One-Shot: Schizoid Personality Disorder
Before graduation from Upper School, all those in District 12 who are 18 or about to turn 18 must be put through a thorough medical and psychiatric examination.
Other than the occasional check-up from her own mother, who is a Healer, the school nurse is pretty much the only person in District 12 who has examined Katniss Everdeen in a medical capacity – pretty much just yearly physicals to ascertain a student's fitness for gym class. The miners have a company doctor, who probably takes his job about as seriously as the school nurse does now – which is to say, not at all.
However, upon getting her results back, Katniss realizes that the bored tone with which the school nurse put her through examination that day seemed to belie an actually rigorous evaluation.
According to her file, Katniss is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (possibly due to a death in the family, the nurse has annotated in the margins). Katniss tries not to roll her eyes. Possibly? She had told the nurse, then the psychiatric evaluator, that her father had been killed in the mines.
The next notation in her medical file makes Katniss furrow her brow in befuddlement: she had apparently also been diagnosed with something called schizoid personality disorder. She flips through the file, thinking that perhaps there are some pages in the back that go into more granular detail what various diagnoses means. Finding no such assistance, Katniss decides to go to the school library one day and research the diagnosis herself.
Her doggedness to learn about the topic stems in no small part due to feeling almost insulted at being so diagnosed. A personality disorder? Her? Katniss has known for a long time that there is a part of her that is fundamentally broken, unable to be put into words, even to herself. But she's never thought she was that broken! A noose of fear actually grips her heart as she goes through the giant tomes collecting dust in the school library, under the Medicinal section: there have long been rumors of a Hunger Games Victory out of District 8 having some kind of personality. According to Katniss's Hunger Games History class notes, the young woman in question triumphed in the arena around the time she, Katniss, was born.
…. Here it is! Katniss traces her fingers along the text and begins to read silently:
An individual diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder typically displays cool, distant and emotionless behavior. These people do not feel a connection with others, and therefore seem to be strong and independent. Due to this missing connection, schizoid persons do not have many friends or romantic relationships, typically show little to no interest in sexual intercourse or relations, and cannot express emotion to their fellows.
Katniss sits back, still somewhat offended, but now also defeated as well.
….. Sad as it is to say, this profile fits her pretty much to a T. She would be the first one to admit that she has never been very good at making friends. She maintains connections with few people, those being pretty much her hunting partner, Gale, and her baby sister, Prim, whom she loves. Prim, probably the only person who Katniss is able to tell her troubles to. Sometimes, she'll open up to Gale, but only stiltedly, and never about certain topics. Topics like, well…. sex. Snow's Roses, this book is right: she doesn't have any interest in sex! What little interest she does have is to wonder how exactly it works and also wonder why everybody else seems to get so jazzed about it, especially her peers. She could never connect with someone that way, bounding herself to another person so carnally. It would just be another form of owing…
Like the owing she still feels on account of that strange connection she developed a couple of years ago, with that one boy in her class, that day in the rain….
Katniss shakes her head. She keeps reading on:
Schizoid persons typically display an unhealthy amount of egocentrism (see note):
Katniss frowns and flips the page she is on back and forth. What note?
….. Note! There it is: Egocentrism: a belief in the supremacy of one's own point of view in an infantile conception of the world.
…. Katniss is really starting to hate this elitist language. Is this book implying that she is stuck-up? She is not stuck-up! She couldn't be: not with her humble roots. If anything, she thinks the word this stuck-up is looking for is practicality. Katniss is practical about most things. The world is too black and white for her to have any viewpoint of the world other than her own, which has served her well in the past. Views on things such as:
Marriage: an archaic institution meant to bound you to someone you love, only to inevitably weaken you when that someone you love turns into someone you lose.
Babies: another vehicle to further weaken you, yoking you to the Capitol's power as they take those children from your arms to be slaughtered in the arena for their own sport.
Nothing egoist about that. Just sensible. Why should she forge connections with people who she will eventually just lose anyway? That was what she had told the nurse and the psychiatrist when they had pressed her on why she has never been very good at making friends.
Katniss re-consults her file. The nurse literally wrote that down as a quote verbatim, then underlined and drew an arrow to a word written in the margins: farouche.
Again with the big words! Katniss rolls her eyes and hunts for a dictionary.
Farouche: marked by shyness and lack of social graces.
…. OK, seriously, did Effie Trinket write this book?
Katniss graduates school. She survives her last Reaping. She has no idea what she is going to do with her life, except for hunt.
Not that there are many professions in Twelve which are open to women anyway, outside the home. Katniss finds herself re-reading the copy of her medical evaluation she was allowed to take home with her.
The nurse wasted quite the economy of words to basically declare that Katniss Magenta Everdeen, aged 18, is a hopeless anti-social. Instead of feeling insulted or aggrieved, the beautiful young Seam huntress: with a diagnosis like this, she isn't exactly suited to work in jobs she doesn't want to do anyway. Many of the biggest jobs in Twelve (read: the mines) are social and collaborative in nature. Aside from feeling claustrophobic down in those dark tunnels where her father perished, Katniss would most definitely not be comfortable working as a part of a team and playing nice with others. Working on a team with one other person, like Gale when they hunt, is fine, but more than one, and when a vast majority of them are big, sweaty men? …. She shudders at the thought.
The one job she is good at might be technically illegal, but it keeps food on the table for her, Mother and Prim, and she gets to be alone most of the time while doing it, or with Gale at the most, except when they're trading. So Katniss decides that is what she will be: she will be the Seam huntress who feeds the district once she is done feeding her family. She will see Prim safely through the last of her Reapings till her baby sister is 18, see her Little Duck get married, and live out the rest of her days contentedly as a spinster before she dies an old maid.
Unfortunately, it seems that Mother and Hazelle Hawthorne have other plans.
Katniss has heard the whispers from the pair of best friends before. Dreaming about their eldest children one day having a Toasting – the district wedding custom – and joining their two families in marriage. Gale is barely twenty, and to Katniss's mind, has always seemed focused more on overthrowing the Capitol than starting a family. Not that, with the hours he now puts in down the mines except for Sundays, he would have much time to accomplish either task anyway.
So Katniss is stunned when, one summer morning, as they crossing back through the Meadow to the district fence, she is cut off in her ramblings about splitting meat mid-sentence by Gale suddenly taking her face in his hands, tilting her head back and kissing her deeply on the lips.
She is completely unprepared, and lets out a choked squeak in the back of her throat before her hands are coming up to splay against his chest and she pushes him away, spluttering.
Apparently, Gale can't take a hint from that, and Katniss is mortified further when he gets down on one knee and asks her to marry him.
"I don't have a ring," he explains. "If I had, I would have followed tradition and proposed to you at the end of your last Reaping. But I'd save up, Catnip. I promise."
Katniss winces with pain and humiliation. She must have at least some social graces, contrary to what her medical evaluation file and those books in the library said about her being farouche and all that, for she is able to let him down gently, even in her vehement protest.
"Gale, I…. I'm not ready to get married!" What she doesn't say, lest she break the man's heart, is that she will never be ready to get married. Nor does she want to be married.
It is with great relief on her part that Gale seems to accept this answer, if only under the false impression that, on some future day, in some future proposal, Katniss might say Yes.
Katniss and Gale never speak about the marriage proposal – or the kiss – again. Not for many years.
One weekday, not long after the out-of-the-blue kiss and marriage proposal in the Meadow, Katniss is coming back from a hunt alone. There is a fresh deer carcass across her shoulder that she knows Greasy Sae will be pleased to have.
Katniss is barely halfway to the Hob before she is suddenly surrounded by shouting Peacekeeper officers, guns drawn. From the buzz-saw haircuts and baby faces, they appear to be brand-new cadet recruits, fresh off the train from the Capitol, and thus unfamiliar with Twelve's ways and how more seasoned officers posted here know to look the other way when game changes hands.
Katniss surrenders.
She is taken to the Justice Building and subjected to interrogation from Head Peacekeeper Thread, a new Head who was just deployed to Twelve and took over from Cray recently. Thread now gives Katniss a choice: either voluntarily enlist in the Peacekeepers for the next twenty years as mandated by law or be shot dead by firing squad.
Were Gale here with her, Katniss knows that the rebel in him might actually opt for the latter, if only to let death be his freedom. But seeing as she has Prim to think about, the decision for her is not a hard call:
She enlists with the Peacekeepers.
Within days, Katniss is given a passport, deployment papers and orders to report to the Commandant in the Capitol for training, at the end of which she will be assigned a district to begin her service to the nation of Panem.
Prim is crestfallen to the point of tears; Gale is outraged on Katniss's behalf, even more when he learns that his best friend's train leaves on a weekday. He will be down in the mines and unable to say goodbye to her. The Sunday before Katniss is to ship out, she and Gale meet in the Meadow, but don't hunt; when she leaves, she kisses him goodbye sadly.
There are plenty of goodbyes in those final days: Madge, the Mayor's daughter, presents Katniss with a drawstring pouch filled with fresh strawberries. She stops in the back alley behind the Merchant Bakery, this time without her usual fare of squirrel, to say goodbye to the Baker's youngest son.
Her old classmate, Peeta, who in recent months had taken over trades on the back loading dock ever since their graduation, appears uncharacteristically lost for words when Katniss tells him of her fate. He motions for her to wait, then slips back inside. When he returns, he has two fresh loaves of bread in his arms, clearly retrieved straight from the ovens, as when he passes them to Katniss, they're still warm. She frowns – fresh bread has never been part of the deal she struck with his father – but since this is goodbye, if not for forever than for a good long while, she lets it go.
Peeta then presents Katniss with a small, Ziploc baggy. There are a trio of sugar cookies inside – topped with icing! Katniss glances up in amazement: Primrose has always liked dragging her to the bakery's front window to oooh and ahhh over the cakes. She is touched that he remembers.
"I'll keep an eye on the little girl. Make sure she's eating," Peeta promises.
Guilt roils Katniss's gut. This is only more that she now owes the man, and she wishes there was something she could give him. …. With his golden-spun hair and eyes as blue as a summer sky, Peeta Mellark has always made her feel things. Bizarre, disquieting things.
"I…. I don't have anything to give you…." she mumbles, ducking her head with shame.
Peeta's tongue darts out along his teeth in thought. Katniss feels a strange spasm in her core as she watches him. "Well…. when does your train leave?"
"Tomorrow morning, first thing."
"…. Can I come to see you off, then? Let that be my goodbye."
Wordlessly, Katniss finds herself nodding.
Her rucksack is packed, her passport stamped. Katniss is wearing her blue Reaping dress. Despite Prim and even Mother wanting to come and see her off, she left their homestead before first light, while her family was still sleeping. It is better this way.
Standing on the District 12 platform at Lucy Gray Baird station, Katniss watches as the porters from Six load the last of the bags. Steam is wafting from the idling locomotive.
Peeta arrives almost too late, in the cool, pink light of dawn. Katniss feels for the Ziploc bag of sugar cookies in the pocket of her dress. There are two of them in there; she left the third with Prim.
Peeta eyes her with a sadness he shouldn't feel. It's not as though they are friends. Outside of trades behind the bakery, they've hardly spoken. Still, Katniss feels her throat grow dry. If ever there was a chance to thank this boy for the bread that saved her life when they were children, this is it. Words fail her – she blames it on her lack of courage, her farouche, her schizoid personality disorder.
"…. Have enough to eat for the train?"
Katniss shrugs. "Between your cookies and Madge's strawberries, I should be fine…"
Peeta nods. "Take care of yourself…." There's an awkward beat, and then he digs in the folds of his apron, pulling out a grimy pendant. "I….. I got this for a song at the Hob. It…. made me think of you. Wear…. wear this for me?"
Blinking, her lips pursed in a thin line, Katniss nods. She lets Peeta shyly fasten the pin to the bodice of her blue dress, directly over her breast.
Courage courses through Katniss like a bolt of lightning all of a sudden, enough for her to work up the nerve to hug him. He feels Peeta relax against her and hold her tightly.
The train whistle gives an impatient blast. "BO-O-O-ARD!" the conductor calls.
Katniss steps out of the hug and shoulders her rucksack. She turns to board the carriage and has just mounted the first step when Peeta abruptly catches her elbow.
"Katty girl."
"What….?" she turns back, only for her eyes to bulge and she gasps as Peeta takes her in his arms and kisses her deeply on the mouth goodbye.
And maybe because it is goodbye, and because she still owes him for that bread, Katniss closes her eyes and weaves her fingers in the strands of his blonde hair and parts her lips for him and she kisses him back.
As the steam from the train and the early morning mist swirl around them on this train platform the Baker's son and the Seam huntress-turned-Peacekeeper-initiate embrace and deepen the kiss. They break apart only because they are forced to, as the train starts to move. Her single chestnut braid whipping behind her like a banner as the locomotive picks up steam, Katniss keeps her eyes on the man who has now become only the second kiss in her life until he is but a speck on the horizon.
Clambering into her train carriage, she licks her swollen mouth.
She can still feel the taste of his kiss on her lips.
Basic training in the Capitol is brutal.
All the more so once Katniss discovers that, while not unusual, female recruits like her are exceedingly rare in the Peacekeeper Corps. She is assigned as a bunkmate to one of the few other women she has encountered thus far since leaving home: a ginger gal who goes by the name of Purnia. Purnia is brash, but friendly; despite clearly not being much older than Katniss herself (if she has to guess, about early twenties), the poor Seam girl's new bunkmate is eager to show her the ropes.
It is clear that, wherever Purnia is from, she is street-smart in way that Katniss, with her natural habitat being the wide-open forest, is not. On the ropes course, at the firing range, Purnia tells Katniss how she grew up in a place called Fogtown, near the hardscrabble brothels of District 8. Katniss recalls from her school studies how Eight was the most rebellious district during the Dark Days.
…. She decides she likes this Purnia. The pair go down to the barber's together by the end of their first week, as is required, to have their heads shaved. Katniss refuses to let any tears fall at the sight of her chestnut braid being hacked off, the curly strands snipped away.
By the middle of her second week, she has finished polishing off one of the iced sugar cookies Peeta had given her, along with half of Madge's strawberries. Many of these, Katniss shares with Purnia. Katniss intends to savor the remaining sugar cookie just as much as she savored the first, except at the end of Week 2, she returns to her bunk only to find her blue Reaping dress crumpled with the pockets turned inside out.
There are crumbs on the bodice.
It simultaneously befuddles and touches Katniss how outraged Purnia is on her behalf. The new buddies ask around and are eventually pointed towards Canus, a hulking new recruit from Two, as the likely thief. Katniss confronts him on the obstacle course, in front of a sheer vertical slab of wood known as The Wall, and beats him up in a fit of rage, enough to send him to the infirmary for a full week.
Purnia is impressed. "To see you whoop-ass that brute, I'd say someone you're sweet on gave you those sugar cookies!"
Katniss flushes at this observation, but doesn't say anything that would confirm or deny it.
Near the end of Katniss's first month of basic training, she is asleep in her bottom bunk one night when she is suddenly and rudely awakened by a posse of the male recruits, who hold her down upon the mattress.
At first, Katniss assumes that these beasts have been sent here by Canus, to take revenge for his humiliation at the Wall. But under the tangle of limbs, she spots how Purnia is also being held back from coming to her aid.
The ginger recruit has a sad and disgusted look upon her features. "All the girls go through this initiation by the end of the first month. It happened to me." Tears of sympathy glisten in her sea-green orbs. "Just try not to resist."
Forced onto all fours on the mattress, Katniss is stripped naked. Her hips yanked up so that her bare ass gets chilled by the cool night air. The male recruits take turns gang-raping her, mating with her forcefully first from the back, and then from the front. Despite Purnia's advice, Katniss thrashes and screams like a wild animal as her virginity is stolen while man after man mates with her the way she has seen some animals mate back in her woods.
By the time this most sadistic of hazings is over, Katniss's pelvis and backside are stained with blood from such violent, anal sex. She draws the threadbare blanket up around her naked form and cries herself to sleep.
Purnia has a picture of a girl taped to the ceiling above her top bunk.
When she catches Katniss looking at it curiously, she explains that it's her girl waiting back home. Purnia takes out real papyrus fresh from the logging camps of District 7, and begins to pen a letter to her beloved.
"Don't you have a sweetheart back home to write to? Back there in Twelve?"
Katniss doesn't answer. She thinks of Gale. She thinks of Peeta.
She eventually borrows some of that District 7 paper from Purnia and writes a letter to Prim. Trying to banish the image of men climbing on top of her, forcing themselves on her, in the night, she then bites the bullet and writes separate letters to both Peeta and Gale. She even writes one to Madge. The fact that postage is free simply encourages Katniss to write more, even as her disposition and disorders leave her with nothing much to say.
Within days of sending off the letters, she receives an ecstatic one back from her sister, followed quickly by a missive from Peeta. There is only enough in either to receive decent, if incomplete, information: some of the lines have been blacked out with heavy marker used for redactions.
"I know a guy who knows how to get things," Purnia tells Katniss, seeing the disappointed expression on her comrade's face. "There are black lights what can see through them redacted stuff. Darius can get them for you… for a price."
Darius is about the same age as, and with cropped, red hair similar to, Purnia. In an accent that suggests roots near District 4, by the sea, Darius tells her he can get her the black lights so Katniss can read her letters from home – but there has to be a trade-off.
At least someone is speaking her language, Katniss thinks. All trades must be fair.
At least, that's what she thinks until she hears what Darius is after: in return, Darius wants her to perform oral sex on him.
He's not a monster like some of the other horndog recruits, but he is a shameless flirt and a cad, besides. Even so, Katniss fights to overcome her disgust as she drops to her knees and tentatively takes Darius in her mouth.
Once he has cum in her throat, Darius forks over the black lights. Katniss stays up all night in her bunk reading the un-redacted letters from Prim and Peeta.
The black lights are really useful, especially once other letters from home arrive. Madge's contains very few redactions. Gale's is blacked out completely, except for his salutation of Dear Catnip.
At the end of basic training, Katniss is given her deployment papers. She has been assigned to patrol in the ranches of District 10, the length of her tour of duty there unknown. Purnia has been assigned to the diamond mines in One.
"I hope I'm not there the whole time," Purnia says sadly. "I've still got fifteen years before my service is up."
Katniss feels sorry for this woman who, to her own complete astonishment, has actually become a friend. For all the Seam huntress's schizoid personality disorder, the camaraderie of Peackeeper bootcamp has a way of making even the most anti-social play nice with others. She hopes that Purnia's girl will remain faithful and true. Whether she will be, and for another decade and a half? Somehow, Katniss is inclined to doubt it.
The night before she and Purnia are to ship out and go their separate ways, Katniss invites her comrade into her bed. They have sex, Purnia using her lips on Katniss's lower ones to make her cum.
Even when performed under mutual consent, Katniss doesn't know what all the fuss is about surrounding sex. Sure, she took pleasure from it enough, enough to conclude that she could do it with girls as well as men, if she wanted to. But she isn't exactly hot for it.
In District 10, Katniss is assigned to patrol from the cattle ranges all the way to that district's Victors' Village. She remembers Purnia's warning just before ship-out to stay away from Roan Tully, Ten's only male Victor who makes the brutes like Canus from bootcamp look like Capitol gentlemen.
She gets free lodging in the district Barracks. Throughout the years of her deployment, Katniss will later decide that Ten is the place that reminds her the most of Twelve. There is class animosity here between the rich Settlers and the poorer people of the Anasazi, much like the divide between those in the Seam and Town back home, though here it is much more pervasive and bitter.
She manages to make a few friends: Bovina, District 10's first Victor of three and one of the arena's earliest champions, will sometimes invite Katniss in for tea when she makes her Village rounds. The other woman Victor, Elena, is almost entirely dependent upon drugs and doesn't say much. There is Dalton, a beef ranch-hand whose job it is to maintain the genetic diversity of the herd by activating long-frozen cow embryos. He's roughly in his sixties, has a wife, though the couple has no children. When Katniss stops by their place one night, she smells incense, and enters the house to investigate.
From what she finds, she appears to have walked into the middle of what might be a wedding ceremony, Dalton reading from a text filled with words that are clearly forbidden. Religion, the praying to any god besides the President, is outlawed in Panem. Duty should compel Katniss, in her role as a Peacekeeper, to report this.
She doesn't file a report. She stays and witnesses the wedding instead.
After the happy couple departs, Katniss tells Dalton and his wife of District 12's marriage custom.
"Think you'll get hitched once you're free from the service, dearie?" Mrs. Dalton asks Katniss with a twinkle in her eye. "Pretty little thing like you is bound to have someone…." Katniss blushes and stutters out a No.
Later that night, upon returning to base, she stays up all night writing letters to Peeta, Prim, and also Purnia in District 1, describing the wedding ceremony. She is careful to leave out the part about Dalton reading from the banned holy book.
By now, nearly a year has passed. Katniss's chestnut tresses have nearly grown back, and once the strands are long enough that she can't hide them under her helmet anymore, she is made to visit the barber's in the Barracks and shave it all off again. In the summer, she stands guard at District 10's Reaping ceremony, and the culling of a Settler boy – apparently as rare as a Merchant being called in Twelve – causes quite a stir. A fellow cadet manages to get Katniss a bootlegged copy of the Reaping footage from Twelve. Once she has watched it to determine that Prim and Gale's brother Rory are safe, Katniss sits on her colleague's face and fucks his mouth for his trouble.
She may not have to like all trades, but all trades must be fair.
The years start to blend together. After a few rotations of the sun, Katniss is transferred from District 10 to the tropical shores of District 4. Now in her mid-twenties, Katniss stands guard along the fishing wharves and sometimes receives fresh salmon and cod from the fisherman. One time, she is even briefly stationed aboard a cutter for the Panemian Coast Guard. She meets Finnick Odair, perhaps the most famous Victor of the last twenty years. If District 10 made her feel less homesick, District 4 is something like paradise.
Katniss still gets letters regularly from her sister, who aged safely out of the Reaping before Katniss had even left Ten. Prim is engaged to be married, to Rory Hawthorne, and promises to send pictures from the Toasting. Peeta writes too, reporting that he has been tasked with catering the Hawthorne-Everdeen wedding and vows to keep an eye on the bride. Katniss wipes at her eyes at the thought of missing her beloved sister's wedding, but at least Peeta will be there. In another, later letter, Peeta informs Katniss that his mother has died. Katniss does her best to give condolences in her reply, even if she has to judge: good riddance to bad rubbish. Peeta will never be under the heel of his horrid mother again.
…. She wonders if he has by now taken over the Bakery from his father. She wonders if he is married, and if so, to whom. In his letters to her, Peeta has never alluded to a wife or a Toasting, and she doesn't have the chutzpa to ask him. She does, however, enclose in one letter to him a perfectly round and smooth pearl she found on the beach.
As for her other friends, the letters have pretty much all but stopped. Madge stopped writing a long time ago, and Katniss lost contact with Purnia. How many years does her old bunkmate still have left in the service? 10? 11? Once in a blue moon, Katniss will get something from Gale, including when he writes her with his own account of their respective siblings' wedding to each other.
There is nothing in his writing to indicate whether he has moved on and married either. At least she knows he's alive.
Katniss's District 4 posting parlays into a commission to District 7. She assists lumberjacks side by side in the logging camps. She even catches a glimpse of the Victor, Johanna Mason once, from a short distance away; when their eyes meet, the only living female Victor from these parts sneers at her. It is here that Katniss celebrates her 30th birthday, and her comrades throw a raging party for her in the Tav, the finest bar in Logging Camp Seven.
District 5 is next, and proves to be the shortest posting of all – just a year. In her letters to Peeta and Prim, Katniss encloses pictures of the hydroelectric dam, accompanied by an amusing story detailing how Matthias Fletcher, a Victor here, made a drunken and truly pathetic pass at her while she was acting as a bouncer in one of the dive bars of the Red Light Sector. In exchange, Peeta sends Katniss recipes for cheese buns, which he knows are her favorite because she told him once; Prim forwards a picture of her and Rory's daughter (and Katniss's niece), Rosebud – just three years old.
The Career districts are next, with lengths of deployment only slightly longer than her stint in Five. Since these are Loyalist districts, they prove to be pretty mundane in terms of security. While in Two, monitoring checkpoints leading into what is known as the Nut, Katniss receives word from Purnia for the first time in years, out of the blue: her old bunkmate's deployment is over, and she has returned to her native Eight, where she intends to marry her soon-to-be-wife. Purnia offers food and friendship to Katniss, if she's ever out that way.
As if the Capitol is reading her mind, or at least her mail, Katniss is hurled from her rather cushy job in Two to the slums of District 8, where security posts are not nearly so leisurely. The place looks like it still hasn't recovered from the Dark Days, some nine decades on. While off-duty one night, Katniss makes her way to Fogtown and tracks down Purnia, meets her wife. They are clearly happy and very much in love. The three stay up late into the wee hours catching up.
Katniss realizes: if Purnia is freshly out of the Corps, then she only has a few more years to put in herself before her term of service is up. She patrols the brothels around Fogtown, which she's heard are ruled by a madame, a Victor, with an iron fist. Occasionally, when she sees a prostitute looking down or emotionally distressed, Katniss will offer the girls, some of them half her age, a kind word and the story of how she was raped during her basic training, when she wasn't much older than they are.
All the while, the letters from Prim and Peeta come, as faithful as ever. In one, Katniss finally works up the nerve and, in her best, if awkward, attempt at small talk, asks Peeta if he is married. It takes a while before she receives an answer, and when she does, he doesn't respond directly to her question. For some reason, this bothers Katniss. Either he isn't married, or he is married and just didn't want to tell her. But if he wasn't married, why wouldn't he just say so?
The final years finally start to move at a pace that seems normal, even glacial, as if sensing how Katniss is so close to the end. She thinks she might complete her tour of duty and receive her discharge papers here, only to receive a new posting in Eleven about six months before her deployment is set to expire. Katniss is appointed to the security detail of the district's mayor, which, if nothing else, keeps her in shape. On the rare occasion when she isn't protecting the Mayor's life from malcontents, she is in the Justice Building, performing clerical work. She experiences her final Reaping while acting as an officer of the law, and has a brief moment to greet Seeder and Chaff, this district's Victors. Seeder, seeming to sense that Katniss is not the Capitol-brainwashed sort, shakes her hand; Chaff kisses her right on the mouth and then tries to pass it off as a joke, claiming that he got to taste Capitol.
Finally, at last, at long last, the twenty years are up. Katniss is honorably discharged from the Peacekeeper Corps and given her release papers. As if in a surreal dream, she boards the mag-lev train from the District 11 station, bound for her homeland for the first time in two decades.
She is 38 years old.
After Twenty Years
When Katniss Everdeen sets foot on District 12 soil for the first time, the person who stamps her passport at customs is:
"Rye?... Rye Mellark…..?"
Peeta's brother does a double take and gawps at Katniss, with her cropped chestnut hair beginning to grow down her back again and wearing the blue Reaping dress she left in – incredibly, it still fits.
"Everdeen. You…. you look good…."
Katniss smirks. In her rememberances, which are admittedly few, Rye had a reputation for being a clown and an ass. "You work in the Justice Building?"
"As a clerk. I help Peeta and Delly, now and again, at the Bakery."
Katniss feels her heart sink. So he is married….. she remembers Delly Cartwright, daughter of the Merchant shoe cobbler, from school: red-head, bubbly, could talk to a statue practically. A little too glass-half-full and a little too much, for Katniss's tastes, but still unfailingly kind. It is clear that, in taking a wife, Peeta chose well.
Katniss hurries home to the Seam. There is much that she recognizes, yet even more that she doesn't. It's December, and the winter winds buffet her, bitterly cold.
A blonde girl answers the door when Katniss knocks, and she loses her breath because Snow's Roses, it's Prim…. and yet it isn't.
Rosebud is 11 now, just shy of Reaping age and not much younger than her mother was when Katniss left. Then a woman reminiscent of Katniss's mother's better days when she was not a widow and young and pretty emerges from the foyer, bursts into tears and runs her down.
"Katty!... By the State! Rory! RORY! Come quickly! Our Katty is home!"
Rory, now a man, comes bursting into the entrance hall. Smirking, Katniss embraces him.
"Where's…. where's Mother?"
Silence. Rory and Prim share a look. Katniss's brother-in-law clears his throat. "She…. she passed. About eighteen months ago."
Katniss's jaw drops and she even gasps. "Why…. why didn't you tell me?!"
Prim is wringing her hands. "We couldn't for a while, because I'd misplaced your last forwarding address, and…."
"Prim." There is a hard edge to Katniss's voice, like the winter wind.
Prim winces. "It's the truth! I finally had to ask for the address of your Barracks in…. Eleven, wasn't it, sweetheart?"
"Eight," Rosebud corrects.
"Yes, from the Baker…."
"Peeta?" Katniss lifts an eyebrow.
Prim nods. "…. Then, when I had it, I….. didn't know how to tell you." She cringes lamely.
Rory silently shows Katniss out to the backyard, where there is a small plot with headstone. Katniss kneels down beside it silently, uncertain how to feel. While she and her mother never had the best relationship when she was young, she still would have liked to know that her mother was ill. Hell, Peeta had been open enough to report to Katniss the death of his mother, and Katniss had abjectly hated the woman!
"Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle….. Catnip…?"
Katniss glances up from her mother's grave and gapes at the handsome man striding in through the back gate, a dead fawn across his shoulders.
Gale has filled out immensely since the last time she saw him. Rosebud gives a shout of "Uncle Gale!" and flings herself at his legs.
Katniss rises slowly. The last time she saw her hunting partner, she was 18 and he was 20, and she'd kissed him goodbye in the Meadow.
She can't read the expression in his face. She wonders if he hates her for serving the Capitol as long as she did, even as it was not her choice.
Katniss gestures at him. "You…. you look good…."
He nods, and now a warm smirk plays on his lips. "…. Missed you, Catnip…."
Prim tugs at her sister's arm. "I'm so happy you were able to keep Mother's old dress!" she gushes, admiring the faded blue fabric. "It'll be good for the Yuletide party tonight! It's at the Bakery!"
"The – The Bakery….?" Katniss stutters, her cheeks turning pink, and she tries to tell herself it's from the cold. Gale frowns at her bemusedly.
"Catnip won't wanna go to no party…."
"Ohhhhh….. Just because you don't wanna go doesn't mean she can't!" Rory waves his brother off. Gale just shrugs and mumbles something about needing to get this deer carcass over to Rooba, the butcher. Rory watches him go, shaking his head.
"Stubborn as a dang mule…. He's been an irascible stick in the mud ever since he and Bristel got divorced."
Katniss starts. Divorce isn't legal in Panem, at least not under any district law. Her clerical work in the Justice Building of Eleven ensured that she was fully fluent in the Panem code and all its statutes. "Gale was married?"
"Yeah," Rory nods, looking glum. "They were pregnant too, but each and every time…. Bristol miscarried."
Katniss goes as white as the permafrost coating the land. "Each and every….? – How many times….?"
"Seven."
"Seven times?!..."
Prim is wiping a tear from her eye. "Eventually, Gale and Bristol just couldn't…. withstand the strain." She tries to brush such tragic thoughts off with a grin, though it's weak. "Enough of this talk! We'll gussy you up, and surprise Peeta at the Yuletide party tonight! I know he will be thrilled to see you!"
Katniss frowns and tries not to flush any further. Gussy her up…. it almost sounds like Prim is playing…. "I don't know if his wife will appreciate that…"
"Wife?" Prim sends Katniss a funny look. "Peeta doesn't have a wife."
Katniss's heart is pounding in her chest. "But…. I thought…. Delly…."
Prim now starts to laugh. "Delly isn't married to Peeta! She's married to Rye! The three of them run the Bakery together."
Katniss smiles weakly, a swooping feeling of relief going through her stomach.
Yuletide is not an official holiday on the Panemian calendar, the way that Reaping Day and the Harvest Festival are. Katniss remembers how most years, when she was a young girl, families would share fresh-squeezed apple cider, if you could afford the apples, that is.
When she and her family arrive at the Bakery for the party, Prim, Rory and Rosebud make a game of blocking Katniss from view as they enter. Behind them, Katniss can hear a silvery voice warmly welcoming her family in. Then Prim is murmuring something about how they have a surprise for him.
The three stand aside. Two pairs of eyes meet and Katniss's mouth goes dry.
If Gale is handsome at 40, then Peeta is…. she can't describe it! His eyes are as brilliant a blue as ever, like the District 4 sea after a storm. He has aged exquisitely well, even while working the ovens, his chest broad and strong.
And right now, Peeta Mellark is gazing at her with such warmth, even heat, to power his ovens for the rest of the winter. A disbelieving smile is dawning over his face.
"…. Katniss….?"
Katniss smiles weakly and ducks her head. "Hello, Peeta…."
He approaches, standing quite close, and she lifts her head to peer into his gorgeous face. "You look….. wow….." Peeta breathes, and pink floods her cheeks. "It's a Yuletide miracle!"
Katniss beams.
There is dancing and music. Mr. Cartwright plays his fiddle. Katniss mostly acts as a wallflower, talking with Peeta, trying to catch up on twenty-years' worth of information that didn't make it into their correspondence. She barely notices when Rosebud falls asleep and Prim and Rory wave to her on their way out, their little girl asleep on her father's shoulder.
Delly's father strikes up a reel. Peeta holds out his hand. "Would you…. like to dance…..?"
Katniss looks at him. "I'd love to…."
Placing her hand at his shoulder, Katniss shyly teaches him the steps. Settling into a waltzing shuffle, she finally murmurs into his chest: "I thought you were married to Delly…."
"What….?" Peeta sways to a halt, pondering her, bemused.
Katniss blushes. "I – I mean…. you never said, in any of your letters, and then when Rye checked me in at customs, he seemed to suggest that you and Delly…." She stops, tries again. "Prim set me straight, but…."
"I've never married, Katniss." Peeta's voice is impossibly quiet.
She stares. A handsome man like this, and he's….! "N-Never….?"
His gaze could make yeast rise in less than a minute. "Never. How could I? After…"
"After what?" Katniss leans in, on tenterhooks.
Peeta shrugs. "Everything. The train station….. The bread…."
She sucks in a breath, astonished. "You remember that?"
Peeta smirks. "I remember everything about you," he confesses. "You just weren't paying attention."
Heat floods her. Maybe it's because she's had one too many flutes of hops, but Katniss now finds herself dragging Peeta into a darkened corner of the Bakery where earlier she had spied a sprig of mistletoe hanging. Yanking his face down to hers, she pushes her lips against his and fiercely kisses him.
It isn't long before Katniss and Peeta are making out, the shadows concealing their heated embrace. When they break apart for air, gasping, Peeta takes Katniss's hands in his and guides her with purpose up the back stairs towards the loft above the business.
The couple slip into his room. They embrace and kiss again, tenderly. Katniss is the one to steer Peeta to the bed.
With their grunts and sighs concealed by the music and the laughter downstairs, Katniss and Peeta have sex.
No, it's more than that – they make love…
They try every position Katniss has ever learned or heard of: Reverse Peacekeeper. Missionary. Doggy-style, also sometimes known as playing the Beast with Two Backs. Peeta fucks her everywhere there is a hole in her: her willing and parted upper lips. Her spread and very willing lower ones. He thrusts his hard and engorged cock in the space between her round and globed buttocks, then rubs it in the valley of her mature and buxom breasts, toned from living a Peacekeeper's life and exercise regimen.
Katniss sits on his face. She goes down on him.
Katniss cums harder than she ever has in her life. Multiple times. After about the fourth time she has been brought to orgasm, she has come to thoroughly enjoy sexual intercourse. She finally understands what all the fuss is about.
Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I've found thee!... Ah, I know at last the secret of it all!...
Katniss rings in the New Year by moving in with Prim, Rory and Rosebud and attempting to adjust to civilian life. And also trying to keep her head from spinning as she replays the night of passion and lovemaking she and the Baker shared. She had stolen from Peeta's bed and his arms the morning after, spending the whole walk of shame back to the Seam trying to come up with a story about why she never came home the night before. Eventually, she lies to Prim and says she got tired halfway through her walk back and slept in the Hob.
Gale stops round whenever he is not on shift at the mines. He and Katniss talk. If he remembers the kisses they shared as young adults, before she was forcibly conscripted, he doesn't comment on them.
In between her at-home Healing consultations with patients, Prim watches her sister and her husband's brother with more than a little curiosity and even hope.
One day, several months after Katniss's return, Prim sits her sister and Gale down for a chat.
"As you know, Gale's mother is sick…. and Mother, well…. Katty, it was Mother's dying wish to see you married, after you came home from your deployment." Prim glances between the pair. "I think it would make Hazelle so content and honor Mother so much if maybe…. you and Gale could have a Toasting….?"
Katniss gapes at her sister. She can't be serious! But then she looks over to Gale, who is smiling almost sheepishly and shrugging.
"I've had an awful lot of time to save up. I have a ring…."
Remembering when he first proposed to her when they were scarcely more than teenagers, Katniss lifts an eyebrow. "Is it the one Bristel gave back to you?" His expression dips, but his eyes are pleading.
"Catnip…. Come on…. for the good of the family. For your mother… My mother…."
Katniss feels trapped. Trapped like a rabbit in a snare. The pressure is coming in from all sides, and after twenty years of feeling the pressure from superior officers, from district rebels, from comrades who plied sexual favors as part of trades, she is too tired to resist anymore.
So, she nods.
The next morning, she sneaks into the woods and kills a squirrel to bring to the Bakery. When Peeta greets her on the back loading dock, Katniss woodenly tells him she is getting married, to Gale, at the end of the following week. She invites him to the Toasting.
Then, for the second time in twenty years, she kisses him goodbye.
It is the morning of Katniss Everdeen's wedding. In the Justice Building, the ex-Peacekeeper and former huntress stands in her mother's wedding dress, the family's one family heirloom. Prim would have worn this same dress for her Toasting to Rory. In Merchant circles, from which the late Mrs. Everdeen fled, a woman's wedding dress is seen as a rite of passage, handed down from mother to daughter.
Where she is sequestered in a holding room just off the chambers of the District Justice of the Peace, Katniss frowns at her reflection in the floor-length mirror. In less than an hour, she will be getting married to a man who, after twenty years, has become more or less a stranger to her. Just a week ago, she had wild, hot, raw, passionate sex with a man who has been her pen pal for about that same amount of time, and yet he seems to know her better than she knows herself. Better than Gale ever could.
Glancing back over her shoulder, out the window above the love seat, Katniss can see the rooftop of the Bakery from here. Gazing at it while a jumble of emotions dance in her stomach, Katniss finally drops her face into her palm and weeps.
The door suddenly opens and, thinking it is her sister come to fetch her and escort her to the marriage license chambers, Katniss frantically wipes at her eyes.
When she turns around, she gasps.
"….. Peeta…..?"
The Baker, her pen pal, her friend, her lover, the second man she's ever kissed, is standing there in nothing but a dirty shirt and apron stained with flour. He looks out of breath, his broad body quivering with adrenaline.
"Katty…."
He lurches towards her; Katniss shies back like a skittish deer.
"Peeta, you – you shouldn't be here…." The tears are gathering, threatening to spill again. "You…. shouldn't be here; it's too painful, you have to go, please, Peeta…."
She starts to cry.
Peeta steps into her, jaw clenched with determination. "…. No….."
Katniss glances up at him and whimpers.
"No, Katty girl. Not until I've fought for you."
Fight for me?... Her head is swimming.
Peeta reaches out a hand: large and calloused and strong from the ovens; Katniss presses her cheek into it, and dares to kiss his palm.
"I need you…." Peeta expresses. "I love you. I want to make love to you over and over again, the way we did on Yuletide…. and never stop."
A small cry escapes Katniss's lips.
"I want to kiss you every day and not just once every twenty years or so. I've replayed our goodbye at the train station a million times; I lived only to read your letters!" He slips an arm around her waist and pulls her into his chest, causing Katniss's breath to hitch. "Tell me…. tell me you love me as much as I love you. I'm so in love with you…."
Nearly sobbing and scarcely breathing, she clasps her hands over his, fingers curling over his wrists.
"If you can't, I'll go, but Katty girl…. tell me…. please tell me you won't marry him…." Peeta is begging with his eyes. "Tell me you're not going to have babies with him, because I know damn well that's not what you want; you'd write about it often enough. Tell me you love me…. please…"
She can feel his hot breath on her lips as she stares into his impossibly blue eyes…. Eyes as blue as a summer sky…. Closing her own, Katniss takes a deep, shuddering breath, and in a raw voice quietly begs:
"…. Kiss me."
His lips swallow hers and they embrace with an intensity that shocks them both. Lightning courses through Katniss's body, and with a plaintive moan, she pulls the Baker closer still. They only break apart to take the briefest gulp of air before diving back in again, and it is just enough breath for Katniss to form words.
"I need you… I want you…." Katniss breathes into his lips, her voice strangely hoarse. "Mmmm…. I love you, Peeta, I love you so much….."
The sound of the door opening makes them jump apart, though not quickly enough. Prim pulls up short, freezing, blinking at finding her sister caught in the act, wrapped in the arms of another man and minutes before her wedding.
The sisters stare at each other, Katniss's grey orbs beseeching. Peeta at least has the decency to look abashed. Glancing between the couple, Prim finally nods in understanding.
"I'll go talk to Gale…." She steals out of the alcove, closing the door behind her with a soft click.
Katniss and Peeta look at each other, then burst into shaky, wet giggles.
"So….. you won't get married today?"
At his question, Katniss smiles. "I never said that."
Peeta studies her incredulously. And then he gets it.
"Katty girl…..! I'm – I'm not dressed for…..!"
Katniss's lips just quirk and she shakes her head. She exhales shakily, emotion clogging her voice. "….. Come here….."
Taking him by the arm, she leads him with purpose into the Justice of the Peace's chambers, even as she can feel herself trembling. Are they really doing this…? Is she? Katniss Everdeen, the girl who once swore off marriage?
Gale is standing off to one side with Prim and Rory, looking defeated. Standing before the judge, Katniss states:
"Your Honor….. I would like to take this man as my husband, if you please."
The District Justice of the Peace gives one discerning look at Peeta, who wears his apron and has flour in his hair, and begins to intone the words to the marriage ceremony.
They don't have rings, and it isn't as though they can use Gale's. Solemnly, Katniss gifts her old Mockingjay pin, the one Peeta gave her at the train station the day she left, to her intended. In return, Peeta fishes something out of the pockets of his apron: it's the pearl. The very same pearl Katniss once mailed him from her posting in District 4. Katniss decides she will eventually drill a hole in it and wear the stone on a chain around her neck, as a sign of her devotion.
Then Katniss and Peeta sign the marriage document. Katniss affixes to the paper her name – her new name: Katniss Mellark.
It feels…. right.
"I now pronounce this couple husband and wife. You may kiss."
Eyes lidded and heavy with want, Katniss and Peeta embrace and kiss, clutching at each other as Prim, Rory and even Gale burst into applause.
The newlywed Mellarks leave the Justice Building ahead of well-wishers in a kind of surreal daze. Gale generously allows Peeta to borrow his cart, and lifting his bride onto the back of it, the Baker pulls it home to the Bakery.
Prim, Rory and Rosebud, are somehow, in record time, able to transfer everyone who had been waiting back at the Everdeen homestead over to the Bakery so they can witness the Toasting. Then, Prim, Rory and Delly sequester Katniss upstairs and change her from her wedding dress into her blue Reaping dress.
Descending the stair, Katniss finds her…. her husband waiting for her by a roaring hearth, changed into a pressed suit this time. Peeta expertly Toasts a piece of bread over the open flame, and he and Katniss reverently feed each other a piece. With the fire's glow dancing in her grey orbs, Katniss's gaze is solemn as, tilting her head, she permits her husband to kiss her.
Mr. Cartwright strikes up a tune on his fiddle and, laughing, Peeta and Katniss dance at their wedding. With his bride leaning against his chest, Peeta whispers into her hair how they'll be OK – they have each other. He tells her he loves her and promises her that they don't have to have children if she doesn't want to.
Peering into her husband's eyes, though, Katniss decides that – even though she is getting close to the end of her childbearing years anyway – Peeta deserves to have whatever happiness she can give him. She might have her misgivings about being a parent, to say nothing of the Hunger Games hanging over their heads, but she concludes that she would have a baby, go through all of that, if it would make Peeta happy.
After all, he has waited forever for her. She owes him this much.
Not long after the wedding, Katniss learns that she is expecting a child. She gives birth to a daughter, with Prim, as the Healer, delivering the baby. Katniss and Peeta name their little girl Patience – to remind them of what led them here.