This You I Choose - part i.
Peeta is rescued from the Capitol, tortured but not hijacked, and 'this would've happened anyway' happens earlier.
When Peeta and I do reunite, he doesn’t kiss me like I’d expected him to. He’s in a stupor, vague and bleary-eyed and can only weakly mouth my name in disbelief. His limbs are rubber as I crash into him yet he wraps them around me all the same. I’m the one to cup his face in my hands, sobbing and angry and so relieved it electrifies every nerve in my body.
The doctors prod at him for what feels like the length of a whole Hunger Games, and I’m waiting for them to leave so I can cry and hold him and I need them to just leave. Leave.
They don’t. So I pretend they aren’t there.
Peeta doesn’t kiss me. He doesn’t grin or tease like he did without fail in the arena, no matter how dire the situation. He strokes my hair, face slack with awe. He repeats my name, again and again and again like a mockingjay. My questions—interrupted by sobs—go unanswered. Are you okay? What did they do to you? Where did they hurt you?
So as the doctors are grabbing his arm far too roughly for my liking and forcing a needle into his vein, he squirms something awful.
And I kiss him.
Once, twice, again and again. It’s kiss five that he registers and kisses me back, and then this lasts for a long time but never long enough. Haymitch comes to collect me, tears me from Peeta’s arms so the doctors can experiment on him some more. I thrash, I scream. Peeta does too.
I’m not allowed back in the hospital until the next morning. With no doctors closely lingering, I crawl under the thin hospital blanket and envelop him in my arms. I trace his scars, monitor his crackling breaths and sponge kisses to his lips and pulse points. When I stop, he comes in for more, and I know that we are both administering pain medication this way.
The morphling relaxes him, but I think my touch is much longer lasting.
———
Over the next days I am consumed by Peeta. He is constantly on edge, distrusting everybody except a handful. Me, Prim, occasionally my mother. Even Haymitch is a bad taste in his mouth, and for how little he speaks, we’re all shocked when he summons the lung capacity to scream at him for lying to us in the Quarter Quell.
It ends in whimpering sobs, which only abate as I cradle his head into the wee hours of the morning.
I can’t stand to be parted from him, convinced Snow will turn the corner, laugh at me balefully and taunt from those puffy lips, “Oh, Miss Everdeen, you didn’t truly think I’d let you keep him?” When those nightmares awaken me at night, I do my best to stifle my gasps. I can’t disturb Peeta’s precious few hours of sleep.
Something different now is how often I kiss him. It’s for his sake, I think at first, but I begin to seriously doubt that. When I’m forced to leave his side for meals I swear I feel myself growing weaker if I go too long without my source.
Haymitch relays to me updates on the resistance, their efforts, Coin and Plutarch’s latest strategies. He more than once reminds me that Coin is looking for a Mockingjay, not the star-crossed lovers, and I’m expected to eventually show up to strategy meetings. I ignore him.
Once, when I’m barred from his room by the doctors—citing a medical procedure that cannot be interfered with—I return to my own quarters. Prim is there, stroking that mangy cat, and looks surprised to see me.
“You’re back?”
“Not for long. Just until they let me back into the hospital,” I grumble.
Prim stands and heaves Buttercup up to her chest, who hisses at me as though I’m the one who disturbed his rest. She opens the drawer where my belongings lie; the locket, the stopwatch, the pearl.
“I thought you might want to take this.” She picks up the pearl and folds it into my palm.
I run it around my knuckles. “Why?”
“Haymitch suggested that you ‘give it to the boyfriend,’” she explains. “We thought it might settle him a bit.”
I scoff at Haymitch’s choice of words and look at Prim, expecting a glint of teasing in her eyes. She of all people knows the love story was for show. To protect her, in fact. A byproduct of protecting my sister’s childhood for all these years is that she has the gall of a teenager. She makes jabs at me often but her giggles and grins always give it away. I wait for this now, but her face is as sound as ever.
“What?”
She looks at me, innocent and unblinking. “You know, to remind him of how things were before he was in the Capitol.”
“You think he’s my boyfriend?” I spit out.
She smiles. “A lot of people think that. I’ve seen you together since he was rescued. Seemed a little more than friendly.”
“That’s no different to how we were in the Games,” I argue.
“Yes it is. No one’s forcing you to do any of it anymore.” Buttercup is glaring at me condescendingly, and I hate the idea that this stupid cat thinks it understands emotions better than I can. “You’re a bad actress, Katniss,” Prim continues, laughing a little. “And you hate being lovey-dovey. Could you have played out that romance thing with anyone else?”
No. But maybe—Gale…and then, I don’t think either of us would’ve thought to play the romance card. We would’ve treated it as one of our hunts, except some of our prey spoke like us. I try to imagine if I’d like the strategy better and I’m struck by a realisation. Gale would have killed. Not just defensively. I remember—just before I was taken to the Capitol for the first Games—he told me that the other tributes were just like animals. Would he have set up snares and traps, sized to fit a child rather than a rabbit? Would he have sought to eliminate our competition? Peeta wasn’t just trying to protect us with the love angle. It prevented us from having to kill.
Would I have been horrified by Gale by the end of the Games?
“Maybe it was for the Games, but I don’t think you could’ve done it if you hadn’t at least liked the person to begin with,” Prim observes.
I gape at my sister and her unabashedness and how she’s right. I think about my own mother; how I reject her every advance and brush of affection. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to kiss and feign endearment for some random boy that I met in the Games, even with survival on the line. I would’ve recoiled instantly and Haymitch would’ve groaned as the sponsors dried up and I’d be dead.
But I hadn’t really known Peeta before the Games. Not properly. How did he make it so easy?
I snatch up the locket, tuck the pearl in the pocket of my uniform. “I’m going to lunch,” I say, despite the hollowness in my stomach having nothing to do with food. Prim bids me goodbye, unfazed by my flightiness.
After a lacklustre meal of some grey mush, I check the schedule on my arm and finally follow it.
———
“Hey, Catnip.”
I jump back, startled. Even with the telltale nickname, it doesn’t immediately register to me that the newcomer is Gale. As I turn to face him, taking in the amusement in his seam-grey eyes, I scold myself. This is Gale. Whom I’ve been spending almost all of my time with since coming to 13.
It’s only in realising this that I also realise I haven’t seen him since Peeta’s return.
“Hey,” I say.
“Feeling better?”
I cock my head to the side. “Better?”
“Now that Peeta’s back,” he says, like it’s obvious. “Do you feel like yourself again?”
I’ve been incomplete since he was kidnapped, and I try to determine if I’m whole now that he’s been returned. Almost. He isn’t quite the Peeta that I lost anymore; still, I am not his Katniss from the Seam.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
He gazes at me expectantly. I quirk an eyebrow.
A chortle rocks his chest. “You’re not going to ask if I’m okay? After rescuing his life?”
Right. Prim, Gale, Peeta. The three people I protect in every universe. “Sorry, I’ve been distracted lately,” I confess sheepishly, scratching my forearm. “How are you?”
“Fine.”
Seeing him again makes me feel steadier. A little more like that girl from the woods. “What are you doing here?”
He taps the tattoo on his arm. “I’m rostered to be here. As are you.”
Weapons training. Trainee soldiers are scattered around the range, some aiming at targets and others being taught the anatomy of a gun by a soldier. No one is shooting yet. With how skittish I become at loud sounds these days, I’ll probably leave when that starts. Gale unstraps a gun from his holster and hands it to me. I fiddle with its mechanisms, trying to recall any of the training on its assembly.
Gale watches for a while and decides to pity me. “Here, let me show you.”
He comes up behind me, my back to his chest. His arms weave around my waist and lay over my hands. Then he manoeuvres them around the parts, removing the magazine and the other pieces I don’t know the name of and leads my hands in a rehearsed dance of reassembling them.
This closeness is nice and familiar. I haven’t embraced him for a while now, but his strong heartbeat reflected against my back reminds me that—even in these dismal bunkers of 13—I can have a piece of home.
With the weapon readied, I graze the trigger and have a sudden vision of it firing against my will. A shudder courses through me. His hands still.
“What’s wrong?”
My head shakes on its own. “Nothing.” But knowing he won’t believe that, I shakily amend, “It’s…this whole thing. We can’t live in this bunker forever. But 12 is gone. I feel like I’m just waiting for this stint to be over”—and to kill Snow, I don’t say—“so we can just go home.”
“Me too.”
“No. I can’t want that.” I extricate myself from him, turning to face him instead. His face is set with hardness as always but his eyes droop with sympathy. “I’m alive. So is Prim and my mother and you. And Peeta was taken from me but he’s back. I have better things to fret over.”
Gale cups my face with one hand and I lean into the touch. “It was home, Katniss. Of course you miss it.”
“I don’t deserve to.” And then I whisper what’s been underlying, plaguing me for weeks with nowhere for the thought to go. “Not when it’s my fault.”
He looks displeased. “Did you drop the bomb?”
I’m starting to think that that doesn’t matter much anymore. That whether you’re at the scene of the crime or being lifted from a broken arena by hovercraft, every thread eventually leads back to the spool. The larking Mockingjay.
“I did, in a way, didn’t I? Doesn’t matter if I was there or not. I practically devised it with every move I made against Snow.”
“Things happen in war, Katniss.” Perhaps I would agree with him, but the roiling in my stomach can’t easily digest this simplification. “You can’t keep hurting yourself. You have to forgive yourself.”
I toss the gun to the floor, loathing the sight of it and distancing myself from him because he’s wrong when his hands still me. His eyes are deep with intent. Then he’s leaning in and I have ample time to know what’s coming. I allow him.
The second his lips touch mine, I flinch. It’s instinct. I have no control over the action.
He pulls away. “What’s wrong?”
“I…” I trail off, unable to find the words. I don’t know what’s wrong.
He considers me for a long moment, then shoves his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “I see.”
“What? What do you see?”
He shakes his head, voice acerbic. “No, no, I knew. But I ignored it. Can’t anymore though, can we?”
“Tell me,” I order, because he’s being cryptic and irritable and I am unable to draw the conclusion he has. It frustrates me just how well he can read my own emotions when I can’t even decipher them myself. I thought it was bad enough from Buttercup, but this is exponentially worse.
“You love him. Peeta.”
The instinct to refute him shrivels up in my chest. It doesn’t ring false. Yes, I do care about Peeta. He’s a friend. An ally. A partner.
“I care about him,” I agree. “But I care about you too.”
“How?” he challenges.
“The same as him. You’re my friends. My allies.”
He crosses his arms over his chest, frowning. “But that isn’t all.”
I think of when Gale was whipped, laying beneath the cover of ice, and I chose him. Then, as soon as I’d been called for the Quarter Quell, I had been all too comfortable seeking another pair of arms to warm me. Because I was lonely, a voice scolds. Because I’m selfish.
Am I still lonely now? Yes. Am I clinging to Peeta merely because I need company? Is that why I would have done anything to get him back?
I would’ve killed Snow. And Coin. And if Gale stood in my way….
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Don’t you?” he says bitingly. “Isn’t that the reason you’ve been glued to his hip since the moment he came back?”
“And what’s it to you?” I snap.
“You know what.”
Because I owe him. As a friend. As I had personally appointed myself to be Gale’s lover. Even if ‘lover’ never came to fruition. Even if he never knew it.
Peeta. Friend. Ally. Partner. There’s something unsaid. For Peeta, partner feels…insufficient. Something is missing.
The hunger coursing through my body. The desperation I felt without him.
“No. That’s not all. Not for him,” I admit.
Gale chuckles ruefully. He reaches out and tucks hair behind my ear. There’s a coldness on his face with the action. “I knew. Since I saw you kissing him on that beach, I knew—it was a foregone conclusion. You’ve chosen him.”
“That’s not—”
“When you were kissing him in the arena, were you thinking about me?” he interrupts.
My mouth opens and closes a few times. “Sometimes. I’d feel guilty about kissing him. Because of you.”
“Because you wanted to be kissing me? Or because you thought I’d be hurt by it?”
His words—plain, but cutting—stun me. I hadn’t allowed myself to consider it, but isn’t it true? Did I want him in my arms, rocking me to sleep, kissing me and me kissing him? No, I wasn’t thinking of that at all. I felt guilty. It felt like I was being unfaithful to him.
I can recognise that feeling because at this moment he has stolen the kiss from my mouth that is reserved for Peeta’s lips.
All the moments I’ve shared with this boy run past my thoughts and away into oblivion. I think about how I spent years with him, alone in the woods. How at any point my feelings should have developed and appeared. How only now, in war and Games and death, do I feel a longing for him.
If this is over, do I see myself in his arms? When things are good? Do I crave his kisses? His comfort?
Gale leans in and kisses me on the cheek. It’s familial and stirs nothing beneath my sternum. “Told ya. I won’t stand in your way, Catnip.”
Then he leaves. I have no desire to chase after him though I feel I should. It’s the nice thing to do, the friendly thing. But after this interrogation, I wonder if that’s why I do anything for Gale. Because I fear that if I don’t he will leave me and I can’t bear to lose anyone else.
I listen to his retreating footsteps until the guns begin to fire. I touch my hand to my cheek.
———
I spend a good hour meandering down the halls of 13’s gloomy bunker. My thoughts tick over on repeat, again and again and again. Peeta will be waiting for me and that’s louder than most of my other ruminations.
You’ve chosen him, Gale said, but that tastes like a lie in my mouth. That implies that I have committed to a relationship, and in turn a future, a marriage, children. Anyone who knows me knows I haven’t committed to that, ever. So there’s no choice to make.
Some choices I have made were never choices in the first place. To volunteer for Prim. To ally with Rue. To save Peeta in the Quarter Quell over myself. Those were never something I decided. I would not be Katniss Everdeen if I had chosen otherwise.
I reach the hospital. My feet brought me here unbidden, drawn by the magnetism lying inside. Peeta. I linger by his doorway, listening for his slow breathing. If he’s asleep, I’ll go in. That way I can just look at him. To understand. To decide if Gale is right.
“Katniss?” I hear him call softly.
I enter. He’s smiling wearily, tired but content. “How did you know I was there?” I ask.
“I didn’t. I heard footsteps. I was hoping it was you.”
My arms are crossed over my chest, my stance defensive.
His brow furrows. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I resist.
“Well, then come here.” He holds out his arms.
“What?”
“The most effective treatment for ‘nothing’ is burying yourself in hugs. Shouldn’t you know that—healer’s daughter?”
He must be picking up a bit if he’s teasing me like this, so I go over. I cuddle up in his arms and my skin is electric with his touch. It’s never felt this way before. Not even on the beach. That was hunger. This is safety, my soul fitting back into my body exactly as it should. I have embraced him every day and night since his return, but this ailment is symptomatic only now that I know about it.
I can never leave his arms. I kiss him, just to double-check, and I sigh as I have my confirmation.
I never chose Peeta. Just like I never chose Prim or Rue. It is, what did Gale call it? A foregone conclusion.
It would be against my very being to not need him.
I pull away and he whines, gently. “Hey, I was enjoying that.”
“You can have more.”
He gives me a tired grin. “When?”
I lay my head on his chest and settle in for the night. My mother won’t be expecting me anyway. She’s given up trying to keep me from him. In fact, only two days past Finnick had teased that Plutarch’s query as to my whereabouts was stupid, because I had a new residence in the Mellark room in the hospital. When Prim relayed the story to me I’d been ambivalent about to react. Now, I want to scoff alongside Finnick. Yes, what a stupid question. Where else would I be?
“Whenever you want.”
Notes
Part two
@gingerale2017 i know you love everlark ;)
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