One-Shot: The Father of My Baby is a Victor

I wait on the train station platform. I feel myself actually smiling. I rarely smile, as I'm not a particularly cheery person.

But I can't help it. Peeta Mellark, the Victor of the 74th Annual Hunger Games, is coming home today.

I visited him in the Justice Building after he was Reaped. To thank him for saving my life long ago. What I didn't plan on was for him to bravely confess his love for me and kiss me on the lips goodbye. For me to kiss him back. For our bodies to become one on a red plush seat. I can still feel that seat grinding into my back, can feel my blue dress pushed up nearly over my head. Can feel something deep within my core break as Peeta unified his body with mine. Feel the pain between my thighs that lasted for days afterward. Feel his blood stain my skin and panties, even mix with my own blood.

And now, our bloods have mixed in a very different and profound way. And now, he has filled me with his offspring. Implanted his seed within me.

When the throwing up started, two weeks into the Games, I thought it was just nerves. From watching the handsome baker's son survive day after day. But then I felt the life stir within me. And that's when I knew.

And when Peeta won, I was both exhilarated and terrified that our baby would not be a fatherless child.

The train now pulls into the station. Peeta bounds off to cheers and upon seeing me, he swoops me into his arms and kisses me fiercely. Having little experience with kissing, I stiffen at first. But then I kiss him back, to gasps and then wild, deafening roars of approval.

As Peeta kisses me again and again, he smiles against my lips. "I love you," he murmurs.

I stare at him in abject adoration, as if I rest not in the embrace of a Victor; no, I rest in the embrace of a demigod. A demigod who just cannot die and who has chosen a mere mortal like me to be the mother of his progeny and raise it.

"Marry me." Peeta kisses down my face and jawline, eventually sending a love bite into my neck that he suckles clean, branding me as his. I arch into him, eyes wide.

"Yessssss..." The last comes out in a hiss. Then I realize what I have just said. I have accepted marriage, something I once vowed I would never do. "But why?" I stare at him. "Why do you want to marry me?"

"Because I think that you are the strongest woman I've ever known. You sing like no one else," Peeta tells me sincerely. "Also, my body has ached for you since we were five years old."

I gaze at him in astonishment. He has ached for me? Me? So much so, that he would lie with me the way a husband would lie with his wife to relieve his ache? Inadvertently have his sperm join with my eggs to create new life in my womb? Just before he was handed over to suffering and death? A death he barely escaped?

My eyes prick with tears. I don't deserve such love. I have a stick-figure body, though that will soon change as my stomach swells and my breasts balloon. Then everyone will know that he has taken me. Had me. Conquered me and made me submissive for the first time in my life. But there are worse men to be beholden to than Peeta Mellark. Still, I've never believed myself to be pretty enough to be either weddable or beddable. Primrose is the real beauty of my family. "Then," I whisper as I clutch Peeta close, guide his hands to my womb, "Let's hope our son is the spitting image of his Victor father. Because if he's anything like me..."

Peeta stares at me in bewilderment. I nod once. "I'm pregnant. A child that is yours grows in my belly. I can feel his life with me."

"He?" Peeta only frowns, though I can tell he is elated. "What makes you think it's a boy?"

"My motherly intuition," I tease, even if I think I will be an awful mother. "And the Mellark name must live on."

Peeta smiles and begs me to marry him again. And even though I know Victors generally do not marry, even though the moment our baby is born, everyone will know who his father is and he will be Reaped in a dozen years' time, I say yes to Peeta's proposal and I mean it this time.