One-Shot: Schoolboy Crush

Katniss Everdeen is Reaped for the 74th Hunger Games, at the age of 16.

Her district partner is Peeta Mellark, a boy from Town who once tossed her a loaf of bread in the rain.

In the Justice Building, she receives some visitors: her hunting partner, Gale. Her mother and sister. The Baker, Peeta's father, pays a visit.

The last visitor surprises her.

Little Davey Cartwright, son of the Merchant shoe cobbler and the kid brother of one of Katniss's best girl friends in school, now approaches her shyly and holds out a small, grimy pendant.

Katniss holds it in her palm. When properly cleaned, it must give off a gold shine. She wonders where the Boy got it: the Seam perhaps? But a Townie wouldn't go to trade down there.

"Tributes can wear a token into the arena," Davey mumbles. "Will you wear this?"

Katniss stares at him, moved by his kindness. "… Thank you…." she murmurs. Stooping, she brushes her lips across the little boy's forehead. She thinks she sees his cheeks turn pink.

Back at home in the cobblery, Eli Cartwright gives his children sesterce cash money to spend during the Games. His only condition is that they spend it wisely.


It's about two and a half weeks after the Reaping, two weeks into the Games. Davey is thankful that he has held onto his sesterce spending money.

There are only four tributes left: the boy from 2, the shifty girl from 5, the large black boy from 11…. and Katniss Everdeen.

Her district partner, Peeta Mellark, placed fifth, and is the latest to have perished. Davey had watched his sister spend her last sesterce to fund a sponsor gift for her childhood friend's medicine. Medicine that Katniss had to enter a Feast for in order to get, and from which the beautiful huntress barely escaped with her life. She had rushed back to the cave where she and Peeta had hidden and where she had nursed him back towards health, only to arrive too late.

Davey had watched in the Square as Katniss had come apart in grief. It made him wonder if she really had been in love with the Baker's son, the same as Peeta had claimed to be in love with her at the interviews.

This emotional torment is probably the worst injury Katniss has been subjected to in the arena. Days ago, she had been hit with a Gamemaker fireball, but recovered quickly thanks to some sponsor sending an ointment paste. Then, a couple of mornings prior, she had blown up the Career pack's food supply, but lost the hearing in her left ear in the subsequent explosion.

Davey fears how Katniss will be able to effectively hunt the rest of the tributes, if she can't hear out of one ear. Cato or Thresh or even that foxy girl could creep up on her unawares.

Here in the Pavilion, a group of Merchants seem to have a similar idea – Davey spots the creamer taking up a collection for the coal miner's daughter, even though she is Seam.

"We're a score of sesterces short!" the creamer calls.

Davey digs into his pockets and counts out his spending sesterces. He might have just about enough.

Pushing his way through the crowd of men, Davey lays his money down towards buying a hearing aid for Katniss. His contribution is just enough to take them over the top and meet the sponsorship cost.

Later, when Katniss returns home the Victor, Davey can't work up the nerve to tell her that it was his sesterces that got her that hearing aid. He asks Katniss's baby sister, and his classmate, Prim, to convey the message to the beautiful huntress instead.


Six Years Later

Davey wipes down the front counter of the shoe shop, staring out into the District 12 night. The establishment is quiet, but in the far distance he can hear the sounds of music and laughter.

It's a balmy evening in late summer – the perfect night for a Toasting.

He isn't sure why he didn't receive an invitation to this one, a Seam union, even though nuptials segregated based on class are very much still a thing in Twelve. And yet his sister, Delly, is a member of the wedding party and his father was commissioned to play his fiddle at the reception. Delly had tried to ask her little brother to come along – Prim wouldn't mind, and perhaps his invitation just got lost. Davey had begged off – it was never good manners to show up to a Toasting unannounced and force the couple to scramble to set an extra plate.

Still, gate-crashing this Toasting may have been nice…. especially to catch a glimpse of…..

The door to the shoe shop suddenly tinkles open and Davey glances up, freezing when he sees Katniss Everdeen standing there, eyes bloodshot, in her blue Reaping dress. The golden mockingjay pin he gifted her at her Reaping is pinned to the bodice, directly over the swell of her breast. From the sweat perspiring off her porcelain skin, she looks like a drowned rat. Or as though she ran through a summer rainstorm to get here.

The Victor of the 74th Hunger Games stumbles in; Davey notes the nearly empty bottle of spirits in her hand. Katniss glances around, confused.

"I'm sorry," she slurs. "I don't really know why I came here…."

Davey starts to cast about for a chair for her, but Katniss just stumbles forward and braces herself against the counter. Davey circles it. He watches her while trying not to stare, waiting patiently. If the beautiful Seam huntress wants to talk, he's here to listen.

Katniss is quiet, as she traces fingers into the varnished, polished wood of the countertop thoughtfully.

"My sister was married tonight…."

Davey nods. "Congratulations…." He murmurs. A beat, and even though she just expressed her uncertainty for coming here, he asks softly: "Would you like some company…?"

She glances up at him sharply, and in the dim light of the cobblery, her gray eyes are sparkling with tears. They still flash, despite the moisture, and Davey wonders if she now views a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on as some sort of debt.

"I'm not your enemy, Katniss."

She falters a little, her gray orbs now revealing something like shame. Anguish. "You… you may not mean to be, but you are. And so is everyone else in this district! What can I do? What can anyone do when you realize your life didn't mean a damn?! That it's nothing but a piece in someone else's Games?" She takes a hearty pull from her bottle of alcohol until there's none left, shakes it, then continues, drunk. "I can't hunt as much as I used to on account of the Peacekeepers watching me. I can't go to the Capitol to make new Victors of my tributes, and I cannot have Prim! So there's nothing left to do but to hate everyone and everything in this cursed town!"

Davey tentatively rests a hand on her shoulder. "You'll never find peace by hating, Katty. It only shuts you off more from the world. And this is only a cursed town if you make it so! For most of us, it's a blessing!"

Katniss stares, open-mouthed, at what she must view as the youth of 18's naïveté. Her face twisting with disgust, she spits at him, "Well, you can keep it!"

She starts to turn and storm away, when Davey catches her arm. Whirling back around, Katniss opens her mouth to angrily yell at him when she suddenly feels Prim's classmate pull her close, so that she's held tight into his chest, his one burly arm slung around her waist. Before she can scold him, Davey summons his courage as he brings his mouth down on hers and kisses her.

Katniss stiffens in the embrace, and though her hands are now splayed across Davey's expansive chest, she doesn't move to push him away. The couple finally breaks apart sensuously.

Katniss Everdeen is speechless, and then her face darkens and for one, mad moment, Davey is afraid she is going to punch him. So he is stunned when Katniss's face softens just the teeniest bit, though her lips do not as her fingers abruptly weave into his auburn curls as she pulls his face down to hers, pushes her lips fiercely against his and roughly, soundly kisses him back.

There is the shattering of glass as the empty bottle of spirits slips from Katniss's hands and shatters upon the floor.

Arms wind about each other. Mouths hinge open as tongues push through to duel and dance. Davey dares to dip his hands below Katniss's waist, feeling up the curve of her buttocks through her blue skirts. He nearly chokes when she takes his palm, guides it to grip her thigh so he can hike it up, raising her leg to his waist where she now hooks it at the back of the knee.

Katniss tastes like sweat. Coal dust and cheap whiskey. She's only kissing him cause she's drunk, Davey decides. Drunk and sad about her sister's marriage. Maybe she's even imagining she's kissing somebody else, like her district partner who died in the arena.

Davey and Katniss finally come up for air, gasping. Davey releases the Victor. Wordlessly, the statuesque huntress holds out her hand. Gulping, Davey takes it, and he lets her guide him with purpose back into the rear of the shoe shop.

The flap of animal skin over the entrance rustles closed behind them.


Katniss and Davey make love in the back of the shoe shop.

By candlelight, Katniss pulls Davey's mouth down hungrily to hers as he spoons her from behind. She wonders if he's touched any other woman like this before. Slowly, she guides his one palm to cup the swell of her breast underneath her blue Reaping dress. Her eyes rolling back into her head, she lets out a pleasured moan as Davey's lips briefly leave hers to blaze a burning trail down to the hollow of her throat.

Katniss shrugs her father's hunting jacket off of her shoulders, so that the leather pools with a rustle down at their feet. Davey's fingers are trembling as they undo the drawstring that now allows the bodice, the top half of her blue Reaping dress to fall away, revealing firm, pert breasts, round as mangoes.

Katniss brings Davey's palm up to cup her again, and her squeezes her breast while fondling the nipple. The other tit, he eventually takes between his teeth, and Katniss lets out a cry of astonishment.

Katniss is now bent over a worktable, her boobs with pebbled nipples pressing into the varnished wood. She feels Davey bunching up her blue skirts, shoving them up over her hips, and she bares her ass to him.

Davey mounts her.

He mates with her.

They have sex.

Katniss and Davey play the Beast with Two Backs ardently, the shoe cobbler humping her ass while Katniss grinds back, drawing his cock further into her anus. Davey fucks her madly, and after one particularly vicious slam, Katniss lets out a curse.

"Fuck!"

Her breathing becomes heavy, staccato, labored. His fingers fist her hair, tug at her braid, to keep himself steady as he thrusts madly inside her, and rutting against him in heat, the noises Katniss makes grow steadily louder. Eventually, Davey claps his other palm over her mouth to silence her.

"Ugggh…. Huhhhhh… Uhhhhhh….. Ohhhhh….. Ahhhhhhhh….. ERMMMMM! MMMMMMM! HMMMMMM!"

Katniss tries to tell herself that fucking the cobbler's son is just a release. A physical thing. A way to repay a long-ago debt, for her district token and the sponsorship money that ultimately saved her life – Prim had told her of Davey's contribution. She also knows this rationalization for sleeping with the lad is just a lie.

Davey's thrusts are weakening, coming in little spurts. Eyes rolling into the back of her head, Katniss feels her toes curl.

Her body suddenly goes taut.

She cums for him. At the same moment that Davey finishes inside of her.

He tells her he loves her.

She says that she loves him back.


Delly Mellark (neé Cartwright) is able to find the tender blessings in life under tyranny.

She is cutting through the back alleyway behind the shoe shop, having just come from the Hawthorne-Everdeen women to check on her brother, when she thinks she hears moaning coming from the back of her family's storefront.

There is an odd silhouette of what looks like two people being cast on the curtain over this window.

Delly can recognize from the shape the two shadows make what is probably going on. The Capitol knows she and her husband and Peeta's brother, Rye, go at it often enough. She shouldn't look. Snow only knows there are worse things to perpetuate in this district than petty gossip. But gossip is like Delly's daily bread.

Delly lifts the corner back. She peers in.

Through the windowpanes, she is astonished to see Katniss Everdeen flat on her back and with her legs spread as Delly's baby brother, a childhood friend of Katniss's sister Prim, grinds on top of her. They're…. Oh Snow's Roses, they're….

Delly isn't sure whether to feel horrified or pleased as she watches her best girl friend and her little brother having passionate sex. Davey finally finishes inside Katniss and drops his head into the valley of her glistening breasts, her bare skin shimmering in the candlelight.

Katniss immediately nudges Davey off of her and steers him back onto a stool, pushing him onto it. Hiking up her blue skirts, she swings a creamy leg over his hips as she moves to straddle him. Taking the man's face in her hands, she kisses him soundly on the mouth as she begins to ride him earnestly, rolling her hips into his cock. Davey seizes Katniss's bum in both fists and groans, jerking up into her wetness. He is growling words at her in his passion - Delly can discern uttered oaths like 'vixen.' 'Temptress.' 'Wench.' Katniss moans in perfect time with him.

"Uhhhhhh… Errrrrrr… Huhhhhh…. Uhhhhhhh… Oooooooo….."

Grinning, Delly lets the curtain fall and hurries on back to the party, anxious to tell her husband and Katniss's sister the news. She is happy and proud of Davey for finally plucking up the courage; she's always known he's had a crush on the statuesque Victor.

The gossip in Delly dares to hope that there might even be another Toasting in the offing before long.


Katniss and Davey finally break the kiss, though they remain in each other's embrace. Her lips red and kiss-swollen, Katniss's eyes are solemn as she drums her fingers contemplatively along his jawline. These she replaces these with her mouth, burning open-mouthed kisses up to his earlobe, into which she now hisses:

"If we get married, you can't ever tell me what to do!"

Davey leans back, amazed and what did she just say? Did she just…. propose….?

"And I won't have children. Babies are something to love only to become something to lose at the Reaping. And any child of ours would be." She eyes him pointedly. "I think you know that."

He nods dumbly.

"We could split time between living at my place in the Village and here at the shop. I can hunt whenever I want. And I'll be nothing but civil to your parents; your father is a good man." Katniss runs her fingers through his auburn locks.

"Go ahead, then," she smiles, crooning. "Ask me."

"Ask what?"

She rolls her eyes, grinning. "Ask me to marry you. Propose."

He has to shift her off of his lap to get down on one knee. "Katniss Magenta Everdeen, will you marry me?"

Katniss smirks at his knowledge of her middle, Covey name. "You've been talking too much to my sister, haven't you? But yes, I will."

Davey tugs her back into his lap, and they embrace, kiss and make love again.


Davey awakens naked in the back of the shoe shop the morning after he and Katniss make love to find his lover gone. Only the scent of her and the furs she must have covered his naked body with before leaving remain.

Without those signs that she came here, that she really had been with him, he would wonder if last night had been some sort of fever dream. This kind of second-guessing over what is Real and Not Real leaves Davey damn near panicking. In some ways, he is still that frightened, insecure little boy who for years has harbored a crush on a woman four years his senior.

Should he go and see her? Search for her and ask her if she meant what she said, about marrying him? If she'll have him.

The pull is too strong. Closing up shop at mid-morning, he hikes back to the Village, and then past it to the district fence.

He spots Katniss in her blue dress, seated amongst the wildflowers of the Meadow. He had hoped he would find her here, even if it had been just a guess on his part.

Wordlessly, he sits down beside her. Neither of them speaks until the sun is dipping in a blazing fireball towards the horizon. Ironically, it is Katniss, who breaks the silence.

"Green."

Davey turns and studies her. "What?"

"My favorite color. It's green." She turns and gazes at him.

Davey licks his lips. It suits the woman.

"What's yours?"

He flushes, his eyes taking an appraisal of her dress. "Blue."

Bashful, he turns his face away. Starts to shift as if to rise to his feet, but then Katniss is cupping his cheek in her palm, turning his face back to hers so she can kiss him softly, then passionately, and the Seam huntress and the Victor fall back into the Meadow grasses.

Concealed by the stalks and the weeds, Davey shoves her blue skirts up over her hips. Katniss opens her lips for him at the same moment that she opens her legs. She clamps her thighs tight around him.

They have sexual intercourse.


She takes him into the woods, back to the lake and the secret cabin that her ancestors built long ago and where her own parents once honeymooned. On the dirt floor of this isolated shack, then later skinnydipping in the cool waters of the lake, Katniss and Davey have sex again.

Katniss teaches him where to touch her, what she likes. Once he has learned to pleasure her, she returns the favor by dropping to her knees and drawing him deep into her throat. She performs oral sex on him quietly, methodically, tucking his balls past her bottom lip and lolling out her tongue to lick the upper reaches of his hardened shaft.

After he has cum in her mouth with a shout, Davey scissors open Katniss's long legs and brings her to orgasm with his own tongue, gnawing on her slick slit and nursing at the peaked and hardened nibbles at her breast.

When they've finished, sweaty and naked and spent and he asks her if she still wants to have a Toasting, Katniss simply responds by kissing him.


Spring arrives.

One clear, blue morning, the church bells are ringing, tolling in the tower above the Justice Building. From the way they peal, it sounds as though someone's just gotten hitched.

Out of the oaken double doors, followed by a small group of well-wishers come Davey Cartwright and his new bride.

Katniss Cartwright (neé Everdeen) is laughing and beaming radiantly, still quite unable to believe it herself that she is here. She shivers as her…. her husband pauses at the base of the stairs to pull her close and kiss her deeply.

Her lips curl against his into a tentative, hopeful smile as she returns his kiss. Errantly, she tosses aside her bouquet of katniss roots and pine needles so that Posy Hawthorne catches it. Gale's little sister catches the katniss roots anyway; the pine needles scatter upon the ground.

Nestled between the embracing newlyweds is Katniss's swollen belly, which Davey now caresses.

The baby hadn't been planned. But when Katniss had learned that she was great with child, she had gone to Davey and told him she was pregnant. Carrying his baby. She had been frightened for them and especially for him when Davey told her he hoped she would keep it.

Yet Katniss also knows that Davey loves her, and he needs an heir for the cobbler shop. So, when Davey asks her to consider keeping their baby, she says Yes. She agrees to carry their child to term, despite feeling a terror as old as life itself.

Davey now gallantly lifts his wife onto the back of a rented cart and pulls it for home. The new Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright hold their Toasting in the shoe shop, before their meager hearth. Posy Hawthorne and Leevey, the bridesmaids, sequester Katniss upstairs to change her for the solemn tradition.

They divest Katniss of her wedding dress – her mother's wedding dress – carefully. The garment is an old family heirloom, one that in Merchant circles is carefully handed down as a rite of passage from mother to daughter. Katniss's mother had absconded with the piece when she had eloped with Katniss's daddy. Primrose wore the garment when she was a bride.

Changing into her blue Reaping dress, Katniss descends the stair and greets her husband before the hearth. They Toast a bit of bread and share it.

Finally, her lips slightly parted and with the firelight dancing in her solemn, grey eyes, Katniss Cartwright tilts her head and permits her husband to kiss her.

The wedding kiss deepens and Katniss feels herself being lifted off her feet as the gathered witnesses cheer. When they break the kiss at last, Katniss goes over to embrace Prim, her sister. Mr. Cartwright, Katniss's father-in-law, strikes up a reel on a fiddle and Davey and Katniss dance at their wedding. It's sweeping and nice and even romantic, but Katniss doesn't feel truly married until she and her husband honeymoon at her father's hunting cabin by the lake, they way her mother and father before her did.

Some six months later, Katniss gives birth to a little boy. There are tufts of little blonde hair on the top of his head.

She names the lad Peeta David – to remind her of the love she lost and also the love that she has found. As for her husband, he assures her that they'll be OK – they have each other.

As Katniss and Davey Cartwright play with their children in the Meadow, their youngest nursing at his mother's breast, both husband and wife know there are much worse Games to play.