Chapter Text
The Great War / peace
Disclaimer: I own nothing!
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It turned into something bigger
Somewhere in the haze, got a sense I’d been betrayed
Your finger on my hair pin triggers
Soldier down on that icy ground
Looked up at me with honor and truth, broken and blue, so I called off the troops
That was the night I nearly lost you
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“Katniss, don’t go. Can we please talk about this?”
“I’m sorry, Peeta,” she whispers. A single tear trails in a betraying path down her cheek and lands on the floor between them with a sickening splat. “I can’t.”
Turning swiftly on her heels, she wrenches the front door open and does what she does best. She runs.
Because Peeta wants children, and Katniss does not think that she will ever be able to give him what he wants.
Her pace quickens as she reaches the forest. She has known this poorly-kept secret of his for a while now. He thinks he is hiding it well from her, but she can see it in the way his stare lingers on the children leaving the bakery, their tiny hands clasped with their fathers’ and covered in powdered sugar. She sees it in the eagerness he has to hold Thom's twin toddlers when the Mayor brings them by for visits in Victor's Village.
She mostly sees it in the way he expertly manages to reroute the conversation whenever a stranger asks about the Star-Crossed Lovers having a child. He does this to protect her feelings, but anyone paying attention can see that he wants children. So badly.
Haymitch is right. She doesn’t deserve him.
On the first night he asked her, five years after the War had ended, their bodies were slick with sweat and a thick haze hung in a low cloud above them. She wished she wasn’t so caught off guard by his seemingly innocuous question. She wished she had a better answer for him. She wished she could have done anything but what she did, which was silently turn over and pretend she didn’t hear him.
But he asked again, five years later, on their Toasting anniversary. Again, she punished him with spinelessness. Remaining locked in her tomb of silence, she left him with a chaste kiss and a flimsy excuse of a hunting trip that lasted until dark. She justified it by telling herself she would be ready next time.
But when the time came, another five summers after their brutal coming-of-age had come and gone, she couldn’t pretend. No, there was no mistaking the way she flinched at the very mentioning of the word “kids” — Tributes, casualties, lives she couldn’t save.
Flashes of battles had suddenly come back to her in a blur. Of the Games, the Quell, and finally, the War. This is the poison she must swallow every day, alone.
They were just children then. It was war, but that doesn’t mean any of it was fair.
And just as he watched her face contort in horror, she heard the sound of her husband’s heart breaking in his simple response.
“This is different, isn’t it?” he had asked her after some painful amount of time between them had passed in strained silence. “You’re never going to come around to this.”
It isn’t enough, she thought. I’m not enough for him.
He was always the one who was ready, and she was always the one who needed to catch up. Sex, partnership, engagement, and marriage happened in a slow, but steady line over the years as their love turned into something bigger. It was always on her terms, and Peeta never seemed to mind. Whatever she could give him was always enough, he said. A small part of her never fully believed him.
Now she has proof.
Despite the blue wave of sadness cascading over him, Peeta made the mistake of trying to cross the kitchen to get to her, to put himself last again in an effort to comfort her first. Feeling so, so small in the face of his integrity, she pulled away from his outstretched hand, the unspoken treaty of faith for every time she has drawn her curtains closed on him.
Once again, Haymitch is right. His honor is wasted on her.
“Please,” he whispered, pleading with her. “I just wanted to know where your head was at. Now I do. Can you talk to me, Katniss? It’s okay.”
The devil lies in the details, however. His trembling hands, his glassy eyes. It wasn’t okay. Not by a long shot.
So she ran.
Katniss pauses to catch her breath when she reaches the lake. Birds call out above her, their migratory formation moving like a dark arrow ripping through one of Peeta’s treasured sunsets.
At some point in her life, she must have written off the idea of having children. She never had courage in her convictions, but this particular fear runs deeper. Perhaps it was the pain of losing her father at such a young age, or growing up with the Hunger Games lurking around every corner.
Katniss knows, however, that when she lost her was she gave up this idea entirely.
She had hoped that he would understand, that giving him her best attempts at sunshine would be enough to bring him the peace he deserved. Peace she is still trying to find for herself. But that feels impossible now.
Taking several deep, meditative breaths, she focuses. The list of his good deeds starts with the bread, as it always does. Burnt loaves tossed into the rain to save her life. Then, she remembers the pearl, and when he planted the primroses outside her house. Her breath finally evens when she thinks of the burning embers in his eyes when she worked up the strength to tell him, “Real”, and eventually, much later, “I do”.
She’s grown beyond what she thought her life would be so many times in the name of protecting him, loving him. Even without the world watching, she knows that she would still die for him. So what makes this any different? Isn’t the worst supposed to be over?
A girl with dark braids kicks up dust as she runs playfully through the meadow. Her bright blue eyes glisten when she spins a little boy with blonde curls and Seam gray eyes. Katniss allows herself one, bemused smile at the thought that these could be her children, her memories.
The sweet dream is over just as quickly as it came, replaced by images of bombs raining down and crimson blood smearing the snow outside of the President’s Mansion. The blood of children. Her sister’s blood.
This meadow is a mass grave, she reminds herself, chest tightening again as the past screams at her from its crypt. What would I tell the children who play here?
Katniss sinks to her knees, mouth forming around silent cries. Peeta was the one good thing she salvaged after the war, the one person she did not lose.
And now, she will lose him, if he isn’t already long gone by now. Over something she thinks that maybe, with him, she could learn to stop fighting against and want too…
…Once the dueling anxieties of the unknown and her history stop butting heads inside of her and creating a fear older than life itself, that is.
It isn’t until she feels the worn leather of her father’s hunting jacket draped over her shoulders that she allows herself to exhale. The warmth of Peeta's hand as it reaches for hers is welcome this time around. His knuckles have begun to turn violet from bruises, and she curses herself for not being there to help him through the hijacking episode he had to overcome alone.
Their silence is comforting now. It’s the kind of silence where she feels like she’s finally good at saying something to him, the kind of silence he understands that she needs. Together, they say a solemn prayer for everything they have lost.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I know you aren’t ready, and you may never be. But I vowed I would always be yours. I’m not going anywhere. Trust me.”
She sighs, eyes still trained on the ground ahead. She wills the girl with the braids from her fantasy to return to her and show him how hard she is trying.
“Haymitch once told me — years ago, before the Quell — that ‘I could live a hundred lifetimes and never deserve you’. It’s times like these when I think he must be right.”
Peeta chuckles a little at the surly Mentor’s comment, but then his hands are resting on her shoulders, spinning her around to face him. His eyes are hard set in truth.
“Even if we got to live just one of those hundred lifetimes, I’d always come looking for you. Every ounce of bloodshed, brokenness…I would do it all over again for you, Katniss.”
After fifteen years, he still knows exactly what to say to quell the constant, looming sense of danger that lives within her. She kisses him after that, echoing his promise in a quiet act of passion and acceptance.
When she looks back on this moment, she remembers thinking it couldn’t be possible to love him any more than she did when she was kissing him by the lake, gripping his hand and letting him promise his life and every possibility of it to her.
Eleven months later, when the midwife places a screaming baby girl with dark hair and blue eyes in her arms, and he’s sobbing into her shoulder, it’s still his hand that she reaches for. His look of unadulterated joy and pure tranquility mirrors the calm that has finally settled within her after laying eyes on their child.
She realizes that once again, she has so much more to learn from the world the Boy with the Bread has given her.
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And you know that I’d swing with you for the fences, sit with you in the trenches
Give you my wild, give you a child
Give you the silence that only comes when two people understand each other
Family that I chose, now that I see your brother as my brother
Is it enough?
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