Chapter Text
After I set everything to rise and shut the buttercreams in the icebox, I jog upstairs to pack what I can of my things. I have a backpack from school and a crate from downstairs that held butter on the train from district ten. There isn’t much here to take. It’s surreal, running the pads of my fingers over the furniture, saying a preemptive farewell to my childhood room. I used to share it with Rye before he was married. I’ve only had a room to myself for a few months and tomorrow I’ll share one with Katniss.
Katniss.
My sketchbooks and pencils go into the backpack along with my one precious paintbrush and the tin of inks I made last summer. She’s the one who showed me what plants to use for the colors.
I’m marrying Katniss Everdeen in the morning. It doesn’t quite make sense. This time yesterday I was stealing myself to marry Ira. I was facing the worst possibility for my future, a bleak lifetime with someone that makes me weary and pained. I’d accepted it really, my only aspiration was to somehow remain myself in my marriage. If I couldn’t be happy, maybe I could find a way to still be me. My father lost himself to his wife, I know he was a braver, kinder person before he knew her. I had hoped to be stronger than that. To keep my children safe, at least end one cycle. But then Katniss came storming in and asked, or rather demanded, that I marry her instead and I wanted to so badly I didn’t argue half as well as I could have.
I’m torn between the glee of being bound to her and the sorrow of knowing the bond will never be heart to heart. She didn’t tell me she wanted me, or react to my confessions, or kiss me goodbye in the dark. She only begged me to save her and insisted on saving me back. That isn’t nothing, I know that. She could have gone to anyone for help. I’m sure Hawthorn would marry her, no matter what she says. And she is saving me. I came alive last night at the thought of never speaking to Ira again and running off into a life full of pine and chicory and all the other sharp, wild things Katniss always smells like. I’d feel guilty throwing Ira over if she wasn’t such a wretched bitch. She’s got a terrible thorn in her side about Katniss and spent the whole week trying to make me agree to various underhanded and snide insults about the Seam and muddy boots. Ira made me cry once in grade school. Said I wished I had a real mommy instead of a mutt. At least on that point she was right. All in all not the easiest bride-to-be, but she isn’t anymore, Katniss is. My bride.
I fold a quilt that belonged to my grandmother and put it in the bottom of the crate. It’s something I might have no right to take, but I don’t care. They took my future and my choice from me, so I’ll take this. I might have had a chance with Katniss for real one day, if she really isn’t with Gale. I don’t know why she changed her mind after kissing me in the meadow last year if it wasn’t for him, but maybe it was something I could have fixed. I could’ve asked her to marry me in the daylight, with my own words, she could have said yes from her own beating heart, if we hadn’t been backed into this corner by my mothers greed and my fathers apathy.
Pants and shirts follow the quilt, but I leave out my good slacks and a white shirt that isn’t a hand-me-down and still holds its shape a little. Hopefully my parents don’t notice me heading off tomorrow in reaping clothes, but I won’t give Katniss anything less. This might not be a real marriage, but I’m going to give her everything I have anyway.
It would be safer and wiser to harden myself now. There’s only so close you can stand to open fire before you get burned. I will be expected to live with, possibly sleep beside, the object of all my desperate and tender desires without ever reaching for her. How will I survive the proximity? It’s not like her flames haven’t already consumed me at a distance. I’ve been drawn to her like a moth to a hearth since I was a child. The friendship we’ve formed over the last two years and the kisses, rare as they were, have only made me weaker. Knowing her has only made her more distracting. So how could I now close myself off from her? After a lifetime of centering her in my own story, there’s not much hope left for me to belong to anyone else. No, I’ll give her everything. It would have been hers anyway.
I won’t have everything from her, but I will have some things. I’ll get to feed her cheese breads and apple tarts and cinnamon biscuits. Even if our lives are quite separate, I’ll know what color her sweater is every day. She might tell me stories of her woods. If I’m really lucky she’ll fill our home with her bird song. I might even see her with her hair unbraided and loose…
I gather what’s left of my things, socks, underwear, razor, tooth brush, soap, school books, the journal of pressed flowers I use as references when I’m frosting, and tuck all of it into the crate as snugly as I can. Then I sneak downstairs, checking around each corner, skipping the floorboards that are known to creek, and I’m out the back door. I don’t feel like a man heading to his new life, I feel like a child running away from home. The fact that I’d be in trouble with my mother if she knew the girl I was sneaking out for only heightens the sensation. Maybe that can be the in between for me and Katniss, the middle ground to land on between a pragmatic arrangement and a love match. We can just be kids hiding out together. Two runaways holed up in the same den.
When I get to Rye’s new place I knock on the front door and wait, tapping my feet in the cold.
He opens the door. “On the run from the law?” He asks when he sees the crate in my arms.
“I need to leave this here for today, if that’s alright?” I explain.
“What for?” He asks as he ushers me inside and calls out, “It’s my brother!”
“The handsome one?” I hear Rose answer.
“No!” Rye shouts.
I shake my head in amusement and unload my things on his living room floor. It’s sparse still but coming together. They got a good deal of furniture at the toasting and Bran has been helping them with what they have left. An oil lamp sits on a new side table, the old tv from our parents room takes up one wall, a box of dinnerware that must have been Rose’s sits partially unpacked on the kitchen counter. There will be none of this for me and Katniss. We’ll be lucky if there’s a broken chair or leaky cup abandoned in our new house. With no wedding and no support from our family’s, I have no idea how we’ll make it work. I picture Katniss dragging in stumps from beyond the fence and eating off them like woodland creatures.
“Actually, can you come to Bran’s with me right now?” I ask as Rye waits expectantly for me to explain myself.
“What’s going on?” He asks, shifting from teasing to concerned.
“I’m getting married tomorrow,” I reply in as neutral and unruffled a tone as I can manage.
“The hell? Ma said it wasn’t for a month yet.”
“I’d like to explain to both of you,” I insist, nervous that they won’t back my play. They’re the only hope I have of someone not thinking this is madness.
“Well fuck. Yeah I’ll get my coat.”
We tromp down the street to the house Bran has shared with Laurel for going on five years now. Their home is warm, almost cluttered, with more upholstery than anyone rightly needs. They’re expecting their first baby in the spring so there are ever growing collections of tiny things here and there, waiting for the first of the next generation of Mellarks.
Bran sits us down on a sofa we’re all a bit too big for, but Bran especially, who’s a good deal taller than both me and Rye, looks amusingly oversized. When I share my news, Bran’s reaction is much the same as Rye’s.
“Dad told me about Ira. I didn’t think they’d push for you to marry while you’re fresh out of school but what do I know,” Bran says with a shake of his head. He’s never seen eye to eye with our parents. One of my favorite things about him. “Why so sudden? She’s not…”
“No! God no. And it’s not Ira. It’s Katniss.”
Bran’s eyebrows shoot up and Rye’s mouth falls open in perfect unison that’s so cartoonish I have to laugh.
“Everdeen?”
“That’s the one,” I smirk. Half marriage or not, pride swells my chest. This is my first time telling anyone about her and I’m giddy with it.
Rye smacks me on the shoulder with a shocked chuckle and Bran runs a hand through his hair.
“Peet you sly dog. How the fuck did you pull that off? Is she pregnant?” Rye asks with a widening smile.
“No, of course not,” I dismiss him with a wave of the hand. “It was actually her idea. It’s more a marriage of mutual benefit.”
“There certainly are benefits,” Rye teases, nudging me in the ribs. I grin despite myself.
“We both needed help, it just made sense,” I say. I don’t want to air her private concerns but they aren’t difficult to guess, and it seems unfair to leave my brothers entirely in the dark about what this arrangement really is. They know we haven’t been seeing each other. They know I wish we were.
“So she’s after you for your frosting skills,” Rye continues in the same tone, “I told you, the baked goods pull.”
“Oh shut up, it’s not just that,” I lie with a sharp look.
“Alright, alright,” Bran chides. “We both got married strategically. Don’t hound him.”
“I didn’t take Rosie for the store,” Rye protests.
“But you couldn't have had her without it,” Bran says pragmatically. “Laurel’s my life, but I couldn’t have married her if she was from the seam. Mother would have had a cow.”
“I have my own business. I shouldn’t need to marry a merchant,” I say, willing it to be true.
“You’re welcome for that,” Rye says. I give him a warning look but he’s right. If he’d taken the bakery I’d have nothing to give Katniss right now.
“They won’t care,” Bran shakes his head again. “Mother will never let you marry a miner’s daughter. There are merchant girls not good enough for her. You could try for someone other than Ira, someone you like.”
“Katniss and I are going to the justice building tomorrow. They won’t know until it’s done,” I say. I make sure to be decided and firm. I didn’t come here for alternate plans.
“Peeta…” Bran warns in the same weary tone our father uses.
“It’s decided,” I say.
“If you do this, it is going to hurt,” he insists.
“Not doing it would be worse,” I hold.
After a moment, he wipes a hand down his face and nods solemnly. “Alright then. Tomorrow morning?”
“I didn’t come to ask you for anything. I just wanted you to know,” I clarify.
“Well, we’ll be there at least,” Bran says as if it’s obvious, glancing at Rye who nods.
“Yeah of course. I’ve got to see this,” Rye adds, “I’ll tell Rosie.”
“I’m not sure Katniss wants to make a big thing of it. We weren’t going to tell anyone until after,” I caution. If I show up with a gaggle of guests she will certainly panic.
“Just the two of us then?” Bran suggests. “We can’t send you to your wedding alone.”
I’d actually really love to have them there to send me off. They’re the family I care most about, and if I’m going to legally bring Katniss into my family I want my brothers with me. Will she mind two people? I hope not. They won’t object and that’s really the main concern.
“Okay,” I agree, “but it will be early. You two remember baker’s hours?”
“I haven’t been gone that long,” Rye insists.
“You didn’t keep to baker’s hours when you were there,” I remind him.
Rye smacks my shoulder a few more times and then I head back to my parents house for the last time. When I pass Ira on the way I don’t look at her, I just smile down at my feet.