Prompt: milliways_bar DE Challenge
Recipient: catslash
Summary: Peeta as artist; the importance of light and color.
Spoilers: This takes place in the months between book one and book two.
Disclaimer: Peeta Mellark and Katniss Everdeen and all things The Hunger Games belong to Suzanne Collins.

Peeta is the son of bakers, and everything goes back to baking in some way or another. He's been counting down the to genesis of everything in his parent's kitchen since before he can even remember.

Take painting.

Painting started with cookies and loaves and small circle cakes. With his fascination at the age of five or six, sitting at the edge of the oven, accidentally burning himself half a dozen times, on his cheeks and forehead and fingers, while he would watched in captivated awe as the white batter turned them beige and yellow, golden browns. And still slice them open to the center white as snow.

You have to master these things first. The basics. How to make it rise right. Correct shapes and color bases. Then you take a step up. Brushing butter and honey across cakes in delicate lines, not wasting a single drop, never putting too little or too much, even if he'll only have one of the hundreds he'll make in a year. And only if things are going extraordinarily well.

Then you can move to edging decor. You practice with colored butters, hard and unyielding lards of butter, for almost a year, until his parents can't find a defect before he can be allowed to even touch icing for the first time. Icing is far more expensive than honey or butter, there cannot be errors. You can't throw out cakes like burned bread. Errors are not an option.

And this is still when all they let him do was white. Another half year and he can do flourishes in white. Flourishes in white that begin to look as good as his father's accents in colors. And they let him test the smallest gift for the mayors daughter. A cupcake. He only had to add pink, but then he couldn't stop.

He had to learn everything. It wasn't a task, it was a passion. How to make flowers. How to move his wrist to make curls. When to use fruit. What was right for a wedding. A birthday. A surprise for whose wife. What to use for mixing just the right colors of orange, to make the top of a sheet like a fading sunset. Somewhere along the way, at least if he's free to do all the decorating, he even mostly stops caring that he's never going to get to eat one. Mostly.

Everything that is beautiful in his life is made up of colors and light in a kitchen. A kind of beauty he has absolutely no words to explain, but he can point to a small flower and tell you how much red and how much white to make the pink that is this exact shade in fondant. The kind of beauty that makes the world outside his kitchen all the more garish.

The kind of beauty he wishes he could share. Except the only person he wished he could share it with never noticed him. No less the simple, silly things which had collected in his mind about beauty. She was in among those, too. But that's not about painting, is it?

It's almost too easy to start painting once they tell him he needs a hobby. He's always wanted to try. He'd become so good at making scenes on cake tops, but paints - real paints in vibrant colors, in fragile silver tubes, and canvases made of startling white fabric stretched to pop - are only the things of childhood fancy. At least until he is a Victor. Until he has more money, and more ghosts, than he knows what to do with it.

After he's mastered the art of frosting into the first rate defense of dying painfully and silently camouflaged to a wall. Because he'd rather have died slowly, of the blood loss or starvation or sickness, than at someone else's hand, another pawn in the greatest twisted game of his world. Except he didn't die. And now he can't forget.

That camouflage once saved his life, and cake decorating gave him that, and now when he's required a hobby, not because he wants one, is he allowed to be a painter.

It's almost too easy. To close his eyes and they blur. The color of Rue's hair would be the combination of these colors. The time of day that Katniss appeared alive still in front of him, the sun would have been this low, effect the color shade this way. When a sword raises and catches light. Or the way the rain fell through the outcropping of the rock, reflecting the ground and the rocks. How her eyes looked when she-

Colors and light.

It's all colors and light.

Living is an act of survival. Baking is an act of survival.

Painting, and painting the truth, especially, is an act of rebellion. It's saying there's more to him than what he's been given, what he's been allowed to say or do or have. That he won't stand for repeating lines he's been given. That he won't believe that the truth doesn't belong in front of everyone's eyes. That beauty doesn't still exist no matter how dark it keeps getting.

But it all started with cookies and loaves and small circle cakes. With watching colors rise and set. How fire and sunshine effect everything. It's also probably why painting always leaves him thinking everything smells like sugar for an hour or two, no matter how gory or graphic the pieces he begins to paint after the Hunger Games are.

Milliways is hard enough already, President Snow's gifts makes this even easier to question.