InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "We were only pretending."

Katniss Everdeen is busy reblogging squirrel pics (tindernest) wrote in wariscoming,
@ 2012-12-16 12:35:00

Entry tags:

katniss everdeen, peeta mellark

WHO: Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark
WHAT: Dropping the l-bomb
WHERE: Their bedroom at Cindy's house
WHEN: Sunday night, bedtime o clock?
WARNINGS: tbd
PROGRESS: in progress

Katniss leaned closer to the bathroom mirror and brushed her fingertips across the healing scratch on her cheek, a fading relic of the moment when the demon wearing Peeta’s face had sent her flying up through the branches of a tree. Almost gone, she thought critically, turning her face to the side to examine the healing bruise at the juncture of her jaw and throat for a moment before working her hair out of its braid and ruffling it slightly with her fingers so that it covered both the scratch and the bruise. During the day she still wore her hair braided, but she hated seeing Peeta wince slightly when he looked at her, fidgeted uncomfortably when she sensed him visually taking stock of her injuries. His misplaced guilt was one thing during the day when she could shoot him a warning look and change the subject, but at night, when they were actually alone… she’d been afraid, the past few nights, since she had healed enough to want to pick up where they’d left off physically, that she would kiss him more than gently and he wouldn’t respond because he was worried about inadvertently pressing a bruise and hurting her, or, worse, that she would work up the courage to slip out of her shirt and he would only look at the scars, would only feel pity and guilt when he saw her. So she wore her hair down and she was tentative with him, giving him time too, to come back from what the demon had done to him.

She brushed her fingers across the stitch-marks on her stomach, little angry red lines, and scowled at her face in the mirror. I don’t know how to do this, she thought, relationships. I don’t know how to just make this okay again or how to say… she trailed off and deepened the furrows between her eyes. This uncertainty, this dependency on the boy in the other room, to be there, to want her, to hold her when she had a nightmare, was terrifying. The fact that it didn’t make her want to leave was more terrifying still. She remembered her mother, long ago, sitting in a chair and staring, unseeing past her children. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to remember what she’d told herself when they’d started dating, you already need him, you might as well have the good parts too. She sighed and picked up one of Peeta’s tshirts from the bathroom floor where she’d thrown it when she’d come in to examine her scars, pulling it on and debating sleep pants for a moment before shrugging the idea off a bit rebelliously. In the summer she’d worn them, even when it was warm, but Peeta was her boyfriend, if he still wanted to be, and she had no reason to be embarrassed, the tshirt came down to mid thigh.

She opened the bathroom door and walked back into the bedroom, only to pause when she saw Peeta, already in bed, lying on his back and waiting for her. In the darkness of the room she couldn’t tell if he was asleep yet, but she could see the exhaustion in his posture (he’d been having nightmares, she knew, and had tried not to wake her with them) and she felt something that wasn’t pity or fear or obligation, more like concern, but deeper still than that, more like the old tug of their partnership that meant that anything happened to him happened to her too. Love, she thought, and paused in her progress towards the bed for a moment as she was hit, suddenly, by how lonely it would be to feel what she felt without the reassuring certainty of knowing that the other person loved you too, that, scared as you might be for all of your own reasons, you were safe. She started towards the bed again and climbed onto it.

Normally she would have settled against Peeta, laid her head on his chest and decompressed, listening to his heartbeat, in the moments before sleep. Now she knelt on the mattress instead and leaned down to kiss him gently, near the corner of his mouth. “Are you still awake?” she whispered, embarrassed at how ready she was to drop this if his response was groggy enough.

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peetanotpita
2012-12-17 07:09 am UTC (link)

Peeta felt like he'd broken their home. Most days it took all of his efforts focused just to function normally around Cindy, Prim, and Katniss, so that they would believe that he was all right when he wasn't. He'd promised Katniss he wouldn't check out on her and he didn't intend to again, at least not for as long as he had when he'd been kept in the crypt, but it wasn't easy feeling like a stranger in his own home. Everything felt foreign to him, now. Even sleep had been robbed of its normalcy for Peeta, because he had grown accustomed to the nightmares about the arenas; about the crypt. But these new nightmares, the ones of all the innocent citizens with snapped necks and broken bodies, all at his hand, the ones he never told — and never would tell — anyone about...they were an entirely different animal.

He'd finally stopped having the nightmares about the awful things he'd done to Katniss with that demon inside him, but only after she'd finally come off her painkillers and they'd been sharing the same bed once more. The comfort that had once been there was gone. Now he worried that any time he touched her, he would exacerbate an injury he'd caused her; that she would, one of these times, recoil because she remembered his face twisted into a sickening grin when she'd received them. She took longer in the bathroom getting ready for bed at night, now, and Peeta thought that was probably because she was examining the progress or potential lack thereof in the healing process of those wounds. He loved her and he wanted her around but he only felt like himself when he was alone and he hated that. Whenever his back was turned, he wondered if the three of them were whispering about him, wondering if he was still their Peeta or whether the demon had taken some part of him away when Tom had exorcised it. Truthfully, Peeta was starting to wonder that, himself, so he wouldn't have blamed them.

He'd been staring at the ceiling, lying on his back and wondering when everything would get better; be normal again when he heard Katniss come back into the room. Sleep was a chore. He hated this part. She would come to bed, assume that when she drifted off, he had too, and all the while he would fight it and fight it until his eyelids felt like they were made of lead and he just hadn't the strength to keep them open anymore. And then would come the nightmares that he refused to wake Katniss for, thinking it unfair to ask her to try to understand these ones when she must have similar ones of her own...of him.

Peeta could feel Katniss climb on the bed and he closed his eyes as she pressed a kiss against the corner of his mouth. Even that hurt; how could she want to kiss him after all of the vulgar things that had come out of that very same mouth? He didn't understand how she wanted anything at all to do with him and he didn't want to ask her, either, for fear of triggering a domino effect that would end with her giving up the ruse that she still wanted anything to do with him at all after everything that had happened and even if the guilt was agonizing when he was around her, he still needed her there.

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peetanotpita
2012-12-17 07:09 am UTC (link)

It was an automatic response that came out when she asked if he was awake, a little more dull than he'd meant for it to sound. "Yeah, I'm up..." he answered, shifting his eyes in the direction of Katniss, resting them on her stomach first because that was closest to eye-level before moving upward to meet her own in the dark. "How do they look tonight...?" he asked in reference to her wounds, even though part of him didn't want to know. That part of him, that selfish, guilt-riddled part didn't want to know about the progress, he just wanted to know when they were healed. The other part of him, though, had to know. He had to know that she was getting better. That maybe when the wounds were gone, if there weren't any scars, maybe so gone would be the memory of the day when he'd nearly killed her and actually left her for dead on the lawn outside the room in which they were sharing this bed. Peeta closed his eyes only for a second —because if he left them too long, he would fall asleep and that was the last thing that he wanted just then — before looking cautiously back up at her, hoping that the darkness would hide the crease in his brow and the self-disgust in his eyes.

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tindernest
2012-12-18 01:35 am UTC (link)

Peeta was stiff underneath her, accepting the kiss but not moving to mirror the gesture with a kiss of his own, and Katniss bit her lower lip, teeth worrying at the skin there for a moment as she worried about his exhaustion and his nightmares, before she remembered to stop herself gnawing at her lips. She’d become self-conscious about that nervous habit since they’d started dating, reminding herself constantly that it actually mattered if her lips were chapped now. All right, she thought, he’s awake, so do I just…do I just blurt it out? How did he say it to me? she realized now, that she couldn’t remember. He had used the word crush not, love during his interview in the first Games. Then in the arena she had tended to tune him out when he got going on the romance angle, concentrating on gathering and staunching blood from his wounds and thinking their way out of terrible danger. Then, because he had always been sincere, he had just kept saying it outside of the arena and she couldn’t remember, now, when she had first heard it to believe it. This is stupid, she thought, worried and resentful all at once by the pressure she sometimes felt, now that she returned Peeta’s feelings, to live up to some fantasy he had begun constructing at five years old when she had been winning footraces and climbing trees and completely oblivious to him, even though she knew, because he had said as much, that their actual relationship, her actual personality, had long since eclipsed those fantasies. This is extremely stupid. Damn it Peeta, I never worried about things like this before-

"How do they look tonight...?"

“Hmm?” she responded distractedly, jerked out of her train of thought, then followed his gaze to her stomach. “Oh,” she said, touching her stomach through the tshirt reflexively when she realized what he was talking about and then shifting slightly on the bed so that she was sitting cross-legged, one of her knees lolling onto his stomach, both the contact and the adjustment so that she wasn’t jabbing him or pressing down too hard completely unconscious in a show of the kind of physical intimacy she used in substitution for words, a forgetting of where her body ended and his began. “They’re coming along,” she said, looking down at him carefully, “Prim’s taking good care of them, they won’t get infected, and they’re shallow, comparatively,” she added, thinking of the wounds Clove had given her, the cut to Peeta’s leg from Cato’s sword during the first Game. She wasn’t sure if that had been reassuring, she wasn’t over concerned with the cuts, having found the bruises far more troublesome in a practical way, and having been much more effected, once the pain was gone, by the memory of Peeta’s possession than the reminder of the scars, and so she didn’t know what he needed to hear.

Maybe things are too complicated to say it right now, she thought, maybe he wouldn’t even believe me anyway. She was about to make some excuse for asking if he was awake as if she’d wanted to talk, when she saw the way he was watching her, the line creasing itself downwards between his eyes as he looked up at her. Her hand went out automatically, thumb smoothing briefly over the crease before she moved to brush a few strands of hair off his forehead. He looked lost and uncertain, not something she was used to from Peeta, and she was struck, suddenly by how many times he had, metaphorically speaking, walked out on a ledge for her. The times he’d held her without expecting her to kiss him, to do anything at all for him, the times he’d told her he loved her without needing to hear it in return.

“Peeta,” she said, and even though she was whispering, her voice sounded loud and clumsy in her own ears, “I love you.”

Her heart beat wildly against her ribcage and she sat very still and looked very serious and waited, feeling like she was suspended in the stomach-lurching moment between a leap and a descent.

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peetanotpita
2012-12-23 02:57 pm UTC (link)

It seemed to take Katniss a while to respond to his question about her wounds and Peeta wondered if it was because she didn't want to answer the question because she knew he wouldn't like what she had to say. Even when she said that they were coming along and that Prim was taking care of them for her, Peeta felt an uncomfortable jolt in his stomach, wondering if she was lying to attempt to make him feel better. If that was the case, it wasn't working. She said that they were shallow comparatively and Peeta was sure that she was referencing their injuries back in the arenas, but all that he could think about were the terrible things the demon had used him to do to complete, innocent strangers. The stab sounds, the slashes; the way it had tortured people just to hear them scream before it had used his hands to snap their necks and leave their bodies to rot, off to find its next victim. Katniss had gotten off easy, comparatively. Peeta still wondered why. He was grateful, but he wondered what had mad Katniss immune to the demon's clear hatred and the glee that came with making someone suffer and watching the light fall from their eyes.

"That's good," he finally heard himself say, letting his eyes start to close as she reached over to run her thumb over his forehead and brushed his hair back. No matter how much guilt he felt for the things he'd done when he'd been out of control of his own mind and body, no matter what happened between them — the little squabbles they had over car keys or dinner — his mind always tended to ease, if even only a little, when Katniss would touch him like that. There was something so simple and intimate about the way that she did it; something that made him feel like, just for that moment in time, he was the only other person in the world to her and Peeta liked that feeling.

His name from her lips caught his attention and pulled him back out of his thoughts in time to hear her tell him that she loved him. At first, it didn't quite register, the fact that it was the first time she'd said it. His response was a simple heartfelt, "I love you, too." But then it hit him and Peeta's eyes snapped open to look back up at her. He wasn't sure what to say. Should he reassure her? Should he ask her if she was certain? Tell her that she didn't have to say that just because she wanted to see him smile again when he'd been unable for what seemed like forever, by now? Instead, Peeta sat up, looked her in the eye and found that he was smiling. Cupping the side of her face with one hand, he repeated himself. "I love you, too, Katniss," he told her and then he leaned forward and kissed her.

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