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