her) that makes him happy.
Katniss loves this man more than anything, despite her best efforts to never fall in love, as she had once forsworn. But she loves him too much to let him give up his future for her. Likely go into the mines to provide for them both…. and possibly leave her a grieving widow, like her mother before her.
"You should take it," she tells him quietly.
Peeta all but reels back, slackjawed. "What?"
"Marry Delly."
"Katty girl…."
"Don't 'Katty girl' me!" she snips, even as she fights to prevent the tears from falling. "It's better this way." Digging into the folds of her dress, she holds out the engagement ring. "You should take this back."
Peeta takes it dumbly. "I…."
Katniss shakes her head. "Goodbye, Peeta…."
She turns to leave, when Peeta catches her hand. Turning around to glower at him, Peeta suddenly yanks her to him, sweeps her into a dip and kisses her hard. Clutching at him, her fingers fisting, weaving themselves into his golden curls, Katniss allows herself this last kiss. A kiss goodbye. Moaning, she even kisses him back until Peeta lifts her out of the dip and they break apart.
Tears are clinging to her cheeks now and before she lets Peeta do something mad like kiss those away, or worse still, pledge to carry her off and have her as his wife, their mother's wishes be damned, Katniss turns and runs.
Ironically, her one thought as she flees for home in tears, to a future that she doesn't want, is what might have happened if she had told someone about her romance before now. She imagines what she would say to Prim, if her sister knew:
I let him go.
What? How could you - do that? her sister would say.
I had to.
Yes, but… but…. why?
Because…. I love him.
The Toasting of Gale Hawthorne and Katniss Everdeen is held at the end of summer.
Standing in the small chapel of the Justice Building before the District Justice of the Peace, so that she and her hunting partner may be wed in the eyes of the district law, Katniss glances about the assembled anxiously.
A part of her still hopes that he might come charging in, roaring his objections when the justice asks for anyone to speak now or forever hold his peace. Peeta will know that her Toasting is today; she had left a note for him in the back of the impounded delivery truck attesting to as much, trusting that he would be the one to find it.
Katniss doesn't hear all of the Justice of the Peace blessing their union, as a tear clings to her eyelash, before finally falling to land on the lace of her mother's wedding dress – a family heirloom from her Merchant days.
"…..couple husband and wife. You may kiss."
Gale is on her faster than she anticipated, and Katniss wonders if the man is now suddenly kissing her if only to get this over with. He certainly plays it as though this marriage is real, and she gasps in startled surprise.
Their wedding kiss is over as fast as it began, and Gale and Katniss Hawthorne leave the Justice Building as man and wife. Gale takes his bride by her hips and lifts her onto the back of a rented cart, which he pulls to their new homestead in the Seam by hand, Posy and Prim skipping ahead.
Most of the Hob is here to celebrate the newlyweds, and Katniss puts on the fakest smile she has ever worn. Before the hearth, she and Gale toast a bit of tesserae bread and feed each other a piece. Then the groom kisses her. His lips taste like ash.
Mr. Cartwright, one of the only Merchants here and a decent sort, strikes up the reel on his fiddle and Gale takes his wife for a dance.
The song is just ending when there is a commotion spilling in from the front door, and for a moment, heart in her mouth, Katniss allows herself to hope….
…. But it is only Hazelle, dragging in Rory and Vick by their ears, with what looks like a cake box comically balanced on her youngest son's head. "That icing is much too damp and rich for you! Eating with your bare fingers like pigs! Apologize to your brother and sister-in-law this instant!"
Vick shuffles forward and sheepishly hands Katniss the cake box. Lifting the lid, the new Mrs. Hawthorne can see that the top of the icing is partially smudged, yet even then, she is left with little doubt:
This was made by his hand.
Peering over her shoulder, Gale frowns broodingly. "From the Town Bakery?"
Katniss shrugs, glancing up to her husband and smiling weakly. "What a nice surprise!" she gushes, sounding all too fake, yet the man she has married buys it, even if he is peeved about accepting what he calls charity.
That night, Gale takes Katniss to bed. When he climbs on top of her, she doesn't cry out or scream, but she doesn't moan with pleasure either, even though she does her best to make the noises torn from her throat sound like pleasure rather than discomfort.
Once Gale finishes inside of her, Katniss rolls over to face the wall. She only dares to weep once she hears the even rise and fall of his breathing.
Close to twenty years pass.
Prim and all of Gale's younger siblings age out of the Reaping. Fours years after Gale and Katniss's wedding, there is another union between the Everdeen and Hawthorne clans, when Rory and Primrose – best pals since they were in diapers – Toast the bread. Prim is ebullient and keeps gushing to her sister about how any babies of theirs will be considered double first cousins. Or something. Katniss just smiles hollowly, indulgently, even as she knows her sister's dream will never come to pass. Katniss will be damned before she has children, even though Gale has been dropping hints.
She is fairly certain she would never have had children if she had married Peeta, but unlike Gale, at least Peeta had understood her reasoning. Gale hates the Hunger Games and all they stand for, and yet he can't seem to grasp the concept that reproducing will just hand the Capitol more cannon fodder for their disitrict, more potential tributes. A true rebel would realize that the best way to fight back would be not to assist in any population increase on the part of the next generation. More than once, Katniss and her husband have had fights over this.
Prim eventually takes over their mother's healing practice, bringing in enough patients and coin to preclude Rory's having to go down the mines, much to both Katniss and Gale's relief. Within a year of the wedding, Prim is pregnant and gives birth to a daughter she and Rory name Aster.
Katniss is startled by how much of the Merchant genes have been passed down to her niece from her mother and grandmother.
She wonders if any child of Peeta's will look like this.
She still sees her old flame, now having taken over his father's business, but she always makes a point to trade squirrel on Sundays, when Gale is out from the mines and they can hunt together.
One Sunday morning, Katniss rises before first light from the bed she and her husband of twenty years have shared, only for Gale to beg off, claiming a cold. She accepts it for what it is, even as her heart clenches: she will just have to make the squirrel run by herself today.
She takes her time bagging the little brutes and walking to the back loading dock, and when she knocks on the metal door, she hopes against hope that it will be Mrs. Delly Mellark who answers the door.
Katniss's heart stops when goldspun hair and entrancing blue eyes appear instead.
For a long moment, the pair of former lovers gaze at each other. Peeta has aged exceedingly well; the years have been more than kind to him. It's his emotional countenance that has clearly taken a beating; there is a stoop to his shoulders.
Pursing her lips, Katniss digs in her game bag and holds up the squirrels. Peeta takes the first and makes a show of inspecting it. He even smiles, though it does not reach his eyes…. those eyes….. pools of blue that she could just swim in, could lose herself into….
"Right in the eye, every time!"
Damn him. She blushes.
He briefly ducks inside before reappearing to pass her the requisite loaves. They're still warm from the ovens – never part of the deal, going back to the trading with his father, but Katniss frowns and lets it go.
"So….." Peeta stuffs his hands into his apron pockets. "How….. how are you?"
"Fine," she clips. An awkward pause. She attempts to crane her neck over his shoulder. "Is, uh….. is Delly around?"
"Nah, she's on an errand – out your way, actually! We've been selling the bread that is close to growing stale out to the Community Home."
"Oh. That's…." That's wonderful. You're so wonderful, she thinks, but doesn't dare speak aloud. "That's….. really nice." No way in Capitol hell would his mother have dared to give away even old wares like that, and certainly not to what she would have called Seam trash. The harpy died some time ago, and good riddance to bad rubbish, as far as Katniss is concerned.
"Well, I'm sure the new Mrs. Mellark is quite helpful," Katniss states primly, even as her heart goes through an odd spasm.
Peeta chuckles, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Between the two of us, we make do."
He still hasn't had any babies with her. Katniss doesn't know whether to sigh in relief or cry. If anyone deserves to be a father, it's Peeta – having kids has always been a dream of his.
But from the way he is staring intently at her now, Katniss is pretty sure that dream didn't involve his children having the former Delly Cartwright as a mother.
"You…." For once, words fail Peeta – a rare occurrence indeed. "You…." You are my heat against the cold. "You look good."
"Thank you." A pause, in which they just gaze into each other's eyes with something that will turn into longing if she doesn't get the fuck out right now. "I…. I have to go."
Katniss manages to round the corner of the alley before breaking into a run. She pelts into Town, past the Pavilion (the open air market that is the Merchants' version of the Hob), past the school and the statue of Lucy Gray Baird under which she and Peeta shared their first kiss as children, nearly past the Justice Building before she collapses under a small oak tree. Peering down into the blades of grass, the sight of a dandelion makes her bury her face in her palms and sob. Dandelion had been her pet name for him, after she had seen a sprig growing in the schoolyard the morning after he tossed her the bread and she brought him to her mother.
Glancing up through her tears and between sniffles, Katniss's gaze falls onto the side of the Justice Building…. and she sucks in a sharp breath.
By the service door where the servants who work in the mayoral residence, she spots her husband wrapped in the arms of and heatedly kissing Madge Undersee, the mayor's daughter and old school girl friend of hers. A basket of strawberries lies spilled and forgotten at the embracing couple's feet.
Neither of the lovers has seen her, and Katniss rises with surprising strength and dignity. Turning on her heel and on the sight of her husband being unfaithful, she marches back to their marital home in the Seam.
Katniss doesn't confront Gale that night. She isn't really sure how, her mind in a tempest.
Lying in the bed they share that night, her back to him, Katniss's thoughts are more haunted by the blonde hair and blue eyes of the man who has filled her dreams for the better part of a quarter of a century.
She can't pretend that she isn't hurt by Gale's infidelity, despite the problems they have had in their marriage. Their mothers and Prim have long ago given up the dream of her and Gale ever having a baby of their own. She's been as unhappy as he clearly has been, and yet she was principled enough not to….!
Katniss suddenly sits bolt upright in bed. It's crazy, it's madness, but Gale's transgression also gives her the permission structure….. She flies out of bed and dresses in her blue frock, stealing her father's hunting jacket over herself for good measure, before plunging out into a driving thunderstorm.
She isn't consciously rationalizing this as getting back at her husband. More overtaken is she by the need to…. to…..
Arriving at the back loading dock, drenched, Katniss knocks on the rear metal door. For a moment, her heart leaps into her throat as she ponders what the hell is she going to say if Delly Mellark happens to answer the knocking at this time of night.
But when the door opens, it is him, standing under the simple bulb of light hanging over the archway.
Seizing his skull in her fists, Katniss yanks Peeta forward into the rain and kisses him on the mouth hungrily. A blinding flash of lightning illuminates the forbidden kiss as limbs winding about each other, the Seam huntress and Town baker embrace, clutching and gripping at each other fiercely.
Peeta gives in within moments, groaning like a man dying of thrist. When they break apart with a sensuous POP!, Katniss is panting, gulping for air. Her storm-cloud grey eyes have turned as black as this night. Wordlessly, Peeta holds out his hand to her and guides her with purpose into the Bakery….
Katniss and Peeta make love in the bakery's basement storeroom.
For the first time in more than two decades, man and woman embrace and kiss lazily, heatedly. One hand palming at his neck, Katniss brings his lips down to hers as Peeta deftly shrugs her daddy's hunting jacket from off her shoulders. The garment lands with a soaked splatter on the stone. Off comes her blue Reaping frock next, the skirts and bodice joining the jacket, pooling with a rustle at their feet.
Undressed by him and naked in all her beauty before him, Katniss is shivering, but not due to the cold of running halfway across the district without an umbrella. Spooning her from behind, Peeta dares to cup the swell of her bare breast, and Katniss mewls pleadingly into his lips where they sup from hers.
"Mmmmmhmmmmmm…"
Her hip burns where his other hand lightly rests before it wanders lower to strum along the soaking wet, musky dampness of her sex, his fingers diddling her slit.
Peeta steers her over to a sack of flour and then shifts them both to their knees. Bending Katniss over on all fours, she lifts her buttocks into the air, trembling as she has a vague idea of what is about to happen. She can't remember if she ever was intimate with him in this position, when they were teenagers. She can't remember. Certainly, she has never done this with Gale.
Peeta now mounts her and mates with her.
His cock slides into her anus, right in between the round, globed cheeks of her buttocks, as though he has always belonged there.
They have sex, and Katniss bucks into him until she can feel Peeta's balls slapping the toned flesh of her rear. He rubs against her faster, and the lovers rut together like beasts of the field in heat, in a carnal manner that Katniss would have thought fit for beasts only. By the light of a single bulb, the ravished young woman takes in the sight of their conjoined shadows mating, and she has to suppress a chuckle – no wonder intercourse is sometimes called playing the Beast with Two Backs. Her breathing has now become heavy, ragged and labored.
"Huhhhhh… Uhhhhh… Uggghhhhhh…. Errrrrr… - MMMMMMM! HMMMMMMM! Mmmmmmmhmmmmmmmm…." Even with the rolling thunder masking their copulating, Katniss's cries of pleasure grow louder and higher in volume and pitch. Peeta claps the hand gripping her hip over her mouth to silence her moans and thrusts into her faster.
Katniss feels lightheaded, dizzy. Squirming his hand off of her mouth, she compromises by yanking his lips down to hers to kiss him hungrily, and let him swallow her groans, her pleas, that way.
"Please….." she whispers around where his tongue is curling with hers, her voice strangely hoarse. "Please make love to me. I want you to fuck me! I want you to finish me, Peet-aaaaaa….. Ahhhhhhh… AHHHHHHHHH!... AHHHHHHHHH! Ah! – Ahhhhhh…"
Her buttocks clench, trapping him and milking him. Her muscles clench. Her eyes roll into the back of her head. Hands splayed deep in spilled flour, her fingers curl, getting the substance under her nails, and in curling, her toes soon follow.
She cums.
Once he has finished inside of her, been brought to orgasm, Peeta tells the beautiful Seam huntress that he loves her.
She says it back.
"I love you too…"
It is another summer, and another Reaping in which Katniss has watched her niece escape from the Hunger Games unscathed.
If only Aster didn't have two more Reapings to go.
She slips away from where her family is congregating and heads to the Meadow, where he is waiting for her. Katniss isn't sure how he beat her here, but at the moment, she doesn't care. Pulling Peeta on top of her and spreading her legs for him, her handsome Baker shoves her blue Reaping skirts up nearly over her face and they go for another frantic shag in the tall grass.
"Uhhhhhh….. Faster….. faster….."
Peeta grunts and picks up the pace, burying his face in between the valley of her boobs, licking her swollen nipples. Katniss droops her head back and sighs with pleasure as her lover pounds into her.
"She's all right…." she breathes, dazed, thinking of her little niece. "Aster's all right…." Peeta lets out a relieved growl and dips his head to kiss her senselessly.
He's close – she can feel it after a year of sleeping with him in secret. Gale doesn't know (and he doesn't know that she knows he's been fucking Madge Undersee), and as far as both she and Peeta are aware, Delly has no idea that she too is being cuckolded.
Peeta is reaching the moment that he is going to pull out, and ordinarily, Katniss would allow it. This time, though, she has none of it, as she clamps her thighs about his midsection, causing the man to choke.
"Katty girl…. No….."
"Yes…!" she hisses, gritting her teeth and arching her back to slap her pelvis against his, meeting him thrust for ever-loving thrust. "Now….. cum inside me. I want your child deep inside me…."
Peeta moans in awe and amazement and jerks his hips faster, finally sputtering to a stop and ejaculating hard inside her fluttering walls.
…. She still doesn't want babies, of course. But lately, she's been having this dream of a child with her hair and his eyes, in a world where there are no Hunger Games. Where Peeta's child could be safe.
Grinning goofily, Katniss pulls Peeta close and kisses him lightly, and the pair embrace.
It is Sunday following the Reaping, and Katniss is on the hunt. This time, her niece Aster is at her side, tracking game.
Gale had thought it best that he and Katniss teach their shared niece how to hunt and manage the snare lines, and so far, Aster has proven quite adept, much to Prim's disappointment. Katniss's sister understands why this work is important, but she would much rather have another Healer in the family. Although, Posy doesn't make a bad apothecary apprentice.
"Auntie….?" Katniss turns to take in her niece, who has been quiet for much of the morning.
"Yes, Duckling?"
Aster is biting her lip. "Do you know how to do….. married lady things?"
This startles a laugh out of the huntress. "And what are married lady things?" she banters back, bemused.
"You know….. the stuff you were doing with the Baker man out in the Meadow the other day.
The world spins. Katniss feels the breath leave her lungs as she realizes…. Snow's Roses. She and Peeta were seen. And by one of the last people she would have wanted to catch them. Aster is 16, but she is still far too young to be knowing about these things, to say nothing of the fact that she saw her precious Auntie Katniss doing them with someone who isn't her uncle.
Katniss purses her lips in a thin line.
"Who else saw?"
Aster's eyes have grown huge. "Just me," she whimpers. "Mama splurged on some ice pops over at the Pavilion but I didn't want one, so I was walking back ahead of the others on my own, and…"
"Slow down…." Katniss chuckles, even as she can feel her heart hammering in her ribcage.
"….. and while I was walking past the Meadow, I saw the Baker man jumping up and down on you and…."
Katniss smiles, a bit more relieved than she was a moment ago. "It's called making love, Duckling. Once you're married, you'll understand. You only do it with someone whom you really love."
Too late, she realizes she has set her own snare trap, and Aster springs it.
"So you do lovemaking with the Baker man, but not with Uncle Gale?" She looks confused and even a little hurt. Katniss sighs. The one person who has probably been affected the most by her and Gale not having children is this young woman before her. Vick and Posy are both grown and have little ones of their own, smaller cousins for Aster to play with, but her niece would never be as close with them as she would be with a child by her favorite Auntie and her Uncle Gale….
"Aster….." Katniss sighs again. "Sometimes…. A man and a woman can be unhappy in a marriage. Your uncle and I…. we were pressured into having a Toasting, and…." She decides to have out with it. "I was actually engaged to someone else at the time."
"Really?" Aster's eyes widen. Then she guesses. "The Baker man."
"Peeta. And yes," Katniss nods. "We have Merchant blood, you and I, from Mum Mum Everdeen and often Townies arrange marriages with their children. Your grandmothers thought Uncle Gale and I would be a good match. Peeta's parents paired him with someone whom they thought would be a good match." Katniss shakes her head. "They were all wrong, and it's led to multiple people being really unhappy."
"But…." Aster is shaking her head. "Isn't what you're doing with the B – Peeta… wrong?"
How to answer that? "Technically, yes, because we're married to different people. Yet we are still in love with each other." Katniss peers at her niece. "Your uncle has fallen in love with someone else too. And when it's love - true love, who can say what is right or wrong?"
Aster is quiet again. A beat as Katniss studies her.
"Does anyone else know?"
"No," the girl shakes her head.
"That's my girl." Ethically, she really shouldn't be asking Aster to keep this secret from her parents, from Prim, but…. "I need to figure out a way to break it to the family."
"Auntie?"
"What is it, Duckling?"
"Are you and Uncle Gale gonna get divorced?"
Katniss doesn't see how, because technically, divorce as a concept, an institution, is illegal in Panem, and in the districts. But most everyone, even here in Twelve, knows someone who is separated. It's about as common as knowing someone who went into the Games. But in order to have a chance of being with Peeta….
"I don't know, sweetie."
The following spring, a new law comes down from on high in the Justice Building, by order of the Capitol, permitting divorce in the districts.
Later that summer, wedding bells are heard ringing in the tower above the Justice Building, usually a signal that someone has gotten hitched.
Inside the small chapel, now 40, Katniss Hawthorne (neé Everdeen) marries for the second and almost surely final time.
There are dandelions woven into the bride's chestnut tresses. She is clad in her mother's bridal gown once more, the Merchant heirloom that in many Townie circles is still seen as a rite of passage, reverently handed down from mother to daughter.
The Justice of the Peace blesses the union, declaring the couple wed in the eyes of the district law. Smiling up into eyes of summer-sky blue and weaving her hands into locks of golden-spun hair, Katniss softly closes her eyes as she embraces and kisses her new husband. Peeta clutches her close and their wedding kiss deepens. When the Baker and Seam huntress lovingly break apart, the small congregation of witnesses breaks out into cheers.
Curling into her husband (Peeta's her husband!) with a bashful smile, Katniss laughs – and the sound turns into a pleased gasp as Peeta tugs her close and kisses her furiously again. Melting into it, Katniss absently tosses her bouquet of dandelions and pine needles aside. She is amused when she learns later that her flummoxed niece catches the dandelions; the pine needles scatter upon the floor.
Tucking under her knees, Peeta lifts Katniss in his arms without breaking the kiss, sweeping her off her feet and carrying her bridal style out into the morning sunlight before setting her gracefully down.
Leaving the Justice Building to well wishers, Peeta takes his bride by the waist and lifts her onto the back of a rented cart. The walk to their new home together in the Bakery is far shorter than the trek she took after her wedding to Gale, but Katniss doesn't mind.
Upstairs in the bakery loft, Katniss allows her bridesmaids to change her from her wedding dress into her blue Reaping frock. Among them is her successor, the new Mrs. Hawthorne (Madge) and her predecessor in the role of the Baker's wife, Delly Cartwright once more – though the shoemaker's daughter is seeing Thom Borden (a friend of Katniss's ex-husband on the digging crew) and has been for quite a while. Turns out Delly was having an affair of her own.
Descending the stair, Katniss stands before her spouse and their roaring hearth, where the pair Toast a bit of bread and share it. Peeta then pulls his bride close, so that the pronounced swell of her belly is nestled between them.
The baby hadn't been planned, but once Katniss had sensed her breasts ballooning with a mother's milk, felt the little one stirring inside of her, she had cast aside her first reaction of a terror as old as life itself. Peeta had assured her they would be OK – they'd have each other.
And she does have him, now and forever, as, with the firelight dancing in her grey eyes, now solemn, Katniss tilts her head and permits her husband to kiss her deeply.
Mr. Cartwright graciously takes to his fiddle and Katniss and Peeta dance at their wedding. She shyly teaches him how to perform the reel. But it is Peeta's gift to his bride that will prove to be the cadenza.
Upon seeing the immaculate Toasting cake he has baked for her, Katniss draws both hands to her mouth in astonishment.
"OH! Snow's Roses, it's a vision! But…. but how did you….? You didn't! You shouldn't have!"
Peeta just spoons her. "Do you like it, Sweetheart?" And though she's never been one for public displays of affection, Katniss nonetheless loops her arms happily about his neck to kiss him soundly.
"Oh…. darling, I love it! I love you!" She's even too ecstatic to mind having to shoo Rory and Vick away from the concoction.
The evening ends with Peeta carrying Katniss into their home with Aster and Prim leading the singing of the traditional district wedding song.
Six months later, Katniss and Peeta's daughter is born.
They name her Hope….. to remind her parents of how they got here, in spite of everything.