
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/394165.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Hunger_Games_Trilogy_-_Suzanne_Collins
  Relationship:
      Katniss_Everdeen/Peeta_Mellark
  Character:
      Peeta_Mellark, Katniss_Everdeen
  Additional Tags:
      Hallucinations, Dreams, Masturbation, Oral_Sex, Body_Horror, Bugs_&
      Insects, Asphyxiation
  Series:
      Part 2 of Fact_or_Weapon
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-04-29 Words: 5152
****** Exocytosis ******
by jadebloods
Summary
     It doesn't feel like something from this life; it feels like it comes
     from someone else's memories, but that doesn't even make sense. None
     of this makes sense. None of this is real. (post-Mockingjay, pre-
     epilogue, with flashbacks to THG)
Notes
     Regarding the warnings: I tagged this as "underage" because it
     depicts sex acts that didn't actually happen (they were
     hallucinations) between two characters who were 16 at the time of the
     hallucinations but are adults in the fic's current time. Just FYI.
     Follows Action_Potential. Spoilers for all three books; canon-
     compliant. Thanks to Angela for comments. Part 2 of who knows how
     many.
Peeta soaks in the river, staring at the birds flying overhead. The sunlight
dapples through the leaves of the tall trees far above him, glimmering gold and
orange and fading slowly to red. His tracker jacker stings feel almost alive
with the way they make his senses buzz and tingle, but the soaking helps a
little. The gash in his leg is much, much worse, and he's too terrified to look
at it right now. He honestly doesn't know how he even made it as far as the
river with such a bad cut.
He closes his eyes, trying to concentrate on breathing through the pain, but
it's hard to stay afloat with his eyes closed because his sense of balance is
all off-kilter. "Proooo-priiii-ooooh-cept-ion" he says out loud, feeling the
roundness of the word stretching his numb lips. He has no idea where he learned
that word. It doesn't feel like something from this life; it feels like it
comes from someone else's memories, but that doesn't even make sense. None of
this makes sense. None of this is real.
Real bleeds into not real because, he thinks, there is no way that his skin is
really undulating like that. He watches as little bumps begin to rise all along
on his arms and then begin to move in seemingly random patterns. Peeta's heart
speeds up as the bumps-- the things under his skin-- start to move up from his
limbs and toward his face. He tries to push them back down his arms with his
hands, but they just tunnel deeper under his skin. They buzz more loudly, and
Peeta gets the very surreal impression that whatever they are, they're angry.
Peeta starts to see black blossoms in front of his vision, and he's afraid that
he's actually going to pass out from fear. He has no idea what to do, so he
starts screaming.
He feels her hands grip the back of his jacket before he sees her. "Shut up,
Peeta, someone will hear you," she hisses, pulling him out of the water and up
onto the river bank, where she unbuckles his belt and pulls off his soaking wet
pants. She lifts his torso and pulls his shirt over his head, and finally she
takes out a knife and cuts off his underwear. He wants to ask her what the hell
she's doing or how she found him, but he's rooted to the spot with fear, unable
to move his limbs or his lips. Then, she says, "You're not going to like this,"
and plunges her fingers knuckle-deep into each of his stings. She pulls a live
tracker jacker out of each of his wounds, and now he knows what has been moving
around under his skin, vibrating his entire body. He wants to scream again, but
this time he can't find his breath.
Slowly, she pulls them all out one by one, each time sticking her fingers under
his skin and digging until she can get a good grip on one of the insects. He
feels her fingers wriggling under his skin, and it doesn't hurt, but it makes
him dizzy and nauseous. As the buzzing and crawling feeling begins to melt
away, he feels his breathing and his heartbeat begin to slow down. When she's
finally finished, she bends down and kisses every sting, and the touch of her
lips burns for a moment, sealing the open wound closed. She kisses his neck,
down each arm, down his chest, around his hips, and down his legs, more times
than he can count, cauterizing his skin as she goes. With each kiss, he feels
himself drift further and further from panic, and his arms and legs, which he
didn't realize he'd been clenching, go limp. She kisses back up his legs,
brushing his bare groin with her cheek, letting her hair linger on him,
tickling the exposed skin.
He closes his eyes for a moment, just a moment, and when he opens them again,
she's hovering above him, naked and glistening with river water that drips into
his face. She lies on top of him and kisses him on the lips. He's still in a
lot of pain, but the body kisses have relaxed him a bit and primed him for
arousal all the same, so he opens up to her. She scrapes his lips with her
teeth, grabbing his hand and placing it between her legs. He feels around
confusedly for a moment before finding her hood with his index finger, and she
moans into his mouth. "I want you to kiss me," she says, "You love me, don't
you? That's what you said? Show me you love me." I am kissing you, he wants to
say, but he can't get enough force behind his breath to make a sound. She pulls
away from him and kneels over his face, with one leg on each side of his head.
"I want you to kiss me here," she says, so he kisses her there. She tastes like
saltwater.
He runs his tongue up and down between her folds, kissing her skin lightly and
softly as she hums with delight above him. "Show me you love me," she pants
again, "Show me. Show me." She rocks herself against his face, riding his lips
and his tongue, gripping the sides of his head. He can't breathe, but the taste
of her is so tangy and invigorating, and her breath is so heavy, that he can't
bring himself to stop. It's all he can do to hold on to consciousness.
After a while she moves away, sliding back down his body until they're face to
face again, and she grinds her hips down against him. She rubs herself firmly
back and forth against his erection, pressing down but not letting him enter
her, and his eyes roll up. It's almost painful, but it's so, so delicious. He
balls his hands into fists and grips the air because he can't breathe, can't
move, can't think. "Do you want to be inside of me?" she whispers into his ear,
and he can just barely nod his head. (Please, he thinks, please stop. Please.)
"Well, I want to be inside of you too," she says, and he has a split second to
wonder what she means before he feels the blinding white pain of his skin
splitting open. Bright red divots open up across his chest with each slash of
her knife, spreading until they reach his sides. His flesh flaps open,
bisecting his ribcage, and he can see his intercostal muscles under the dermis.
When he inhales, they open wider, like perverse red lips spreading to expose
bone teeth. She tugs on the skin above his left nipple, and it parts easily,
rending connective tissue from muscle and bone (it sounds like ripping open a
sack of flour) until he can see his own heart beating in time with his breath.
He tries to scream, but nothing comes out. He can't hear anything but the thud
of his heartbeat and the sound of wind blowing through the branches of the
trees above his head. His vision fades completely to black, and when he regains
consciousness, his skin is whole again, and she is gone. He looks up at the
moon through the leaves (how much time has gone by?), and it glows enormous and
shiny like a silver coin, or like bubbles slowly rising to the surface of a
lake. As it turns out, it isn't the moon at all. He watches the bubbles drift
lazily upward over his head as he exhales.
He looks down, and he finds himself underwater, swimming just above her. He can
just barely see her black hair, drifting up to brush against the skin of his
stomach. She's naked again, and he can see her whole body, her olive skin, by
the moonlight filtering through the water, making the surface of her shimmer
and glow. He can see the curve of her breasts, her hips, the soft dip of her
center, and his lungs burn with desire-- no-- with the rapidly firing
electrical signals of dying cells, devoid of oxygen, suffocating on their own
waste. He reaches down to cup her breast, and he feels her nipple harden
against his thumb. She swims up to kiss him again, cupping him in the palm of
her hand. She strokes him gently with her hand, licking his lips and biting his
neck softly. He feels himself growing hard in her delicate fist, and his vision
starts to go all... swimmy. She smiles at him and then swims down, taking him
in her mouth.
He gasps, and the last of his air escapes his mouth, floating in small bubbles
to the surface. She runs her tongue over him, brushing her teeth lightly
against his foreskin, and he feels all of his blood and energy collecting in
his groin. Her hands grip the base of his erection, pulling him into her mouth
as she sucks the blood and sexual energy further and deeper. His heartbeat
throbs in his ears as his vision starts to darken. The fire in his chest grows
stronger until his heartbeat is as loud as a drum and he can feel it pulsing
throughout his entire body, in his throat, in the palms of his hands, in the
balls of his feet, in his erection inside her mouth. He tries to breathe, and
his lungs fill with water. It seeps into all his nooks and crannies, coating
his lungs, filling him, stuffing him, turning him hard and turgid. He's not
sure, but he thinks he hears her laughing.
He blacks out again, and when his vision fades to white, he finds himself on
the ground-- or at least he thinks he's on the ground-- and he inhales... and
he inhales, and this time air fills his lungs, cold and crisp like autumn, like
leaves turning color and lighting up the entire District with their fire. The
trees burn like she burns-- like they had burned together-- and they take the
buildings and the people with them, turning everything to ash and coal and
charred husks of foundations, of bodies. He sees her silhouette backlit by the
fire that follows in her wake, scorching the ground as she walks toward him.
When she reaches him, he sees that she glows blue like a low gas flame. He
feels the heat radiating from her, but her touch doesn't scorch him. His skin
is immune to her fire, but not to her touch, and when she puts a hand on his
chest, his lungs burn again. That's when he realizes that he's burning, too.
His flame is greenish-yellow, and it originates from his solar plexus,
spreading down his legs and arms to a bright white-yellow at his fingertips.
He reaches out to her, touching her shoulder, and her clothes burn away,
turning to ash and floating off into the air. She looks into his eyes and says,
"Touch me," so he does. He kisses her, and her fire burns his throat, coating
the inside of his body with damp warmth, a flickering, fluttering desire. She
gives off energy like a small star, and he feels it humming, vibrating, through
his chest, down to his groin and legs. "More," she says, so he picks her up,
and she wraps her legs around his waist until he can back her up against a
tree.
To say that he enters her would be to give him more agency than he really has.
It is much more accurate to say that she pulls him into her, as if there is a
black hole at her core that draws him and everything else towards her center,
to be crushed under the weight of their own mass and condensed to nothingness.
He burns white hot inside of her, and when he closes his eyes he sees every
blood vessel in the thin skin of his eyelids, as though he were trying to block
out the sun.
Her hair flutters up to tickle his face and wrap around his neck like a
constrictor, tightening its hold as he pushes deeper inside her, cutting off
his air until his lungs are full of nothing but a dry heat. Even still, he
cannot stop. She rides him like he's some sort of half-human half-animal
muttation, and it's the filthiest, most shameful, most beautiful thing he's
ever done. Her skin has turned into the brightest white light, and her eyes
glow until he can no longer make out iris from sclera from pupil. Her hair
surrounds her face like a wispy black corona. He tries to speak her name, but
he has no air, and again he can hear his heartbeat throbbing in his ears while
he throbs inside her with a desperation unlike anything he's ever known.
This is nothing like the stolen moments under the covers, jerking himself
furiously but silently with his lips clamped shut to avoid waking his brothers,
and it is nothing like the sophomoric fumblings in the dark with the merchant
girls who had lips skilled enough at kissing to arouse him but had clumsy hands
that were too ineffective to get him off. (But he'd always gotten them off,
hadn't he? That Peeta, he such a giver. Always giving and never taking.) No,
this is so much more than that. This is everything and nothing. This is the
purest and dirtiest thing in the entire cosmos. This is the very act of
creation itself, the cleansing fire before the world can be rebuilt, and it is
taking him down with it.
He feels the pressure building up in his torso, boiling slowly but steadily
before losing control, atoms splitting and spinning off and colliding into one
another. It's a chain reaction causing chaos in his body until he's splitting
in two, exploding outwards, radiating from his groin to his stomach to his
heart. He doesn't need to breathe anymore, because he finds that his body is
now shattered into a million tiny pieces.
He floats like this, for a while. The million tiny pieces that used to be his
body float like grains of sand, forming constellations in the infinite vacuum
of space. He watches the stars expand, enlarge, implode, and die. This happens
in the space of minutes, and he sees the whole universe expanding, spreading
itself thin, until there's nothing left, until the entire thing collapses in on
itself and turns inside out with a bang. He watches as everything in existence
is made anew from the emptiness, as his body is pieced back together, as his
bones knit and flesh weaves and cells reanimate.
He inhales, and he's back on the forest floor once more, staring up at the
moon. He's shaking violently, shivering from the cold and the exposure. His
pants are sticky, and he's pretty sure he's come all over the inside of them,
but he can't wash them out right now. He tries to stand, but his leg won't
support his weight, so he crawls into a thicket of bushes and covers himself
with as many leaves as he can reach. His vision still dances with small points
of shining yellow light (or are those just sparkle bugs?), but he thinks, for
now, that this is real.
---
When Peeta wakes up, the first thing he always does is look around to figure
out where he is. Even though he knows that he's been waking up in the same
house in District 12 every morning for the past several months, he still
doesn't quite trust it. Every morning, he fully expects to wake up in a cave,
or on a beach, or in a prison cell or hospital room. He just has a hard time
believing that it's all over.
Sometimes he wonders if the war will ever truly be over or if it will continue
to linger on in the bodies and minds of the people who had to live through it
and the people who were broken by it, the way he was, and countless others like
him were. Peeta mourns his dead friends (he has not had time to process the
death of his family, and he has no idea when he'll get around to doing that),
but what really concerns him are the survivors, people like Johanna and Annie,
or Katniss and Haymitch, people who were just broken and then dumped in this
strange new world to fix themselves. He doesn't think that any of them are
fully capable of fixing themselves, but he thinks that they might be able to
help each other, at least, which is why he had insisted on returning to
Victor's Village. He knows that between the three of them, they will always be
triggering memories for one another, but he also knows that they need each
other because no one else will understand. Sometimes misery just needs company.
Peeta wakes up and stares at the familiar wooden beams over his bed, watching
(a million tiny) dust mites dance in the sunlight from the window. The illusion
of safety is intact for at least one more day, because he's back in District
12, back in his house between those belonging to Katniss and Haymitch. He
glances over at Katniss, who is lying next to him, still asleep. She had moved
away from him in the night, toward the edge of the bed, but the sole of her
foot is pressed against the calf of his good leg. She's facing away from him,
and he can see her long dark hair spread out on the pillow (like a black
corona). Though her hair is normally quite dark-- almost black, even-- the
sunlight reflecting off of it gives it the shade of mahogany with slightly red
tinges along the edges.
He picks up a lock of her hair and turns it over and over in his fingers,
watching the way it changes color when light reflects off of it at different
angles. More yellowish this way, more reddish that way, with dark brown and
black over here (turning color like leaves in autumn).
As strange as it seems, considering what happened last night, he has no idea
how comfortable he is supposed to be with her body right now. They had never
had a whole lot of boundaries with one another, but that had been mainly out of
survival (in one way or another). What he really wants to do is spoon up
against her back and breathe next to her neck, but he doesn't know how she
would react to that. They had crossed the line into a new level of intimacy
last night (and this was true intimacy, as nobody had been watching; he would
at least allow himself to believe that much), but he doesn't know what that
means here and now in the cool, clear light of day.
They hadn't exactly discussed it, and although Peeta is fairly excellent at
reading people, he just isn't in the business of making assumptions where
Katniss is concerned. He's never been the kind of guy who just reaches out and
takes whatever he wants-- and he isn't stupid: he knows that some people would
consider him a lesser man for that, but he doesn't care. He doesn't want the
kind of manhood that doesn't take anyone else into account.
He contents himself with just lying next to her until she wakes up, at which
time he'll take his cue from her on what to do. Until then, he twists the lock
of hair back and forth between his fingers, watching the fire red highlights
light up and fade away with the direction of the sun.
Fire. That sparks a memory from his dream last night (they burned together). He
can only pull back wisps of it that he doesn't fully understand (such as why
the taste of saltwater is threatening to give him an erection right now), but
he knows that the gist of it was the memory of his tracker jacker
hallucinations during the first Games. He remembers having otherworldly dreams-
- almost nightmares-- about being with Katniss and the two of them doing
disgusting and transcendent things to one another.
He isn't entirely surprised that he dreamed about that last night. At the time,
he had been experiencing a lot of confusion about what to do and how to feel,
much less how to even decode what she was thinking. The original hallucinations
likely reflected his fears and insecurities (and desires) at the time, and
bringing it back up now must be directly related to the manifestation-- the
extraction-- of those same insecurities and desires when she finally came to
him last night.
The sad thing-- the sick thing-- is that he doesn't even know if his memories
of his own hallucinations are real, or if they were also tainted by the
hijacking. He imagines that they were, but he guesses that he will never know
the full extent to which they've been modified, since nobody else can really
tell him whether something that happened entirely in his own mind was real or
not real. On the one hand, it would have been hard for them to manipulate
memories that they couldn't even know about since no record exists of them on
tape. On the other hand, tracker jacker venom works directly on the fear center
in the brain, so it could have seeped into those strange, erotic memories on
its own, without any prodding from the Peacekeepers who detained him.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about it, though, was that despite how
terrifying the memory should have been, Peeta hadn't been afraid. There are so
few memories of the past three years that don't completely dismantle him, awake
or asleep, that he has no idea how he managed to get through it last night
without waking up in terror. He vaguely remembers something Dr. Aurelius told
him once about the importance of brain chemistry in determining how one reacts
to the recollection of memories, and he wonders if that has anything to do with
it? Maybe he should give Aurelius a call this afternoon.
Katniss begins to stir now, rubbing her eyes and looking blearily around his
room. She looks confused for a moment until her eyes focus on him, and then
they calm with recognition. She has little red lines down her cheek from the
embroidery on the pillows. Peeta smiles and says quietly, "Good morning." She
grunts in affirmation and stretches, and when the sheet pulls away to expose
her breasts, she either doesn't notice or doesn't mind, because she takes a
moment before covering back up. (Peeta thinks of saltwater again and feels a
stirring in his groin, but he pushes the sensation to the back of his mind-
- for now.) "How did you sleep?"
"Good," Katniss says lazily, as if she doesn't quite believe it yet. "Really
good, actually." She bunches up the sheet and sits up, and Peeta can see her
vertebrae poking out under her skin all down the line of her back, down to her-
- "How about you?"
Peeta looks up quickly. "Oh, you know. It wasn't entirely unpleasant, which I
guess is saying something." He adjusts the blankets around his midsection,
trying to be subtle.
Katniss doesn't look at him, but she does smile slightly to herself. "Yeah,"
she says, digging around at the foot of the bed for her clothes. She finds her
shirt and pulls it on, then stands up to pull up her shorts. She pulls the
blanket back up to the pillow on her side of the bed and smoothes it out next
to him, her finger lingering for a moment on the embroidery. "I should probably
go back home."
Peeta sits up at that. "Wait. Do... you want some breakfast or something?" He
doesn't say, Don't go, please. I just got you back. Don't go already.
She thinks about this as she twists her hair up on top of her head, securing it
with a ribbon from her pocket. "Greasy Sae is probably already on her way over.
I really ought to be there." She looks at Peeta for a moment with a look that
he can't quite read, and then she leans over to kiss him on the forehead. "You
can join us in a little while... if you want? Okay?" It sounds to him as if she
wants him to come over but doesn't actually want to come out and say as much.
She probably wants some time alone to think. Katniss always wants time alone to
think through things. It's frustrating as hell... but he respects it.
"Okay," he says. They exchange goodbyes (and another brief kiss), and she
leaves. He waits until he hears her footsteps descending the creaky stairs and
the sound of his door latching shut, and then he flops backward into the bed,
feeling heavy with thoughts and emotions. He lies there for a while-- he
doesn't know how long-- and thinks about the events of last night. He turns
each memory over and over in his mind like a child collecting pebbles, picking
out the smoothest, shiniest ones and pocketing them for later.
He was struck by how easily they had moved together, with a kind of familiarity
that he'd never experienced before with any of the other girls. It made sense,
since they had spent so much time together in such strange and extreme
circumstances, that they would have picked up some subconscious sense of one
another's body language. Even still, he had not been prepared to see her in
such a light. He had wanted it, yes, desperately, but it was almost as though
he never actually expected it to happen.
Peeta exhales loudly into the silent room, overcome with images from the night
before. He's overwhelmed by this new erotic element of their relationship, and
that's putting it lightly. He can easily picture her body, the swell of her
small breasts, the curve of her hips, and her long, black hair sticking to her
collarbone with sweat. He can hear the noises she made when he touched her,
small, soft humming noises and sharp gasps, and he can feel the way her body
responded to his touch, arching off of the bed and shaking with impatience. He
can even smell her, primarily like girl sweat but with light undertones of bar
soap. He exhales again, much more shakily, and reaches down to feel his
erection under the covers.
He realizes that he's not going to get anything done today until he can clear
his head of these intoxicating images of her. He hasn't had this much pent up
sexual energy in longer than he can remember. His sex drive has been awfully
perfunctory for a few years now, much more like opening a valve every so often
to release steam than something to enjoy, so this is an incredibly welcome turn
of events.
He slips his hand inside his shorts and strokes himself slowly for a while to
savor the deliciousness of it, the desire and the passion that has been absent
for so long because of everything his poor mind and body have been through. He
replays the events of last night in his mind's eye, feeling himself grow harder
as he retraces how he had been able to get Katniss Everdeen to come in his
hands. He had held her, touched her body, and made her make those little
noises. Thinking about her while touching himself is not a new thing; Katniss
had been a recurring character in his sexual fantasies ever since he had
figured out what men and women do together. She hadn't been there every time,
but often enough to stick out in his mind-- just like how in real life, he had
noticed other girls and been with other girls, but somehow his mind just kept
coming back to her sooner or later. It's different this time, though, because
he doesn't have to speculate; he knows what she looks like, sounds like, and
smells like. He wants to know even more-- what she tastes like and feels like
on the inside.
He wants to be back on top of her, manipulating her body with his fingertips,
making her sigh and squirm. He wants to make her come again-- if he could do
nothing else for the rest of his life, he would just want to make her come over
and over. And-- he barely wants to admit this to himself, even in his own
fantasies-- but he wants to be inside her. He feels himself flushing at the
thought of it, and he strokes himself faster, spurred on by a sudden vigor. Oh,
god, he wants to be inside her, to manipulate her not with his fingers but with
his body, and to make her come around him so that he can feel it. Peeta lets
out a few harsh breaths, clenching his free hand and his abdominal muscles as
his body tenses up and then releases in waves as he comes.
He lets out a few more shallow breaths as his muscles relax and go limp. He
lies back and closes his eyes, just breathing for a little while. When his head
clears, he feels a bit sheepish because he knows that he'd have no idea what to
actually do with his body to make her come like that, but it's just-- it's an
instinct that takes over when he thinks about being on top of her. And it
isn't-- it isn't just about that. He knows that, even though he gets...
overwhelmed by her sometimes.
It strikes Peeta-- not for the first time-- how strange it is to be in love.
Love makes a man want to do the most animalistic things with the very person
for whom he has the most tender feelings. Not violent things, just... crude
things. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to him when he doesn't have an
erection, but it's the truth. And, to get away from the crudeness for a moment
and focus on the bigger picture, something else very important had happened
last night. She hadn't said she loved him, but she had said that she was his.
That's something. He didn't know what, but it was definitely something. It felt
more like a promise than an affirmation-- it didn't give any labels to what was
going on between them (after everything that had happened in the past few
years, it would feel absolutely absurd to call Katniss anything quite so
mundane as his girlfriend), but it acknowledged that there is something going
on-- something genuine this time, something that may eventually get a name if
he can be patient. He could live with that.
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