One-Shot: A Miner By Day, A Whore By Night
Katniss goes to Cray.
Before she is 12. Before she can legally take out tesserae. Before she can be saved by a burnt loaf of bread tossed in the rain. Before she sees a dandelion. Before she can learn to hunt.
She goes to the lascivious Head Peacekeeper for a few reasons: both food and money are scarce enough at this point that she is out of options, and she is resentful enough of her mother's catatonic state that she rationalizes the act of selling herself might be the one thing that forces the woman to rouse herself.
Katniss is picked her very first night out behind Cray's door. Her virginity is obvious to all the other girls standing in line, never mind the Head Peacekeeper himself, and he brings her inside.
Her youth does not dissuade him. He clambers on top of her.
The carnal act is decidedly unpleasant.
Though Katniss quickly learns that she need not necessarily enjoy having sex in order to become fluent in it. In order to become proficient in it.
She also learns that the act of lying in bed with a man pays exceedingly handsomely. By this metric alone, she quickly becomes addicted to it. Her mother and sister notice the influx in coin, but if either suspects how she comes about such cash, neither confront her.
The years pass. Katniss grows from girl to woman. It turns out that Cray runs a sex ring that benefits not just himself. Katniss is passed around amongst the Peacekeepers in the Barracks. She proves to be a popular girl amidst the cadets because she is a Seam woman who nonetheless has the developed curves – the firm, smart, globed buttocks and the round, buxom breasts – of a Merchant lady from Town. That's the Aryan blood in her – Katniss is half-Merchant, descended on her mother's side.
She eventually turns 18, and ages out of eligibility for the Hunger Games. By the time she graduates from school and the Reaping, she has taken to sharing a Reaping Kiss each year with Darius, a gingered and handsome Peacekeeper private from whom she took his virginity when she was 14, and he was 19.
Katniss is now by law able to be married, to be assigned a house of her own….
…. and to sign up for shifts down the mines.
This she does in spite of her claustrophobia, in spite of the fact that her father died in those shafts.
Now firmly in adulthood, Katniss leads an existence of misery: a miner by day, one of the few women on the digging crew. A whore by night, one of Cray's most popular girls. Hours of working on her feet all day before she is up half the night lying flat on her back. Between her miner's pay and the coin she earns pleasuring Peacekeeper doughboys and district men in the know, she is able to earn her keep, supplementing her family's Healing income.
Her only day off is Sunday.
It's the day the mines are closed, and also the day that Cray for some reason decides to show temperance. Katniss initially goes into the woods as a means of personal escape.
Eventually, she finds her father's bow and arrows and begins teaching herself how to hunt.
The first game she trades doesn't pay well, though the squirrel meat proves popular when dealt in the rear alleys behind the Merchant shops, including the Bakery.
The Baker's youngest son – a peer and former classmate of hers – has a warm smile and kind eyes…. Eyes as blue as a summer sky….
Peeta is effusive where Katniss is taciturn. He has an economy of words that is eloquent and tangible, whereas the only language she knows how to speak does not need words – just ragged breaths and sweat-soaked bodies pressed together. In defiance of this divide, Peeta tells her the deep stuff. How his favorite color is orange and how he likes to sleep with the windows open. Katniss haltingly tells him she enjoys the green of the forest. She doesn't mention her sleeping preferences; she would be ashamed if Peeta knew how she spent her nights. In any event, she is struck by how he seems to know quite a bit about her: how she used to enjoy singing, and even apparently sang in school at one point; she doesn't remember this. But he does, remarking how her chestnut hair was in two braids instead of one, she wore a red dress instead of her now standard blue Reaping frock, and all the birds fell silent.
…. She likes his hands, Katniss decides. They are at once coarse yet gentle. Calloused and meaty and strong from working the ovens.
Peeta eventually offers her a job in the Bakery. Katniss stammers out that she can only work Sundays, and never past dark. That's fine: he takes her on anyway, starting out as a cleaner.
Eventually, Peeta will then take her as a lover, and finally as his wife.
The shift from employee to romantic partner takes place one stormy night in autumn.
Katniss is fully prepared to depart into a driving rainstorm from the back loading dock of the Bakery. Peeta tries to entreat her to stay the night. She begs off, fearing her digging crew foreman's wrath in the morning, until her nervous pleas peter off into whimpered mewls and eventually die a peaceful death in her throat.
She is pressed into the Bakery's bricks. The Baker's son's mouth is on hers, and he's kissing her…. kissing her….
….. Katniss kisses him back.
The Merchant man and Seam gutter rat embrace and deepen the kiss before sensuously breaking apart. Only the back dock lamp and a flash of lightning illuminates their clasped union. Taking her hand in his, Peeta guides Katniss with purpose into the Bakery….
Katniss is mechanically competent enough in her profession that she knows how to fuck a man.
But even after all her years under Cray (sometimes literally), she doesn't know the first thing about making love to one.
She shivers as Peeta lovingly spoons her from behind, trailing kisses down the sweaty, soft curve of her neck, which she now bares to him. Curling her hand around the back of his own neck, Katniss hungrily brings his mouth down to hers and they kiss lazily, languorously as the thunderstorm continues to roll outside. It matches the thundering of blood in her ears, throughout her whole body.
Katniss has shamefully slept with hundreds of men, and yet she has never once felt this aroused.
The pair fall back into a pile of flour bags, ready for shunting. Making this her bed, Katniss swallows, her throat dry, and spreads her legs for this handsome man.
Her blue Reaping skirts are being shoved up and over her torso. Peeta grips the toned flesh of her thigh and hikes it up, up and above his hip, before he swiftly mounts her and claims her. He takes her in one, smooth thrust.
They have sex. Slapping their pelvises together, Katniss and Peeta exchange twin groans and grunts in between exchanging their tongues amidst heated kisses. Kisses that make the Seam whore's head spin.
She's kissed a multitude of men because she has to. But this is the first kiss from any man that makes her want another.
Her breathing has become heavy, ragged, staccato and labored. Her pleasured moans reach a melodious pitch. Peeta raises her leg higher still and couples with her madly until….. –
Her toes curl, in the spilled flour at their feet.
So do her hands, her fingers clasping the sweat-slicked skin at his rippling shoulder blades, nails digging almost dreamily into his flesh.
Lashes fluttering shut, her flinty grey orbs roll into the back of her skull.
She cums. A dazed and disbelieving Katniss can't recall the last time she was brought to orgasm.
When he finishes inside of her, Peeta tells the beautiful Seam woman that he loves her.
… Katniss says it back.
"I love you, too."
It is inevitable that, overcome by lust, they would go for another round. Katniss and Peeta spend the better part of that night making love in the bakery's basement storeroom.
Katniss kisses him deeply as Peeta deftly shrugs her daddy's hunting jacket off of her shoulders. The leathered garment lands with a soaked splatter on the stone. Off comes her blue Reaping frock next. There are four buttons on the front of the bodice. Peeta unbuttons them skillfully, and once the garment's blouse parts like curtains, Katniss grips his hand and guides it to amorously cup the swell of her breast. The blue skirts eventually go the way of the hunting jacket, pooling with a rustle at their feet.
Undressed and naked in all her beauty before him, Katniss is shivering, and not from the cold. Rather, from the heat. Peeta weighs the swell of her bare breast in his palm once more, this time daring to tweak the hardened and pebbled peaks of her nipples. Katniss mewls pleadingly into his lips where they sup from hers.
"Mmmmmmhmmmmmmm…."
Her hips burn where his other hand lightly rests on her hip before wandering lower to finger the soaking wet, musky dampness of her sex. Palm her slit.
Peeta steers her over to a sack of flour and shifts them both to their knees. Bending Katniss over on all fours, she lifts her buttocks in the air, suddenly trembling and terrified as she only has a vague idea of what is about to happen. She's never done what her clients call 'playing horsey' before, and she has never, ever had relations bareback – without a condom.
Once more, 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. Her grips her bum in his fists.
They are intimate once again. 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 against each other like beasts of the field in heat, in a carnal manner that Katniss would have thought fit for beasts only, even in her sexual experience. By the light of a single bulb, the ravished young woman takes in the sight of their conjoined shadows coupling, mating, and she has to suppress a chuckle – no wonder sexual intercourse is sometimes called playing The Beast with Two Backs. Her moans of pleasure are louder this time, rich and alto and lowing.
"Huhhh….. Uhhhhh….. UGGH! Er! HMMMMM! MMMMMMM! Mmmmmhmmmmm…." Even with the rolling thunder masking their union, Katniss cries of ecstasy grow dangerously louder in both volume and pitch. Peeta claps the one hand now gripping her hip over her mouth to silence her moans and he thrusts into her faster, fucking her.
Katniss feels lightheaded, dizzy. Squirming his hand off of her mouth, she replaces it with his as she kisses him hungrily, fiercely, so that he may swallow her groans and her pleas in this way.
"Please," she whispers around where his tongue is now curling with hers in a pattern dance, her voice strangely hoarse. "Please make love to me. I want you to fuck me! I want you to finish me, Peet-ahhhh….. Ahhh….. Ahhhhhhhh!... AHHHHHHHHH! Ah! – Ah….."
Her buttocks clench, trapping and milking him. She cums once more, and he quickly follows in ejaculating.
Thoroughly deflowered, Katniss now sings to him, gathering this man who has loved her close:
"Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I've found you! … Ahhhhhhh, I know at last the secret of it all!..."
In post-coital bliss, Peeta asks Katniss for her hand in marriage.
She hesitates, and looks deep into his eyes. His proposing is oddly adorable.
… She says Yes.
Later the following summer, wedding bells are heard ringing in the tower above the Justice Building, usually signifying that someone has just gotten themselves hitched.
Inside the small chapel, now 19 and legally permitted to wed in the eyes of the district law, Katniss Mellark (neé Everdeen) marries her love.
There are dandelions woven into the bride's chestnut tresses. She is clad in her mother's bridal gown, the Merchant heirloom that in many Townie circles is still seen as a rite of passage, reverently handed down from mother to daughter. Mrs. Everdeen had absconded with the prized garment when she wasn't much older than her eldest girl, upon eloping with Katniss and Prim's father.
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 sister 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 short, just off the Square, 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.
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 during their passionate, in-secret affair following their first night alone together in the bakery storeroom. Honestly, with a heavy Seam woman's menstrual cycle, Katniss thinks it a miracle she had never been impregnated by a Peacekeeper during all her years prostituting for Cray. But once she had learned a child had been conceived, once she had sensed her breasts ballooning with a mother's milk, felt the little one stirring inside of her, Katniss 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. She is now the Baker's wife. No longer will she go down into the mineshafts. No longer will she have any man but this one in her bed, to make love to him by night.
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 her sister away from the concoction.
The evening ends with Peeta carrying Katniss into their home with Prim and Delly Cartwright 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.