Peeta Mellark, The Baker's Boy

PEETA MELLARK

I just keep wishing I could think of a way to show them that they don't own me. If I'm gonna die, I wanna still be me.

Basic Info

NAME: Peeta Mellark
CANON: The Hunger Games (canon point: end of Quarter Quell)
SCRUBS COLOR: Navy Blue
VISIBLE AGE: Seventeen
GENDER: Male
HEIGHT: 5'10"
PHYSIQUE: Fit, healthy, and probably beat to shit
COMPLEXION: Fairly pale, but tans easily
HYGIENE: Good when he can maintain it
HAIR: Blond
EYES: Blue
DEFINING MARKS: Prosthetic leg (mostly not noticeable under clothes)
ACCENT/SPEECH: More or less standard American but with an Appalachian/Kentucky tilt
BEARING/DEMEANOR: Casual, open,
GAIT: Very slight limp thanks to the prosthetic; it's only noticeable if you watch him closely for a length of time
HABITS: Nothing obvious, but is pretty constantly working, either in the bakery or on his art

GAMES: 74th, 75th (Quarter Quell)
HOME: Panem, District 12, bakery
FAMILY: Father (Thyme), mother (Rozelle), two older brothers (Wheat and Semo)
GOAL: Protect Katniss and get her home

SKILLS

Sheer determination more than anything else, really. Peeta's incredibly stubborn, though in a quiet way a lot of people will miss, and when something's important to him he will damn well fight to protect it or accomplish his goal. That something is almost never his own self-preservation, though.

In terms of actual skills, the most prominent is that he's a baker and has been his entire life. He was raised working with food and is very, very good at producing it, though of course he has a special relationship with bread, so he can help feed everyone with actual good food. Working in the bakery has made him unexpectedly strong as well, since the Capitol shipped their flour around in hundred pound bags and he had to learn to lug those around and even throw them, which makes him ideally suited for manual labor or even as a human ambulance service. He's also deceptively quick and is a devastating, if relatively untrained, hand to hand fighter that can literally pick up and throw his opponents if he gets his hands on them. Training for the Quarter Quell also gave him some woods skills thanks to Katniss and Gale, though he's not (and never will be) as good as either of them in that field. But he can identify edible plants (that was a specific thing to address after the Nightlock incident), set snares, fish, and more-or-less find a direction in an area as long as there's no outside interference. He knows how to garden and take care of plants, though not in a full-scale way like actual farming. He's also a very talented artist, which saved his life in the 74th Hunger Games by allowing him to camouflage himself after the whole tracker jacker incident (though his wounds got infected and he ended up losing the leg). This talent extends to being able to make maps of an area or depict it accurately through only a verbal description, as long as the description being given to him is accurate, of course.

Possibly his biggest unexpected skill, however, is his skill at manipulation. He has a talent of reading a crowd, knowing their mood, and knowing what to say to bring them around to his way of thinking. It's a by-product of sitting back and observing people so much at home; he's naturally emotionally savvy, even if he doesn't often stir it for his own defense, and he's refined a talent of knowing exactly what to say and exactly what way to say it in that gets people thinking the direction he wants them to. He notoriously used this in the lead-up to both Hunger Games he was involved in to get the Capitol audience (and the sponsors) on his side, getting them to throw their weight behind Katniss with his love confession and the next year actually driving the people of the Capitol to demand the Games be cancelled with the "revelation" that Katniss is pregnant. President Coin even wanted to save Peeta over Katniss because Peeta is such a good emotional/manipulative speaker, but she was overruled - and the Capitol then used him for its own ends.

PERSONALITY

Just looking at him, Peeta Mellark isn't someone people take much notice of. If they do, it's in an almost off-hand way: he's the kid working diligently, usually with a nice smile on his face or a look of concentration, who has a friendly word for everyone he sees and a pleasant aura that makes him comfortable to be around. No one would be able to guess how many different facets he has, or how cleverly he can use them. He has a gentle and artistic soul, being a talented baker and artist that can vividly bring a moment to life and capture the colors of a sunset, but he's far from being a rug to walk on, as people find out to their detriment.

Overall, Peeta's a good person, even a great one, and a wonderful guy. It's kind of a miracle he's as genuinely good as he is considering he grew up in an abusive home with a pretty horrible mother who definitely hit her sons and is implied to have whipped them. But somehow he came through all that with what is possibly the best and brightest spirit in Panem, aside from maybe Rue or Prim. He's genuinely kind and friendly to everyone he meets, as long as they're not being an asshole (or he desperately needs them to be sober so they can tell him how to stay alive...), having a good reputation around District 12 and being willing to paint with the morphlings during training before the Quell. Katniss is a special case for him, but he was willing to let himself be beaten so he could give her food when they were eleven and she was nearly dead of starvation, and it's not hard to imagine he'd do something like that again. He has plenty of friends at school, though it is implied he's no one's "best" friend. He gets along well with Prim and Mrs. Everdeen, better than he does with Katniss after their first Games, bringing the family bread just because he wants to and making them other little edible gifts. He deliberately puts himself in the way of Commander Thread to protect Gale from being whipped further when he was already striped bloody, even though he and Gale are rivals for Katniss' affections and they both know it. Gale himself ends up saying that it's impossible to hate him - and boy did Gale try - because he's just too nice, genuine, focused, and well-meaning. It's heavily implied that he volunteered to go back to kill the female tribute from District 8 in order to make it quick for her and not have her suffer at the hands of the Careers, and shares Katniss' kind thoughts about Thresh even though they'd only seen each other across a training center or an arena field. His speech to the morphling who sacrifices herself to save him in the Quell is beautiful and thought up spur of the moment, trying to give her some comfort and peace as she dies. He genuinely wants everyone to be happy, to get along, for life to not be such a slog, everything peaceful and pleasant. He's not nearly naive enough to think that's ever going to happen, being all too aware of the world he lives in and how shitty it is.

While he is definitely a nice guy, he's not a pushover in any respect. While he inherited most of his personality from his father, he got his determined core from his mother (probably the only thing of genuine value she could give him). Peeta has a very long rope and a lot of patience to hold on to it and forgive people their foibles, but there are lines he's not going to let people cross and when they step up to them, he will tell them about it and force them to alter their behavior. It comes out first around Haymitch, when Peeta punches him in the face during his writing them off on the train to the Capitol, and it never really goes away after that. Time after time sees him turn hard and occasionally almost nasty in order to force something to happen, but always with some sort of genuine benefit. The most notable example is probably when, after the announcement of the type of Quarter Quell, he throws away Haymitch's entire stash of white liquor, forbids Ratter from selling him anymore, demands they train like Careers for the upcoming match, and forces everyone to comply with the training and everyone else to help them in it, such as dragging Gale in to teach them about setting snares. Whenever he gets hard and forceful it's always for a good cause, but it's not any less hard and forceful for having good motives behind it. And when he's angry, he will tear things apart with his bare hands, genuinely frightening people around him with his rage and strength. When he sees Brutus kill Chaff, who he wanted to save, he goes into a berserker rage and kills Brutus with his bare hands and a knife, even though the older man is a much more accomplished fighter and dangerous opponent.

The thing that no one is ever prepared for with Peeta, though, is his ability to manipulate and steer people in the direction he wants them to go without them even realizing it. He has a way of noticing what happens around him and putting the pieces together that makes him very emotionally savvy, and he can take that knowledge and formulate strategies with it that are amazingly effective. The biggest example comes when he claims Katniss is pregnant and he actually gets residents of the Capitol to demand that they cancel the Quell to spare her and the fake child, but it happens frequently even aside from that time. He's very good at making speeches and talking to people in general, telling them what they want to hear in the way he wants them to hear it. He and Haymitch share this trait, only Haymitch is a lot more secretive about it, which lets them work together well and understand each other decently even if Haymitch and Katniss are much more similar temperament-wise. He tries to use this ability only for good reasons, but he doesn't hesitate to do it if he thinks it needs doing, such as in his interviews with Caesar before the Games and the Quell, when he intervenes in Gale's whipping, and even when he's speaking to Katniss herself in the Quell after she's mentally tortured by the jabberjays. He speaks so certainly that he can get almost anyone to believe almost anything, being reassuring, comforting, confessional, or whatever he needs to be, so much so that Katniss can't tell whether his words to her after the jabberjays about them just repeating manipulated recordings are what he believes or what he wants her to believe. Katniss notably believes that any rebellion they begin should be lead (or at least figureheaded) by him, since he always knows the right things to say, and in the Quell even makes a reasonable guess that the other Victors are deliberately keeping Peeta alive, even at the cost of their own safety, in order to use his talent to inspire the rebellion happening in almost all the Districts, believing herself to be better off as a martyr. He tries to talk and negotiate when he can, but he does know when it's time to drop that tactic.

And of course there's everything that has to do with Katniss.

Oh, Katniss, Katniss, Katniss. Peeta's been in love with her since he was five, and there's never been another girl for him (or guy). At the same time, she kept to herself and didn't seem to want anyone approaching her, and so he respected her wishes and didn't do it. He always kind of had the hope of "maybe someday," at least until he became fairly sure in his early teenage years that she and Gale were a thing, but he just couldn't let go of his crush no matter how smart it would be. And then they were Reaped together and all his worst fears came true in a second, because he was going to lose any chance he'd ever have to be with her and there was a really good chance she wouldn't make it home herself. Once he gets over the shock of the Reaping, he starts acting, and every single step is made so that Katniss will come home. Everything he does in the Games is to make her popular, get her sponsors, create their "story" so that she has the best chance possible of winning, and damn if he doesn't actually get it done. He sells the idea of their star-crossed love scenario hard and fast and it works because it's real. He loves her from the depths of his heart - though at the beginning, during the first Games, it's an idealized love, since he doesn't really know her or has ever been disappointed by her. Notably the only time Peeta is ever taken in by other people, with the exceptions of when he's just too far away from the planning to know anything about it, is when Katniss sells the romance. He knows enough about her to not expect her to be as open and affectionate as he is, but he never knew just how good she could be at playing along with his scheme, and he believed it to be true because he wanted it to be true. When he finds out she was just acting - that even if she didn't want to kill him, and by the end of the Games cared enough about him that she couldn't kill him, she doesn't love him like he loves her and she doesn't want much to do with him since he'd be a constant reminder of the Games and the horror they endured - he's devastated. He doesn't stop loving her, he can't just turn his feelings off, but it takes him some time to trust her again and he has to admit to himself that he needs to know her properly, which he didn't, and makes the first steps towards being real friends on their Victory Tour. The nightmares they share also bring them closer, as they find it easier to share them together than alone and start sleeping together chastely. What with everything that goes on during the Tour and then the Quell, neither of them quite realizes when they genuinely become each others' rock of stability, but by the end of the Quell it's a sure thing, obvious to everyone except themselves, and even they've come to suspect it.

The Games has done a number on his psyche, though. No one ever comes through the games in one piece, mentally; if they're unchanged by their experiences, there was already something wrong with them to begin with (this applies to the Careers, too, since while they're eager to go, the deadliest opponents, and the likely winners, they're undoubtedly brainwashed into buying into everything going on and would probably be just as horrified as the rest of the Districts if they hadn't been raised in the Career system). Peeta developed severe PTSD in his time in the Games, being forced to kill to defend himself and Katniss, nearly dying, knowing she almost died, being terrorized by the Gamemakers. The bodies and deaths and faces of the lost haunt his dreams at night as they do Katniss and Haymitch, and he knows he's never going to get off this ride. While he'll never be in the arena again (so he thought), there will be kid after kid after kid coming into his life every year and he'll have to send most of them off to die, a fact that he only fully understood on the Victory Tour when Haymitch spelled it out for him and Katniss. But aside from the world of Panem just being awful on its own, he's also been trapped in a high-stakes Capitol intrigue from the time he and Katniss left the arena, and it's not untrue to say his determination to protect Katniss, at the cost of his own life, indirectly leads to the rebellion that begins during the Tour. If he hadn't sold the romance angle, the rules wouldn't have been changed to allow for two victors, Katniss would never have tracked him down, the new rule wouldn't have been pulled out from under their feet, and they would never have tried the berry trick that ignited all the hurt and anger and fear in the Districts. While he doesn't blame himself for any of it, since he knows the Capitol's made up of a bunch of bastards who want to stay in power and keep the Districts down at all costs, it's impossible not to make the connection. But he's spent the past year being a pawn in their machinations, something that causes him torment and worry for the people he cares about, especially Katniss and his family, trying to stay one step ahead of their scheming and not always succeeding. He lets out his rage and anger and terror by painting, or working in the bakery, letting his feelings flow out through his fingers and creating good in order to destroy the bad. It helps, a little. He still gets nightmares almost every night, except if he sleeps with Katniss, and sometimes even then. He can try and fight the tide of intrigue but it's so hard and so overwhelming and so exhausting, and he doesn't want to lose himself to it.

Something he confesses to Katniss after the interviews for their first Games is one of the key items in his personality. He knows he's being sent somewhere to do horrible things and he likely won't survive to go home. Hell, he's planning to not survive so Katniss can, and he'll just help her in any way he can until he's taken down. But he wants to live as his own person. He says that he doesn't want the Capitol to change him in the Games, that he wants to find a way to show that they don't own him. He fully admits that he will fight and even kill to survive - after all, he's not naive, and even if Katniss doesn't know all about it he has a plan - but he refuses to fall to the Capitol's machinations. He's going to live and die the way he wants to, doing what he wants to do, in a very "they may take our lives but they'll never take our freedom" way. And, once again against all odds, he lives up to it, volunteering to suicide at the end of the Games in order for Katniss to make it home, even using his allowed token for the Quell to remind her of her reasons to live and not his. He always lives and acts as himself, perhaps a slightly changed self after all the trauma, but still recognizably and undoubtedly Peeta.

And then he was taken by the Capitol after Katniss destroyed the arena's dome, and everything changed.