Work Text:
It was his idea to go swimming.
Summer had come early this year—just a few weeks into May, when dots of color had barely started to appear on the winter-bald trees sprouting their fresh new buds, and the last of April’s weak showers had come and gone, leaving behind that musty earth scent that actually managed to mask the burnt acid stench that still wafted in from the center of town sometimes, where the firebombs had hit the hardest.
Overnight, it seemed, the weather shifted dramatically: the temperature rose fifteen, twenty degrees in one shot and the dampness in the air turned muggy and humid with the onslaught of sharp sun that practically pricked the skin with its heat. So one morning, when Peeta suggests that we take a break from working on the memory book and cool off by the lake instead, I gladly take him up on the offer. We make a makeshift picnic, throwing together the leftover stew that Greasy Sae brought over earlier in the week, iced tea from the pot I’d brewed last night before going to bed, and fresh buttermilk biscuits that Peeta had finally perfected, after several failed attempts to reconstruct it from his damaged memory.
The truth is, I’ve been meaning to take him here for a while now. To show him the place where I was happiest as a child, where fond memories still exist, untainted by ashes and bone and ghosts that seem to follow me everywhere I go. Where I can make new memories, new associations that have nothing to do with pain and destruction, and everything to do with hope—however dim a spark it may be at the moment.
A place where we can begin to put all the broken pieces back together and find ourselves again amidst the rubble. Find out who we are with each other.
We stretch out on a thick blanket under the cool shade of an elm tree, my head pillowed on his arm, his fingers languidly running up and down the side of my waist. Bits of sunlight still manage to poke through the tangle of branches, though, with only a few emerging leaves on the tree’s bare limbs, and sometime around noon, when the temperature starts to peak and I can feel the thin, delicate material of my shirt clinging to my back as sweat trickles down between my shoulder blades, I raise myself up on my elbow and look down at him.
“Do you want to go wade in the water? Might help with this heat…”
He shields his eyes against the glare of the sun, squinting up at me, and I see a smile start to form.
“Actually… I was thinking maybe we could go for a swim.”
“Oh.”
I’m blushing. I know I’m blushing, because I can feel a hot flush spreading across my cheeks.
“We never did get to finish those swimming lessons you tried to give me in the clock arena, did we?”
The heat now spreads down to the rest of my body. I’m pretty sure I must be glowing red now. Girl on fire, indeed. His smile grows wider, acquires a touch of wickedness. I force myself to keep my composure, but clearly he’s noticed my growing discomfort and he arches an eyebrow.
“Is everything ok?”
“Yeah… yeah, of course.” But I say this a little too quickly, and only just stop myself from biting my lip. “It’s just… I didn’t pack a suit or anything.”
“Oh,” he says. “Well, neither did I.”
“Right.”
His smile turns into a grin. “I can… look away if you want me to.”
“You’re finding this amusing, aren’t you?”
“No, not at all.” But a small laugh escapes his lips, exposing his lie. “All right, maybe a little.”
Now I’m fighting my own smile, but it’s getting harder by the second. I playfully shove him back down onto the blanket, but this only makes him laugh all the more. He holds up his hands in mock surrender, and I decide to seize this chance to gain the advantage, pinning his wrists to the ground as laughter now bursts free from me in earnest. His wrestler’s instincts are still deeply ingrained, though, locked away in a place that the Capitol hadn’t touched; he grabs hold of my wrists, taking me by surprise as he easily flips our positions, and before I know it, he’s hovering over me, his face merely inches away from mine, his breath warm and shallow and smelling of the sweet, faint scent of cinnamon.
My heart drums in my ears. I wonder if he can hear it. Feel it thundering away in my ribcage.
His fingers slowly release my wrists. I feel an irrational sense of loss when he does, as though a lifeline has just been severed. His hands stay on either side of my head, though, framing my face, and I’m overcome with a sudden longing to reach up, to pull him towards me and feel his breath in my mouth, filling my lungs.
“So… how about those swim lessons?”
I force my breath to steady, to quiet the throbbing in my ears.
“You promise not to look?”
He laughs softly, then pulls up to sit back on his heels and turns around, so his back is to me. “As you wish.”
My mouth quirks up into a smile. “No peeking. I’m watching you.”
“Not one peek. I swear.”
He keeps his promise, keeping his back to me as I pull my shirt up over my head and kick off my shoes and socks and pants. My scars stand out bright pink in the sun, stretching and flexing with my movements. The impulse to hide them still runs strong, even though I know perfectly well they don’t phase him. That they don’t make me any less beautiful in his eyes. There’s a fraction of a second when I want to tell him it’s all right, that I don’t mind him looking after all, but I lose my nerve and I make a dash for the lake, eagerly plunging in and letting out a sigh of contentment as soon as the cool water makes contact with my skin.
“All clear?”
“All clear.”
“Ok, then… now it’s your turn not to look.” He grins before adding, “Not that I mind you looking, but I figured I’d do the gentlemanly thing by giving you fair warning.”
I make sure he sees me rolling my eyes before I turn my back, but I’m not able to hide my smile completely and I’m sure he catches a glimpse of it, because the last thing I see is his grin widening. A few minutes later, I hear the water splash and feel his arms circle around my waist. He spins me around to face him, and I loop my arms around his neck, gliding up to him until our bodies are touching.
“This is different without a floatation belt,” he says, sounding a little alarmed. I feel his hands tighten ever so slightly around my waist.
“I won’t let you go until you feel ready. I promise.”
He smiles. “I know.”
I begin to flutter my legs, guiding us towards the center of the lake, where it’s a little less shallow, lengthening my arms to start to ease off him and give him room to try some of the movements on his own.
“Let’s start with treading water,” I say. “Do you remember the leg motion? Just hold onto me as you use your legs.”
He nods and starts to kick gently. He struggles at first to find a good cadence; his good leg finds it easily, but his other takes a bit longer to catch up. Slowly but surely, though, his confidence grows. I slide my hands down further along his arms until only our fingertips are touching, then, eyes locked on his, I gesture for him to add the arm movements as well.
“My hands are right here if you need to grab hold of them,” I tell him. “You’re doing great, though.”
He looks apprehensive at first, then a smile starts to form.
“That’s it…”
“See? I was paying attention before.”
I laugh softly. We stay in the water for the next few hours, gradually moving from treading water to actual swimming—just a few feet, at first, and staying close to the banks, but in time, he starts to find his rhythm and begins to venture out farther until we’re chasing each other playfully in the water, splashing it on the other and laughing when the minnows tickle our toes.
It’s nearly sunset when the temperature starts to dip. We swim back to the shore and wrap ourselves in the blanket, huddling together as we watch the sun begin its gradual descent, melting into the warm apricot glow of the horizon. My hair’s still damp, but he lets me rest my head on his shoulder anyway, and he lays his cheek onto my crown, his fingers finding mine under the blanket as he wraps his arm around my waist.
After a while, he says softly, “I used to paint this, didn’t I? The sunset… Real or not real?”
“Real,” I say, feeling my mouth curve into a smile at the memory. “You used to mix all kinds of colors—ten, fifteen different kinds, at least—just to get the perfect orange. You wanted to capture every last detail.”
He looks back at the sunset again, transfixed by the sky as it transforms from a soft, muted orange into a cool blue-violet. Then he says, “I used to paint you, too.”
It’s more a statement than a question, but I answer him anyway, to give him confirmation.
“Yes.”
“I remember now.”
He lifts his head to look down at me. I raise my eyes to meet his, struck by how much this moment reminds me of another one when we sat this way, too—on a different shore, in a different time, in a much different place. But we had held fast to each other then, too. Holding on to what we thought would be the last moments we would ever get to spend with each other, wanting to draw out the memory for as long as possible.
“What else do you remember?”
He’s thinking of it, too. I know it. Feel it deep in my core.
He tells me not in words, but in gesture, bringing a hand up to my face to trace my cheek, my jaw, my chin with the backs of his fingers. Then he pulls me towards him and kisses me, and the hunger I had felt in that other moment—on the beach where I thought I was counting down the final hours of my life and was clinging to the only person who’s ever made me feel this alive, this loved—overtakes me again. It’s a hunger that’s always been there underneath the surface, I realize that now. I just never recognized it or put a name to it until Peeta made it rise up out of the depths. But here and now, I finally understand it. Know what to call it. I let it engulf me like the tides of the sea, letting it pull me into its undertow, and for the first time, the knowledge settles within me.
It would have always come to this. It would have always come to Peeta.
He cradles my face when we part, fingers lovingly tracing the shape of my mouth. And then he asks me.
“You love me. Real or not real?”
I tell him, “Real.”