#I can’t tag everlark yall this is a first

[katnissmellarkkk]

Hiiii, y’all! I got drabble requests — that I love and appreciate and will be writing v soon — but somehow this is the concept that my brain wanted to write tonight. I was reading a fic and I got suddenly inspired and this extremely angsty, canon compliant oneshot was born. I’ve never written in Peeta’s point of view before though so go easy on me 🥺😘😅.

Trigger Warning : As it centers around Peeta’s childhood, it contains strong mentions of maternal abuse.

Summary : Peeta confronts his regretful mother the night the Quarter Quell is announced.

“Did you ever love me at all?”

I stare at her, the woman who used to hit me with a belt, who turned my face black and blue with her open palm, who put angry red lines across my back, who chased me down the upstairs hallway until I was cornered and trapped, until I was at her mercy. The woman who singlehandedly became the motivation behind Rye’s wrestling career and subsequently mine too.

She’s a mess now. Her blonde hair tied up in a disastrous bun, the small amount of makeup she can afford — and cherishes like gold — smeared all around her eyes, her knuckles bright red, like she’d banged her fist into the wall with all the force in her body.

She’s not a big lady. She’s nowhere near as large as she seemed when I was a kid. Back when I was small and naive and all I wanted was her attention. All I wanted was for her to care about me.

I’m twice her size now. I’m as tall as Rye and barely two inches shorter than Rueben. Our father still has all three of us beat in size but I sense my eldest brother will surpass him any day now.

I’m twice her size and she can’t hurt me now even if she tried and yet, when I stand before her, one on one, I still feel like the little boy who asked her to kiss better the mark that came from inside her own fist.

“Mama,” I murmur quietly, alerting her suddenly to my presence.

Her head flies up from her desk at once, staring at me in shock. “Peeta?”

“Hi,” I whisper, my vocal cords giving out when I need them most. I try to swallow the lump building in my throat — the lump I always feel when in her presence — and instead I make it worse.

“What’re you doing here?” She asks and there’s no malice in her tone but I flinch just the same. Because I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell her. I don’t know why I came here.

Because you’re my mother and you were my first home and I miss you even though I spent every day of my life wishing to escape from you?

Because I’m headed back into an arena once again, this time for certain death of my own accord, and I feel like if I don’t do this now I never will.

Because Katniss turned to Gale in her hour of need and I can’t fault her, I can’t blame her for loving him, but it stings. It stings so bad. It stings and it hurts and it throbs to the point where I think I might explode and when I’m in pain, all I can think about is you. All I can think about is you and your rage and your rejection and my being a constant disappointment to you. All I can think about is how much pain you inflicted on me when I was only a child. What did I do to deserve that?

“Peeta?” She inquires again when I don’t reply, squinting at me through the darkness of the night. We have to be quiet or else we’ll wake my father, sleeping only twenty feet away in the next room.

I can smell her breath from here. It mildly surprises me, to sniff alcohol so blatantly on her. Typically it’s my father who drinks away his sorrows. Typically it’s him who passes out drunk and one of us boys are dispatched to bring him home and put him to bed before he can disgrace his wife beyond repair.

“Why were you drinking?” I ask, avoiding the question in her baby blue eyes. The same eyes she gave to me. I don’t even know why people claim I look like my father. I stare at my mother like I’m staring into a mirror. I have her upturned blue eyes and matching nose. I have her downturned mouth and rounded chin. I have her exact shade of white blonde hair and the barely visible eyelashes too. I have her mannerisms when upset and sometimes when I close my eyes, I swear I can hear her berating me like not a day has passed since I lived under her thumb.

She looks down at the empty glass bottle by her feet, as if her inebriation is news to even her. I see a flare of defensive anger flash across her face — she has so many different kinds of anger. I wonder if it’s normal to be able to identify them all in under a second. I wonder if it’s normal to feel a knot twist in your stomach when your mother reaches for your hand — but she composes herself. She composes herself and reaches for my hand and I pull away on instinct because the only times she ever showed me affection was after she’d hurt me real bad.

She has the good sense now to look down at the ground, at least. Finally, she is feeling a tinge of the rejection she drowned me in my whole entire life.

“How did you get in here?” She asks quietly, standing up from her chair, straightening her spine and meeting my gaze. Transforming into someone else again.

Rejection has always made her change shape.

“Dad left the backdoor unlocked. I came up through the side stairwell,” I tell her evenly, but we both know that’s not the answer she’s looking for.

“Why are you here?” Once again, there’s nothing but plain, quiet curiosity in her tone but I still feel my chest ache at the question.

And I can’t drag this out any longer. “Did you ever love me?” I murmur, feeling as pathetic as I know she thinks I am. “Even when I was little? Or when I was born? Did you ever love me at all?”

“You stupid creature!”

“Can you do just one thing right?”

“You think I wanted this life? You think I wanted to be your mother?”

“Of course I did,” she says, maybe for the first time ever, but it barely registers to me. Maybe it’s because after a lifetime of waiting to hear it, the sentiment falls short to the fantasy my mind created. Or maybe it’s because I don’t believe it. Too much has happened. You can’t wipe a chalkboard clean in one night. Especially if the writing on the board is seventeen years old.

Somehow that revelation is the most painful of all and I turn quickly to go before she can clock the liquid quickly building up behind my lids.

“I loved you,” she exclaims abruptly, catching me off-guard. Her outburst paralyzes me into place. “I loved you more than anything,” she proclaims now, and I hear the tears in her voice and the most insane urge to console her wells up deep inside my chest. But I force it down. You can’t make up for seventeen years in one night. “You were my baby. You are, Peeta. You are-“

“Don’t say that,” I hiss, but my mouth feels disconnected from my brain and my head is spinning. I’ve never heard these words before. Not from her. Not ever from her lips. Fury bubbles up inside me as I turn to face her. “Don’t you dare tell me that now. You told me you hated me. So many times.”

“I never said that.”

“You never had to actually say it. I could see it!” I have to make a conscious effort to lower my voice. The last thing I want is to have my father join in on our happy moment right here. “I could see it, Mama. In everything. Every time you looked at me, you acted like I was a disturbance to you. You could barely tolerate being around me-“

But it’s her turn to interrupt me. “It wasn’t you I couldn’t tolerate, Peeta. It was me. You reminded me so much of myself. In ways you can’t even begin to understand. You were so much like me. And I hated being me.”

Her words are earnest, there seems to be an element of truth behind her tone, her tears appear to be real. And what she’s saying tracks. Years ago, my father used to tell me the same thing.

“She doesn’t hate you, Peeta. Sometimes you just remind your mother of the parts of herself she doesn’t like so much.”

“It’s not about you, son. It’s never been about you.”

“She loves you. She loves you, she just can’t express it. She can only see the bad parts of herself. And sometimes that makes her only see the bad parts of her inside you.”

But somehow hearing over and over again that I’m just like the woman who once hit me in the face so hard I told my friends I fell off the bakery roof and they believed me doesn’t give me much comfort at all.

“That’s too bad,” I whisper, realizing we’ve stood in silence for too long. Realizing that my coming to see her tonight was pointless and to come here of all places, after seeing the person I love most in the world in the arms of the one she loves, means I’m nothing more than a glutton for punishment.

I am nothing. Just like my mother always said.

And evidently she’s not even done yet. No, for some reason she’s rambling on, twisting her hands the way she used to in the aftermath of her maltreatment. “You were stubborn. When you were young, you were the most stubborn boy there ever was. And sarcastic. And too hopeful. You believed in fantasies. You always believed you could be more than this district would let you be.”

“What?” I snap, exasperation rising up and decimating the lump in my throat. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I’m telling you all the ways you were like me. All the bad qualities I passed down to you.” She sniffles loudly and wipes her nose in the same way she smacked my hand once with a wooden spoon for doing. “I was trying, Peeta. I was trying to protect you,” she admits desperately. “I thought if I was hard on you, it would prepare you better for life in the long run. I thought that if I could rid you of all my qualities, you would end up happier than me. I was trying to give you what you needed.”

I feel my chest heave involuntarily and I have to look away, ashamed to be crying in her presence. “What I needed was a mother who loved me,” I say through gritted teeth, fighting to keep it together even a little. “If you cared about me at all, that’s what you should have given me. Not bruises and bloody noses because you thought it necessary to beat the qualities you couldn’t stand out of me.”

“I did love you,” she pleads, her eyes — the same eyes as mine — flashing to the empty liquor bottle on the ground. “I do love you, Peeta. So much. After that announcement tonight, I was beside myself. I can’t stand the idea of you heading back into that place-“

But I can’t stand the idea of letting her finish that sentence. “Is that why you told me last year that Katniss was District Twelve’s big winner? That she’s a survivor?”

And in an instant, she’s casting her gaze down towards her shoes, the remorse splayed plainly across her features. Almost inaudibly, she still attempts to explain. “I was always most motivated when trying to prove someone wrong. I didn’t mean-“

“The last time you may ever see me and you thought to give me some kind of reverse psychology?” I exclaim, still seeing bright red.

Which apparently is another quality I get from her. My ire. As evidenced by her quick tonal shift as well.

“I thought it would make it easier if you didn’t come home again!”

We both fall silent at that. There’s nothing left for me to say. I have all the answers I’ll ever get and there’s nothing she could say that’ll make me feel better. There’s nothing that can erase the past or change my childhood or alter my memory. There’s nothing that can make me forget the way she treated me growing up.

But she’s not done yet. She starts walking towards me and I’m about to leave before this scene gets any more dramatic and my father gets involved, but she grasps my arm before I reach the doorway. She grasps my arm in a gentle hold, so different from the hand that used to stain me purple without remorse.

“I’m sorry, Peeta,” she whispers, begging me to hear her. Begging me to hear her sincerity and remorse. “I’m so sorry for what I did. I’m so sorry for how I treated you. For how I hurt you.”

I shake my head though, the tears I tried so hard to repress flowing freely now. “Stop,” I rasp but she pretends not to hear me.

“You were always a good boy. It was me who was bad. I was the disappointment,” she insists, her voice considerably firm for the amount of salt water coursing down her face. “I was wrong. Not you, honey. Me. I was wrong.”

But you can’t erase seventeen years in one night and I try to break away again, but I’m just too overcome with emotion to refuse any longer.

And then she pulls out a weapon strong enough to cut me to my knees in an instant.

“It wasn’t your fault, Peeta. What I did to you and your brothers wasn’t any of your faults.”

“Stop talking,” I urge desperately, my jaw locked tight and my teeth biting into the soft flesh of my tongue. “Just stop it. Please.”

But her arms are slowly coming around me and she’s close to sobs and she begins to whisper the painful sentiment all over again. “It wasn’t your fault that I hurt you. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I let you go so long without hearing that. But I don’t want you to die without knowing that I was the one in the wrong. And I would take it all back in a second if I could-“

And I can’t stand it anymore. I give into her hug, collapsing against her with such a force it knocks us both down to our knees. I’m not a little boy anymore, I’m not the child she could so easily hurt, I’m not the kid who was too afraid to stand up for himself or his brothers, but he still exists inside of me. It’s him that wants my mother’s embrace, who wants the apology for the wounds he didn’t understand, for the words that kept him awake at night, that caused him to fall asleep with a damp pillow.

And I know she may just be drunk or that she could take it all back when tomorrow comes. I know that this is merely her guilt speaking and my probable death is hanging heavy over her head. But there was a time when these words were all I ever wanted to hear and I choose to take that for what it’s worth.

It doesn’t mean to me now what it might have years ago. But it still means something.

It still means something.