Katniss Everdeen is busy reblogging squirrel pics (tindernest) wrote in wariscoming, @ 2012-09-15 23:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | katniss everdeen, peeta mellark |
Who: Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, Ghost!Mr.Everdeen and Ghost!Cato
Where: Cindy's house
When: Backdated to kickoff night of ghost plot
What: GHOSTS. It's either happy or OHSHIT depending on who you are.
Warnings: TBD
Status: In progress
In her dream, Katniss was standing by the seashore. She knew the sea only vaguely, only as seen through a train window, passing by in a long blue flash of glinting sunlight and waves rendered frozen by sheer speed. There had been a sort of sea in the arena of course, for the Quell, but that had been different. It had been flat and odd and artificial and she had hardly looked at it, consumed instead by terror, so that the salt of that sea mingled in her mind with the taste of blood. The sea in her dream was the real sea, Finnick’s sea, the sea of District Four. She watched it rise and fall in rhythms like a heartbeat, smelled the air and let it comb her hair back from her face. For a moment, even locked in unconsciousness, she had a feeling of relief, of respite. Though she could not remember the concept of nightmares, she was thankful not to be having one. Until she heard him calling her name.
“Katniss!” Peeta was out on his disc, transported from the games into the middle of this sea, but he wasn’t fixed in place, he was floating away, out towards the horizon. Katniss widened her eyes, she knew she hadn’t meant to let him get so far away, and she raced to the shore, feet sending up little flurries of sand as she ran. When she was at the edge of the water she stopped, sucked in a breath of air, and prepared to dive forwards. Except suddenly she knew, the way things are known in dreams, suddenly but intuitively, as if they have always been known but have only just been remembered, that if she let her skin touch the water she could never walk on land again. She hovered by the water’s edge, calling for Peeta, pacing, but never letting her toes edge up to where the waves lapped the shore. For his part, Peeta grew smaller, let the tide take him away, and when she could still see his face it was the saddest thing she had ever seen, it was like being torn in half. In the dream she crouched and tangled her fingers in her hair, pulling, and began to cry.
“Shh, you’re all right, it was only a dream,” Katniss jerked slightly limbs twitching once and then settling, as she eased from her melancholy sleep into a drowsy sort of twilight between dream and reality. She could feel wetness on her pillow from where she had been crying, but she didn’t think this had been a screaming nightmare. If I’d been screaming Peeta would have come, she thought and started to close her eyes again, relaxing into the familiar feeling of a broad, callused hand stroking her hair in time to the soft shushing noises his voice made.
…which was when she realized that the hand soothing her didn’t belong to Peeta.
Katniss started upwards and scrabbled back, feet and hands sliding on the sheets for purchase, until her back hit the bedframe, her eyes dropping to her hands as she fumbled for the knife she kept under her pillow. Damn it how did someone get past Cindy’s wards? How did someone break in here without Cindy or Peeta or I waking up? Is Prim-
“Your sister’s okay, I’m with her too. You don’t have to worry, Katniss.” The voice became familiar then, distinct from simply ‘male and not Peeta’ and Katniss jerked her head up again, her eyes going wide but her movements stilling until her breathing was the only thing that distinguished her from a wax doll, a model of a person. Perched at the end of her bed, hands raised in a placating gesture, was a man in his early thirties, dressed in sooty coveralls and letting a pickaxe rest against his thigh. His face was coated in grime and lines had been etched around his eyes and mouth, deeper and earlier to form than the people Katniss had gotten used to seeing in Lawrence, people who moisturized and applied sunscreen and tried not to frown too often. Despite the soot and the grim lines, however, the man’s face was kind. Half the lines, upon closer inspection, were from his eyes crinkling up during a smile, and his eyes themselves were clear and gentle, a light gray that Katniss hadn’t seen mirrored back to her outside a looking glass in years.
“Dad?” she whispered, her voice just a croak, squeaking up through a suddenly dry throat. “Dad?” This time she didn’t resist when he reached out for her, when his hands closed gently around her shoulders. “I’m right here,” Mr. Everdeen said quietly, reaching up to brush a few strands of hair behind her ear. Katniss opened her mouth to ask one of the thousand questions competing with each other to rise through her suddenly swollen throat, but her father beat her to it. “I was allowed to come back for a while to see you and Prim. I can’t stay long, but right now you’re safe, Prim is safe, everything’s okay.” And though that wasn’t much better (back from where? Who let you? clamored in the back of her mind) she found that she couldn't doubt him, couldn't even doubt that this was him. For the first time since she was eleven she took someone’s word for Prim’s safety and she let herself be pulled into a hug, let herself feel very young and responsible for no one.