Work Text:
***
It’s a foul, silken smell which stains her. It beads the back of her neck with sweet, sickly sweat.
The white roses look like dead children’s mouths, plump and pampered and breathless. Walking through the garden is like moving through thick, scented water. Her head feels heavy.
Wormy, fleshy white.
She looks at her own hands which are the soothing shade of dark-green olive. They look like stems, her hands. But still, at least they are not white.
She kneels on a patch of tangled grass, like she’s about to pray.
But she throws up instead.
Delicate white foam trails from her lips. As if she’s spat out the roses.
She kneels like that for a long time, trying to breathe.
The hand which smooths down her hair is cold. It passes over the hot skin of her forehead.
Snow brushes her head. His fingers are veined and thick, almost coarse. There is dark earth under his nails. He works the garden himself sometimes. He digs and prunes. He only humbles himself in front of the roses.
“Oh dear. Upset stomach again, is it?”
Katniss curls her fingers in the grass. The blades tickle and slice through her skin.
His hand traces her cheek. He lifts her chin.
His head is luminous, his white hair, his white beard, like wisps of sky.
Katniss wrenches her head away for a moment and heaves into her collarbone.
He clicks his tongue in pity.
“I have just the thing to make you feel better.”
He takes out the bun from his pocket, still warm from the oven.
Katniss smells raisins and nuts and cinnamon. The bread is meant to remind her of the baker.
Snow sits down on a stone bench. There is a small alabaster bowl on the wrought iron table. He breaks the bun in half. He dips the bun in the bowl of milk.
Katniss misses the bread of the man she once loved. When she eats the bread, she can fool herself into thinking he is still alive, that his hands kneaded the dough.
The president keeps her guessing in that regard. It is the prize he holds just out of reach. Maybe I’ve kept him alive for you.
“You don’t want it to cool down, do you?” he asks, knowing the exact slant of her mind.
Katniss crawls towards him. She stops by his knees. She waits for him to lower his wrinkled hand.
“You can do better than that,” he teases in grandfatherly fashion.
Katniss knows what he means. These little parlor games have been played before. She makes an effort to raise herself a little. She grips his knees. She puts her palms on the worn brocade of his trousers.
The president smiles.
“Open wide.”
The hot, spongy core of bread melts on her tongue.
This meal will only make her sick, in the long run. The cure is the ailment.
At first, she thought he was drugging her food and drink, so she tried to go without. But they forced it down her throat anyway. And after a while, she wasn’t sure he needed to drug her. The very air seemed poisoned. It reeked with opiate sweetness.
She spends so much time in his garden, she has grown used to the miasma.
“Roses are heavy feeders,” he explains, poising the shears above a bush of a hundred white, pearly mouths. “And you cannot feed every bloom. We must be selective. If you want a thriving garden, some lovely shoots must go without.”
You cannot argue with the philosophy of a gardener. But she tries, at first.
“How do you know which blooms to kill?”
The president places the freshly cut calyx in the buttonhole of his velvet suit.
“It takes a practiced hand. In time, you are able to tell. Some roses are almost waiting for it.”
Katniss tries not to shiver, but the white dress she has been stitched into is too thin. He has forbidden undergarments. He can see her nipples through the thin shift. His practiced hand reaches out and cups a breast, gathering the sinuous fabric in his fist, making Katniss stiffen.
He holds her small breast as if it were the lion-head of a carnivorous flower which he has tamed.
He bends his head and presses his lips against the plump, hard nipple, wetting the muslin with his tongue.
Katniss stiffens further. She feels the cool, stinging air against her flesh when he removes his hand and mouth.
“You are one of the blooms we must feed,” he says, resuming his previous point. “You’ve been deprived for so long.”
Katniss thinks of the people in her district who have been deprived all their lives. They will go hungry in their graves too.
“What makes me more deserving than the others?” she asks bleakly, staring at the petals quivering above and below.
“My dear.” He smiles a soft, sad smile. The smile of a gardener who knows the burden of tending something as frivolous and essential as flowers. He brushes his thumb against her chin. His finger is stained dark yellow with pollen. “I do. I make you more deserving.”
All flesh looks white and cadaverous in the pale blue light of dawn.
Katniss runs naked through the woods.
She was always the hunter. Even during the Games, she never lost the feeling of being in control of the arrow. She could decide where and when to release it.
Now she is the one hunted. Hunted for sport and fancy. Not to be killed but to be debased and disgraced. She is not running for her life. She is running because he wants her to.
His metal hounds are programmed to chase her until her strength wanes, until her lungs burn and her legs give in, until she is mounted.
“Diana hunted by her own hounds,” he told her the first time he released her, stark naked, into the woods of his estate. “A virgin hunt.”
She was still untouched then. And she ran, she ran as if she could fly, because she still believed she could outwit him. Still believed that he had underestimated her.
That first time, the large chrome hound pinned her to the ground so that she could not slip out of its paws. She screamed when she thought the metal beast was going to rape her. She howled like a frightened child when she felt something hard and cold wedging between her thighs, spreading them open.
She cried out in relief when the dog stepped aside. When it was the tyrant’s aged hand touching her instead, stroking the curve of her buttocks, Katniss exhaled.
“If given the choice, Diana will only give her chastity to a fellow god,” he murmured, letting his hand slide to her cunt which was cold and dry, but which he started working and plying with thick, coarse fingers.
He didn’t fuck her then. He merely fondled her, sinking his knuckles inside her, one by one.
Katniss convulsed. She heaved a delicate white froth on the forest floor.
On the second virgin hunt, the chrome hound mounted her again and held her down and made her whimper. Then it stepped aside and crouched by her head and sniffed her hair, emitting a strange whir and a smell like charred flesh. Snow smiled at the dog, although she couldn’t see. He stroked his cock above her hips until she felt the greasy, milky cum sliding between her buttocks.
There was a sound he made near the end, the pained grunt of a man who did not want to be caught in the middle of his pleasure. That dreadful sound followed her everywhere, like her ears were stuffed with it.
On the third hunt, the hound pinned her to the ground with her belly up. Her head was positioned between the dog’s gleaming rear legs. She could see the strange metal casting that served as its genitals.
President Snow stood over her. If she lifted her neck, she could see his flushed face, could see him take out his cock where before she’d only imagined what was going on behind her. But she couldn’t hold her head up for long. Eventually, it had to fall back. She was forced to look at the dog’s phallus as Snow stroked his cock over her cunt.
On the fourth hunt, she did not run. She thought maybe refusing to take flight would frustrate the game. The hounds surrounded her and started to bray loudly. They barked with a ghastly machine voice. She couldn’t do anything except shrink into a coiled ball on the ground. They all released something at once. A sickly sweet piss. They urinated on her with mechanical joy. The smell was white – the smell of putrid white roses. Katniss pressed her hands over her face. Her whole body shook with revulsion. It kept shaking long after. She could not get rid of the smell.
On the last virgin hunt, she knelt in the middle of a mossy clearing and leaned her cheek on the ground. She breathed in the smell of wet, brown earth.
The hounds had been sent away. Instead, she heard the soft thud of his cane against the fallen leaves.
President Snow stopped in front of her. He tapped the cold end of his cane against the ridges of her spine.
“Look at you, little frigid huntress. Lying there with your cunt in the air, waiting to get fucked. Virtue has worn you down. It did not take long.”
Katniss shivered with helpless rage. She wanted him to come closer so she could strike at him, scratch out the white of his eyes.
But Snow kept his cane on her spine. He dragged it down to the tailbone.
“Shall I fuck you with this stick? Is that what you want?”
Katniss shook her head. She looked up at him with a baleful glare.
Snow smiled. He tapped the stick against her back. There was a soft click in the mechanism. A small dart shot out of the cane’s tip. It sank into her flesh.
Katniss gasped. Her body seized up as the fluid he had shot into her nervous system ransacked her senses.
She trembled and writhed with the effort to accept it. That something was happening to her which was out of her control. She was no longer the hunter.
The feeling was full of dark flame, full of hot resentment, and strange lustful pollen. It was coursing through her, the poison of being prey.
Snow retrieved his cane. He watched her dispassionately, watched her grovel at his feet. Then he walked away slowly.
Katniss rose on shaking legs. She stumbled after him. He had injected her with need and she couldn’t help but follow him back into the garden.
Roses everywhere. If you touch them, they quiver, and you can tell, they’re waiting to be plucked.
She followed him into one of the hothouses where white and pink flowers steamed the glass.
He sank into a heavy armchair, claw-footed, the vermilion of its tapestry faded with many afternoons of mastery.
He watched her come up to him with a dazed, white look in her eyes.
He helped her straddle his lap. In fact, he held her there, held her firmly, because she was slipping and shaking all over, feverish with the foreign agent inside her.
She gripped the gilded frame above his head and moaned hoarsely, moaned like a hound of hell, cried out in strung-out, stupefied abandon as he sank inside her and fucked her fast, and she felt like a fleshy white worm, swallowing another white worm, making room for it inside her. Like pulsing, coiling snakes.
He seemed to grin at her. Or maybe it was a grimace.
“This is what you’ve always wanted,” he rasps. “For someone to take away your will entirely. That heavy weight on your shoulders.”
She felt herself opening further, moaning louder, going slack with mindless venom pleasure. He lowered her to the ground. Her back arched painfully, close to snapping in half. Her breasts looked like blooms pushing their bruised petals open. Her hair brushed the gravel, her scalp felt every sharp pebble. From afar, it looked as if her neck was broken. He fucked her like that, sitting on the edge of his chair, holding her thighs in his lap while the rest of her broke into petals on the ground.
But that was months or maybe years ago. That was only yesterday, perhaps. She isn’t sure.
Time inside the garden is governed by the clipping of his shears, the swish of a blade, the soft thud of a flower’s head.
Sometimes, she sees her sister, darting in and out of the bushes.
One evening, Primrose is skipping around a stone fountain. The mermaid in the fountain spouts water through her mouth, but the sculptor was quite cruel. He made her mouth too small for the torrent gushing through her lips. Her song is drowned.
Katniss tries to call out to her sister, but Prim can’t hear her over the noise of the water. She’s wearing a crown of roses, pink and white, and her face shines with a film of sweat. She runs towards the maze of hedges, leaving petals in her wake like breadcrumbs.
Katniss follows. Her bare arms brush against tangled briar, but she doesn’t feel the little cuts.
She can hear Prim laughing. She turns a dark-green corner. There, in the middle of the terrace, her sister curtsies playfully, like a doll in a story.
The young man is so tall that little Prim’s head, bowed down, barely reaches his waist.
Katniss recognizes him from the film footage, the propaganda reels. Young Coriolanus Snow, silver and sterile and handsome. Unbelievable, in many ways.
Coriolanus cups her sister’s jaw. He draws her head closer.
Primrose puts her thin arms around his knees. She embraces him fiercely, rubbing her cheek against the seam of his trousers. The rose crown slips from her head.
Katniss feels something white and viscous coming out of her throat.
Coriolanus lifts his haloed head and looks straight at her.
He runs his fingers through her sister’s fair hair, keeping her head against his leg.
Please, Katniss mumbles, feeling the white scum of hatred bubbling on her lips. Please take me instead.
Coriolanus gives her a winning, boyish smile, a full grin.
Take the crown then, he says, sounding almost eager in his youthfulness. No one is stopping you.
Katniss picks up the braided crown of roses. She puts it on her head.
The blur of reality fogs her vision. She blinks and her eyes water, and he is no longer young, and maybe never was, but that doesn’t mean the bargain wasn’t struck.
She takes him in her mouth carefully, without spite. She lets the white scum fill her throat.
Is Primrose still alive somewhere? Is he keeping her sister in another garden? Is the baker there too? Are they all right? What is he doing to them?
Are they thinking of her? Wondering why she hasn’t broken them out? Why she hasn’t freed them yet?
What else was she ever good for?
She can feel the pressing guilt of these questions, like a second skin, the precious, flimsy hope.
As long as there are gardens and roses, she must stay. She must wait and see. Maybe there will be a chance to volunteer herself again, to give her whole self away for them. And finally, her will would be gone.
Katniss sits naked in the clearing, having exhausted herself with running. Her skin is flushed.
The chrome hound plops down by her side.
She pets the gleaming hardness of his back.
Roses are heavy feeders, he said. They gently suck the milk of the earth. They like for the soil to be rich. They go on eating for a long time.
She rides him slowly, clenching her thighs, like a flower opening her mouth. She feels like she is fattening, like she is drinking from him. Like soon, but not too soon, she might exhaust his resources.
It’s a foul, silken smell, smearing her insides. But she doesn’t get sick with it anymore. She keeps the bile in her mouth, right on her tongue. And she leans forward and puts her mouth over his.
A shock of vengeful pleasure runs through her when his wrinkled mouth curdles, when he shudders and groans with loathing. When he flinches with the wretched taste of his flowers.