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Chapter Text

i. the village

When Katniss was seven years old, her father showed her the first of many corpses. 

It was a stag, its antlers long and proud even half-buried in the mulch of the woods. Its eyes were replaced with half-formed clumps of wet leaves, and its fur and skin were exchanged for green moss soft as the blonde down on Prim’s toddler head. Where moss didn’t cover, mushrooms did, dotting its flank where white spots did as a fawn. What caught Katniss’s eye most, however, was the young beech tree growing through the cavern of the stag’s pelvis, bark bone-white and tender leaves a gentler green than the moss. 

Her father knelt beside it, and Katniss leaned against the butter-soft leather of his jacket, not wanting to get closer to the bones than she had to. “Do you know what happened here, Katniss?” 

“It died.” 

Her father chuckled. “It did. A long time ago, looks like. What kind of mushrooms are these?” He nudged her off his shoulder, an unsubtle go on, get closer. 

Katniss knelt cautiously on the mulch beside him, still a good foot away from the deer. She noted the characteristic hollows across the tall, skinny caps of the mushrooms, and her mouth watered. “Morels.” 

Her father kissed the side of her head. “Good job.” He pulled a small canvas bag off his belt and opened it. “Now–why did the morels grow on the deer?” He methodically harvested the morels, plucking them not just on top of the bones, but where they grew underneath as well. 

Katniss picked a few from behind the deer’s skull. “I don’t know.” 

“Because, Katniss,” her father said. “When bodies die, things grow well where they were. Life taking after death. That tree and these mushrooms see what the deer left behind in its meat and skin and bones, and they decide that they can use it.” Her father tied up the bag and wiped the dust on his pants. “And then we get to use it, and make your mother happy.” He stood up and offered Katniss the half-full bag of mushrooms. “You wanna give ‘em to her?” 

Katniss took the bag, grinning. 

That evening, they cooked up the mushrooms with the squirrel her father caught and the dandelion greens Katniss picked, and they fell asleep with full bellies. For just a while longer, Katniss did not think of death and bodies and what is left behind. 

The place that had been District 12 grows from the death that had filled it. It takes time to sift the charred bones from the glass-and-stone rubble, but they do–those from District 12 who returned, and those from 8 and 11 and 4 and even 13 who decided to follow the Mockingjay to rebuild from ash. It doesn’t take long for them to learn that Katniss is not the Mockingjay here, and that the Mockingjay is no longer needed. Here, she is Katniss Everdeen, digging graves in the Meadow because she can’t look at the bones without dry heaving, but she’s going to do something to fix her home. Delly digs beside her, and Peeta brings quick bread to everyone digging and pitchers of water to drink or to wash their hands of ashes, and the old goat man brings a wheelbarrow of bones with a gruff nod, and Katniss digs until her hands form callouses and the Meadow becomes a graveyard. 

The people from District 11 teach them how to till the ashes into the soil, and the next summer wheat and corn grow where children had once stood, fearing they would be reaped and discarded like chaff and cob. 

Not anymore, Katniss thinks, as she walks down the cut-through path to home. The breeze brushes the stalks of corn against each other, and she turns her formerly-deaf ear to hear it. Good thing: there are no Hunger Games. Good thing: they taught us to grow food. 

She looks toward the lit-up windows of the homes in the formerly Victor’s Village, now just the Village. It’s drawing dusk, but three children chase each other between the wildflower-spotted lawns. One of them is a toddler, no more than three, and her thighs are fat-round as she clumsily runs after the other children. Good thing: babies have fat thighs. Good thing: no one makes kids stop playing. 

All the houses in Victor’s Village are filled. Almost all by multiple families, living together in community the way they’d never been able to before. Children whose parents build the medical factory or sow the fields are watched by other people who live with them, strangers from other Districts, from opposite ends of Twelve, turned aunts and uncles and cousins. An improbability, an impossibility, happening where, if Snow had had his way, nothing would have been, ever again. Good thing, she thinks. People help each other.

The door to her home creaks slightly as she enters, and she takes in the smell of bread and stew. “Home,” she calls. She hangs her game bag on the hook. Nothing today–she didn't hunt, really, this time. That’s a still-unfamiliar privilege: being able to go to the woods just to sit in the summer breeze. 

“Kitchen!” Peeta responds. He steps forward to stand in the entryway–sleeves rolled up, towel over his shoulder, wooden spoon in hand. 

She swipes her finger up the bowl of the spoon, licks the gravy off. “That’s good,” she says. Peeta smiles. Good thing: sometimes I make Peeta smile. 

“About damn time, sweetheart.” Haymitch sits at the kitchen table, legs kicked up on the spare fourth kitchen chair. “We took all this time to make dinner, and you’re late.” 

“I made dinner,” Peeta says unnecessarily. 

“I stirred.” 

Katniss takes the spoon from Peeta. “Sit. I’ll dish.” 

The stew is thick and brown, full of carrots and potatoes and chunks of meat. Probably from the squirrels she brought in yesterday. The carrots, though… “Carrots?” 

“Tulsee’s garden grew a million,” Peeta says. “She wouldn’t even take anything–she just told me to take them away. There’s even more in the pantry.”

“I’m looking into distilling carrot liquor,” Haymitch says. When Katniss and Peeta both glare at him, he holds his hands up in mercy. “Joking.” 

She ladles the stew into bowls and tears a chunk of bread off for each; today’s is seeded and thick-crusted, and still warm. She sets the bowls down, and the three of them eat. With spoons, despite what Effie thought years ago, though Katniss thinks she could lick the bowl clean. She settles for using the bread to sop up the remaining gravy. 

The bread is one of Haymitch’s favorites, as is the stew. They won’t acknowledge it, just as there won’t be a birthday cake or a birthday song. She’d left him a new pocketknife by his pillow this morning; he has it tucked into his belt where his old knife used to sit. Peeta made sweet buns this morning, another of Haymitch’s favorites. His birthday, she understood, was still difficult, even when the sun no longer rose on the reaping. 

Conversation flows as easy as breathing, with the lulls natural with someone as non-talkative as Katniss feeling comfortable instead of awkward. When they finish eating, it’s Haymitch who collects the dishes and washes them in the sink, and his hands don’t shake. 

It didn’t used to be so easy. Before Peeta came home, when Katniss couldn’t drag herself off the couch, let alone down to Haymitch’s own house, she’d only eat if Greasy Sae cooked for her, and Haymitch subsisted off what he could make for himself. Once Peeta came, they drew back together. Peeta was always the glue, after all. 

It was her idea for Haymitch to move in, though. Once Peeta started cooking, he came over for dinner nearly every night, and would relax on their couch until he finally decided to go back home, long into the evening. More than once, he ended up falling asleep there. Neither minded. They were just glad he slept from normal tiredness instead of passing out from drink. He still drinks, of course, but most times he drinks less. When he slept there, they just covered him with a knit blanket and made sure he had his pocketknife in his hand, and were glad if he stayed in the morning. 

“He should just stay,” Katniss said, one night in their bed. They lay together, her back to Peeta’s front, and maybe that’s why she could talk about something like this–because she couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see the softening in his creek-blue eyes. “I don’t–like him being alone.” 

“Me neither.” Peeta’s hand tightened around her stomach. 

“We have too much room anyway. And his house–if we clean it up, someone else could take it.” 

“Katniss–”

“He could drink too much and choke–”

Peeta nipped her shoulder through her nightshirt, and that caught her off guard enough to shut her up. “Katniss. It’s a good idea.” 

Of course, Peeta was the one who told him, after breakfast, once Haymitch made noises about going back home for the day. “Let me go with you.” 

Haymitch’s eyes narrowed. “Why?” 

Peeta shrugged. “So I can help you grab your things. You’re moving in.” 

“I’m not–”

“Yes, you are,” Katniss said. “There’s five bedrooms here. Take one.” 

“Unless you prefer the couch,” Peeta offered. 

Haymitch opened his mouth and raised a finger as if to retort, but it all faded. “You… want me to stay here?” 

“You’re here half the time anyway,” Katniss said. 

Peeta puts an arm in front of her. “ Yes, Haymitch. We do.” 

“Won’t be, ah–in the way of your love-nest?” 

"Love-nest? ” Katniss said. 

“You’re lovebirds!” Haymitch argued. “This is a love-nest!” 

Peeta put himself between Katniss and Haymitch. “You’re moving in.” He looked between the two of them, a hesitant half-smile on his face. “We stick together, yeah? Real or not real?” 

“Real,” Katniss said automatically. 

They both looked to Haymitch. His grey Seam eyes darted uncertainly between them. “Real. Just–” he raised his hands to his chest defensively. “If you have kids, I’m not babysitting. And I don’t cook.” 

“Good,” Katniss said, ignoring the pang of panic at the kids comment. “I don’t want us to get food poisoning.” 

“Then it’s a deal,” Peeta said. “The Victors of District 12, housemates.” 

And it, somehow, works. Against all odds, works. Now, when Haymitch has a nightmare, he is not alone in an echoey, too-big house. Half the time, when he wakes up from one and goes to the kitchen for tea and liquor and distraction, Katniss is there, or Peeta, or both of them. Some nights turn into morning, all three sipping tea in nightclothes, silent or talking, until dawn breaks through the gauzy kitchen curtains. One-eared Buttercup sits in the windowsill when he’s not exploring town and begging for scraps, and Katniss is finally able to look at him without wanting to sob. 

Haymitch’s geese graze in the backyard, each named after someone they know. Johanna is, naturally, the most crotchety goose, and Peeta has a bum leg, and Finnick defends the flock and is somehow goose-handsome. The one named Sid is the smallest, and the one named Lenore Dove is the most beautiful. 

Deciding to find him geese was easy. It had been another bedtime conversation that Katniss broached facing away. Peeta reckoned he could fashion an incubator–”Basically an oven, yeah?”--and Katniss knew she could find goose eggs by the lake in the spring. Getting the eggs was another store entirely. Geese, much like many former tributes, are sharp-eyed, mean creatures who don’t take well to their flock being disturbed. Katniss had to hide out in the trees and shoot an arrow at one goose in order to get the laying goose to squawk and run in defense just so she could swoop in and scoop up an egg or two. It worked a couple times, but the last mamma goose wasn’t so easily fooled, and Katniss had to put an arrow through her eye. Made a good dinner, though, and she only had two eggs in the first place. She wasn’t upset, and any qualms she could have had were thoroughly quashed when she revealed the pile of eggs to Haymitch and his face fell to pure, childlike joy. He’d enjoyed the roast, too. 

They share cups of tea, now. The dishes are washed and put away, the leftover stew stored in the icebox, and the three of them sit comfortably in the living room. “The Meadow’s growing back in,” she says. “There’s wildflowers all over.” 

There is no marker for the mass grave in the Meadow. Cold stone would have never felt like a right memorial. Instead, the people of Twelve live on in the stories of the people who escaped, in the coal dust still surrounding the empty mine, in the flowers just starting to peek out of the upturned dirt of the Meadow. 

The poetry of it feels almost heavy-handed, like something Plutarch would have come up with in a propo. The Meadow had saved Twelve, once, when Gale led whoever he could there, out of the fire and ash of the Capitol’s bombs. The people that the Meadow couldn’t save feed it, growing it greener and brighter than it ever had before. She thinks of her father, walking her through that Meadow to get home with their bounty of morels. Life taking after death, she remembers. 

She wonders if there can ever be enough life to take back all that death. 

“There’s primrose growing,” Katniss murmurs. “In the Meadow.” 

Peeta takes her hand in his, kisses the back, runs his thumb over her knuckles. “And it’ll keep growing.” 

“It better.” Haymitch leans forward, hands intertwined between his legs. “No one likes a muddy graveyard.” He knocks his tea back like a shot and sets the cup on the low table between them before standing up. “Goin’ to bed.” He moves stiffly towards the stairs, but stops and touches Katniss’s shoulder. “You’re… we’re doing good, sweetheart.” He shakes her shoulder. “Real good.” He points at Peeta. “Real.” 

When he leaves, Peeta settles against the couch, and Katniss lays against him. He plays with the end of her braid, and Katniss thinks she could melt into him. “Do you want more primrose in front of the house?” She can feel the quiet rumble of his voice in his chest. “We can dig some up tomorrow.” 

Prim’s bones aren’t here. She doesn’t know where they are, and she never will. She can almost be fine with that, with primrose growing deep in the Meadow, under a willow. 

She kisses him, and he, as always, understands it as yes.

Chapter Text

ii. the bread

Peeta teaches Katniss about bread. About how all bread really needs is flour, liquid, yeast, and salt. The liquid hydrates the flour, allowing it to turn from dust to dough, and the salt gives it flavor, but yeast–

“It’s what makes bread good,” Peeta explains. He sets a jar reverently on the counter; it’s filled with some kind of white goop, like bread dough that’s gone wrong somehow. “You can have bread with just water, flour, and salt–that’s how you made your tesserae bread, right?” 

“Generous to call that bread.” It had been more of an awful cracker–coarse, flat, and bending instead of snapping. The kernels of grain would get stuck in her teeth and it tasted like nothing, but when it was all they had, it was eaten. Better that than hunger pangs. 

Peeta smiles. “Well, this is what makes bread not that.” He goes on, then, about fermentation and proving and how his starter makes the bread rise, but it’s kneading that holds it together. Katniss listens, as she always does, but she finds herself more focused on how his forearms flex and wrists twist as he kneads the dough across their flour-covered countertop, and how his brow furrows ever-so-slightly as he tears off hunks of dough and shapes them into perfectly round balls. He shows her how, and she takes to it–it’s methodical, folding the bottom of the roll into something like a flower bud until the top is stiff and smooth as oiled wood. 

When they cover the dough balls to rest for a second rise, she notices a stripe of flour in his hair, the white of it almost blending into the sun-bleached blond. “You’re not allowed to go grey yet.” She ruffles the flour out of his hair, and he gently smacks her hand away. “You’re only 22.” 

“In theory,” he says quietly. He catches her hand and runs his thumb over the back. 

His hands are tacky with the bare remnants of dough, and there’s a bit of flour in the crease of his thumb. She brushes it away. He doesn’t need to say sometimes I feel ancient, sometimes I feel like a child learning to walk, sometimes I think I’ve been dead for six years. She knows. And he knows she knows.

Growing back with Peeta, Katniss thinks, was as inevitable as good bread rising. She was tesserae grain, and he the soft white flour they had so much of now. The Games were water, and Haymitch salt, and the Capitol the hands that kneaded them together. Coming home to 12 was the yeast, and each others’ arms the warm place they needed to rise. 

They bake the rolls and put them still warm in a covered basket alongside goat cheese and jars of lemonade sweetened with honey. They pick blackberries from a hidden-away patch Katniss knows on the way to the lake in the woods, and when they reach there, they sit on a blanket among the waving wildflowers and glittering lake and eat until their stomachs ache and their lips are sticky with sugar. Eventually, they lay on the blanket and kiss the sugar away. It is noon, and the sun is high, and sweat sticks their skin, but they know how to move together in harder circumstances.

Afterward, they dive into the lake. Katniss taught Peeta to swim four years ago, when he kept waking up in saltwater nightmares. He prefers to keep his head above the surface, but he treads water as well as Haymitch’s geese. The day softens to afternoon, and they slip through the summer-warm lake and splash each other until they laugh and rub the water from their eyes. They sup on more bread covered in the last of their sun-warmed goat cheese, and chew mint leaves Katniss finds at the woods’ edge. 

Peeta paints on a hand-sized canvas from oils in a tiny pallet. Katniss watches his brushstrokes form the blue-brown lake, the sunlight caught in it, the slender grasses waving at the water’s edge. He nudges her away. “Sit. I’m painting you.” 

“Why?” 

“You’re beautiful. Sit. ” 

Her hair is half-matted from the lake water, waves tangled and covered with sand, and she’s fairly certain there’s the start of a sunburn on the bridge of her nose, but she sits anyway. She wiggles her toes into the pebbles of the beach and lets her head rest on the back of her neck. The quiet drone of bumblebees mixes with the hiss of waves on the shore and the swipe of brush on canvas, and above it all, a mockingjay calls, echoing some tune Katniss has never heard. She smiles.

The sun droops lower in the sky. Soon it will be sunset. 

“We need–”

“Done,” Peeta says. He snaps his paint pallet shut and pats the blanket beside him. “C’mere.” 

Peeta holds the painting; she's too scared she’d drop it, somehow, but she takes it all in. The lake is captured perfectly, the waves echoed in soft swoops along the visibly pebbly beach. Katniss is rendered more abstractly, likely due to the size of the canvas, but her shoulders are loose and her leg is kicked into the dirt, and she looks up into the sky. But one thing is not painted from the reference in front of him: the Katniss in the painting is surrounded by dozens of katniss plants, their arrowhead leaves blowing in the breeze just like her hair. 

Katniss is never going to find herself beautiful–but she can accept that Peeta does, if Peeta sees her like this: happy, and relaxed, and soft in the waning light. She’s not on fire, anymore–she’s of the earth. She’s home. 

She looks from the painting to the painter, and sees her home in his eyes. 

Stay with me. 

Always. 

“Marry me,” Katniss says. 

Peeta’s breath audibly catches in his throat. “Ma– what?”

Katniss cups Peeta’s face and kisses him soundly. “Marry me. Soon as we get back. We have bread. We can make a fire–” 

“Katniss,” Peeta says, and he sets the painting down to wrap his hands around her waist. “I didn’t–we could never get married, if you didn’t want to–”

“I do. I want to marry you.” A laugh bubbles in her chest. “Not because we’re supposed to, or because you want to, or because someone is making us– I want to marry you because I love you, and we’re here,  and we're home.” 

She kisses him, and he kisses back, and they kiss like they’re the only thing keeping each other alive, hungry and desperate and rich with unsaid words. When they pull apart, Peeta presses his forehead to hers, and speaks, his voice gravelly and thick: “Let’s get married.” 

By the time they make it home, the world is limned in sunset orange. Peeta’s orange. They push through the door, stumbling on their threshold and startling a sleeping Buttercup, but they just laugh. Haymitch isn’t home, and he won’t be tonight–on nights like this, he’s allowed to get blackout drunk, and near everyone in town will mind him now to be sure he is alright as he can be. 

It’s too hot for a fire, on this cloying summer night, but they build one anyway, together. They pile kindling in the fireplace, grab dried grasses as tinder, and set the wood alight in another gorgeous shade of orange. Peeta spears one of the rolls on a skewer, and they both wrap their hands around the end of it and slowly turn the bread over the fire, watching the edges brown and crisp. The smell of toasting bread mingles with rich woodsmoke. 

Neither is sure whose fault it is that the bread falls into the fire. They salvage it from the flame and share it anyway, and neither even tastes the char. 

It is July fourth. For the fifth year in a row, there is no reaping. 

Chapter Text

iii. the victors

District 12’s first ever harvest festival sees the small town square bathed in yellow string light and awash in fiddle song. A stand offers hot popped corn sweetened with syrup, and Greasy Sae next to it offers steaming barley stew served with fresh hunks of bread. In the morning there is a pig show, and in the afternoon, Haymitch’s goose named Lenore Dove takes home first prize. 

“Why didn’t you enter Johanna?” says the human Johanna testily. 

“She’d have pecked all the others,” Haymitch says.

“So she still would’ve won.” 

“It’s a beauty contest! ” says Annie, laughter in her voice. 

“If she killed them all, she wins!” says Johanna. 

“She hasn’t killed anyone– ” Peeta says.

“Nah, she’s right.” Haymitch looks fondly across town to where, presumably, Johanna the goose terrorizes the other geese in their backyard. 

“Win on a technicality is still a win.” Katniss shrugs. 

“Now, really—“ Effie titters. “They’re all lovely pets–” 

“Think they’re lovely now?” A catlike grin spreads across Haymitch’s face. “You should taste ‘em roasted up.” A jest–he’d never roast one of his geese, but Effie wouldn’t know that.

Effie releases what could only be described as a squawk, and everyone else devolves into laughter. 

The visitors are, ostensibly, in the district for the harvest festival–many still view them as the victors or as war heroes, and those who don’t pay as much mind to that know that Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch know them. In reality, though, the visitors–Effie, Johanna, Annie, her son, and Katniss’s mother–are in town for Katniss and Peeta’s wedding. 

Initially, they had no plans to have a wedding beyond their private toasting. The Capitol-planned spectacle had soured the both of them on the idea of a full ceremony. But then, two weeks ago, Katniss was on the phone with Effie, and she feined a minor emergency so she could get off the phone and convince Peeta that maybe they should have an actual wedding, largely because Katniss couldn’t stop imagining the look on Effie’s face if she learned the two of them had gotten married without anyone knowing. 

The list was short, still–the visitors, Haymitch, and Delly, who Katniss had nurtured an ever-growing soft spot for since she helped save Peeta. No one else in town knew, and they picked the weekend of the Harvest Festival so there could be food and dancing and music they didn’t have to plan. The only planning was making phone call invites and ironing Peeta’s slacks. 

Katniss did allow Effie to pick her dress after the woman stopped sobbing over the phone, and she brought a surprisingly simple linen dress with her, immaculately wrapped in tissue paper. Butter yellow, with daisies and ivy embroidered across the bodice, it hung to her knee. The cloth was petal-soft and flowy, and Katniss felt less like she wore a wedding dress and more like she was wrapped in comfort. 

“I didn’t think you’d want a white dress,” Effie says. She adjusts the sleeves to rest just below Katniss’s shoulders and smooths a stray wrinkle. “But I thought pale yellow would bring out your eyes.”

“My eyes are grey,” Katniss protests weakly. 

“So is the moon, and the stars are yellow!” 

“Effie–”

“Katniss,” Effie’s voice wavers. She turns Katniss to face her, and Katniss has never quite realized that Effie is shorter than her. Perhaps its because Effie is wearing shorter heels, and her peach-colored wig flows down her back rather than towering over her head, but Katniss has to look down on her. “You just–you look beautiful, and I am so very glad that–that…” 

She trails off, and Katniss doesn’t need her to continue talking to fill in the blanks. She wraps Effie into a hug, inhaling her sugar-sweet and clean cotton scent, and murmurs, “I love you too, Effie.” 

Katniss’s mother does her hair–half of it braided, half of it loose. She ties the end of the braid off with a cream-colored ribbon and brushes the hair off Katniss’s neck. She runs her fingers through it longer than Katniss would have let her years ago, but she is just glad to have her here. 

She’d never have asked her to come--she would have expected her to say no, with all the ghosts still filling everything back home. But Peeta asked her mother for her, and, according to him, there was no hesitation. “She’s only upset she missed the toasting,” Peeta had said. “But she said that she and your father–”

“Toasted alone anyway, yeah,” Katniss said, smiling. “Hypocrite.” 

They’re wed at the shore of the lake at sunset, with Haymitch swearing them to each other and everyone they love standing around them, smiling or weeping or whooping when they kiss. There are holes in that group–Finnick shaped, Prim shaped, too many others– but Katniss is glad to have even these few people with them. 

Good thing: my family is bigger than it once was. 

Afterward, they meander back to town. They eat too much food and dance until their feet could fall off, and Annie’s son is so tired from running around with other children that Johanna carries him, passed out and drooling on her shoulder, back to the house. 

Katniss and Peeta are the last to arrive and the last to sleep, as they don't shut their eyes until dawn ekes its way through the curtain. Their night is spent talking, and holding each other, and treading the familiar territory of each other’s bodies until they don’t have breath to talk anymore. 

As dawn bleeds gold into their room, Peeta draws Katniss close and asks, sleep heavy in his voice: “Real or not real: I’m your husband. We’re happy.” 

“Real.” 

Katniss’s mother leaves after two days, claiming work, and Effie goes with her, claiming “ Terribly important activities.” Effie cries, and Katniss’s mother hugs her silently, and Katniss watches the train leave until Peeta leads her away. 

Annie and her son stay two weeks. He spends his days playing with children he stumbles across in town and swimming like a fish in the lake. Peeta bakes him cookies, and Katniss shows him their book of plants, and the child looks so much like Finnick that she sometimes can’t look at him without thinking nightlock nightlock nightlock–

Peeta loves him. Katniss would let Annie and her son stay forever with how much Peeta loves him. 

After he is in bed, the five victors sit and talk late into the night. Annie and her son have a home in District 4, right by the sea. He loves fishing, and Annie taught him to make a fishhook out of anything. “Not that he’ll need it,” she says softly. “But it feels safer for him to know how to survive.” 

She has friends back home in 4. People she trusts to take care of her son when she drowns in herself again. One of them, apparently, is a man. A transplant from District 11–tall and broad and gentle with his hands, who carves toys from wood for her son and fixes anything that needs fixing. “He’s not Finnick,” Annie says. “But he’s good, and understanding, and he loves my son, and he makes me feel… safe.” 

“And he’s so fuckin’ hot, ” Johanna says. “Don’t leave that out. I wouldn’t kick him out of my bed.” 

Annie flushes as red as her hair, and Johanna and Haymitch heckle her until she tells them every last detail, with Johanna filling in the gaps that Annie won’t say.

Delly joins them for dinner nearly every night they’re in town. Katniss isn’t sure why, but she sees nothing wrong with it. There’s even a benefit–Johanna is, miraculously, even less abrasive around her than he is with Annie’s son.

Annie and her son leave with three loaves of bread and a whole box full of his favorite cinnamon cookies. They leave behind a promise to visit again and Johanna Mason. They don’t exactly invite her, but no one tells her to leave, and there’s still three empty bedrooms in this massive house. Plus, Katniss likes Johanna even more when they’re housemates, not roommates. So Johanna stays. 

She often flees the house. She slings an axe along her back and runs until her tumbled feelings morph into anger, and takes her anger out on trees in the woods. She brings back firewood, and it’s healthier than morphine, so no one stops her. 

She does run holes in her shoes, but having an easy line into Delly and her cobbler’s shop makes repairing them easy. Half the time Delly comes over for dinner, she ends up tsking over Johanna’s shoes and taking them home to patch holes before bringing them back the next morning. 

“She could probably learn how to fix them herself,” Katniss says after the fifth time. 

Delly just shrugs and smiles. “I don’t mind fixing them.”  

Sometimes Katniss joins her—not on the run. Running has never suited Katniss. The pounding of foot to ground makes the ankle she’d broken ache worse, and she runs enough in her nightmares, from fire, from Clove’s knife, from poison fog—

The point is. She doesn’t run. Johanna wouldn’t let her anyway. The one time Katniss asked if she wanted company when Johanna had woken up more wild-eyed than normal, Johanna flipped her off and ran out of the house before another word could be said. That day, however, it was early winter. No snow yet, but bitter cold that spoke of it coming soon. She didn’t take a jacket,  Katniss thought.

Katniss packed her game bag with a blanket, a thermos of hot chocolate, and Johanna’s jacket and climbed a lookout tree at the edge of the woods. She waited thirty minutes in its boughs, breathing on her fingers to keep them from freezing, before Johanna came racing towards the treeline. Katniss dropped right in front of her. 

“Fuck you,” Johanna said. 

“Fuck you.” 

“I don’t want company –”

“I don’t want you to chop your arm off.”

“I’ll chop your arm off–”

“I’m staying.” 

“Asshole.”

“Yeah, you too.” Katniss planted herself on a rock and tossed Johanna the jacket. “Put that on and get chopping. It’s cold.”

Johanna holds her axe towards Katniss for one pregnant, non-threatening moment before throwing it into the dirt and yanking the jacket on. “Mother hen.” 

“Just be glad it’s me, not Peeta.” 

They don’t talk, most of the time, when Katniss joins her in the woods. It’s neither of their way. They just exist together, adjacent to each other’s place. 

Good thing: Johanna is my friend.  

Katniss doesn’t ask to join. When she thinks Johanna needs her, she goes. And when Johanna needs to talk, she talks.

It’s spring. Green leaves push blossoms off trees, and the air is warm and the breeze is sweet-scented. The night before, Peeta made a strawberry shortcake from strawberries Katniss grew in their backyard, and Delly brought cream from her neighbor’s cow to whip into  sweet, thick topping. They’d played cards and laughed into the night. It was good. Things were good. 

So when Johanna stomps down the stairs the next morning with her short-cropped hair sticking up and eyes too-bright and her running shoes half on, Katniss follows. 

Johanna’s run is short, this time. Katniss has only started digging dandelions and wild garlic from the ground when Johanna sits cross-legged with a huff beside her. 

“Why’d you marry Peeta?” Her words shoot like rocks shot from a sling.  

Katniss drops her spade. “We–wanted to. I mean, it was pretty impulsive, but–”

“Why–” Johanna cuts herself off, shakes her head. “What made you decide you could do it?” 

Katniss sits up on her haunches and looks at Johanna.The other woman’s eyes burrow into the ground. There’s a furrow in her brow and anger–no, not anger. Fear in her eyes. “Johanna…” 

“There was a girl I liked back home,” Johanna starts sharply. “Before my Games. Her name was Clary. She could–climb a tree like a squirrel. And tell a fir from a spruce from across a clearing. She was my best friend, and–” She digs her fingers in the dirt. “We got together not long after. She kissed me, first. And then they killed her, when I wouldn’t prostitute myself to old fucking men . Her, and my brother, and my parents–” She looks up, finally, and her brown eyes are bright as amber. “So how’d you know it was safe.” 

Birds tweet cheerfully above them, and Katniss can’t hold Johanna’s gaze. She looks at the earth instead–cool, familiar earth. There’s a dandelion, right between Johanna’s spread hands, sunlight yellow and as familiar as the hunger pangs had once been. “I don’t know,” Katniss says. “But I hope it is.” She picks up her spade and holds it out, handle first, to Johanna. “Dig those up. It’ll be good for dinner.” 

She doesn’t take it. “What if hope isn’t enough?” Her eyes are wild, her face drawn. A memory flashes: Johanna, soaked and terrified, frozen as water fills the room.  

We survived, she thinks. We’re the victors, and yet.

“Then you just try to live,” Katniss says. “And one day, maybe it will be.” 

Summer comes. Annie and her son visit again, and the boy insists that they go to the lake as many times as possible while he’s there. He’s about as hard to say no to as Finnick was, and the lake is cooler than the sweltering air, so they go. Peeta and Haymitch roughhouse with him, dunking him with laughing shrieks and tossing a ball over his tousled head until he tackles Peeta back. Katniss sits in the shallows with Annie, their legs kicking in the sun-warmed water as they watch their boys. 

Johanna sits on the picnic blanket in the shade of a willow tree, drinking lemonade and heckling them. Anytime Annie’s son ends up under the water, her words cut off until he’s in the air and shrieking again. Delly sits by her. She wears a massive floppy sunhat, and she laughs at Johanna’s faux-anger and touches her wrist when she freezes. Good thing, Katniss thinks. Delly is kind. 

Katniss hadn’t appreciated her until 13, when she helped construct the slow bridge that Peeta took to come back to himself again, and hadn’t appreciated her for who she is until they all moved back to 12. She’s kind, of course, and soft–but she’s the soft that only people who’ve lost everything can be. Her parents died in the bombing–they’d been good people, too, and her mother had always fixed Katniss’s shoes for only two squirrels. She’d been left with her older brother, and then he died in the battle in the Capitol. Delly Cartwright would be well within in her rights to be bitter and angry and to never return to District 12 ever again. But instead she chooses, every day, to be gentle and to wear silly hats. 

Eventually, Peeta and Annie switch places, and Katniss rests her head on Peeta’s shoulder. “Kid almost knocked my leg off,” he says wryly. He reaches one hand down and unstraps it, sighing as he shakes out stiffness from his stump. “Hate wearing it in water anyway. It chafes.”

“Poor thing,” Katniss says. 

Peeta just chuckles, and they fall into comfortable silence. Haymitch picks up Annie’s son horizontally and winds back his arms as if to throw him, and the child shrieks with glee every time Haymitch feints. “He’s a good kid,” Peeta murmurs. “So happy. ” 

“Doesn’t know an ounce of fear in his life. Of course he’s happy.” The words come out more bitter than anticipated, but Katniss won’t take it back. 

“We could have a kid that happy,” Peeta says quietly. 

“I don’t–” Katniss starts. Her tongue feels thick and gluey in her mouth. There are no Reapings. There is food on the table. No one wants us dead. He wants kids so badly.  And, quieter, maybe I do too. “I don’t know.”    

Peeta takes her hand, squeezes it. “That’s okay.” 

Katniss pulls their joined hands up to her lips and kisses the back of his hand. “Love you.” 

“Love you.” 

There’s a crunch of feet on pebbles behind them. Delly holds Johanna’s hand, and the two women walk towards the water–Delly leading, Johanna just barely behind her. Johanna moves stiffly, but there’s an unfamiliar softness in her eyes as she looks at Delly. At nothing but Delly. 

She continues looking only at Delly as they step into the shallows, and she matches Delly’s gentle smile with a shaky one of her own. “Keep going, Dels,” Johanna says. “Or I’ll stop.” 

“You can stop anytime–” 

“I don’t want to stop.” 

Delly pulls Johanna further. The water is up to their thighs. “Then I won’t.” 

Johanna’s hand twitches on Delly’s shoulder, only for Delly to catch it and hold it along with the other. A wave comes, splashing up their hips, and when Johanna flinches, Delly soothes with quiet words Katniss can’t hear. 

And then Johanna tackles her. They fall into the surf, and Katniss is terrified for a moment that Johanna’s snapped, somehow, until the wave passes and she sees the two women, chest deep in water, Johanna’s hands pressed to the sides of Delly’s round face, kissing like their exchange of lips and tongue and breath is the only thing keeping them alive. 

“Oh,” Katniss says. 

“ Finally.” Peeta laughs, and Haymitch whoops, and Delly’s giant hat floats towards Annie on a wave, and Katniss sits there, dumbstruck and feeling foolish. 

“How long–” she starts, and Peeta cuts her off with a kiss to her forehead. 

“Haven’t you wondered why Delly’s been around so much?” he says against her skin. 

“I thought she was being friendly!” 

“Mmhmm, and fixing Johanna’s shoes?” 

She shoves him away, and he laughs, and Katniss finds herself laughing, too.  

Ever since she first met Johanna, and more since 13, Katniss has seen Johanna as some awful mirror. That if she hadn’t had Peeta, if he hadn’t drawn her to defy the Capitol that they both live, that Snow could have made her a new Johanna. Sell her, and when she wouldn’t be sold, kill everyone she loves. She would’ve grown just as angry, just as bitter, and it would’ve been just as warranted. 

But Katniss had Peeta. Gentle, kind, clever Peeta, who chooses every day to be gentle. And she still has him, and she will have him. 

Johanna presses her forehead to Delly’s, and she stands with her in the water, unshaking, and Johanna Mason, even temporarily, stands a victor again.

Chapter Text

The child is a clawing thing in her womb, gnashing and kicking and flipping. The fear gnaws, and her stomach swells, and it’s only Peeta’s arms at night that let her sleep. 

She wants this child, and not only because Peeta wanted children–though it would be a lie to say that his desire wasn’t the spark that lit her embers. It took ten years before Katniss could answer yes to Peeta’s unspoken question, enabled by the pills produced in the medical facility her mother managed.

Before the pills, when she and Peeta lay together, any delay to her period came with crushing anxiety of pregnancy that, occasionally, made her prevent them from being intimate at all. It didn’t matter how many years there were no Games, or how stocked their pantry was–the idea of a seed planting in her womb was terrifying. 

It still is terrifying, even as she’s chosen it. It, oddly, took her having the option to not have a child that made her want children. If she took the pills every day, each month, she wouldn’t conceive. If she wanted to conceive, she just needed to not take the pills. She took them for several years before she realized she wanted to stop taking them, and she chose it over a year before she let herself fall pregnant. She didn’t tell Peeta, or her mother, or Haymitch, or anyone. For a year, she held the desire in her chest like a squirrel with a nut, hoarding it until she would be sure that she could use it.

She told Peeta at the lake. It was spring, and the magnolia trees were blossomed pink and fragrant. She shared bread and lemonade, and she told him she wanted a child, and he kissed the lemon from her lips and the tears from her cheeks. 

Later, she wonders if the child was conceived then, among the blossoms and the lap of the lake on the shore. 

Her stomach is ripe as a peach. She can’t hunt; can barely walk with the weight of it. She wants the child out, and wants the child to stay in forever, where there’s nothing dangerous. 

She has nightmares most nights. Not of the Games, always–not what she saw, at least. Instead, her mind conjures images of a boy with her hair and Peeta’s eyes with a knife in his gut, or a girl with Prim’s smile and Peeta’s hands chased by lizard mutts. Or, worse of all, a faceless, nameless baby thin and starved because she couldn’t feed it. 

It’s a fear as deep as the earth and as natural as breathing, and Katniss can’t understand how it will ever go away when the child is born. How she will ever look at their child and not see it dead. 

The girl is born in winter, when a deep snow falls over their home and mutes every sound outside. Her mother is there, cooling her heated body with snow pack, and Haymitch wipes her sweating brow and murmurs “It’ll be okay, sweetheart,” and Peeta holds her hand even when she squeezes so tight she, distantly, fears she’d break it. 

Peeta catches her, and her grandmother swaddles her in a blanket she knitted. When the girl is placed on her chest, her blurry eyes blue and her head dark and blood-matted to her head, the fear Katniss expects to rush over her like an icy gale is stopped by joy as warm and soft as an evening in front of the fire, holding cups of tea and laughing despite it all. 

“We have a daughter,” says Peeta, his voice soft with amazement. 

She’s reluctant to let anyone else hold her, for fear the joy would dissipate like dandelion fluff in the wind–but her mother tells her she needs to rest, and so she relinquishes her daughter. First to Peeta, who bathes her in warm water and coos affection when she shrieks. Then to her mother, who holds the girl silently and cries. Then the girl is offered to Johanna, who refuses, and to Delly, who counts her toes and tickles her nose. Finally, the girl is passed to Haymitch, who sits stone-sober in a rocking chair and rocks and rocks until the girl is asleep. 

“Hey sweetheart,” he whispers to the girl. He looks up at Katniss, and there are tears in his Seam-gray eyes. He’s grown older, since he moved in. Leaner, and grayer, his wiry lines turned thin and brittle. Katniss worries for his liver. But with all of that there is a lightness to him and a warmth that can’t be ignored, and that warmth pours from him now, holding Katniss’s child. “She’s gonna be a handful,” he says. 

“I’ve planned for it,” says Peeta. His hand covers hers, and she squeezes it. He leans in and kisses her ear. “This is… real, yeah?” 

“Real,” she says. “She’s real. This is real.” 

Good thing, she thinks, as she breathes in the baby-sweetness of her. A daughter. Our daughter.

***

Katniss takes her to the woods when she’s a week old, slung in a sling across her chest. She doesn’t hunt–it feels wrong to introduce her to blood so early, even if it was just hunting and nothing worse–but she points out birds and squirrels that she knows her newborn eyes can’t yet see and tickles her nose with an oak leaf. 

Peeta has his own sling, and he tells her about yeast and salt and kneading. He presses her tiny fist into a ball of dough and tells her that the spring back means it’s ready to bake. He takes her shopping and on walks around the village and waves her tiny hand at everyone she sees. He paints so many portraits of her that he has to restock his paints within three months of her birth. 

She doesn't look like Prim. A part of Katniss was terrified she would inherit Peeta’s eyes and hair and look just like her–a part of Katniss longed for it. While her eyes settle to merchant-bright blue, her hair is decidedly Seam-dark from the moment she’s born. Good thing, Katniss thinks. Her grief will not follow her daughter. 

The victors’ house is filled with baby laughter. Johanna grouses that “the kid’ll never learn to walk” with how often she is picked up off the ground. No one comments that Johanna picks the girl up every time she holds up her chubby baby arms to her. 

The girl grows like wheat, sun-warmed and round-cheeked. There is no starvation in what had been District Twelve. Good thing, Katniss thinks, as her daughter clumsily crawls her way across the living room floor, fat thighs speeding. My daughter is healthy. 

Effie visits, bringing dozens of tiny frilly dresses. Dutifully, they dress her in them for Effie to coo at. Peeta ties her thin hair in tiny pigtails. Katniss longs for her hair to grow long enough to braid. 

They take her to the lake, and she plays for hours in the sand and the shallows. Katniss shows her her namesake plant and Peeta paints her taking a sand-covered nap on the blanket, and when she’s old enough, Johanna teaches her how to swim. 

By the time she can walk, she’s got the entire house wrapped around her finger, especially Haymitch. She constantly follows Haymitch around on her fat little toddler legs, little hand dragging him bent-over to keep her steady. He learns how to work wood with his pocketknife just so he can make her a tiny, clumsy wooden goose to play with, as the tempers of the geese preclude her from following him out when he pastures them. When she’s two, Haymitch makes sure that one of the hatchlings sees her face first. The geese accept her, then, and another of her parents’ fears is dissolved. 

Good thing, Katniss thinks, the first time the entire gaggle of geese follows sedately after Haymitch and the girl. She’s got a whole flock behind her. 

***

After a poorly-timed story from Johanna about a monster in the woods, the girl refuses to enter the forest, shrieking and squirming away when they approach a copse of trees. Initially, Katniss is discomfited to see her child afraid, and, worse, feels irritated. 

“I don’t like it,” she says, one late night over tea when only the children sleep. “It’s just the woods.” 

“Where there are animals and giant trees and things she doesn’t understand,” says Haymitch. “And keep coming out of it with death things.” 

Katniss flushes. “I don’t like her scared,” she admits. “That’s all.” 

“I was scared shitless of mice when I was a kid,” says Johanna. “Run away when I see one scared. Still don’t like them.” She shrugs. “Kids are scared of things. What matters is that what she’s scared of can’t hurt her.” 

Peeta takes her hand. Katniss squeezes it. Good thing, she thinks. My girl has childish fears. 

***

The boy is born when the girl is four. She had to wait a while to have another–the weight of that fear never quite dissipated, and it grew anew when she carried him. 

When the labor pangs come early, the fear shoots through her like an arrow loosed. Luckily, her mother is already in town, “just in case,” she had said, and so she soothes her and wipes her brow and assures her that it is early, but not too early, that the child will be fine–and Katniss, woozily, thinks about how she could hardly hug her mother fourteen years before, how she would have never let her mother hold her the way she did now. She considers how she holds her daughter, and how, if the girl would let her, she would hold her always. Katniss shuts her eyes as a contraction comes over her, and she lets her mother hold her. 

He is born bald as an egg and wrinkled as a walnut–a little early, a little small, but screaming loud enough to wake the whole house. Katniss holds their son on her chest, and Peeta traces the soft spot on his bare head, and he does not ask if this is real. Haymitch holds the girl, and she looks warily at the squirming, red ball of flesh on her mother’s chest. 

“That’s your brother,” says Peeta. “Your little brother.” 

“I wanted a sister,” the girl says. 

“Tough,” said Haymitch, his voice thick. “A little brother’s a fine thing, sweetheart.” 

The girl climbs clumsily on the bed, snuggles against Katniss, and looks down at the boy. She reaches for his hand, and he wraps his little fist tight around her finger. The girl laughs. 

Katniss thinks of Prim, and grief intermingles with joy. 

Good thing, she thinks. My daughter is an older sister. 

***

It doesn’t take long for the girl to warm up to the boy, just as it doesn’t take long for him to grow. He sprouts like a dandelion, all blond fuzz and long limbs. Katniss could spend hours touching his yellow curls. 

The boy loves the woods. When an infant, he was happiest in a sling on Katniss’s chest as she gathered; when older, he observes everything with his Seam-grey eyes, mushing wildflowers and berries in his small hands. After she learns he inquisitively puts everything in his mouth, she makes sure to only give him edible things.

“This is a dandelion,” she tells him. She tickles his nose with the yellow flower. He can’t understand her, really. Not yet. But she tells him what her father knew, not because he’ll need it, but because she wants to tell him. 

“This is burdock.” She holds up its scraggly root. “That was my father’s name. Your grandma uses it for medicine.” 

She holds up a blackberry. “You know this one.” He smiles at her with blackberry-tinged gums and reaches out a purple hand. She gives it to him, and he clumsily shoves it in his mouth. She laughs, and he laughs in response. 

Good thing, she thinks. I laugh more. 

***

Her children play in a graveyard. They do not know that they do. The meadow is full of spring-green grasses and dandelions, of rue and primrose so thick and soft that the graves beneath them are undisturbed and undetectable. The boy chases after the girl on his toddler legs, and she weaves rue into flower crowns, and Peeta watches them laughing and playing. Katniss sits on a blanket under a willow tree and lays out the abundance of their lunch–goat’s cheese and lemonade, crusty bread and blackberries, sandwiches with cured meat and dandelion greens, crisp shortbread with honey to drizzle. When the children are tired of playing, they will eat, and when their bellies are full, they will collapse into naps in the summer sun. Peeta will paint them, and Katniss will count every one of their breaths. 

When they get home, Peeta has made a birthday cake for Haymitch. Apple-stack, iced with sweet buttercream. He allowed Peeta to make a cake this year. 

It has been sixteen years since Katniss and Peeta were reaped. Their children play in the Meadow. 

Good thing, she thinks. This is all real.