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theartofdreaming1 · 3 years

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Slightly paraphrased, but Peeta talking about that moment he developed his crush on Katniss is just too sweet 😊

As usual, my thoughts regarding this week’s prompts and random thoughts on chapters 22-24 are below the cut (sprinkled in some psychology thoughts again).

heart

Honestly, I think the people in Panem would perceive the whole everlark storyline the same way we perceive and react to our ships on tv (desperately wanting to reach through the screen, shoving the characters forcefully together, screaming “And now, kiss!”); especially the Capitolites who barely recognize the tributes (or people in the districts, in general) as people. The people in the districts would definitely view the whole thing more under a “reality tv” kind of lens, questioning how much of the relationship is real or not (we know that Finnick certainly thought that the entire thing was just a spiel, until Peeta hit that forcefield). The time spent in the cave must have been pretty convincing, though.

mind

I think that Katniss is still torn here - On the one hand, she kind of wants to believe that Peeta is actually into her (remember the happiness she felt when Peeta told her how his crush on her began, and it all added up and seemed so real), but on the other hand she’s terrified of that possibility because A) lingering trauma from her mom’s depression in response the Mr. Everdeen’s death, B) Katniss never even considered falling in love, so that’s a sudden unexpected thing to deal with, and C) maybe it’s just for the sake of the Games; and wouldn’t that hurt, getting your hopes up only to learn it was only for show? (How about we ask Peeta about that?)

soul

Yeah, that quote about Peeta only eating stale bread also struck me as quite sad. It just further adds to his understanding how there should be more to life than just survival, though. (One day, I’ll make that post about Peeta, Katniss, and Maslow’s pyramid of needs, I swear! I’ve already gathered some research material)

Chapter 22

My mother’s hand strokes my cheek and I don’t push it away as I would in wakefulness, never wanting her to know how much I crave that gentle touch. How much I miss her even though I still don’t trust her. - Ugh, I can’t... Katniss misses her mom, misses being cared for😢 I’m so glad we’re going to see her patch up her relationship with her mom in CF... On a different note, Katniss craving that gentle touch just perfectly illustrates why she’s so drawn to Peeta, who is generally such a gentle soul (I mean, he’s literally the person stroking her cheek here 😊)

He [Peeta] doesn’t seem angry about my tricking him, drugging him, and running off to the feast. Maybe I’m just too beat-up and I’ll hear about it later when I’m stronger. But for the moment, he’s all gentleness. - As I was saying... 😉

“I’ll go hunting soon,” I say. “Not too soon, all right?” he says. “You just let me take care of you for a while.” - I love them so much😊🥰 And then Peeta makes sure she’s well-fed and hydrated, he rubs her cold feet and tucks her into the sleeping back... and she let’s him! 💗

“He [Thresh] let you go because he didn’t want to owe you anything?” asks Peeta in disbelief. “Yes. I don’t expect you to understand it. You’ve always had enough. But if you’d lived in the Seam, I wouldn’t have to explain,” I say. “And don’t try. Obviously I’m too dim to get it,” he says. - Oof. This exchange here is interesting in many ways: 1) it highlights their different experiences, tied to their different socioeconomic backgrounds, basically, and 2) that Katniss is very much aware of this difference, but we also see hints of her own ignorance here - because Peeta didn’t have to starve in his childhood, she thinks that he can’t possibly understand this level of hardship; but there are other ways in which one can suffer/lack fundamental needs, which brings us to 3) Peeta’s response about being “obviously too dim to get it”; I think this is a clue to his mom being also verbally abusive towards him: she called him “stupid creature” when he burnt those loaves of bread for Katniss and when he’s losing it in the attic of the Justice Building in D11 in CF he is mad that Katniss and Haymitch keep things from him “like [he’s] too inconsequential or stupid or weak to handle them”, which - to me - sounds like he’s tired of being treated that way (i.e. the way his mother treats him)

“I want to go home, Peeta,” I say plaintively, like a a small child. - God, this is a teenager in a murder-arena who feels like wanting to go home is a childish notion instead of a totally legitimate wish for anyone in that situation, regardless of age 😢

It’s not that Peeta’s soft exactly, and he’s proved he’s not a coward. But there are things you don’t question too much, I guess, when your home always smells like baking bread, whereas Gale questions everything. What would Peeta think of the irreverent banter that passes between us as we break the law each day? Would it shock him? The things we say about Panem? Gale’s tirades against the Capitol? - Geez, Katniss, give Peeta some credit here! A) It’s not like Peeta can walk around District 12 talking publicly about the injustices happening there - she and Peeta hadn’t even talked with each other before the reaping, whereas Gale is her best friend who rants to her while they are outside the confines of D12 and B) Peeta is literally the one who introduced the whole “not a piece in their Games”-idea to her; why would he be clutching his pearls over Katniss and Gale’s irreverent banter?! Just because Peeta didn’t live on the brink of starvation (she again brings up how his house smells like bread and - at this point - still thinks that the family running the bakery actually gets to eat what they produce just like that), doesn’t mean he doesn’t see how shitty life in D12 is - he can still want better conditions for those who are worse off than him!

“I did do the right thing,” I say. “No! Just don’t, Katniss!” His grip tightens, hurting my hand, and there’s real anger in his voice. “Don’t die for me. You won’t be doing me any favors. All right?” - Well, we’ll see this song and dance again in CF...

And while I was talking, the idea of actually losing Peeta hit me again and I realized how much I don’t want him to die. [...] And it’s not about what will happen back home. And it’s not just that I don’t want to be alone. It’s him. I do not want to lose the boy with the bread.” - I wish CF Katniss would remember this moment when she is questioning her motives about saving Peeta’s life in the arena - You. Care. For. This. Boy! You. Value. Him. For. Who. He. Is!!!

This is the first kiss that we’re both fully aware of. [...] This is the first kiss where I actually feel stirring inside my chest. Warm and curious. This is the first kiss that makes me want another. - Whoo! Is it hot in here or is it just me? 😉

I’m struck by his immediacy now. As we settle in, he pulls my head down to use his arm as a pillow; the other rests protectively over me even when he goes to sleep. No one has held me like this in such a long time. Since my father died and I stopped trusting my mother, no one else’s arms have made me feel this safe. - He makes her feel safe in a murder-arena!!! 😭 This is the kind of stuff that makes everlark just a top tier romance, tbh

Peeta telling Katniss about his crush starting on their first day of school 🥰😭 - and her reaction to it... For a moment, I’m almost foolishly happy - yes, because you have a crush on him, too! - and then confusion sweeps over me. Because we’re supposed to be making up this stuff [...] So, if those details are true... could it all be true? - YESSSSSSSS!!!

“You have a... remarkable memory, “ I say haltingly. - as a severely socially awkward person... I felt that lame response in my bones 😅

“You don’t have much competition anywhere.” And this time, it’s me who leans in. - God, this would be such an amazing moment if it didn’t get tainted by that immediate sponsor gift, which just serves to muddle Katniss’s feelings with her sense of survival, further complicating her relationship with Peeta... *sigh*

Chapter 23

“What was that you were saying just before the food arrived? Something about me... no competition... best thing that ever happened to you...” “I don’t remember that last part,” I say, hoping it’s too dim in here for the cameras to pick up my blush. “Oh, that’s right. That’s what I was thinking,” he says. - Peeta is the master of being a cheeky little shit and adorable flirt at the same time

“So, since we were five, you never even noticed any other girls?” I ask him. “No, I noticed just about every girl, but none of them made a lasting impression but you,” he says. - I appreciate that while Peeta has had a crush on Katniss forever, he clearly didn’t spend the entire time pining after her, oblivious to the rest of the world - he has a life outside of Katniss Everdeen, but ultimately, it all lead back to her

A disturbing thought hits me. “But then, our only neighbor will be Haymitch!” “Ah, that’ll be nice,” says Peeta, tightening his arms around me. “You and me and Haymitch. Very cozy. Picnics, birthdays, long winter nights around the fire retelling old Hunger Games tales.” “I told you, he hates me!” I say, but I can’t help laughing at the image of Haymitch becoming my new pal. - Laugh all you want, this is going to end up being your future anyway 😄

He [Haymitch]’s at something of a disadvantage because most mentors have a partner, another victor to help them whereas Haymitch has to bready to go into action at any moment. Kind of like me when I was alone in the arena. I wonder how he’s holding up, with the drinking, the attention, and the stress of tring to keep us alive. - Katniss is already worrying about her “new pal”, I see ;)

Maybe he [Haymitch] wasn’t always a drunk. Maybe, in the beginning, he tried to help the tributes. But then it got unbearable. It must be hell to mentor two kids and then watch them die. - Honestly, that sounds absolutely awful...

Poor, Katniss, when she learns of Thresh’s death :( - But no one will understand my sorrow at Thresh’s murder. - It’s horrible how compassion and basic human decency gets construed as ‘weakness’ in the world of Hunger Games (esp. the Capitol)

Then I escape into sleep, comforted by a full belly and the steady warmth of Peeta beside me. - Honestly, I think a word analysis of THG-series could be interesting; how often does Katniss mention “warmth”, “steady/steadiness” “safe/safety/security” in connection with “Peeta”?

“We make a goat cheese and apple tart at the bakery,” he says. “Bet that’s expensive,” I say. “Too expensive for my family to eat. Unless it’s gone very stale. Of course, practically everything we eat is stale,” says Peeta [...] Huh. I always assumed the shopkeepers live a soft life. And it’s true, Peeta has always had enough to eat. But there’s something kind of depressing about living your life on stale bread - Katniss is starting to realize that the lives of the merchants isn’t a cushy as she thought; also, in a way, we see a “prettier” version of how Panem treats the districts overall -> feeding the districts just enough that they can do their work (plus/minus a couple of people who’ll die of starvation, but at a small, for Capitolites insignificant margin), but not so much that they are in good shape to rebel; here, the merchants of D12 have just enough that they can live a “decent” life (they know it could be worse -> the Seam), but they don’t have enough to live a free, comfortable, self-determined life either. This also just further drives a wedge between the inhabitants of D12 (the merchants won’t want to rebel because they don’t want to get ‘demoted’ in their lifestyle, starving like the people from the Seam, and the Seam folk feel resentful towards the merchant people, while also not having the resources to rebel, due to their awful socioeconomic conditions)

What would be my life like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I’m not really sure who I am, what my identity is. - It’s so sad who Katniss has been so consumed with ensuring that her most base needs are fulfilled that she barely has had the time to really figure out who she is and what she wants from life (If we’re talking Maslow’s pyramid of needs, Katniss would primarily be stuck on the lowest tier 😢)

At least, we’ll be friends, I think. Nothing will change the fact that we’ve saved each other’s lives in here. And beyond that, he will always be the boy with the bread. Good friends. - Honestly, Katniss counting on being good friends with Peeta after the Games is the highest honor she can bestow on him at that moment (she’s so into him, lol); of course, knowing that their relationship is going to be a bit rocky once they’ve come back makes this thought a little sad... but we also know they’ll make up (and out ;) in the future

Peeta licking his plate and blowing a kiss out to Effie is such an adorable goofball-moment 😊

I cover his mouth with my hand, but I’m laughing. “Stop! Cato could be right outside our cave.” He grabs my hand away. “What do I care? I’ve got you to protect me now,” says Peeta, pulling me to him. - This moment would be so cute (also, Peeta’s so confident in Katniss’s skills to protect him, which is adorable - toxic masculinity who?) but... Ugh, he’s just so giddy here, it kind of breaks my heart for when he learns later that (at least some) of Katniss’s reactions were just for show

“If we want food, we better head back up to my old hunting grounds,” I say. “Your call, Just tell me what you need me to do,” Peeta says. - Love how Peeta’s always ready to follow Katniss’s lead :)

Ideally, I’d dump Peeta now with some simple root-gathering chore and go hunt [...] “Katniss,” he says. “We need to split up. I know I’m chasing away the game.” [...] “Show me some plants to gather and that way we’ll both be useful.” - Teamwork! If it weren’t for Katniss worrying for Peeta’s safety, they’d be on the same page here

“What if you climbed up in a tree and acted as a lookout while I haunted?” I say, trying to make it sound like very important work. “What if you show me what’s edible around here and go get us some meat?” he says, mimicking my tone. - I really like how Peeta’s challenges Katniss here; he doesn’t just go along with everything she says, while still being quite reasonable

I feel like I’m eleven, again, tethered not to the safety of the fence but to Peeta, allowing myself twenty, maybe thirty yards of hunting space. [...] I allow myself to drift farther away, and soon have two rabbits and a fat squirrel to show for it. - I don’t know, but Katniss feeling tethered to Peeta makes me think of Mary Ainsworth’s attachment theory, according to which children with a secure attachment to their primary caregiver use their “attachment figure as a safe base to explore the environment”... Of course, Ainsworth’s Strange Situation was conducted with young children, but attachment styles are supposed to influence the relationships we form with people in our later lives as well (including romantic relationships)... I dunno, just a random association that popped into my brain 😅

Chapter 24

Peeta’s a whiz with fires, coaxing a blaze out of the damp wood. - Heh, Peeta sure knows how to handle fire, huh, Katniss (or should I say: Girl on Fire?) 😏

I order him into the sleeping bag and set aside the rest of his food for him when he wakes. He drops off immediately. I pull the sleeping bag up to his chin and kiss his forehead, not for the audience, but for me. Because I’m so greateful that he’s still here, not dead by the stream as I’d thought. - Aww, this is so sweet (and domestic)!

It’s funny. I feel almost as if it’s the first day of the Games again. That I’m in the same position. [...] But no, there’s the boy waiting beside me. I feel his arms wrap around me. - They are a team! Katniss doesn’t have to face the horrors of the Games alone anymore! It keeps boiling down to this.

#thgagain #thg #hunger games #katniss everdeen #peeta mellark #thg meta #my sketches and drawings #everlark

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rainsongdean · 3 years

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you’re always golden to me

post-mockingjay / pre-epilogue everlark healing together, appreciating the sunset, and maybe even falling in love

"We should head back before it gets dark." Peeta's words rang out in the open air between them, but they were not enough to pull Katniss from her trance-like state.

It had been a rough day. Not enough so to be classified as a bad day, seeing as Katniss had found the motivation to move from the bed to the couch at some point in the afternoon. Now, though, watching the clouds paint watercolors in the sky seemed to bring her back to life. She was encapsulated by the sight.

"Not yet," she eventually spoke, her voice somewhat hoarse from not using it for a while. "I want to stay until it's over. Besides, we could walk home blindfolded from here."

It was true. Katniss had discovered the hill nestled in the woods behind Victor's Village not long after returning from the Capitol. She found solace in being embraced by the wilderness rather than being suffocated in her old home, so when she accidentally stumbled upon the tall mount that overlooked the wide plains and open sky, she knew she had found what she had subconsciously been searching for.

It had taken a few months before she brought Peeta to her secret spot. He'd only returned to District 12 a few days before she had found the hill, and they both needed some time to warm up to each other again. But one day, after suffering through a particularly vivid flashback that ended with him handcuffed to one of Haymitch's spare cages for his geese, Katniss figured it would do them both good to escape into the forest for a while.

That was the first night they watched the sunset from the hill. It had been slightly uncomfortable, sitting inches apart on the dewy grass, no attempt at conversation made by either party. Eventually, Peeta suggested they return home to make dinner before it got too late, but Katniss insisted that she could tell by the shape of the clouds that they would put on an impressive show.

As usual, she was not wrong.

It was the most vibrant spectacle either of them had seen - far more breathtaking than any Capitol party or fireworks display. Sure, they had both watched the sun go down in 12 before, but their view had always been clouded by the thick layer of dust in the air from the mines or obstructed by the cluster of buildings stacked practically on top of one another. Here on their hill, nothing stood between them and the sky. Beyond that, the best part was they got to share it together, just the two of them.

Since that night, the pair made an effort to hike the two-mile trek to the hill at least once a week, though they typically found themselves there more often than that. Katniss still liked to visit the spot alone, sometimes using the safe space to speak aloud to Prim or Finnick and imagine what they would say back. Other times she just enjoyed the silence.

Peeta, too, ventured to the hill a few times by himself. He had tried on several occasions to paint the landscape, and while he was able to perfect the morning glow and mid-afternoon sun, he couldn't capture the colors of nightfall that he most desired to paint.

Despite the significance that the holy ground held for each of them individually, neither one could deny that they preferred to visit the hill together. Katniss had been unofficially living with Peeta for weeks now, and they even shared a bed most nights, but there was a different breed of intimacy that came with being in the woods, nestled in their own little corner of the universe.

"Fine," Peeta sighed contentedly, breaking the silence again. "We can stay as long as you'd like." With that, he leaned toward the picnic basket they had brought and reached in, shoving aside the empty containers that once held a selection of berries, cheeses, and breads to reveal a neatly folded fleece blanket he had stashed in the bottom. "I came prepared," he announced with a sense of pride.

Katniss briefly pulled her gaze from the view for the first time since the sun had begun its descent to offer Peeta a small smile of gratitude. The gesture warmed his heart with the blaze of ten thousand sunsets.

Taking care to wrap the soft cover around their legs, Peeta pulled the fabric up to their chests and then eased his back to the ground until he was laying horizontal on the hill. Katniss followed suit so they were both engulfed by the blanket.

Their new angle only served to better showcase the colors stretching endlessly above them. One hue in particular transported Katniss back to a seemingly ancient memory of the two of them.

"Orange. Muted... like a sunset." Katniss didn't break her eye contact with the sky but smirked to herself as she spoke.

Peeta nudged her shoulder playfully in response, easily picking up on what she was referring to. Their conversation on the train about favorite colors was one of the first to come back to him after he had been rescued from the Capitol. Shifting slightly toward Katniss, he reached out and twisted his finger gently around a stray strand of hair that had escaped from her braid. "You're so poetic when you quote me," he mused sarcastically.

"Well, your choice of favorite color is much more poetic than Effie’s choice of wig," she quipped. It was ironic how some of her and Peeta's best conversations had happened in the midst of some of the worst times of their lives. And yet, there they were: safe and relatively happy, just two kids trying to piece themselves back together with some pastel paints, cheese buns, and hidden hills. It may not have been anything profound, but it was living, and Katniss figured that, for time being, that would be enough.

She inhaled deeply, trying to absorb the moment. They had reached the peak of the sunset when every particle in the air seemed to glisten from the giant star's final attempt to remain on the topside of the world. There was only one word to describe it.

"Everything is golden."

And, for an instant, it was.

But as the sun succumbed to the pull of dusk, the raging reds and oranges that had scorched the sky swiftly turned to delicate pinks and purples, paving the way for the black of night.

It was then that Katniss realized Peeta had been uncharacteristically quiet, his sunset commentary usually being much more prolific than hers. When she turned her head to the left to face him, she found he was already staring back at her, still toying with her hair. His deep blue eyes twinkled like he knew a secret and was about to let her in on it.

When they first met, that kind of look from Peeta overwhelmed her. Sometimes Katniss would catch him staring at her like she carried the world in her hands, or spun threads of gold with her words. It puzzled her, annoyed her, and at times even enraged her. But after his hijacking, it had been so rare for that young, innocent Peeta to reappear and give her that look which spelled out his love for her so plainly on his face, and she had grown to cherish it.

"I change my mind." For the third time that night, Peeta's voice sliced open the veil of silence that covered them.

Katniss abruptly rose to a sitting position, an expression of confusion clouding her face as she leaned over Peeta's resting form. "What do you mean?"

"I change my mind," He repeated calmly, shrugging as if the answer to her question was obvious. "The sunset isn't my favorite shade of orange anymore."

Katniss bit her lip and furrowed her eyebrows, causing the wrinkles on her forehead to deepen. Peeta could tell she was trying to keep herself from challenging him, so he decided not to torture her any longer.

"You are my favorite shade of orange," he reached his hand up to caress her cheek, easing away the signs of worry that had risen on her face. "You, sitting here with the sun reflecting in your eyes, your skin glowing in the light." He lowered his voice to a whisper and retracted his hand, slowly guiding Katniss's head to rest on his chest so she could hear his heart beating. "The way you make me feel like I'm on fire inside, all the time."

Girl on fire. The words echoed in his mind and, although he did not dare speak them, he internally admitted they rang true. And it was in moments like those, as he held her under the night sky with millions of stars blazing above them, that he saw Katniss burn the brightest.

"Oh, shut up," she exhaled, turning away from him in an attempt to conceal the blush that had overtaken her smiling face, but Peeta didn't have to see it to know it was there. "You're so cheesy."

"Hey now," he feigned a hurt expression, "I thought you liked my cheese."

Katniss couldn't hide her outburst at his nonsense and they both fell into a fit of laughter together. They hadn't spoken much about what exactly their relationship status was at the moment, hesitant to put labels on anything, but he still wanted her to know how he felt about her. And while Katniss had never been proficient in using her words to convey her love, the way that she clung to Peeta, burying her head in his arm while gasping to regain her breath from laughing so hard, told him everything he needed to know.

"Come on, we should really head back before Haymitch gets worried." Peeta attempted once again to persuade Katniss to return home after they had both calmed down. His stomach was beginning to growl - the small rations of their picnic earlier weren't nearly enough to tide over his appetite until morning - and now that the sun had set, he'd much rather snuggle up with Katniss on their couch than on the cold, hard ground. And besides, while he didn't really think their mentor would be waiting up for them, he figured the argument might be enough to persuade her.

"Seeing as it's past 3 p.m., I think it's safe to say that Haymitch is passed out on his couch," Katniss countered, but her actions said otherwise as she began to gather herself up off the ground. Peeta knew she had a soft spot for the old man.

It took them a little over half an hour to walk home, leisurely following the path that their own footprints had created over time. Upon entering the house, Peeta made a beeline to the kitchen to heat up some leftover stew from the night before. While he ate, Katniss headed to Haymitch's house, opening the unlocked door to find him asleep in his living room as she had predicted. She pried the half-empty bottle from the arm that hung off the couch and set it on a nearby table before turning the lights out and closing his front door behind her.

She had recently made a habit of checking in on her friend, especially during the weeks when Effie travelled back to the Capitol for work. She knew he had done the same for her countless times. Haymitch never seemed to question why he would sometimes wake up with a blanket draped over him or a pillow propped beneath his head, and Katniss didn't plan on bringing it up. Like most things between the two of them, it went unsaid.

Later that evening, tucked under the covers of Peeta's bed - their bed - Katniss felt more at ease than she did most nights. Maybe it was the serenity of the particularly striking sunset, or maybe it was Peeta's roundabout confession of the feelings he still had for her. Either way, she was pleasantly content.

On the other side of the mattress, as Peeta danced on the cusp of sleep, his mind dragged him back to something Katniss had said on the hill. Everything is golden. He knew what she meant; that the landscape had been blanketed by the radiance of the sunset. But he felt it was true in another sense, and that maybe this new phrase was an even more appropriate way to describe the true essence of Katniss Everdeen.

Before drifting off herself, Katniss heard Peeta mumble one last line of admiration, causing her to fall asleep with a smile ingrained on her lips.

"You're always golden to me."

#the hunger games #katniss everdeen #peeta mellark #everlark #katniss and peeta #one shot #haymitch abernathy #effie trinket #catching fire #mockingjay #thg #hunger games #everlark fic #everlark fanfiction #everlark drabble #thg fanfic #drabble #primrose everdeen #finnick odair

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hutchhitched · 3 years

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I’m a week late to the game, but I’m excited to join this discussion. I’ve read the books multiple times, but it’s been a long while. Thanks to @everlarkedalways for hosting. Here are thoughts and musings on Chapter 1.

Katniss wakes to a cold bed. For the person who becomes the Girl on Fire, this is not a good beginning.

Katniss passes through a few gates to get to the meadow, something I didn’t remember from previous readings. The barriers that are set up around the district seem excessive, but that oppressiveness likely does lead to apathy. We know that constant persecution and systemic racism causes trauma in minority groups. It seems logical that the citizens of District 12 have suffered a lot of that.

Katniss is a rebel, even though she tries to convince her audience that she’s not. There’s been a lot of talk in the fandom that Katniss is a reluctant rebel and leader, but she says in the first chapter that she’d said plenty of things that could have gotten her in trouble when she was younger. It was only after seeing her mother’s response to her words, that she learned to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself. Since Gale’s frustrated with Katniss’ lack of interest in resisting the Capitol once he learns of the uprising in District 8, it’s interesting that she was a rebel even before she met Gale. I imagine she and her father spent a lot of time talking in the woods. Likely, he encouraged her to speak her mind and think about what she believed (also likely, without overtly encouraging her to be rebellious). If that’s true, her father equipped her to survive in more ways than simply teaching her how to hunt. He also helped her think about societal problems and how to combat those. This is a little head canon mixed with canon, but I have no regrets.

There’s imagery of slavery in the descriptions of food and labor. Each citizen is provided grain and oil by the Capitol. In the antebellum slave system, slave owners were responsible for clothing, feeding, and sheltering their slaves in exchange for labor. Food rations were wholly inadequate, often consisting of small amounts of corn. No meat, no dairy, no sugar. Basically, slaves were expected to subsist on cornmeal. Slaves were almost always malnourished and on the verge of starving. As a result, child mortality was 50%. There’s no mention of high a high infant mortality rate in Panem, but I’d bet good money on it being true.

Gale says at one point that it’s in the best interest of the Capitol to keep the citizens separated. He’s referring to the merchant class vs. the miners (those who don’t have to take out tesserae and those who do), but the Capitol has also separated Panem’s citizens into districts. That, added to the gates through which Katniss has to pass to go into the woods, demonstrates a concerted effort to divide and conquer.

In Panem, the populace seems to be divided mostly over class. There is little mention of gender (other than tributes who are male and female being reaped), but there is nothing in the books (that I remember) that says women are exempt from working in the mines. Slave women were also expected to labor in the fields, so gender is irrelevant to some degree in Panem (more on that in later chapters). There is also very little mention of race. Katniss says that her mother and sister stand out with their blonde hair and blue eyes, but those are not necessarily racial features to Katniss. Personally, I think Collins did this intentionally. Our society is hard-wired to see race; thus, we do when we read the books. Katniss doesn’t seem to because race doesn’t appear to matter as much as class, at least in chapter 1. Panem’s main divisions are a result of class issues based on socio-economic status.

Side note: I’m not trying to argue that Katniss is white (northern/western European in ancestry). Nor am I arguing that race is not an important topic. I think Collins is being subtle, and I think it works in this context. Because Collins doesn’t define her characters that way, it allows for us who read the books to discuss racial identity amongst ourselves (and there has been a lot of it—Remember the backlash over Rue’s casting? Remember the masterlist of Katniss as a POC that caused such an uproar? Does anyone have a copy of that, btw? I’d kind of like to see what’s on it.). The fact that we as a fandom have that discussion is evidence that race is a systemic issue for us, even if Katniss doesn’t overtly mention it.

In Colonial America, during the Early Republic, and during the antebellum period, the southern hierarchy evolved in such a way as to divide society based on race. It was imperative to the elite planters to divide and conquer based on race instead of class. Since 30 to 50 percent of the population in slave states was in the poor white class and there were four million slaves in the United States when the Civil War began in 1861, it was vital that the relatively small number of slave owners control the rest of the population that vastly outnumbered them. The planter elite (those who owned 50 or more slaves) made up less than three percent of the total population. Only about 30% of the South’s white population owned one or more slaves. That meant that 70% of the white population and four million slaves and 500,000 free blacks had to be controlled by the minority ruling class. That’s a massive imbalance.

Slave codes and black codes before the Civil War and black codes and Jim Crow laws following it created the climate on which this racial hierarchy was based. Slaves and free blacks were not allowed to carry guns, testify against whites, serve on juries, and so on. Slaves could not be in possession of a gun or ammunition, wear material worth over certain amount (resulting in cotton and muslin for slaves and silks and satins as clothing for whites), make over a certain amount of money, learn to read, and consume alcohol. While many poor whites suffered economically the same way slaves did (and were sometimes materially worse), they had privileges slaves did not. As a result, whites could “comfort” themselves by saying, “I may be poor, but at least I’m white.” This problem was exacerbated because poor whites who couldn’t find jobs believed that slaves stole their employment from them (They’re taking our jobs!). That thinking continued after the Civil War, too, and is at the foundation of white privilege today. In Panem, the citizens are divided along class lines, but everyone lacks the necessities the same way poor whites and slaves both lacked food and adequate clothing and shelter prior to the Civil War (and beyond).

That’s a lot of meta for one chapter. Onward! Thanks for hosting this re-read. It’s been a while since I sat down with the books.

#thgagain #the hunger games #the hunger games meta #thoughts

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warriorlid14 · 3 years

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Please do elaborate

OKAY SO PACIFISM IS A PRIVILEGE!!

Like, okay. Obviously we all want to live in a peaceful society where no one gets hurt and all problems are solved with discussions and civility.

But that assumes that everyone is civil.

So this post was about the hunger games, right? We have a society where citizens are basically slaves. Where if you speak up, you will be killed. Where if you try to feed your family, you will be beaten (hi Gale). Where you have no freedoms. No rights. No voice.

How are people supposed to react? By sending angry letters to Snow? By knocking on the doors of your fellow citizens? No. The only thing they could do was rebel. Was fight back.

"But people died!" Yeah, and that sucks. That really, really sucks. But what was the alternative? People were already dying. People were already suffering. There was no quality of life. Kids were born into extreme poverty, and if they were unlucky, they starved to death or were drafted into the murder games. If they were lucky, they got to live a full what, 60 years maybe, working to their deaths.

Seriously, what do you expect them to do?

But ok, let's talk about Gale. Because of course this was about Gale, my favorite revolutionary boy.

Because there's this idea that Gale isn't kind. That he isn't compassionate or is heartless. And for a second, let's put aside everything he does for Katniss, her family, Peeta, and his district during the course of the series. Why do you think he's fighting, y'all?

Because he's bloodthirsty? Because he gets a kick out of killing people? For shits and giggles? No. It's because he cares. He cares very much about his world, about his district, about society, about random strangers who have been hurt by the Capitol. This is the same kid who, long before Katniss was reaped and he was whipped and his district was destroyed, was out in the woods ranting about justice and about the cruelties the Capitol was committing.

And, okay, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that hatred and revenge wasn't a factor in all of this. Or that he didn't let it get in the goal of justice. But like, this is a kid who has suffered and struggled his entire life. Whose dad was killed. Whose best friend was taken by the Capitol twice. Who was tortured for trying to feed his family. Who watched his home and his district burn to the ground. What, are we saying that we personally wouldn't be angry if even one of these things had happened to us?

Did he go too far at times? Yeah, sure. Or well, he wanted to, but let's not forget that his plan to kill everyone in the Nut was shut down by the adults in the room because they recognize that you shouldn't let angry, traumatized teenagers make that decision. (Also, side note, but pet peeve of mine: can we pls stop acting like the Nut was some residential area? The Nut was a military base. The Nut was responsible for the aerial strikes that killed thousands upon thousands of people. They had to take it down to win the war. To, ya know, stop thousands of more people being murdered. And by the time Gale went to the D2, the rebels were out of options. And yes, obviously, his suggestion to cut them completely off was callous, but it was shut down because the adults in the room knew that he was reliving the worst moment of his life "We watched children burn to death and there was nothing we could do!")

Gale was trying to end the war and free himself, his family, his country from an oppressive regime. I'm sorry that his way of fighting wasn't, like, hugging peacekeepers and trying to convert them. Because, hey, that's not how fighting oppression works. At least not when society is as far gone as Panem.

Katniss is right when she says that at some point you have to turn around and fight back. Hell, even Peeta was like "yeah no, I'll probably kill if I have to". Because, yeah, I'm sorry, but the stakes at hand were um... let's see, more children drafted into murder games. Uhhh more people dying. More horrific work conditions and atrocities. Uhhh all the characters we love dead. Because, seriously, what do we think was going to happen if they lost the war? Things were going to be better? Snow was going to pardon all of the rebels? Losing wasn't an option. So you best believe Gale was trying very hard not to lose.

Also, okay, this idea that Gale hates all capitolites? I mean, partially true. But it's not about being a Capitolite. He was perfectly fine working with Plutarch and Cressida and the capitol rebels. He didn't love the prep team (for obvious reasons. That's a whole other rant that someone can ask me to get into later) but he also tolerated them and tried to be civil because they weren't a threat (and also for Katniss). Do you know who he does hate? Those working for the oppressive regime.

It's just- someone fighting for their liberation, even if they retaliate with violence, is never on the same grounds as their oppressors. And i know that this has turned into an incohesive rant, but the reason all this discussion about Gale makes me so angry is because stuff like this happens in real life all the time.

I mean, I know it's unfair, but what I hear when people go "but Gale is so angry :/ " is people telling minorities to shut up and that their struggles aren't that bad. (Because, quick reminder that Gale is a POC). it's people going "I support BLM, but destroying property is never the answer".

Sometimes you have to fight back. Sometimes you can't afford to sit back and do nothing because going so means living in subpar conditions. And if you can afford it, if that doesn't affect you, then that's a privilege.

#pls feel free to add to my incoherent rant #gale hawthorne #thg #the hunger games

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beautifulpaxiel · 4 years

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Thoughts on Mockingjay...

So I’ve been stewing on this for a few days now and I finally had to get it out.

Over the weekend, I finished up listening to the audiobooks as read by Tatiana Maslany, and I have a few things to say, particularly in regard to Mockingjay.

But first - how is Tatiana Maslany not a bigger star?!

Not only because of the audiobooks - which she absolutely NAILED (I actually replayed over and over the bit where Katniss screams at Buttercup because it was so heartbreaking, ugh) - but a woman who can play five different clones in such a way that you forget it is only one actress performing all these different characters because each one is fully thought out and distinct from one another deserves to have ALL the awards and be a MAJOR star.

Okay, got that off my chest. Back on topic. I’m putting the rest of analysis under a cut because it gets pretty long and rant-y.

I know that Mockingjay is probably the least favourite book in The Hunger Games trilogy for many people.

But I would argue it’s actually the most thematically rich of the three. I actually enjoyed reading it more the second time around, because I grasped so much more of Suzanne Collins’ intentions.

Firstly, I’ll address the complaint that a lot of people seem to have about this book - that for much of it, Katniss is a whiny, moping mess.

My answer to this is: I’d be surprised if she weren’t, given what she’s been through! When we open, we see girl who’s been through not one, but TWO Hunger Games. Her mentor who she thought she could trust has lied to and betrayed her, the boy she now realises she’s in love with has been captured (and tortured) by the Capitol, and her whole district (including thousands of its residents) was bombed into oblivion. The latter in retaliation for her blowing up the arena in the Quarter Quell. So Katniss believes - of course - that she has those deaths on her conscience.

Add to this, she’s in District 13, a place that for years she thought didn’t exist, and for a girl whose natural home is in the woods, she finds living underground torturous.

And the events of Mockingjay do nothing to ease Katniss’ mind. In agreeing to be the mouthpiece for the rebellion - at the behest of Coin and Plutarch - she witnesses the bombing of the hospital in District 8.

She witnesses the slow decline of Peeta from health into torture-induced madness via his Capitol-broadcast interviews. Suffers as Gale is part of the rescue mission for the captured victors, thinking she might lose both of them.

Then when Peeta is finally returned to her, he tries to kill her, and as Katniss subsequently discovers, has been twisted into a version of himself that believes she is a mutt, a creature to be destroyed at any cost. She closes herself off to any remaining possibility of a relationship with him, but can find no comfort in Gale, particularly as his ideas about vengeance against the Capitol take a dehumanising turn.

She witnesses the assault on the Nut in District 2 and is subsequently held at gunpoint and then shot. When she is recovering from her wounds, Johanna siphons off her pain medication.

And then she goes to the Capitol, witnesses her squad-mates die on a mission she fabricated, and - worst of all - sees her sister, the one person she has always sworn to protect, get blown up in an explosion that tears Katniss’ skin to shreds. Later, she finds out the method of the explosion was based on an idea partly developed by Gale, irreversibly shattering what was left of their fragile friendship.

I think that just one of those events would be enough to traumatise a person, but to experience all of them?

To a paraphrase a quote from Beetee (originally about Finnick)

“If you knew what she’d been through these last few years, it’s a wonder she’s still with us at all.”

So you say Katniss is being whiny, mopey, depressed etc - yes, you’d be right. But if you read the above, I think she had every reason to be.

Mockingjay may seem an endless parade of death and destruction. Those were my thoughts upon my first reading.

But on my second reading, I realised the broader point Suzanne Collins was trying to make.

Mockingjay has several important themes, but key among them is war. As most of us are all too aware, wars are ugly. Futile. Needless. Senseless. They don’t discriminate between the “good” people and “the enemy”. Women, men, children - war treats them all the same.

And anyway, nobody is all good or all bad. Even Snow, despite the thousands if not millions of deaths he is responsible for (among other heinous crimes), baulks at the idea of taking life without a “specific reason”.

I was gonna say more but I think I kind of ran out of steam so I’ll end it there for now.

Thanks for reading.

#thg meta #katniss everdeen #tatiana maslany #war tw #death tw #ptsd tw

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ilguna · 4 years

Text

Tacenda - Chapter Sixteen (f.o)

Summary: you’ll never truly be free from the Capitol.

Word Count; 2.8k

Warnings; swearing, DEATH MENTION

NOTES: i give reader a last name to fit the world.

–

You cross your arms, staring at the ground. The people around you don’t look nervous, and they’re probably not feeling nervous either. But with your history and speeches given in front of an entire district, you’re more than nervous. You hated it when the governor used to address the entire district.

That means something drastic has happened. He wouldn’t go out there to announce a happy sunday and wish everyone a happy weekend--even though you guys never take weekends off, unless it's for a victor or something important happens in the games. Not even when the new rules had been implemented, did he address District Four.

You suppose things must work differently around here, considering that it is one big, underground bunker. It has one leader, and Coin works as well as anyone can under these circumstances. You can’t imagine she does anything important, besides regulate food and air quality.

You sound sour, and it’s because you hate the days where the district is brought together for news. And considering that there’s so many people here, it’s not just one place to huddle up. A couple of floors at least have people gathered around the sides just to see her. There’s giant tv screens and speakers just to see and hear everything she does and says.

Parallels, have you ever mentioned how much you hate them? You’re not a fan of some nostalgia, and this is one of them. Just like how you weren’t a fan of the Quarter Quell and volunteering in. it’s better than getting picked, that would have been an absolute nightmare in your eyes.

Or when you had looked to Reed and Mox to see the looks on their faces. How they were absolutely blown away that it was happening to you. The first time, it was a shock that you were going in. The second time? Oh god, they were fucking disappointed. You’ve seen that look on Reed’s face before, he gets it from your guys’ dad.

They share the exact same look. They suffer the same silence, and they carry a family burden as if they’re the only ones allowed to hold it. You guess that’s what happens when the second oldest is a crybaby, but still. It took years for Reed to finally trust you with at least some responsibility.

The morning of the first reaping, when Alyssum had cried you awake. You weren’t even allowed to have her in your room for a very long time. And he wouldn’t even leave the house, no matter the chores he needed to take care of outside. It was always an emergency thing if he turned to you. If Caspian’s mom couldn’t take care of it or something.

Anyway, the train station, and being on the train, and the tribute parade, and the training days, and having that god awful, gut-wrenching feeling of knowing that you’re going in again. You had an alliance again, and you had people that didn’t necessarily trust you. You knew things that they didn’t, and it’s the worst part.

Being afraid that they’re just going to kill you for no reason. Just because they’re afraid that you’re going to be the one to do it first. Just knowing that you would be killing people, and struggling to survive and gaining more injuries than you deserve…

You’re just glad that no one came out a winner. No one in that alliance had killed each other and turned back to back. No one had shot first, no one had left. You didn’t have to be crowned a victor again, and be brought on in front of the entirety of Panem to rewatch the entire fucking games.

You think about that constantly. The ‘what if’?

What if Katniss and Peeta had turned on you? What if either of them had tried to kill you, or Finnick or Johanna? What if you had to defend your husband, even if that meant both Katniss and Peeta resulting in death? What if you had to kill the two people that would be leading the country on a fucking rebellion?

And you always came out with an answer. That you would do, what you would have to do.

You would kill people in the alliance if you had to. You would absolutely tear apart the alliance and ruin everything that had been going on. And you would do it unapologetically, because Finnick comes first. Yours and Finnick’s safety comes first, no matter what.

You can admit it all now. Since you’re no longer inside of the games with all of that on the line. You can admit that you hadn’t truly slept until you were on the beach, because you knew that Finnick was right next to you, awake. You had hardly slept next to Finnick that night the fog came.

You would wake up, and fall back asleep at the smallest sound. You’re sure that at some point in the night, you even heard the cannon that signaled Blight’s demise. Every time that Katniss would shift, or Finnick had moved because he was uncomfortable, it forced you awake because you were so utterly terrified.

“Nothing’s wrong, (Y/n).” Finnick tells you, “This is probably a regular thing.”

“Great, so I’ll be miserable at least once a week--” and then you laugh, looking at Finnick, “Just kidding, I’m miserable all the time.”

Finnick gives you a look, clearly not happy with how you’re thinking, but you raise your hands in defeat and even turn to look at Coin. She approaches the microphone like some untimely villain. You don’t understand why she couldn’t have just stood there the entire time.

Everyone shushes each other when they see her. The room is quiet almost immediately.

“Good afternoon,” she begins, “Thank you for interrupting your schedules. They have already adjusted to compensate for the delay. Please, check in with your unit supervisors when you resume work.”

Fortunately for you and Finnick, you two are still on medical watch. You go up there like three times a day to get checked up on, and then you get to spend the rest of the day wandering around. It’s boring, really. You don’t know how you ended up here, with nothing to do. You didn’t spend years of training just to be seen as useless.

“I have an announcement for the citizens of thirteen, and our welcome guests from twelve. Katniss Everdeen has consented to be the face of our cause to help unite the district against the Capitol.”

You look at Finnick the same time he looks at you, “She’s still a teenager.”

“Nothing we can do.” Finnick mutters back, but he looks apprehensive too.

“In exchange, I have promised several concessions. First, we’ll assess all opportunities for the extraction of the victors held hostage in the Capitol. Peeta Mellark--” the crowd is clearly displeased. You look over to see that Katniss is approaching, and you elbow Finnick to get his attention some, “Johanna Mason, Annie Cresta--”

“I made the deal for your family too, (Y/n).” Katniss says.

You look at her, almost like you don’t believe it.

“--Reed, Mox and Alyssum Gallows.” Coin manages to spot you three standing in the crowd, but quickly resumes her speech, “One freed, they will be granted full pardon for any and all crimes committed against the rebel cause. If Katniss Everdeen fails to fulfill her duties, the deal will be off. Thank you for your attention. Please, resume your daily schedules.”

After that, she steps away.

You stare at the spot that Coin just was. Then, you look down at the ground, perplexed. And finally, you stop at Katniss.

You’re careful when you reach out, placing your hand on her shoulder. You don’t want to set her off. There’s a part of your brain that’s been telling you that you’re not in the games anymore, so there’s no need to take these precautions.

You don’t need to move slowly as if a fast motion would set her off. You don’t need to tiptoe on your words, and keep an eye on her at all times. You’re inside District Thirteen, and no matter what happens, she won’t attack you. Especially not now.

“Thank you, Katniss.” You say, removing your hand now, “I appreciate it.” You look towards where Coin was, “But I just have to ask, why?”

“What?” Katniss asks.

You look at her, “What’s your motive for it? Don’t get me wrong, I’m eternally grateful, but don’t tell me this a ‘bottom of your heart’ kindness thing. There’s more behind it.”

You look at Finnick to see that he’s confused. And you have to admit, you’re a little smug that you’ve managed to find a secret before your secret-seeking husband here. It’s one for the books.

Looking back at Katniss, she opens her mouth and then closes it again. She takes a moment like she’s composing herself, “There’s multiple reasons.”

You were right, “And they are?”

“You deserve to be with them again,” she says like it’s obvious, “If I were away from Prim and my mom I would be driven crazy and yet… you're completely composed. You haven’t even complained a single bit—I wouldn’t have known if Finnick didn't mention it.

“It’s also for saving Peeta and I’s life inside of the arena.” She shrugs a little bit, “You sacrificed a lot and you deserve to be reunited. And they deserve to be somewhere safe.”

You open your mouth for a moment to say something, but you stop. Turning to Finnick, you put your hand on his chest, “I’m going to our room, don’t feel rushed to follow.”

He doesn’t let you leave so easily, catching your wrist and pulling you towards him, “What’s wrong?”

“I need a moment.” you tell him, “I’ll be fine.”

You pull away from him after that, and he doesn't’ really make an effort to stop you. Thankfully, the bottom floor has practically cleared already. There’s basically no one, so getting on the elevator is easy. It comes quickly, you step in, pull the guard rail down and then you back up against the wall.

Finnick and Katniss begin talking, but Finnick’s eyes never leave you. You make a face, close your eyes and shake your head. Soon, you’re being lifting, and as you pass the first floor, you’re no longer in sight of him.

With this freedom, you crouch down, pressing the heels of your hands to your eyes. It feels like the entire world has completely collapsed on you again. You don’t want to think about it. You didn’t want to think about them unless you had to.

In this case, it’s not mandatory. You should have just kept your mouth shut and accepted her kindness gratefully instead of some suspicious bitch. Maybe then, it wouldn’t feel like your whole world is circling the drain right now.

You just need to get to the room. You need to get there, so you can sit down and relax and cry it out all alone. It’s not like you can lock Finnick out of the room, you wish it were possible but it’s not. He’ll come to check up on you soon, and you’ll be forced to explain it all to him.

You don’t want his empathy, you want it all to be alright again. You want to be back in your victor house, making pancakes for six. And you want to have Annie, Mags and Caspian’s family over for board games and food exchanging nights. And you want to be out on a boat in the middle of the ocean, fishing again.

Maybe you should have died in that arena. Being dead would definitely be better than this. You wouldn’t have a damn clue about your family, because they wouldn’t be your problem anymore. They would be Finnick’s job to get out, and his to worry about and care for.

It’s not like you can just hand off all that responsibility right now. Because you’re still alive, and breathing, and you’re the one that’s directly related to them, not Finnick. Hell, you’re not even sure if Finnick even feels a part of the family, even after all these years. You guys include him in on everything, because he’s your second half but…

If you weren’t alive right now, Finnick would feel obligated to try and get your family out. Maybe he won’t stick around for very long, just long enough to get them on their feet again. He probably wouldn’t be able to stand it for very long, especially not with watching Alyssum cry. Mox is bearable, but Alyssum would be a whole new level.

You’re not even sure how Reed would respond if you were dead. Had you died inside of that arena, in front of everyone to see… he probably wouldn’t have much will to not resist against the Capitol. Sure, he would want to stick because he’s still there for Mox and Alyssum, but god.

Sometimes it feels like you’re holding the entire family together with glue.

The elevator opens just in time. You push yourself up, and without even looking, you slam right into someone. Two hands grab your arms, steadying both you and them.

You look up to see who it is, and you’re met with Haymitch.

“What happened to you?” Haymitch lets go of you, backing up a little bit.

“I--I…” you laugh a little bit, shaking your head, “Nothing, I’m fine.”

Haymitch raises an eyebrow at you, “Have you ever just thought about letting it out?”

You give him a face, slowly backing up, “What?”

“I’m no genius.” he remarks, “But you’re one bad news away from a breakdown. Talk to Finnick, you two are married.”

You press your lips together, “I can’t.”

“Why?” he asks, you stop moving once he laughs, “You know, you can Katniss are so alike, it’s almost sickening. Besides the looks, of course. The both of you act as if Peeta or Finnick can’t take the news, but that’s what they’re there for.”

Haymitch pauses, looking to the elevator, “You won’t lose him. Talk to Finnick.”

“You don’t even sound like yourself.” you scowl.

He gives you a little sideways smile, “That’s because I’ve been sober for a while. Doesn’t mean I’m not credible.”

He then walks onto the elevator without another word. You don’t dwindle where you stand. You move to the balcony-ish arena with the railing. Leaning over, you can see that Finnick is still standing there with Katniss, but it seems as if the group has grown a little bit. Plutarch has joined them.

Finnick has this certain habit when he speaks, that he’ll move his hands around. Especially when it’s something important. He says it’s for visuals, to draw the people in, and to keep him on track. It’s exactly what he’s doing down there, motioning, getting into the conversation. He’ll let Plutarch talk, and Katniss will look between them.

Occasionally, she looks like she pitches in too.

You move away, and go right back to going to the room. You’ve calmed down some, it must have been the shock of running into Haymitch in the first place. You don’t know if katniss has even seen him just yet. You’ve been here for almost a full week, and that’s the first you’ve known of him.

There’s no one in the way when you finally get to the room. You shut the door completely, and get yourself out of sight. The room is able to be seen through with a window. Off to the left, though, there’s a living room area. It’s private, and you go over there.

Sitting yourself down on the couch, you place your head in your hands. You take in a deep breath, and let it out slowly. A slow inhale, and a very slow exhale when you need it. When it doesn’t end up working, you look up to the clock in the room.

You inhale, holding your breath as you count down from five. You exhale, hold and count down from five, and then you repeat. And you do this over and over. Even when the tears come back and threaten to spill. You keep on with the mandatory breathing.

You can’t cry now. You’ll only allow yourself to cry when they’re finally here, inside the building, safe. You promise to let it all out in front of them. You promise to hold onto them tight and never take them for granted ever again. You promise not to make anymore drastic decisions without weighing their opinion.

You breathe in, but it’s hard because your throat feels like it’s clogged. You grab onto your throat as if that’ll make it better. Your breathing turns ragged.

“Damn it.” You cry, slamming your fist into the couch, “Damn it!”

You just want it to all be okay again. That’s all you want.

#ilguna #finnick odair #finnick odair imagine #finnick odair oneshot #finnick odair fanfic #finnick odair x reader #finnick odair tacenda #tacenda #tacenda chapter sixteen

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allonsysilvertongue · 5 years

Text

Different Page

Hello! I know I've been missing from the hayffie world for ages. I wrote this while bored and I know it won't be as good as what I used to write so pls go easy on me. Also, really excited about that Hunger Games prequel we're getting next year!

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The Ballad of A Drunk & His Lady: Different Page

Twelve was different nowadays.

Effie glanced around, taking in the sight of the train station. It wasn’t as crowded as Four or the City, but there was definitely more people commuting as of late. There was a ticket booth set up to the left of the station’s main entrance which was never there before and it showed one the most glaring development Panem had gone through since the fall of the Capitol – the freedom to travel between districts.

Leaving the station behind, Effie took the familiar route to Victors’ Village. Today in particular, it brought back a rush of memories especially the time she came to Twelve as an Escort for the Third Quarter Quell. She blamed it on the reports she spent the last one and half weeks pouring over for the Council, a task that had been given to her as the only surviving Escort in Panem.

The ringing from a bicycle startled her out of her thoughts. She stopped to give way to the teenage boy with a big basket mounted behind him on his bicycle, carrying bags of flour.

“Thanks, Ms Trinket,” he shouted over his shoulder before disappearing at the next bend to Peeta’s bakery.

She wondered what this week’s special would be at the bakery. It was always something different each time she visited, which she would later on in the afternoon. First, there were other agendas on her itinerary.

Standing at the fountain in the middle of Victors’ Village, Effie took a deep breath before crossing the threshold to the run down, familiar house. Haymitch had adamantly refused to repaint the exterior no matter what she said. It had now become an amusing point of contention between them, amongst other things. At least though, the overgrown weeds were under control so Effie took that win.

She knocked and waited patiently, knowing full well that Haymitch usually takes his time to answer the door.

“Good morning, Haymitch,” she greeted him with a warm hug.

He grunted in response but brought his arms around her before stepping back to allow her in.

“How have you been?” she asked politely, taking off her coat and scarf.

“The same,” he shrugged, an answer he gave her each time.

Effie tutted in disapproval.

“Perhaps a trip will do you good, as I have often suggested.”

She watched him wave her suggestion away. Haymitch ambled over to the kitchen, limping slightly. It pained her to see him this way but he seemed to have accepted his bad hip from the horrible fall he suffered last winter. The two weeks he spent in the hospital in the City had been a stressful two weeks for her before he was eventually cleared to return to Twelve and she could once more breathe a little better.

He never walked the same since but he still treated her the same, and that was all that mattered.

Effie settled down on the chair she had marked as hers, watching him quietly put the kettle to boil. He took her favourite strawberry teabag from the cupboard above him and set it on the tea cup.

“Have you heard of the plans they have for Four?” she asked.

“The ones in the paper? Yeah, read about it. It’s stupid.”

She couldn’t help but chuckle. Of course he would think that of a carnival.

“I think it will be fun,” she countered, taking the tea cup from him. It was interesting how domestic they have become since the war ended. It was a shame though, she thought, that she was too scarred by the war for them to be anything more. “We are excited for it.”

“Hmm?” he raised an eyebrow.

“Annie, Jo, Finn and myself,” she clarified. “I will be inviting the children when I see them tonight, and of course, you are more than welcome to join if you are so inclined.”

He made a face and pushed a plate of sponge cake in her direction. She nodded her thanks but did not touch it. Knowing him, it could have been from a few days ago and she was much too polite to be checking it for moulds in front of him. It was best to just stay away from it altogether.

They stayed silent with Effie sipping her tea and Haymitch, his coffee. She enjoyed this monthly visit to Twelve, something she had been doing for the past three years since the war ended. They maintained a polite civility, often talking about Katniss and Peeta, about Johanna and Annie as well as her baby in Four. They talked about her work in the City but they never talked about them. Never.

Not since he tried that one time and she completely regressed into herself, throwing away six months’ worth of therapy out of the window. It had scared him off, and he would rather have her mentally healthy and physically well even if she would never become his rather than have her falling apart.

She wasn’t sure if they were both contented with this life, but at least she was. And she wanted to allow herself just this one time to be selfish.

So whenever she was asked, she would always answer that yes, she was happy because it was the truth. She was happy that Haymitch and her were friends; that he seemed to be more open and was able to share more things with her. Maybe that was what they needed; for them to be friends first before anything.

Their friendship was comfortable to her; it was new and yet, so familiar.

So she wasn’t sure if she wanted more. Annie had often asked and she had always shook it off. Being with Haymitch had been something she wanted more than anything else once, a lifetime ago. But now… She was a different person now.

War tended to do that to people – change them.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, leaning back against this chair. “So, you doing okay?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “Oh, speaking of. I have taken the liberty to restock your multi-vitamins.”

As if on cue, he rolled his eyes but took the bag from her nonetheless. It started out with pills for his hip and since he was taking them, Effie took a step further and got him some vitamins for his general health. Sometimes, Effie thought, he had never imagined that he would survive the Quell, then the Rebellion and finally the war that when he actually did survive, he didn’t dare to take this chance at life for granted.

So he began to make an effort to take better care of himself. He would still wait for his shipment of alcohol that would arrive with her every month but it was no longer drinking to drown his sorrows and dull his memories. He drank to keep the shakes at bay; to keep this body from going into withdrawal because at this point, a withdrawal would likely kill him.

It was progress and Effie was more than willing to take that.

“Have you heard…” she began. “Plutarch is dating.”

He choked on his coffee but cocked his head to the side, waiting to hear the gossips she would bring in with each visit. Effie had certainly gotten used to this – this easy friendship with Haymitch.

Perhaps one day, things would be different but she had made no promises to him and he was not expecting anything from her more than this recurring visit and the time she spent with him.

They were both alive and that was all that mattered to each of them.

#hayffie #effie trinket #haymitch abernathy #filed under: the ballad of a drunk and his lady #hunger games fanfic

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catoscloves · 5 months

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i actually do have a math test tomorrow that i need to study for but one thing about the hunger games series that's been making me think a lot lately......... the way katniss interacts with the career tributes is by far one of the most fascinating thing about her characterization and the theme of the books.

katniss has this hatred for them because she believes them to be these vile, bloodthirsty, pampered, brainwashed murderers with no honor (hence her hostility toward peeta after he seemingly chose to ally with them). she very much has reason to hate them, as do most of the oppressed districts. katniss sees the careers as adversaries, since she really has no choice but to.

however, she's not motivated by her hatred, and her actions towards them are more merciful and compassionate than she gives herself credit for. when clove dies, she actually takes the time to note that cato literally begs for her life, for her to stay with him - and this is from katniss, a narrator who tells only the details which are most crucial to her and her family's survival (and, from a narrative construction perspective, crucial to moving the story forward). katniss makes it clear to the reader in thg that she does not want anyone else to die, including cato, whom she has no obligation to care about, someone she despises on principle. katniss shoots cato, but suzanne makes it excessively clear that katniss did so out of pity, as a mercy kill, not as vengeance or a deliverance of justice. because despite the fact that he's not a likeable or good person in her eyes, she doesn't feel any satisfaction or joy in making someone suffer, no matter her opinion of them.

and even though she did not get to know the career tributes well, and more often than not found them unpleasant to deal with at best and sadistic, bloodthirsty people at worst, katniss still took every opportunity to humanize them and honor them as much as she is capable of. it's not an accident that cato and clove, supposedly expendable secondary characters who, in any other series, would have been easily disregarded by the narrative once they outlived their use, were mentioned throughout the book series and as far as mockingjay, which took place two years later. because despite the fact that they were, in her eyes, hateful and violent people, she never saw them as forgettable or expendable or arbitrary, as side characters confined to the background, as nameless bodies that she had to kill. katniss made the effort to remember them as human beings, victims just like her, living under the capitol's thumb.

because the realization that katniss comes to, which is the theme that suzanne has been trying to express throughout the series, is that the capitol is the only villain in this story, the only party responsible for the deaths and atrocities. even the career tributes, who are supposed to be these barbaric and savage brainwashed tools, whom she has little reason to care for, are victims of the capitol's cruelty. as both haymitch and finnick advised her to, she remembered who the real enemy is, and continuously reminded others, including the reader, of this fact. katniss knows that the career tributes, while somewhat complacent, were never the problem, the reason their society was so broken. it was the capitol, and the rich's exploitation of children for their own entertainment, that was always the enemy in this scenario - and katniss, as well as suzanne, spend the whole of the trilogy communicating this message.

#the hunger games #anna reads thg #career tributes #cato and clove #katniss everdeen #cashmere and gloss #etc etc I'm not tagging everyone

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everlarkficexchange · 5 years

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Maps

Author: @wingletblackbird

Prompt 25: I have a song prompt based on Maroon 5’s Maps. It fits Everlark so much. Peeta was there for Katniss in her dark times while she almost gave up on him when he was at his worst down on his knees. But eventually he followed the map that led to her and they got back together. [Anonymous]

A/N: This one shot references the lyrics to Down in the Valley which is an Appalachian folk song I headcanon as being “The Valley Song.” It’s a pretty good song for Everlark too which works quite nicely. There are several variations to it, as is typical of folk songs, I chose the version I felt suited the best.

Rating/Warnings: Just the confused thoughts and epiphanies of Peeta who is wrestling with his hijacking. Very minor coarse language. Should be suitable at least for anyone over thirteen.

Maps

I was there for you

In your darkest times

I was there for you

In your darkest nights

But I wonder, where were you?

When I was at my worst

Down on my knees

And you said you had my back

So I wonder, where were you?

When all the roads you took came back to me

It seemed like he was getting better. Somedays felt good, others bad; sometimes he wasn’t sure. Holistically, they said he was getting better, yet something niggled away at his subconscious. Something he couldn’t reach. In his dreams, he is in the dark reaching for something. He wakes up before he can find it.

Therapy is complex, difficult. There seem to be so many issues, so many fractures. Healing his mind feels like he has two hundred improperly healed bones they need to re-break and reset. The nature of the healing tends to fall in two camps though. First is dealing with the present. Bringing yourself into the present. It took him awhile to do that. It’s easier to live in the could-have-beens. Or just not anywhere children are bombed. But he stamps his feet, touches his face. This is where I am. This is where I live. It’s a harsh cruel world, but it’s still that way even if he lives in his time-loopy brain. Better in the present where he can do something, grasp something, learn to avoid triggers, to handle flashbacks. He’s had enough fake. He’s not there anymore. That’s no longer his reality. Mind over matter. He laughs at the notion when both have been desecrated. So much has been stripped away. He knows he will never get it back. He just needs to know how to move forward. He needs to know what makes him, him. Second camp is dealing with just that. Tracker Jacker venom, even without the torture and hijacking, is designed to target your brain to show your very worst fears. They say it’s driven men mad. Is he mad? Peeta needs to know what his worst fears are–better yet, face them–if he really wants to distinguish reality from shiny. He screams in his sleep and destroys rooms in his rages. He thinks it’s not an inaccurate thing to call him mad. He is in every sense.

It all comes back to Katniss. Everything has to come back to Katniss. Dr. Aurelius stresses that his life cannot revolve around one person, and he knows that’s true. It’s not healthy to exist for a person. You are a person independently, but the hijacking was about Katniss, breaking Katniss, ruining Katniss. He needs to know how the venom would affect that. What would he most fear about Katniss? What did they target?

It’s sadly obvious, especially when they talk about his childhood. The bitter mother who had deigned to have another child in the hopes it might be a girl. It wasn’t. The father who turned a blind eye to the beatings. His brothers who paired up against him, but weren’t particularly close to each other either. The tense politics. Did his mother love him? Did his brothers? His father? He was closest to his father, he recalls.

“Do you think he loved you?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I guess he did, but I often thought it might just be guilt. Like when Mom would take a wooden spoon to me, even a rolling pin, I would get bruised, and Dad would do nothing, but afterwards he would slip me cookies. I wasn’t above taking advantage of it. I knew if Dad saw me bruised up, I’d be more likely to get away with things. If he really loved me though, he ought to have stood up, stopped it. He said he was ‘keeping the peace,’ but there’s no peace in a household like that. He was a coward. Giving me cookies doesn’t make up for it. It was just his way of trying to make himself feel better.”

“People aren’t one-dimensional. It’s quite possible your father felt guilty, especially if it is he who pushed for another child. Likewise, there is no denying he should have stepped in where he saw abuse, but would he have felt guilty if he didn’t care? You said you were closest to him. Did you feel he loved you in spite of the hurt? Can you separate your worth from other people’s actions?”

Ha! They talk it over again and again. He’s only ever partially sold on it. It makes Peeta feel pathetic. That after all he’s been through, all he’s seen and done, all he wants to know is if his Mommy loved him, but it’s important, so important, because it feels like Katniss abandoned him, and used him, and he’s so pathetic he took her scraps while she gave it all to Gale. Used him, abandoned him, tossed him aside like trash, and he the fool who allowed it. Stupid boy. Useless child. They could convince him she wasn’t a mutt, and he could convince himself he didn’t want to be a violent killer, but the hardest thing to shake is feeling worthless. That’s the real fear, and ten times harder to shake when the last thing he remembers after allowing her to bite down on his flesh, saving her life, is her screaming and screaming Gale’s name. And that this happened when he’d deluded himself, again, that maybe she cared, because she didn’t kill him, because she kissed him, because of what Gale said, because she gave him a nightlock pill that was meant for Gale. She’d insisted he take it, closed his hands over it. That feels important, like something just outside his reach. Reaching. Reaching. Reaching. He cannot touch it. Why is it important? It only made sense what she did. It was only fair. She and Gale were together. He was alone. No one to shoot him if need be. But it still feels important. He fixates on it, but nothing. There’s nothing, but the nagging ache. He was a fool. Fooled again by Katniss Everdeen.

He doesn’t hate her anymore. He knows that. He doesn’t believe she was trying to kill him, even in their games. Definitely not in the Quell. He’s seen the footage again and again and again. There was no faking that force field. Gale said that kiss was real. He’s inclined to believe it. There’s no reason Gale would lie about that. Peeta is concerned. Worried. Scared. He knows Katniss is in Twelve, but otherwise nothing. She does not answer calls. There is no response to his letters. He is abandoned. Unloved. Unwanted. Unwanted. Unwanted.

You’re still trying to protect me. Real or not real?

Real. That’s what you and I do. Keep each other alive.

After that I always thought of you as an ally.

Was that all it was? An alliance to keep each other alive? But then why the self-sacrifice? And if she cared enough to die, why wasn’t she here? Why, with the exception of that one time she visited him, has she never come to see him? Why? He protected her; he held her on the train. Those memories the Capitol couldn’t quite touch, just alter his impressions of. He tries to remove the taint of fear, of abandonment, look at it objectively. If she wasn’t just a user, if she cared and trusted him in her bed, and he loved her enough to hold her in the night, why wasn’t she here in his darkest night? Why? Why? Why?

Peeta fills papers with etchings of the word why. Why? Why? In various angry angles. Why? It’s like the last piece of the puzzle. He cannot go home until he knows this, because he does not know to handle the enigma that is Katniss. He will have no peace until he knows, has an answer he can live with. He needs to process it, put it in its place. Was he played for a fool? Or was he–is he still–just a fool in love?

Why?

He watches the footage again about how he told her he heard her sing when they were five years old. His memory of it is… faint. He looks up the lyrics to the Valley Song hoping to jog the memory. Some lines stick out like a sore thumb.

If you don’t love me, love who you please.

Wrap your arms around me, give my heart ease.

Was that it? She loved someone else, and he knew it, but didn’t care? He was content just to be able to hold her? There seems to be a hint of truth in that. There’s no denying Katniss has suffered greatly, and he’d like to think he’s not so heartless as to not try and be there for her. (But shouldn’t she do the same? Couldn’t she just write back? Call? Check up on him? If they were at least friends?) (But she protected him. Didn’t want to be separated from him. Gave him the pill). Distantly he thinks he remembers crying when he listened to the song as a boy, but was that just baseless infatuation with a pretty voice? With the idea of even “Angels in Heaven know I love you”? Or was it merely the words about not being loved back, and being happy with scraps or cookies which resonated with a young, neglected boy? Something else entirely?

Peeta pulls up the footage of Katniss singing about the hanging tree, because if he fell in love with her because she sang, maybe he can find his way back to understanding if he hears her again.

Are you, are you

Coming to the tree

Wear a necklace of rope

Side by side with me.

Peeta listens. It’s undeniable her voice is beautiful, that the birds stop to listen. It sends chills down his spine, but Peeta is an artist and more interested in what lies in her voice, why she chose this song. There’s a desperation in her tone, a resignation, an entreaty, a strange kind of hope, almost a yearning. He cannot say he isn’t affected by it. Was she suicidal even then?

Wear a necklace of rope

Side by side with me

How many people had answered the call and died side by side? He’d heard they’d sung it as they attacked the hydroelectric dam. Was this a call to die together for a cause? To be free? He shakes his head. He’s still missing something. He knows he is. He shuts the recording off, and goes to sleep.

As he dreams he’s haunted by lines of The Valley Song that echo through his head in Katniss’s voice, but sweeter, younger, more innocent…loving.

Down in the valley,

Walking between,

Telling our story,

Here’s what it sings.

A two-braided Katniss Everdeen is holding out her hands to him. Her hands are stained red with berry juice that oozes out of a Nightlock capsule.

“Are you coming to the tree?” She asks and raises her hand to bite down on the pill. He sees his hands rush forward to stop her, but all he sees is older, eighteen year old Katniss Everdeen swinging from a tree. He wakes with a gasp. What the Hell was that?

As is his wont, Peeta sketches his nightmares out. Are you coming to the tree? But Katniss was carrying a pill that oozed juice like berries. He guessed it made sense. The nightlock pills were so named after the stunt he and Katniss had pulled in their first arena. Death and suicide is death and suicide. It all gets muddled in his subconscious. Honestly, as nightmares go, he’s had significantly worse. There is an emotion he felt at the end, when he was reaching for her, he doesn’t recognise. He has to remind himself not to fixate and let it go. It’ll come when it comes. Instead he watches the double suicide scene again.

He’s struck with a new thought as the berries cross her lips. One he’s not sure he’s ever considered before. What if it wasn’t a bluff? Would she really have eaten those berries? He’s not sure, and at this point he’s not expecting any kind of answer from Katniss. He’s alone in this. Maybe this needs to be about how he understands it anyway.

Are you coming to the tree?

Had he? Did he?

He’s not sure. He never is anymore.

She hadn’t been dead in the first arena though, nor condemned to it. Why would she bite? What motive could she have? What gain would there be? He was the one bleeding out, and there’d been nothing for him to lose in biting down on them, especially if he wanted to get her home. The same didn’t hold true for her. She was probably just bluffing. He decides he can’t fault her for that though, at least she tried to get him home too. He knew she had family that depended on her. He can’t fault her for her actions. Not really. At least she’d tried the bluff. Or was she truly suicidal then too? Did it go back that far? Doubtful. She’d fought too hard for that. Maybe she wasn’t even suicidal when she sung Hanging Tree. Maybe it was just a creepy song.

She haunts him every night. After his day is done, his sessions over with, he lies and mulls over the mystery of her. He sees a broken girl. He sees a scared girl. A selfless girl maybe, although with the hijacking that’s hard to accept, but he sees what she did for her sister, for Rue, even for him. He’d think she was just a kind, but human girl who’s been through too much were it not for how she approaches him: There for him, but not really. He cannot help but feel slighted by her. Where was she? The girl who would defend him, and guard him against death, but claims she could shoot him as easily as any other Capitol mutt. There’s some piece to the puzzle missing here, and if he could find it, he’s sure he’d understand this riddle.

Invariably he just plays The Hanging Tree on repeat like a sick lullaby to bring him to sleep. It’s the only footage he has of Katniss he knows for certain wasn’t meant for a propo. It’s his only slice of real. She chose the song of her own accord, for her own reasons. Peeta watches the footage of him warning her not to trust everyone just prior to her going to Twelve, hoping to find a link to the song. He doesn’t see it, and neither does it seem an entirely appropriate response to the destruction of Twelve, unless it’s resignation at the deaths that will come from the rebellion. It’s the song of someone condemned to death claiming freedom, calling another to die for it too. It’s not a concept he’s entirely unfamiliar with. When he’d coded on the table, and they’d brought him back, it had felt like being trapped all over again. He’d have rather been dead. He’d been grateful when Lavinia and Darius had been put out of their misery.

Thoughts of death over capture, death over torture, and listening to the Hanging Tree no less, it’s no wonder his dreams are grim and confusing.

Are you, are you

Coming to the tree?

The two lines repeat poignantly through a dark night. Peeta can’t see anything. He’s running through the forest trying to find…something, someone, reaching… Lightning flashes, and in the illumination he sees the silhouette of a massive tree.

He wakes up.

Peeta devotes most of the rest of the day to painting the lightning tree with strokes of white, yellow, brown, black, and blue. Perhaps it’s fanciful, but he wonders if Katniss was thinking about how they’d been supposed to meet up at midnight when she sang that song. That maybe she’d seen his tortured state in his interview with Caesar and had lamented that he’d been left behind.

…Just not enough to be here after he was brought back. Or even here now. In any capacity. Letters. Phone calls. Nothing. Even when he saved her damn life, proved he wasn’t trying to wrap his hands around her throat, not to kill her anyway, but to save her. That’s the heart of what is bothering Peeta, and the height of his hope. He’d thought he was slowly understanding Katniss Everdeen. He traces the scars where she bit him over and over and over again, because it is proof: Proof he is not only a Capitol mutt, a liability. He was remade to kill her, but when it counted, he’d saved her, stopped her taking that pill. Maybe he is not a monster. Then she screamed and screeched for Gale…

He doesn’t understand. What was Gale supposed to do?

He looks back at his drawings of the first strange dream. The little girl with the berry-pill. She asked him if he was coming to the tree. This girl had wanted to take that pill. She wanted him to take it with her. Katniss had tried to bite down on that pill. She’d also closed his hands over the pill Gale had given him, telling him it was for last resorts, like she’d placed the berries in his hands. Victory or death. Then she’d hugged him, and he’d felt scared, trapped, vulnerable, she was too close to vital organs. She could kill him. But it also felt safe and familiar. Muscle memory had him wrapping his arms around her, fighting through the hijacking. It had felt wisest to separate, but he could feel Katniss’s anxiety. Had they felt that way in the Quell? It’s like something slides into place in his mind, and he remembers her kissing him, saying she’ll see him at midnight. Remembers the anxiety. These aren’t just images on a screen to him anymore. He wonders if this is progress.

There are many avenues to memory. Muscle memory like what happened with the hug had happened only once before with Katniss. When she had kissed him when they’d been running from the mutts. It had felt so familiar, but of course it had, they’d done it often enough. Had she meant it though? Or was it just her using a kiss to get what she wanted? Him in his right mind. He can’t hold mere survival instinct against her, heck it might have even saved his own life if they’d had to shoot him instead, but it doesn’t mean that she meant it. That’s always the problem. Real. Not real. Real. Not real. It had made him feel good in the moment. She’d kissed him even when he was just the Capitol Mutt: The liability. For awhile, he’d thought she’d cared personally.

A lot of things should count for something that don’t seem to.

He really is mad.

After three days of sulking Peeta pulls up the footage of his first interview with Caesar after he was captured trying to find if there was anything more about the Lightning tree moment he’d forgotten, but nothing new comes. “Neither of us knew anything except that we were trying to keep each other alive!“ He’s all but shouting in Caesar’s face. That at least confirms what Katniss was saying about the two of them protecting each other. So he watches the next interview. Again, nothing. Finally, he watches the footage of him warning Thirteen of the attack. He watches it again, and again, and again. It’s futile though. They’d jacked him up so high on venom, his memory of it all is nothing but loopy, if it exists at all. He clearly hadn’t felt abandoned by Katniss in that cell though, not like he does here. (Even though he lost his goddamn leg getting her out of the their first arena, she still doesn’t even have the consideration to answer the questions he sends her.) Is it because he’s ignorant, a fool, or is it something else? Is it because the kiss on the beach was real? Like Gale had implied? Whatever it was, it was strong enough to fight the fear-conditioning enough to talk. He shuts off the projector with a huff. There are no answers here.

Are you, are you coming to the tree,

Where the dead man called out for his love to flee?

Well, she might have been his love once, but that had meant for nothing in the end. She’d visited him once, reluctantly, and hadn’t been very nice. Had had the audacity to snark about kissing Gale too. He’d been asking perfectly reasonable questions too. All things considered he’d been decent, and decidedly not a “dead man” at that, but a living one who needed answers.

Bitch.

He tries to examine every bitter, angry thought like that against the knowledge of his hijacking, but honestly she is a bitch. He gets she’s grieving, but so is he. He lost his whole damn family, and his leg, and his sanity, but if she asked him questions he’d still have the decency to answer. She responds to none of his letters. It’s like she does the bear minimum of human decency, keep each other alive, no kidding, and that’s it. Allies. Allies are together out of need, nothing else. I need you. Yeah, to keep her alive. When the game’s over, the alliance ends. Goodbye. He doesn’t hate her for it. He’s mad, but he doesn’t hate her. She’s a piece of work is all. He was just a fool, and when he gets out of here maybe he’ll go to Four or Seven or Eleven, but he is not going back to Twelve. When he feels guilty about it, remembering she risked her life for him in the Capitol, he reminds himself it’s not more than they all did for each other. Nothing special. He doesn’t owe her a damn thing. Why should he go see her? When she won’t contact him after all he’s done? Hell, she’d have shot him herself if she’d absolutely had too. That kiss being nothing more than a manipulation. It’d be just like shooting another one of the Capitol’s mutts. He tries to forget about her, but truth is all he does is stew in outrage.

He dreams about that kiss-on-the-run again and again and again, and hates himself for it. Not just because he dreams of her, but because sometimes he is unbearably rough with her when he responds which he can only attribute to the hijacking. Well, that or he is extremely angry with her in his subconscious too. It’s only when he has the nightmare he wraps his hands around her neck like he’d done right after his rescue, he reminds himself what a risk she really had taken in kissing him. He is breathing and gasping when he wakes up from it, cold with sweat, and he goes to change his shirt, splash water on his face. When he looks in the mirror with dead eyes staring back he wonders how she knew he wouldn’t have done it. He was close then, even now he feels it within him: The rage that lies sleeping, has always lain there even in childhood. He still fights to reign it in, and used to use wrestling to release the excess pressure of. How had she known he wouldn’t give in to it? How? He falls back into bed a lethargic lump. As he drifts in and out of the realms of consciousness and sleep, he remembers the desperation in her eyes.

“How did you know I wouldn’t kill you?” He asks in the dream.

“I didn’t.” She replies.

Suicidal even then, or just plain insane. Maybe she is as crazy as they whisper about when they decided to send her back to Twelve in exile. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t answer his letters. Maybe she’s a loon. When he falls back to sleep he thinks he hears singing.

Write me a letter,

Send it by mail.

Send it in care of,

The Birmingham Jail.

Maybe he will go back, just once, to check up on her.

He spends the next few days of his free time trying to sketch her lying in bed with him. He remembers that, and there must have been trust on both sides for it to have happened, but he only remembers flashes. Isn’t sure of a lot of it. Was this when he’d told her “Always?” He’s not sure. He’s been given to understand they helped keep each other’s nightmares at bay. She’d asked him to stay. Was this when he’d said it? He must have said it before, because after she’d kissed him that time, she’d begged him, “Stay with me.” The reply had come without forethought. Only afterward did he taste the familiarity on his tongue. He’d said it often. Always. Always. Always. Always. Stay with me. Stay with me. Not us. Me. Her. Maybe he’s reading too much into it. If she’d wanted him, she could have talked to him properly when he’d asked for her in Thirteen. She was trying to get him back to reality, out of his flashbacks, when she kissed him. That’s all. It was about survival.

And he could’ve believed that if he hadn’t just come to the conclusion that maybe she was as much a headcase as he was now, because survival doesn’t bite through people’s hands trying to get to suicide pills. Nightlock. She hadn’t cared to live. So…

He has a headache.

He wants to ask Dr. Aurelius if it’s true Katniss is that mentally unstable, but is scared to reveal so much of himself, and he cannot help but feel that if he is truly getting better, he ought to be able to work this much out for himself. Because if the hijacking destroyed his understanding of Katniss, surely the treatment would mean it would come back? So he runs his conclusions through his head.

Katniss is not perfect, but is not evil, has even been known to be quite selfless

Refused to shoot him, but risked her own life for him in the Capitol

Has been suicidal for awhile

She seems to care about him on some kind of level, because she told him to take the pill

And she hugged him when she didn’t have to.

He’s not sure how far the caring lies, mainly because she has never been there for him, certainly not like he had been for her in the past.

He’s not sure why she’s not answering his letters now, but thinks maybe she’s trapped in her own head too.

It’s all random bits of information. He is missing the critical piece that ties it all together, painting a cohesive picture that makes sense. So he draws Prim’s death. Katniss going down in flames. Was this what broke her so badly she’d been exiled? Was this why there are no phone calls and no letters? He misses Prim too, a lot. He can only imagine how Katniss must feel after everything that has happened, and all she did to keep her sister safe. He chokes on sobs, and tears pierce his eyes as he considers how deeply she must be grieved. In this moment, he can forgive her her absence. He’ll never claw the dead children out from behind his eyes. He feels a strange, familiar urge to wrap his arms around her.

Stay with me.

Always.

Prim told him once Katniss struggles to see people in pain, especially people she cares about, and she isn’t good with blood. She always runs away when her sister and her mother were taking care of patients. She’d told him as a comfort when he questioned, if the girl cared so fucking much, why she wasn’t there in Thirteen coming to see him. He wonders if it’s true that it was because she cared and it hurt. He has seen how much Rue’s death devastated her. She hadn’t known Rue nearly as long as her own sister, or as long as she’d known Peeta. It makes her a bit self-centered, maybe, because he’d really needed to talk to her, but maybe it’s also not horrifically bitchy.

He tries to recall her body language. The way she’d held herself when she’d come to see him, like she was trying to hold in all her internal organs, like she was wounded. She’d looked unhealthy, unkempt. Everyone says that’s why Snow had you tortured. To break me. He’d never considered until just now that maybe it had worked, because she’d been suicidal, if her song choice was any indication, if her kissing him was any indication, long before Prim’s death. She’d also pointed out people were watching, he notices as he pulls up and re-watches the footage. Maybe it made her feel uncomfortable? He hadn’t thought of that before. People were always watching; he’d been past caring; he’d been skeptical and hateful and angry. It was all he could do to stay in control. He listened for explicit answers. Nothing else. He didn’t have the energy to spare for it. Now he’s curious. She had started talking to him more when the cameras were put away. In the Capitol, she’d played Real or Not Real with him. Maybe she’d felt guilty. Maybe she’d felt less hunted.

He is standing on a thick bough, high in a tree. Jabberjays sing all around him.

Are you, are you

Coming to the tree

Where they strung up a man

They say who murdered three

There is a noose wrapped around his throat. He smells blood and roses. He is shoved forward, and wakes before the quick stop.

That’s why Snow tortured you. To break me.

Shit. It’s his first thought on waking, because he realizes something. Katniss didn’t sing that song as her own call to arms. It’s his. She was answering his call. She’d wanted him to be dead, and she with him, to go to a place where it didn’t hurt. Or at least, that’s how he thinks she must have seen it… Like those nightlock berries! He’d been strung up. He’d been dying, and she held out the berries. Together or not at all, she’d told the Capitol. She’d told him. He pulls up the sketch again of the little girl holding a nightlock pill that oozes juice. Are you coming to the tree? She’d been echoing his words, his story. She really did care. He believes it now, because that’s why she kissed him. Together or not at all. I should never have let them separate us! Peeta had said. He’d understood. Maybe he still did. Loving someone enough to lay your life on the line.

Where a dead man called out,

For his love to flee.

And hadn’t he been dead? When he called for her to flee the coming bombs, isn’t that when they’d killed him? Hijacked him beyond recognition? I wouldn’t be shooting Peeta. He’s gone.That’s what she must have believed. She’d tried afterwards, played the game with him, but then her sister died. Her desperate, “Stay with me,” seems ten times more so now, because if Peeta’s worst fear is being used and unwanted, then Katniss’s must be losing people. Her father. Her mother. Her sister. Him? How can he expect her to handle her worst fears any better than he has?

So when she’d made to bite that capsule, she’d be dying to be free, because it’s not about what you can die for, but what you refuse to live with. He’d known going into the Games, that the price of his soul, his identity, his integrity, wasn’t worth his life. Better to live a short life you can look yourself in the mirror with, than a long, shameful one, where you turn a blind eye to the evils of this world. Better die together, live free, then live alongside cruelty. Alone. Fight the pain and win on your terms, or die and escape it. And he sees this might have always been the plan. She told him to take the capsule, but hadn’t killed Gale when he’d been captured. She hadn’t expected to survive, hadn’t expected Peeta to survive, didn’t really think he was even alive, but she hadn’t killed Gale when he got captured, so when Peeta stopped her from hanging, she hadn’t been calling for Gale to flee… but to help her do so.

Peeta looks at the painting of the tree with the illumination of the powerful lightening; he adds two nooses hanging from its boughs; he adds two severed limbs, arms, holding pills that bleed juice. He paints the truth of two people who brave death together to find freedom. This is their gamble, but not their bluff. He finds resolve, peace.

He’s going home when released. He’s going straight back to Twelve, because the war is over. And they weren’t the ones who had to hang.

Bird in a cage, love

Bird in a cage,

Dying for freedom

Ever a slave.

Not anymore, because he’s going home.

It’s time to live again.

#Springtime Edition 2019 #submission #wingletblackbird #prompt 25

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saltpepperbeard · 5 years

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☕️ galey bird

THEM’S FIGHTING WORDS, ANON LOL. THAT NAME ALONE IS ENOUGHTO INDUCE RAGE. I honestly can’t even watch THG anymore without snapping somekind of something/shouting profanity at him whenever he comes on screen lol. SOYES, LET’S DISCUSS THIS LOVELY INDIVIDUAL SHALL WE. I’m about to go on a HELLof a tangent, because I of course have OPINIONS™. Some of which actually aren’t that bad actually lmao BUT I DIGRESS; HE ALWAYS MAKES ME EXTRA AF-

*Lowers the Extra Meter* Okay. In all honesty, I canappreciate Gale as a character. He’s written well, and he’s rather complex. Heis very hardheaded and sticks to his goals, so much so that he isn’t afraid tothrow other people completely out of the way. Very very strong-willed, veryvery loyal, and very very fiery. Definitely makes for an interesting character.

…HOWEVER LOL, my appreciation for him is very quickly tarnisheddue to how he treats Katniss throughout the series. And how he acts in responseto her actions/motivations.

I will say, their relationship was acceptable in THG. Heactually was tolerable during this book, as I appreciated their friendship/howthey’d been hunting together for the majority of their lives. And how they’dbeen helping their families along after the mining accident. Even BEFORE Istarted shipping Everlark however, and even BEFORE I knew Everlark was endgame,I didn’t hop on any kind of romantic Katniss x Gale train. I viewed them onlyas hunting partners, and as friends.

Soooooo when mr. gALEY BIRD started showing feelings forKatniss, and when he made things worse by being an ASS about it lol, my likingfor him began to drop.

It’s very clear fromthe beginning of CF that Katniss wasn’t wild about romantic involvement withGale. She talks a lot about their families managing during the food shortagesand what not, but then she also goes on to say “I’m sure plenty of peopleassumed that we’d eventually get married even if I never gave it any thought.”And then she mentions Peeta and how she’s unsure of how exactly she feelstowards him. But like, STRAIGHT UP WAS LIKE “i never thought to marry galelmao.”

And THEN, he randomly kisses her right. And instead of beinglike “oooh that’s nice :),” she literally sits by the fence and has to decidewhether she liked it or resented it. And thought about Peeta. And just wenthome lmao. And decided to prepare a speech about “never wanting a boyfriend andnever planned on marrying.” LIKE…SHE WAS PRETTY CLEAR.

But he continues to lay it on thick in CF, and goes fromlike 0 to 100 flirt wise whenever he can. I think because he gets majorlyjealous of Peeta, and tries to win her affections back from him. But like…Hedoesn’t seem to respect her feelings towards Peeta at all. She’s MAJORLYconfused/conflicted in early CF, because Gale’s coming at her and she’s like“tf this is my best friend i Don’t Want This but i’m Hurting Him” and thenshe’s like “everything i did with peeta was for the games…bUT WAS IT REALLYTHOUGH???” So she’s just in this STORM and he doesn’t really do anything toalleviate that.

AND OKAY, TO BE FAIR LOL, both boys were actually erring onthe problematic/entitled side in early CF. Peeta was all pissy because he“didn’t want to forget” and consequently went cold on Katniss for a bit, andthen Gale’s advances are only met with Katniss going :/. SHOUTOUT TO THE “ILOVE YOU/I KNOW” LMAO.

BUT, difference between Gale and Peeta, Peeta apologizes forhis actions. He has a conversation with her about it, and decides to start overas friends, which she appreciates. Because she mentions something about wantinga regular, uncomplicated friendship with Gale again, but he doesn’t even giveher that option. He just keeps pushing and getting more possessive, especiallyas she gets closer with Peeta.

And of course my favorite example of the disconnect with howGale/Peeta treat her is the lovely “running away” example lmao. When she asksGale, he picks her up and is all for it, but sours up the second she mentionsPeeta/refuses his advances. Peeta on the other hand, agrees, asks if Gale iscoming, and is completely fine with everything. While Peeta did admit to beingjealous of Gale, he doesn’t…ACT LIKE AN ASS ABOUT IT LOL. He’s willing totolerate him if it means Katniss is happy. Matter of fact, to quote from thefreaking BEACH KISS-

“Peeta’s intention is clear. That Gale really is my family,or will be one day, if I live. That I’ll marry him. So Peeta’s giving me hislife and Gale at the same time. To let me know I shouldn’t ever have doubtsabout it.”

LIKE??? HOLY SHIT LOL. GALE WOULD NEVER, MY DUDE. “You canmarry Peeta it’s okay Katnip I know you love him” LIKE LOL NOPE FALSE FAKE NEWS.

He even went out of his way to help Gale after he gotwhipped too. He took him back to the house, watched over him for Katniss, andwhile he was probably feeling jealous, did NOT complain about it. Just makes methink of Gale not giving a shit about Peeta suffering in the Capitol lmao.

…HEY SPEAKING OF MOCKINGJAY LOL, I GET PARTICULARLYJKJSLDKSDS. Mockingjay is weird actually, because unlike THG/CF, there’s a characterization rift between the books and the movies, at least in the first half. During the first part of the book, it seems like the thing that predominantly drives a wedge between him and Katniss is his commitment to war/fighting/killing. He starts really getting into it, wanting to appease Coin, making deadly traps, etc. And a lot of anger erupts between him and Katniss consequently.

Because, she of course can’t kill senselessly, and death is extremely personal to her. But to him, it’s not; he can easily GRA-TA-TA without much thought, as long as it means he comes out on top. And throughout Mockingjay, it seems Katniss can tolerate that mindset less and less. Which of course leads to her saying “I don’t need Gale’s fire. I have plenty of fire myself.” He starts thinking like the people she’s been trying to fight, so he later turns into the enemy himself.

SCREWS HIMSELF RIGHT OVER, HE DOES.

And like…I can actually appreciate having him fight so selflessly? Like, a lot of D12 citizens definitely would have died without him jumping into action. He definitely doesn’t hesitate to fight for what he believes in, and that’s admirable. But he just…starts going about it the wrong way in Mockingjay, especially towards the end. And that’s just…can’t hAVE THAT, MY GUY.

Buutttttt then we have movie!Gale lmao. And I think Gale in both of the Mockingjay movies is predominantly where most of my salt comes from. Which. yeah yeah I know, naysayers; it’s technically not fair because that’s simply an adaptation of his character. BUT IT’S STILL HIM IN THE END LMAO SO I JUST.

On top of his war commitment, there’s also major possessiveness/jealousy still going on, which makes him all the more difficult to bare lol. Like in the movies, he doesn’t care about the fact that Peeta’s suffering at ALL. He glares at Katniss when she watches propos, he refuses to support Peeta whatsoever, he makes all sorts of backhand comments…And then oddly enough is the first to volunteer for Peeta’s rescue lmao. THAT doesn’t make sense. His characterization doesn’t know what it wants to do in those movies. (And then like also he wants to kill those in the Capitol without much thought but then says it’s not fair to hunt the buck in D13 like????) Other than iNDUCE ANGER.

In the books, he at least backed off his advancements towards Katniss, which she said she appreciated because she felt like they could just be friends again. Though, I’m not sure if it was entirely genuine/coming from the right place? Katniss mentioned something about Peeta being out of the picture and the fake-marriage thing not hanging over Gale’s head, which in turn made him a Normal Freaking Person again. Which…KIND of makes me narrow my eyes, because like…he should have just acted normal around her like that REGARDLESS of what was going on, REGARDLESS if Peeta was there or not.

“WHAT WOULD PEETA MELLARK DO.”

And it’s so unfortunate because she legitimately appreciated his company/their friendship. Idk why he had to get so bent out of shape about trying to get her to love him back, and getting pissy when she started to fall for someone else instead. Like, I’m sure if he had just held his tongue, it would’ve made things way easier on their friendship.

It also makes a little more sense that he volunteered to save Peeta in the books, because he AT LEAST wasn’t pissed off towards him 24/7 like he was in the movies lol. I imagine his jealousy was still there, but he was probably doing it to make Katniss happy. He was probably trying to score some points with her lmao.

Jodi? Not trusting Gale at all? IT’S MORE LIKELY THAN YOU THINK.

And then I feel like the characterization matches back up for the second half of Mockingjay/MJ2. He starts getting all possessive again with Peeta back in the picture, and his attitude towards fighting gets completely amplified when they’re in an actual warzone. Annndd so therefore I start getting mad at him all over again lmao.

It actually makes me my angriest whenever he complains about Katniss kissing him and it not feeling genuine, whenever he lowkey highkey manipulates her into trying to fight by saying “I don’t think Snow used any rulebooks when he hijacked Peeta,” and when he says he’ll kILL PEETA WHENEVER THE CHANCE ARISES LIKE??? YO. IT MAKES ME SO READY TO FIGHT HIM LOL.

SO. TL;MAJORLYdr, I’m okay with him in both the movie and book of THG, NOT okay with him in the movie and book of CF, OKAY with him in the early part of the book in MJ, but NOT okay with him in the later half or the two MJ movies.

It’s like…Essentially, I appreciate his friendship with Katniss. I like when they cooperate, and when their fiery attitudes kind of match each other. But he tarnishes that whenever something else comes into the picture, be it war or Peeta. He kind of turns their friendship on its head for the sake of wanting to fight a certain way, or by trying to get Katniss into loving him when all she wants is a friendship.

And it’s sO…Like I almost feel bad for them, more so for Katniss though lmao. Like if he had just been more patient with her, and more understanding of what she wanted, then maybe things would have turned out better between them. Like, MAYBE they could have still been friends after the rebellion, and wouldn’t have to throw away years of friendship.

Buutttt he didn’t, chose instead to be problematic on multiple accounts, and so I’m definitely clinging to Peeta lmao, tHE GENTLE AND UNDERSTANDING ONE.

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thankyoufinnick · 7 years

Text

Commentary on the latest Mags’ War installment.

No matter how evil I am to my characters, I maintain that I’m nicer than Suzanne Collins. The most noticeable improvements in this chapter are 1) Cashmere’s survived! 2) Because of this, Finnick’s not going to go semi-catatonic.

It’s another one of those cases where plot and characterization dovetail: I’ve got plans for Finnick, and so he needs to be rather more functional, but also, a support system is like the number one most important thing you can have with PTSD. Now, Katniss is the furthest thing from being responsible for Finnick’s mental health, but I’ve always believed that if she’d had a completely different personality and been willing to go to him for help with her suffering, it would have helped him with his.

Well, Cashmere has a completely different personality than Katniss. She’s not in a position to help Finnick directly, advise him, comfort him, etc., but her not pushing him away gives him a human connection that makes all the difference to him. My Finnick suffers most when people push him away. You’ll see this theme reflected again and again throughout this series. Most notably, this is why Annie needing to be alone on some of her bad days is infinitely more difficult for him than when she wants him around on her bad days.

So, Cashmere and Finnick are there together, and they’re both better off for it. Though it’s going to be a long time before either of them is in a good place.

Somebody left a comment saying that “The character development that Mags had in this series makes her death even harder to handle!” Now, this delights my evil writer’s heart to no end, because it means I was successful in bringing her to life.

But what I wanted to talk about was how I chose to depict Mags’ death, and the Quarter Quell in general.

I am not a fan of authors trying to rewrite the same scenes from a different POV. In most cases, it just comes across as unoriginal. And repeated dialogue is usually extremely boring to me. I’ve seen it done well exactly once, by Cynthia Voigt in the Tillerman series, which is all around excellent and I can’t recommend it enough.

This is the main reason part 2 of Mags’ War avoids interactions with Katniss as much as humanly possible, focusing on Johanna before the tributes enter the arena, and Cashmere once they’re inside the arena. The scene where Finnick and Johanna and Mags talk about Katniss’s refusal to team up with them, and where they plan their arena strategy, is just about the closest I come to overlapping with the events in Catching Fire, and it’s still not my favorite scene.

In all other cases, I made a point of speeding past anything that would have repeated dialogue and blow-by-blow action too closely. For instance, writing Cashmere’s defection at the Cornucopia was unavoidable. That scene couldn’t be skipped. But Cashmere is deliberately focused on wildly different events than Katniss. In the middle of combat, she doesn’t even register that Gloss kills Wiress. She notices the arrow going in, and then by the time she’s processing sensory input again, we’ve diverged from canon: Finnick gets to her before Johanna.

At that point, it’s a completely different scene, and the reader should be engaged in seeing what’s different (quite a lot). The dialogue then becomes extremely different.

By assuming the reader is familiar with canon, I deliberately omit certain events, such as the jabberjays, and only allude to them in passing later. I assume knowledge of Beetee’s plan, and throw into relief events that aren’t highlighted in canon, like the moment when Cashmere watches her brother’s face in the sky. Other than that, she’s by and large focused on grieving her brother, strategizing a way to stay alive long enough to kill Katniss, and justifying her defection (I feel like I may have handled her constant agonizing over this decision a little heavy-handedly, but I had to stop editing and post at some point). That chapter was all about Cashmere’s mental state, not the events of the arena.

I avoided repeating dialogue again by having Cashmere so focused on killing Katniss that she misses what Finnick says to Katniss (”Remember who the real enemy is”). Btw, the events of the Quarter Quell are extremely heavily movie-inspired.

With the very important exception of Mags’ death! You should assume Finnick carrying Peeta and Katniss carrying Mags for that one. The next chapter will open with Finnick dreaming about that, and that is a case where I’m rewriting an event from canon from a different POV. But, because it’s a dream after the fact, it’s not a step-by-step march through the events, and it’s again extremely focused on Finnick’s mental state, and the history of his relationship with Mags. It’s also got a bit of foreshadowing that I won’t spoil.

Another event that I sped past in this chapter was Katniss finding out about the revolution.

As if to prove his point, she barges in with an energy that Finnick, still sluggish, could envy if he didn't know that she's in more pain than he is. At least I signed up for this, he tries reminding himself after she's carried away, unconscious.

He wouldn't have sedated her without at least the nominal consent Cashmere gave, but everything happened faster than he could process. He's left staring after her, trying to think of one reason Johanna won't hate him as much as Katniss after this.

Aaaand...that’s it. That whole scene, condensed into a couple dialogue-free sentences, completely with foreshadowing in the last sentence there.

Ditto when Finnick tries talking to Katniss after he goes to lie down.

Katniss doesn't feel like talking, and Finnick can't blame her. He doesn't have much comfort to offer.

This assumes you’ve read the scene in the book (yes, I’m skipping back and forth between book and movie-canon, sorry).

“Katniss. Katniss, I’m sorry.” Finnick’s voice comes from the bed next to me and slips into my consciousness. Perhaps because we’re in the same kind of pain. “I wanted to go back for him and Johanna, but I couldn’t move.”

I don’t answer. Finnick Odair’s good intentions mean less than nothing.

And that, of course, is what I mean that if Katniss had a competely different personality, that scene could have played out very differently. Cashmere’s a lot more willing to interact with him, hear his explanation:

“You're out of the arena, and you're never going back. I couldn't tell you, but I was trying to get as many of us out alive as I could. That's why I wanted you with us.”

“I didn't know,” she whispers in horror.

Finnick remembers that Gloss is dead.

“I'm sorry I couldn't save your brother. I only ended up getting you, me, Katniss, and Beetee out alive and free. Johanna, Peeta, and Enobaria are prisoners of the Capitol. Everyone else is dead.”

“I thought you were going to kill me.” Cashmere is dazed. “I only thought you'd be quicker about it than Brutus.”

“I'm sorry I couldn't tell you. There's no way we could have saved anyone if word had gotten out.”

“But even if I knew,” and here she grows more agitated, “I couldn't have left my brother alone in the pack!”

“I know. You're incredibly loyal and brave. I'm sorry. I will say that until I die. I'm sorry I couldn't do more."

He strokes her hair and murmurs apologies until she relaxes a bit

[Discussion of arena strategy.]

“I'm sorry we couldn't tell you. I really am. But you're safe here now.”

Encouraged, Cashmere shifts enough to look at him. She doesn't ask, but there's a question in her eyes.

“If you ask Plutarch,” he answers, “you're on parole as long as you're with me. If you ask me, you're under my protection. Stay with me, and I'll keep you safe.”

She nods. “I'll do whatever you tell me to. I'll stay with you.”

And this is where a lot of canon-divergence begins. Stay tuned!

#mags-verse extended edition

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ellanainthetardis · 7 years

Photo

Ah, me and my nasty cliffhangers... :p I promised angst for this story remember? Well, now I deliver...

{FF] or {AO3]

16. Twenty-two Weeks (2)

Effie watched Snowball growling at her feet while she waited for the butler to bring the phone to her mother. She could hear Haymitch moving upstairs and she hoped, for the puppy’s sake, that his shower would be brief. The dog looked unsettled.

She dragged a chair away from the kitchen table with a small frown so she could sit and pat his head without having to crouch or wriggle in ways that her stomach would have made difficult.

“What is the matter with you, my pretty baby?” she cooed. “You are one very unhappy puppy tonight…” She scratched him behind the ears and down the side like he usually liked but instead of rolling on his back, he stubbornly remained lying on top of her feet. “Are you sick?” she hummed. “You better not be sick, I warn you. I will be very sad if you are sick.”

“Euphemia?” her mother asked in her ear, clearly taken aback. “Who is sick? Is it your… victor?”

Elindra still couldn’t help but pause before referring to Haymitch. Effie swallowed back a sigh though. Credit had to be given where credit was due and her mother had been very good at keeping her opinion about Effie’s choices to herself lately. Since the trip to Four, she even seemed to have definitely reconsidered her stance on Haymitch being a disgrace to the family. He could be quite charming when he wanted to be and it seemed he had managed to put a spell on her parents during that dinner.

“No, no. We are fine.” she hurried in reassuring her. “It is simply our…” She stopped and winced because for the numerous calls they now exchanged every week, she had yet to explain the new addition to their household. “Mother, I did not tell you, did I? We have a puppy now.”

There was a very long pause at the other end of the line and then Elindra repeated in a detached, casual tone. “A puppy.”

“Yes.” she grinned and she didn’t have to fake the cheer in her voice.

She had grown very attached to Snowball in the short amount of time he had been there. She tangled her fingers in his fur, combing the long hair free of the numerous knots. She needed to brush him again. Haymitch wouldn’t do it. He said she was ridiculous and soon she would have him perfumed and groomed like a Capitol dog. Since Haymitch was good about taking him for walks, cleaning up his mess and training him, she didn’t mind the grooming duties. Snowball was a darling anyway. He loved it when she brushed his fur or gave him baths.

“You never said you wanted a dog before.” Elindra was obviously wincing. “I thought you preferred cats. They are much more refined pets.”

“Snowball is a big cuddly toy, Mother.” she chuckled. As if he knew she was talking about him, the puppy lifted his head and looked at her with his shiny dark eyes. “You cannot look at him and not fall in love.”

“If you say so.” her mother sighed. “I cannot say dogs are in fashion, right now. Well… Perhaps the small ones. As accessories.”

“Actually, I called to thank you for your package.” she said, sensing a change in topic was in order. The boiler suddenly stopped making noises and she figured Haymitch was done with his shower. She automatically patted the dog’s head, silently mouthing at him to be patient a little while longer. The puppy placed his head on her knees, staring at her. “It was really thoughtful of you and I love everything. Did you know we have not bought any baby clothes yet? You bought him his first outfit.”

“My little Eustorgio deserves only the best.” her mother declared in a very pleased tone. Elindra did like to be first in everything.

“Eustorgio was vetoed.” she announced.

“Pity.” Elindra commented “Tell me, how are you? Are his kicks still strong? How is the nursery coming along?”

By the time she was done with the small talk, Haymitch was back downstairs, bundled in his coat and scarf and Snowball was making such a racket she could barely hear her mother.

“Are you certain you needed a puppy?” Elindra sighed as Haymitch tried to convince the dog to go outside. “It seems awfully untrained.”

“He does not usually behave like this.” she frowned, as Haymitch struggle to drag him out to the backyard. It seemed the geese were at it too and her frown deepened even further. She waved when Haymitch closed the back door with a long suffering glance.

She tried not to read into the puppy’s strange behavior and the geese’s honking but she was suddenly acutely aware of being alone in the house. She was having one of those strange moments when a place that was otherwise safe and comforting now felt treacherous and suffocating.

Her breathing quickened as adrenaline flooded in her veins, her senses were hyper…

She knew she would have a flashback or a panic attack if she went on in that fashion. She also knew it wasn’t good for the baby so she focused on keeping her breathing even.

“I hope you did not yet buy a stroller, Effie, because I found the most perfect thing.” Elindra told her, oblivious to her sudden distress. “It is a pram that can double as a stroller later on. And to topple it all, it has dirt-track driving wheels so it should be very practical in your District. I ordered it. It should be delivered sometimes in the next two weeks. An insufferable delay for a delivery but that is what you get for living so far from the Capitol.”

“You should not have.” she remarked, subdued.

She was safe and this was ridiculous, she repeated to herself.

“Are you displeased?” Elindra asked, a bit on the cold side. “I just wished to help. I could cancel…”

“No, I am not displeased, I meant you already did a lot for us.” she replied. “You do not need to keep sending gifts.”

“You need a pram and a stroller and you need something that will work on unpaved streets.” Elindra pointed out.

“Yes, but…” she tried to argue.

“Simply say thank you, Euphemia.” her mother sighed. “I have every right to spoil my grandson, do I not?”

She figured Haymitch would have a different view on that but Effie knew it was pointless to argue. Elindra would simply take offense and she was enjoying being on good terms with her mother for once – for the first time in forever, probably.

“Thank you, Mother.” she answered. “I mean it.”

“Well…” Elindra huffed, maybe a bit embarrassed by how genuine Effie sounded. “You are very welcome. I do wish… I do wish to…”

She did wish to make things right between them, Effie understood that. “I know.”

“Good, good.” her mother breathed out. “I am terribly sorry, darling, but I must dash now. Your father is taking me to a fundraiser tonight and I am simply nowhere near ready yet.”

They said their goodbyes and Effie was left alone in the silent house. She had never had any problem being left alone in their house before. She loved their house.

Still, she had learned to listen to her instinct long ago so she headed straight to the living-room to grab the scarf she had left there with a half-cooked plan to go to the children’s until Haymitch came home. It was almost time for dinner anyway and it was the children’s turn to host it – not that she was ever responsible for the food, that was mainly Peeta and Haymitch’s territory; Katniss hunted it, she purchased whatever wasn’t in the forest for the girl to pick up and the boys cooked it, she deeply loved that system.

Her hand was closing on the scarf tossed over the armrest of the chair closest to the fireplace when she felt it.

The prickling at the back of her nape.

She knew she wasn’t alone.

She whirled around, half expecting to have gone crazy, half praying that she would be alone and it was simply her imagination playing tricks on her. She dropped the scarf, her hands flying to her stomach in a meager form of protection.

She recognized the man instantly.

It was the one from the grocery shop, the one she had seen several times around town and the reason why she didn’t mind Haymitch’s overprotective tendencies so much. Clay, she recalled, his name was Clay.

She remembered his daughter also. Leyla had been thirteen and not one of their cutest tributes. Effie had known she had no chance from day one. The child had been nice though, well-mannered, polite, with a keen eye for fashion… She had loved the dresses and the…

“What are you doing here, Clay?” she asked, keeping her voice poised and calm. It wouldn’t do to lose her mind. It wouldn’t do to give him any reason to get angry.

The man hated her, it was written all over his face.

And why shouldn’t he? She had reaped his daughter.

How long had he been lurking around? It explained the geese honking and Snowball’s strange behavior. Brave faithful Snowball…

“Saw you in town today.” Clay snarled, waving his right arm around. She took a step back when she realized he was holding a knife. “You’ve got no shame, right? Parading around with that stomach when our kids are dead?”

His eyes were shifty. He was drunk or he had snapped. Possibly both.

“I am sorry.” she sincerely offered. “I know it does not make it alright and I know it won’t help you grieve but I am deeply…”

“You shut your mouth, you stupid whore.” he hissed, taking a threatening step forward. Effie took two back, her eyes darting around, searching for a weapon, searching for something. They fell on the open box on the coffee table and the knife she had never handed back to Haymitch. Clay was still ranting, slowly inching closer… She took her chance and circled around the armchair, trying to keep some distance between them. “My Leyla’s dead. Her mom… She killed herself. I’ve lost everything and you…” He shook his head. “You should be dead too. You don’t get to have any of this. You don’t get to have a family. You don’t get anything!”

Her thoughts had been running around in all directions as she slowly but surely gave in to panic however they came to a screeching halt when she realized what would likely happen. He wasn’t just there to hurt her. He wanted her dead.

Her first thought was for the baby in her belly, the baby that would die with her.

The second went to Haymitch and what he would feel if he came back home to her dead corpse. It would destroy him. He wouldn’t be able to go through that a second time. He would lose it. He would start drinking again if he didn’t do something even more stupid.

It wasn’t just about her… Yes, losing her would probably be a hard blow, but the child? He wanted the child so much… He was excited about it. He had accepted the fact he would be their boy’s father and he was looking forward to it. The lost child would be the icing on a cake of horrors.

She couldn’t bear the thought of Haymitch going through any of that.

“You cannot hurt my family.” she whispered, tightening her hold on her pregnant stomach.

Her family.

She had gone against the Capitol for her family once. She had bought golden tokens and had taken a stance. She had borne months of torture and isolation. She had begged for her guards to hurt her instead of Peeta and Johanna. She had done things she never thought she could do.

She had survived.

For Haymitch.

For the children.

“You won’t hurt my family.” she repeated, stronger.

“You don’t get to have a family.” Clay spat. “Mine’s dead. Because of you.”

“You do not understand.” she retorted calmly, fear suddenly deserting her as she lunged for the knife on the coffee table. Her fingers closed around the smooth handle. It was heavy and unfamiliar in her hand but it was Haymitch’s and it had protected him in the arena so, in some twisted way, it was comforting. “I won’t let you.”

Clay stared at her for a while and then burst out laughing like it was the best joke he had ever heard.

Perhaps it was. She was standing there, almost six months pregnant, one arm wrapped around her stomach, a knife she didn’t know how to wield properly in her free hand…

She could feel her baby moving though and it was all the incentive she needed.

She would protect her baby with everything she had.

She wouldn’t die, couldn’t die, because that would mean losing their child.

“I will kill you.” she warned, her voice breaking a little. “Please, do not make me kill you.”

Clay was still laughing. “I think you’ve got yourself confused with our traitor victor…”

Nobody should ever underestimate a mother, she thought. The length she would go for her children – all of her children… She realized just how far at that moment. She had suffered before and she was prepared to suffer again. But kill, now… Killing was a new thought, a new urge, one Haymitch had claimed feeling in the past and she had never really shared.

They had different views about what protecting someone meant. She shielded when he preemptively attacked. She didn’t like violence. She never understood why he always had to make a show of strength.

She did now.

“He is not a traitor.” she snapped. “Without him President Snow would still be alive.”

“Bullshit.” he sneered “I’ll get to him too, you know… But you first. I want him to see you dead.”

“Haymitch did nothing to you.” she hissed.

“He should have brought her back!” Clay shouted. “He saved those kids, why not my girl? She never hurt anyone, my Leyla…”

“She was a darling.” Effie agreed softly. “She would not want this. Please, Clay…”

“Don’t you talk about my girl!” he growled.

He pounced on her.

His knife slashed the air and she barely had time to duck out of the way to avoid getting stabbed. She felt the burning bite on her shoulder and arm, she felt the blood dampening her woolen sleeve… It didn’t quite register.

He came at her again and she did the only thing she could think of, she barreled into him with a pitiful war cry, hoping against all odds it would carry to the children’s house and they would come running to her help. He dropped his knife in her surprise attack and she readied hers to strike without giving him time to react, beyond any clear thoughts now.

He grabbed her wrist and twisted it. Haymitch’s hunting knife fell to the floor but she wouldn’t give up. She scratched at his face with her nails. They struggled with each other for a moment until she tripped over the open box…

She went down, crashing on the coffee table that broke under her weight, cushioning her fall a little… She didn’t have time to register any of it. Not the shock and not the pain.

Clay was straddling her hips, his hands wrapped around her throat… So tight…

She couldn’t breathe.

She felt around for the knife.

There was only room for one thing in her mind.

She needed to protect her baby.

#hayffie #effie trinket #haymitch abernathy #april showers

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