Katniss Everdeen is busy reblogging squirrel pics (tindernest) wrote in wariscoming, @ 2012-09-29 17:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | katniss everdeen, peeta mellark |
Who: Katniss and Peeta
What: Katniss jumps out of a tree and attacks Peeta with feelings. I'm not even kidding.
Where: Tree. Driveway.
When: Evening, when Peeta gets home from a shift.
Warnings: TBD
This is stupid, Katniss thought for approximately the eight-millionth time since she’d climbed up into the tree, one of the many bordering the driveway that wound up the wooded road towards Cindy’s house, I’m stupid. I should get down and go inside and make Cindy let me help her with something. I should get some laundry ready and bug Prim about her homework. She can see the evening unfolding before her even as the day fades, darkness coming earlier now that it’s fall, and the world around her tree darkens into early evening. She can see herself scrambling down from the branches she’s nestled in, throwing her laundry and Prim’s into the machine that does in moments and for free what Hazelle did for years until her hands were cracked and hard to provide for her family. She can see herself pulling a chair up for dinner, Peeta’s bread and whatever Cindy’s wandered in to add and maybe even a side dish from Prim, can see herself eating a stretch of those dinners that goes on for years, if the war will let them. In none of these visions does Peeta hold her hand or kiss her or deviate in any way from the alliance, the friendship, that they have managed to salvage from fights to the death and deception and the kind of sheer terror that would make an animal gnaw its own leg off to escape a trap. That’s worth something, isn’t it? That could be enough for me.
There was something smooth against her lips, slipping over the calluses on her fingers as she rubbed it back and forth. The pearl. She squeezed her eyes shut briefly, but didn’t move it away from her lips, as she remembered Peeta handing it to her in the arena, the small flash of a smile that had, just for a moment, made him look as young as he really was. He looked like that most often, she’d discovered, when he was able to give someone something they needed. It had taken her a long time to notice that because she’d been so busy refusing anything he’d wanted to give her, hadn’t been something she’d noticed at all until they’d begun living together in Lawrence without Snow haunting their every step. Now she could see that he’d meant it when he told her she didn’t owe him for the bread, for anything, because she’d seen him jumping to offer River any sort of kindness he could since her brother had been taken, seen him with Prim, helping her with her homework or letting her help him bake, even when she fumbled the proportions and ruined a batch of bread. She’d seen that he didn’t do it out of pity or condescension. It didn’t mean that she didn’t still owe him, didn’t still hiss a warning at Prim when she forgot to thank him for help or for a baking lesson, but she’d accepted that generosity as part of him and had come to feel a kind of protectiveness towards it, as if Peeta had thrown open all the doors to his house and gone to sleep without worrying about who might stroll inside. There were few enough people like him in the world, and she had no problem with the idea of spending the foreseeable future making sure he could stay just as he was, no matter the cost. Anything more though…
She tucked the pearl back into the pocket of her jeans and swung herself down a branch, not out of the cover of the thickest of the foliage but a bit lower to the ground, within a safe range to jump down. Her father wanted her to be happy. Cindy had told her that it could be worth it, if the other person was willing to work for it. Peeta was, of course, had obviously been willing to work for it even when there was no chance at all, but he wasn’t the question, she was, and she didn’t know if she was capable of that. If she even wanted to be. Then there was Gale, back home and waiting and wanting her with all the draw of her past. She remembered holding his hand as he’d lain on the table, whip marks on his back, and just knowing that they had belonged to each other. Except that she wasn’t quite sure that the girl who had belonged to Gale even existed any more, if she hadn’t died in the bloodbath at the Cornucopia during that first Games and let another girl run away into the woods with her body. A girl who didn’t belong to anyone, not even Prim, not as much as she’d used to back when Prim had needed her so much, needed her for everything. Now she was almost grown, more than her sister in some ways, and moving, unafraid, towards a future in which she wouldn’t need her at all, no matter how much she’d want her around, and then… Katniss grimaced and rested her forehead against the bark of the tree’s trunk, biting her lip hard. No matter how many times she thought this through she could never make it come out even, was as fumbling and confused as she had been with math problems back at school, nothing ever managing to carry through all the steps of the equation without coming out a jumbled mess of decimals nowhere near the smooth precision of the practice problems on the board. Maybe I’m just never going to know.
Except she knew what she’d felt during the Quell, when they’d kissed on the beach, like her body was electricity and humming for more so fast she couldn’t even be scared. She knew that she didn’t want to lose him, and that she cared for him enough to die for him. When she’d pictured her future here she’d pictured him in it, however possible. Didn’t all of those things together mean that she loved him the way he wanted her to?
Maybe, she thought, remembering Prim’s prodding that Katniss and Peeta try to ‘date,’ it means I’ll never know until I actually try.
Which was, of course, the most terrifying idea of all. She could discover she didn’t love Peeta after all and hurt him. She could fall in love with him and he could get to know her better and discover that he didn’t want her after all, that she wasn’t the girl he’d fallen in love with, the idealized, older version of a girl who could stand up and sing, unselfconscious as a bird. Because she wasn’t that girl, hadn’t been for years, and if that was who Peeta really wanted…
The sound of tires moving over gravel cut off her train of thought and she clenched her hands hard around the branch she perched on as Peeta got out of one of the cars he’d borrowed from Cindy and started towards the house, limping a little after being on his feet all day at work. Her eyes were on his arms, the shape of them under his long-sleeved tshirt in the way she’d found herself looking at him lately, since they’d stopped kissing and she’d had time to miss it, and at the same time she wanted to hug him because he looked tired and the tangle of lust and protective concern just confused her more, swirled up in her stomach into irritation with him and herself and everything and before she knew it she’d dropped from the tree in a practiced, silent motion.
“You know you keep saying it, but I have no idea why you think you love me,” she snapped suddenly, her voice almost echoing in the quiet of the evening.
…which was when she processed the fact that she had just dropped out of a tree and blurted out the middle of a conversation she had been having in her own mind at Peeta with no warning, and glared fiercely to cover up her embarrassment. Well, this is already going well.