Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

We learn to keep busy again.  To try to take comfort in routine like Dr. Aurelius suggests.  It’s not comforting exactly, but it does fill the hours of the day. 

Peeta bakes.  At least, that’s what I hear from Haymitch, who scowls at me and delivers news of Peeta’s comings and goings, knowing I avoid him as best I can.  There’s no reason for me to hang around his house, watching him bake cakes and ice cookies, I tell Haymitch, so I hunt, and he can’t do that with me.  Besides, I don’t much like the idea of a hunting partner anymore.

What I don’t say is that being around Peeta is too much like digging up a part of the past that I have no right to miss.  I never deserved his love, but for some reason I’m as uneasy with its absence as I once was with that burden.

Peeta asks to go hunting with me just once.  He’s lurking on my doorstep, when I emerge in the morning, and there’s no way to avoid him without turning back around.  When he asks, I know it’s a bad idea, because everything between us initially is strained and unsettling, and I can’t imagine spending several hours alone with him in the forest.  I don’t respond, not wanting him to come and not knowing how to say ‘no’ to him either, still feeling forever in his debt and frozen by the earnest look in his blue eyes that still isn’t the one I find myself searching for.  I grit my teeth and spin on my heel, hoping he’ll take the hint as I silently stalk off, but he doggedly follows after me anyway.  I know it, because I can hear him.  Stone deaf Athys, who shuffles around where the Hob used to be, smiling vacantly, could hear Peeta.

When we’re deep in the forest with the sounds of his footfalls reverberating in this quiet place like thunder, I spin on him.  “You’re scaring away the game!”

The way he twitches at my explosion and reaches out to steady himself by holding onto the trunk of a skinny, stunted tree makes me immediately regret my anger.  He doesn’t need my anger.  Doesn’t deserve it.  He came back to District 12, and while I don’t think he came back for me, he certainly didn’t abandon me the way everyone else has.  He worked hard to learn real from not real so that he could come back home without snapping my neck, and I’m still unkind and unfeeling.  There was always something wrong with me, but now I’m completely broken.

For all I know, my temper triggered a flashback of an altered memory, since he’s looking down at the damp forest floor and his knuckles are turning white, but if it is a hijacked memory, it passes without incident.  He doesn’t launch himself at me and wrap his hands around my throat, squeezing until little stars pop behind my eyelids.

Instead, he looks back up at me with lucid, clear eyes and apologizes.  “I’m sorry.  I’m wasting your time.”

“Why would you want to come out here?” I ask on a loud exhalation, because I really don’t understand.  He’s better at home, in his kitchen, working with dough.  Why would he want to spend time with me at all, when I couldn’t even muster a thank you for his gift of the primroses?  We’re better off in our mostly separate worlds.

“I don’t know,” he says, stuffing his hands into his pockets.  “I wanted to see what it was like for you out here, I guess, where you find peace.  I thought I’d watch.”

It makes me uncomfortable when Peeta is open like this.  It always has.  Particularly now when he looks at me with those eyes that seem to plead for understanding.  It reminds me of the way he used to look at me before the Capitol eviscerated whatever we might have become, and I can’t afford to think about that sort of thing anymore.  It wouldn’t be right.

“I can assure you that there’s nothing to see.  I’m just trying to be useful.”  By giving the game I catch to Greasy Sae and her simple little girl or Haymitch, who has something of an appetite when he’s tending his geese more than nursing a hangover, or Peeta, who still needs to put on more weight.  Of course, he’s right: I also do it because hunting helps my mind go blank and maybe that’s as much peace as I can ever hope for.

It’s a disastrous day.  I don’t catch anything, and overcome by guilt, I walk him back to his house hours before I planned to go back.  With my gut twisting with remorse, I still manage to sound ungrateful, when I tell him in his kitchen, “I’m the hunter.  You’re the baker.  That’s what you’re good at.  That’s what you should do.”  I hold onto that—that he’s the boy with the bread even though I know he’s not that boy anymore, anymore than I am the girl he loved.  I’d just rather Peeta not ever have to kill something again.

He leans on the counter, where he works his bread in the mornings, staring back at me, as he says, “Two different worlds.”

“Two different worlds,” I agree.

Even I know that’s a lie.  If Peeta and I ever came from two different worlds—Town and Seam—the differences between us were much smaller than the differences between Capitol and District.  So small in fact that they didn’t much matter once we were two kids thrown into the Arena together, and those differences certainly don’t matter now.  The Arena, Capitol, and war forged us into a pair of beings that are more alike than they were ever different.

Peeta and I have been formed by the same forces.  Two of the Capitol’s last projects.  A pair of mutts.  I don’t know whether I want to be reminded of that, which is why it’s easier to just be separate.  So, that’s the end of it.  I pretend we’re different, and I hunt alone.  We’re busy, but separately.  I’m aware that he’s there and it’s obvious to even me that he’s aware of me, but we lead the separate lives I do my best to want, because wanting anything else would be…wrong.

But as the days pass and turn into weeks and months, Peeta is at my door at night more often than not with a basket full of cheese buns.  My favorite.  I try to look thankful when he turns up, because they taste just as good as before, but I was never any good at faking things and it’s hard to take pleasure in anything anymore.  It’s hard to get over the feeling that while we’re supposed to be safe and Peeta is here and the bread is still warm as he presses it into my hands, we’ll never be safe and somehow this will all be taken away.

Peeta will be taken away.

And then I’ll be alone, and even if I don’t deserve him, there’s something that crawls under my skin that wants him near, that requires it.  A basic, driving need—even if that’s so very, very wrong.

It’s the bread that keeps bringing him back to me, and while sometimes I think all I’ll ever be fully comfortable with for the rest of my days is sitting alone, punishing myself for everything that is both my fault and not, and numbly staring into space, once I stop fighting it, there is a kind of contentment in having Peeta sitting beside me.  Even if we just silently stuff ourselves with bread.  I don’t quite trust the feeling, but it gets harder to close the door in his face with every passing day.  I only did that a handful of times anyway.

This odd companionship, these moments we spend together are something new.  The time we’ve spent together in the past was always highly charged with either fabrication on my part or fear.

Peeta must feel the newness of it too, because one night he says after swallowing down a piece of bread, “We never did this before.”  His face is a wordless question, asking me whether he’s right, whether the Capitol stole some memory from him that duplicates these quiet moments.

“No, we didn’t.”

I barely even saw Peeta when we came back from the 74^th games, let alone sat alone with him like this, bumping elbows while we hunch over a table, and although I know why it was that way, I wish there were memories like that, which I could share with him.

“Then this is better.”

I know what he means.  He means this aspect of life is better than before.  And maybe it is.  Maybe there are things about this new world we created, which are measurably better even for a burned up girl like me.

When something is good, you want more of it, and after a while, I find myself wanting to prolong those nights even after the buns are all eaten.  Nights go by when I wish he would stay a little longer but I can’t bring myself to ask.  Not directly at least.  I’m not good at asking for the things I need.  Particularly when needing them makes me feel weak.  I wish I had the right words to say so I could get what I want without opening up my veins to the world.  I’ve bled enough.

“Do you want some tea?”  Innocent enough, I tell myself, swallowing hard.

Surprise flickers across his face.

I don’t think I’ve ever offered him anything.  If Greasy Sae isn’t here to feed us both, he doesn’t get much hospitality in the Everdeen house.  But I can make tea.  I know how to heat up a kettle, and it doesn’t feel like too much of an effort.

He glances at the clock over the mantel, at the late hour.  “It’s late for tea.  We won’t sleep.”

I stand up, brushing off his concern as I move towards the kitchen.  “I don’t sleep anyway,” I admit, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed by the memory of Peeta’s strong arms around me.  How I slept better in his embrace on the train, during the Victory Tour, in the Training Center, how he helped hold off the nightmares, and my chest vibrates with my loneliness.

I’m lonely for Prim.  She’s never far from my mind, my little sister with her ducktail shirt.  I’m lonely for Gale, who once knew me better than anyone, but is someone I’ll never be able to truly trust again.  I’m lonely for Finnick.  Cinna.  Anyone who would understand.  But, I’m lonely for Peeta too, and he’s actually here.

I grip the handle of the kettle, staring across the room at him, when I say, “You probably don’t sleep either.”  I think I can hear him scream sometimes from across the Victor’s Village, when I’m laying awake, staring up at my bedroom ceiling.  I’d think I was imagining it, but I’m not the only one that hears the noise: it makes Buttercup hiss at the foot of my bed.

“No, I don’t sleep, Katniss.”

I know not to reach for the sugar.  Peeta never takes sugar in his tea, and neither of us need worry about losing the sleep that already escapes us.

Chapter Text

Chapter Two

We’re not alone, though sometimes it feels like Peeta and I are the only ones in this burnt up, bombed out world.  But it isn’t just us two and Haymitch and Greasy Sae.  As the months go by, a few hundred others return because, whatever terrible things have happened here, this is our home.

Only, initially there isn’t a whole lot to return home to, so as people turn up, things begin to change, they have to change.  Little changes for now, but bigger changes loom around the corner.  With the mines closed, they say they want to plow the ashes into the earth and plant food, so less people starve while the Capitol feasts on lamb stew with plums.  It might be another year or eighteen months before they arrive, but machines from the Capitol are supposed to break ground for a new factory where they decide we will make medicines.  The irony of that should probably illicit some emotion from me, but it leaves me feeling empty, like just about everything else.  I don’t even bother to call my mother to see if she’s somehow involved, because I don’t think I really care to know.

And strangest of all, although no one seeds it, the Meadow already shows signs of turning green again—delicate, thin blades of new green grass, peeking through the black remains of what was.

I know this is what we fought for: for a new life, for rebirth, so something better could rise out of the ashes.  But that’s just the problem.  All I can focus on is the ashes, the bones, the bodies upon which this new place is built.  The very thing that makes the Meadow green.  And I’m not sure it was worth it, because I can’t imagine any world, however green and new and good, worth trading my sister for.

Peeta seems more encouraged by the changes than disturbed by them.  He seems more like himself, when he reports to me whenever a family comes back, listing names I’m supposed to recognize.  He lets me know when a new shop stall turns up and what they have to offer.  When a home goes up and who’s moving in.  He must notice these things during the hours he’s out delivering bread to people.  I try to notice as little of it as possible.

“Did you see the second story on Cedar’s house went up?” he asks me one night, disrupting a comfortable silence that exists between us after a second round of hot tea that scalds the roof of my mouth.

“I don’t ever walk that way.”

Of course, there aren’t that many paths to take when heading for my hunting ground, but I hope my statement will put an end to this line of discussion.

“We could walk out that way together,” he suggests.

“No.”  My response is quick, and I can see that it stings him by the way the skin beneath his right eye pulls, a subtle spasm of the muscle beneath.  “I’d rather walk somewhere else,” I amend.

He rubs his chin, where the stubble of a beard would be growing if the Capitol hadn’t altered him.  I try to picture it—blond stubble along the sharp line of his jaw—and my stomach does something funny.  I fix my eyes on the hole in my sock and wiggle my toe so that it peeks out.  It’s something mundane and ragged to distract myself from the unnerving image that flickered through my mind’s eye of my fingers tracing his jaw.

“I spoke with Martin Cedar and he said they want the first floor to be a storefront.”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest, as I sink further into the sofa cushion.  I know I sound petulant and childish, but I haven’t the energy to feign interest.  “I hate the new homes.”  If I frown hard enough, maybe he’ll spare me the details.

Peeta looks down at me.  He’s right there, close enough to touch.  He used to sit across from me in the overstuffed chair, but he sneaked up on me over time, night after night, until he ended up sitting right next to me, and for some reason I pretend not to have noticed.

“When something new goes up, it’s like what was there before is wiped away,” I finally say, my voice little more than a whisper.

I can hear Peeta swallow and see his throat working before he responds, “It was already wiped away.”

He’s right of course.  The bombs did that more than a year ago.  These people are just trying to make a new life for themselves, and it’s ridiculous for me to want it to stop, for time to freeze.  But even with nothing left but black ash and bombed out shells, I can overlay in my mind how it used to look.  If they tear that down, sweep it away, build things up, make changes, I’m afraid I won’t be able to see it anymore, the way it once was.

My arms slip from over my chest to hug my middle, as defensiveness gives way to a more vulnerable feeling.

I’m beginning to forget.  The number of steps that led into school.  The slope of our roof.  The lettering on the Mellark Bakery’s sign.

The exact shade of Prim’s eyes.

I reach for Peeta, seized by the sudden need to see if his eyes are the same blue as my sister’s.  Whether I’d even recognize it if they were.

There’s a twitch in his flaxen brow, when my hand closes on his bare forearm.  With single mindedness, I search his eyes, and maybe I should stop, maybe I should be afraid of him, but I’m not; either because I trust him or because I should already be dead and so I just don’t care.

I’ve stared up into these blue eyes with intensity before, I realize, when I was pretending to be in love with him, playing it up for the cameras, for the Capitol, and President Snow.  That’s when I finally decide this is a bad idea and release my grip on him.  It’s too late though.  He’s digging his fingers into his thighs.  I can see he’s got questions he wants answered, and I’m not in the mood to play our game.  Not with the questions he’s liable to ask.  Not with the image of my fingers trailing over his skin still fresh in my mind.

I kick up off the sofa, bending over only to gather up our mugs and slink into the kitchen.  I’m almost finished scrubbing them clean of tea stains in the sink, when I hear his voice, a little deeper than it was even a year ago, asking, “What were you doing, Katniss?”

“Checking for something,” I say flatly, as I turn off the water.

“For what?”

I reach for the dish towel, telling myself to ignore the waver in his voice.

“I don’t think I can remember Prim’s eyes.  Yours are the wrong blue.”

The next morning he’s got dark circles under his eyes when he walks into my kitchen, but that’s not what surprises me—he almost always has sunken eyes and so do I.  It’s that he’s here at all, when morning is when he’s busiest, baking bread.  His presence alone is a shock to our developed routine, and it startles me enough to make me jump like a prey animal startled in the woods.

Normally he’d apologize for frightening me—he apologizes too much, for those tense moments when he turns mutt and I’m poised to sprint away from him if need be—but instead he stands there, shifting on his feet, looking like he wants to say something, but doesn’t know where to start.  Peeta used to be the one with the right words, but they took that away from him too.

“Everything okay?” I ask, my fingers tracing the grout of the tiled counter, my body full of tension.  I didn’t hear his screams last night, but you never know.

We don’t touch much.  Not with such blatant purpose like when I grabbed his arm and stared a little too desperately up into his eyes, and I’m sure he wasn’t prepared for that.  When he left my house, he seemed agitated, and it’s already occurred to me that my strange behavior could have triggered an episode or just a fresh batch of horrors to visit him in his dreams.  Part of me wanted to go check on him last night, but the other part told me to hide on the floor of my closet, so I wouldn’t be tempted to open Prim’s bedroom door on my way down the stairs.

He holds out a piece of paper to me.  “Here,” he says.  He’s looking at the paper.  Not at me.

There’s a half beat where I’m terrified he’s handing me a letter.  I’m afraid he’s written down a bunch of questions I don’t want to answer.  Questions about us.  I’m afraid he’s written down how he feels about me.  I don’t know which I’m afraid of more: that his feelings are what they used to be or—more likely—that they’re not.

But it’s not a letter; it’s a picture.  A drawing in colored pencil.  Of my sister.

“It’s just a first draft.  You tell me what’s wrong and I’ll fix it for the painting.”

“The painting?” I ask dumbly, as I pour over the sketch.

He’s captured the flip of her hair, the curve of her lip, the little upturn of her nose.  His memory for detail is much better than mine.  He has the eye of an artist, and he’s recreated my sister with the delicate stroke of his pencil.  I move to trace the outline with my finger and then jerk back, worried it will smudge under my touch.

“I’m going to paint a picture of Prim to help us remember.”

I look up at him as I realize that he said us, not you.  That’s when it hits me square in the chest: I don’t have to bear the burden of remembering alone.  Peeta and I can do it together.

“Is it all right?” he asks, still staring at the paper in my hands.

I press it to my chest, nodding, for a moment strangled by an overwhelming feeling of gratitude that wells up from my stomach. Gratitude and a crushing feeling of stupidity.  It’s taken me all this time to understand that measuring who owes who has been pointless with Peeta.  With Peeta it’s always been a matter of sharing, not debt.

“Could you do this…could you sketch or paint my house and the bakery store window and the Hob?” I choke out.  “Can you paint it all?”

He looks relieved that he hasn’t made a giant misstep, hasn’t caused me to stalk off the way I did when he planted the primroses, when he says with a shy smile, “Sure, Katniss.”

And that’s how our book begins with Peeta’s pictures and my words.  At first it’s the things we want to remember, even the things that awaken emotions that prickle my healing skin and make tears roll down my cheeks.  Once we’re stronger, we begin to record the things we need to remember.  The ugly things that need to be written down for posterity so there is less of a chance that they’ll be repeated.

What I discover is that putting them down on paper is a little like excising a tooth.  You’re still not right after it’s been pulled, you’re never getting back that tooth, but the pain doesn’t gnaw away at you in the same way.  In our waking hours, we’re not quite as beholden to the past, so long as we know we’ve preserved it in the book.

Chapter Text

Chapter Three

Revisiting the past isn’t always easy and I wouldn’t be strong enough to even attempt it without Peeta at my side.  My feet tucked under his thigh the way they once were for the benefit of the cameras while he works away at a sketch in the chill of winter.

Maybe not entirely for the cameras.  I couldn’t have gotten through any of this without Peeta.  I needed him then and I still do.  I can see that now.

While there are nights I don’t sleep because of how those sketches come to life like black and white ghosts, there are the rare occasions when Peeta finishes something untainted by horror or guilt, tilts the sketchpad towards me so I can see, and smiles.  And it’s almost exactly the smile I remember, his smile from before, and it’s like a burst of color in my otherwise grey life.  I’m drawn to it like Buttercup is drawn to a sunbeam: it makes me scoot in closer to him, pushing my feet further beneath the heat of his solid thigh, leaning until my braid falls forward and brushes his shoulder, so I can bask in the goodness that the Capitol couldn’t devour.

He’s not just a shelter from the things that keep me awake at night; he’s also the hope of something better.

That’s why Peeta is the only person I can imagine sharing my secrets with, like my one hiding spot from when I was a little girl.  I don’t want to forget it, I want it preserved in our book, and I want to show him, share with him something good.

The notion comes to me one night, when I’m lying awake, shivering beneath the blankets after fighting off a bad series of nightmares.  I don’t want to go back to sleep, because the dreams wait for me.  Dreams where mutts chase Peeta across the Victor’s Square, snapping at his heels with drooling, poisoned fangs, threatening the one thing left in this world that I care about losing.

I’m out the door and down the steps in my thick coat and boots before I can stop myself, fleeing terrors and seeking out something safe so quickly that I stumble over a loose stone, as I make my way past Haymitch’s house.

“Watch your step there, sweetheart,” a voice calls out from Haymitch’s porch.

“Haymitch?”

“Expecting someone else?” he prods dully, while he holds up a white liquor bottle I can just make out in the predawn light.  “You’re out awfully late.”

I take a few steps closer to his porch, squinting.  “You’re out awfully late too,” I lamely point out.

“I’m just taking in the vast beauty of this world,” he says on a laugh that is only part laugh, part sputtering cough.

 “You’re drunk.”

“Well aren’t you observant,” he returns flatly.  “So what is this I’m unwittingly witness to?”

“I’m just out.”

“Huh.  You don’t have to sneak around.  They all think you’re married.”

“Why don’t you go to sleep,” I suggest with a scowl, ignoring what he means to imply, as I stuff my hands in the pockets of my coat and bounce on my toes to stay warm.

“Maybe I will,” he says, leaning forward until his elbows rest on his knees, the bottle dangling from his hand precariously.  “That’s not bad advice, but why aren’t you asleep, sweetheart?  Do you regularly sneak over to the boy’s house in the middle of the night?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I nearly shout in my keenness to dissuade him of this presumption.

“Course you do,” he says, sipping from the bottle.  “Isn’t that fancy Capitol doc of yours progressive to work this into your little routines?  Well, go on,” he says, waving his hand at me dismissively.  “Don’t let me stop you.  It’s about time.”

“It isn’t that,” I spit back, giving his fence a kick for emphasis.

“You’re too stupid for it to be that,” he says with a withering look.

I scuff my feet, looking down at the frost covered ground, torn between walking back towards my house so Haymitch will know he is wrong about us and following through with my objective.  My desire to take Peeta out with me, to share something with him, which is all he wanted from me when he followed me out into the woods that day, finally wins out, and I stomp away from Haymitch, as he calls out to me, “You still don’t deserve him.”

I shout back, telling him to shut up, as I’m running up Peeta’s front steps, though he’s right, and it’s probably selfish of me to wake Peeta up like this.  Just further evidence that I’m too selfish to deserve Peeta as a friend.  Just like I was too selfish to deserve his love.  But that doesn’t stop me from pulling on his door, which I know will be unlocked.  Mine always is too, because locks can’t keep the real monsters out.

I don’t know what my plan was exactly—slip into his darkened room and shake someone who suffers from hijacked nightmares awake?—but it surprises me to see him standing at the bottom of his stairs, bare-chested and scratching his stomach, while he blinks sleepy eyes at me.

“What’s wrong?” he asks in a sleep hoarsened voice, as he reaches up to rub one eye.

He looks oddly young and also undeniably not, as he stands before me, and for a moment I can’t say a word.  So, I push the door closed with the heel of my boot, instead, shutting myself inside with him so it will be harder to bolt.

His brows furrow.  “I heard you shouting.”

Peeta sleeps with the windows open.  Even in the middle of winter.  Of course he heard me.

I shrug awkwardly and tuck the wayward strands of my hair behind my ear, hoping he didn’t hear everything.  “Sorry about that.  Haymitch is drunk.”

“Do you need me to help with him?” he asks, shuffling forward.

Peeta is strong enough that he’s lugged Haymitch’s hulking unconscious body to bed on occasion, when I’ve found him drunk enough that I was legitimately worried, but I don’t think tonight is one of those occasions.  He’s still fully upright and obnoxiously observant.

“No, no…I was coming over for you,” I say, speaking as quickly as I can manage in case I lose my nerve.  “It’s nothing to do with Haymitch.”

“You okay?” he asks, reaching out to stroke the arm of my coat right at the slightly worn elbow.

I nod briskly.  “I’m fine.  I just want to show you something.”

“Should I get my coat?” he asks, and that’s the only question he needs answered.  Otherwise he’s dressed and out the door behind me, following close behind, as I stride towards the place that was my one and only hiding place.

Of course, I know it’s not there anymore.  The Meadow isn’t what it once was.  The ashen ground isn’t even dotted in new shoots of green anymore, since the winter snows came and made everything turn brown.  But it was here once.

“It was right about here, I think,” I say gesturing towards a spot that is just as lifeless and void of markers as all the rest of it.

He’s quiet for what feels like an awfully long time, while looking at me, not the spot, before asking, “What was here, Katniss?”

I suddenly feel incredibly stupid for waking him up and dragging him out here to show him what?  There is nothing here.  There’s nothing left.  I knew that, didn’t I?

“Nothing,” I say, wiping roughly at my eyes, as I turn my back on the spot, on the idea that I’d come here, share this with Peeta, and somehow feel…something other than emptiness.

I try to keep my back to him, but after unsuccessfully attempting to circle around me, Peeta finally grips my shoulders and turns me around to face him.

“Katniss,” he says, so gently that I have to screw my eyes shut tight or tears might actually fall.  “You wanted to show me something?”

“I can’t,” I croak out.

I can’t, because not only isn’t it there, but standing here in the cold, describing to him what this place means to me suddenly feels like too much.  Or not enough.  Like my little offer of hope that’s just a pile of ashes is just as broken as the rest of me and will never compare with Peeta’s promising smiles.  Like I have nothing to offer.

He squeezes my shoulders.  “Okay.”

I didn’t expect him to let it go so easily.  I don’t know why I expected him to prod at the wound.  Even when he asks me a barrage of questions—real or not real—while we’re working on our book, I can feel him watching me, trying to measure whether he’s pushed me too far.  There’s still a little dance we perform, moving around each other in circles, even as those circles get tighter with each pass.

“Okay?” I repeat back.

He swallows and nods.  “Yeah.  Whatever you want.”

His nose is red with the cold, but his hands, which have been stuck inside his coat for the duration of our trek, are warm when they come up to frame my face.

My heart begins to hammer wildly in my chest.  I’m as startled as Peeta was the day I latched onto his arm and stared into his eyes in a desperate search for a glimmer of my sister.  But it’s not the feel of his rough palms pressed against my cheeks that shocks me, it’s the realization that I need him to touch me.  The realization that some of my dreams about Peeta aren’t what most people would call nightmares.

I’m frozen like prey, eyes wide, fixated on his lips, while my brain whirs through a rush of questions.  What exactly do I want from him?  What does he want from me?  Is he going to kiss me?  Do I want him to kiss me?  Does that make me a terrible person if I do?  That burning when we kissed, that was real and it felt like something…

“It’s okay, Katniss.”

His hands drop, slipping back into the pockets of his coat, and I realize he was never going to kiss me.  I can feel the blood rush to my face, but hopefully the cold has already made me flushed enough to hide my crushing embarrassment.

“Dr. Aurelius says we have to be patient.  Take our time.  He’s right.  Don’t you think?”

“Why do you and Haymitch want to talk about Dr. Aurelius?” I ask angrily.

I’d like to ignore Dr. Aurelius entirely, but Peeta makes me take his phone calls.  Sometimes he asks me questions about Peeta and I hang up the phone.  Our shared neurosis is just that—shared between the two of us, but not for public consumption.  Not anymore.

But why I really snap is because the suggestion to take our time seems so hopelessly trite.  Enough hours, days, weeks, years will never go by for me to feel that burn again.  The girl on fire.  She’s as good as dead, because Peeta doesn’t see her anymore.

Peeta’s familiar with my shifting moods, so he simply waits, until I work up the nerve to speak again.

“I’m sorry I brought you out here.”

“Don’t worry about it.  You can show me whatever it is when you’re ready.  Or not.  It’s fine,” he says, sniffing in the cold.

He’s being supportive.  Kind.  We’re just friends.

I really should be okay with that, and bury whatever insanity made me think about those kisses, because twelve months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine having a friend, and if I’m going to have one, I want it to be Peeta.  I need it to be Peeta.

Chapter Text

Chapter Four

The progress on our book seems to have ground to a halt, and the blank pages in our book stare back at me like a silent accusation, reminding me what a coward I am, because there is something I know I want decorating one of those pages, but I can’t bring myself to say it out loud.  People that watched me in the Districts of Panem on their television screens thought I was a hero, that I was brave and strong, but what I know for a fact is that Peeta is the only one with any courage in this room.

Which is exactly why I tell him I’m tired one night, when his pencil hovers over the page and his brows arch in a silent question, as if to say, what next?

“I think I’m going to go to bed early.”

“Oh.”

I can hear the disappointment in his voice.  Confusion even.

For two people who rarely sleep, who dread their beds and the relentless reign of nightmares, it has to be one of the oddest things I’ve said to him since we started this routine.  The days are starting to grow long again, and he never leaves for his house until the sun has been down for hours, fighting sleep and loneliness.

He probably doesn’t know what to do with himself if I toss him out of here now, and frankly, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself either.  Climb the walls most likely.  Or end up locked in a closet.

He looks down at the pad and then back up at me, and something shifts in the blue of his eyes.

“Is it about the book?  Because, if you don’t want to work on the book anymore, Katniss, we can do something else,” he says, as he leans forward and slides the book onto the coffee table before us.  “Just say the word.”

Something else.

That something else makes me snatch the book off the table and riffle through the pages, looking for the page we were on when I had my embarrassing meltdown in the Meadow, because I don’t know how to define something else and boundaries are what maintain our friendship and knit together the frayed strands of my sanity.  Boundaries are what keep me from thinking about how Peeta used to look at me.

I find the page and hold it out to him, pointing to the picture he’d worked on that night, while I moodily jabbed at the dying embers of the fire in my fireplace with a poker.

“I wanted to show you something that day.  The day you did this sketch.”

“I remember.”

“And it isn’t there anymore.  It’s gone just like everything else, and the only way I’m going to be able to remember it is if it ends up in this book,” I say, giving the book a shake.  “The last thing I want to do is stop working on the book.  Okay?”

He nods silently and gingerly takes the book back, settling it in his lap.

“Tell me about it, Katniss,” he says, and this time, though I’m still afraid, I let the fear propel me, running towards the fire, instead of shying from its flame.

“I had exactly one hiding spot as a little girl—in the Meadow under a honeysuckle bush,” I tell him.

I peer down at my thumbnail.  It’s bloody from where I chewed at a hangnail this morning.  Tearing with my teeth when all I needed to do was walk into the bathroom and find my mother’s fingernail clippers.  They must be in there.  Everything else of hers is.  Carefully stowed away in the medicine cabinet, waiting for her return, although I know she’ll never book that ticket.

“I never showed it to anyone,” I say, thinking of my mother, of my father, of Prim, all the people who will never know about that place.

“Did you ever have a place like that?” I ask, fully aware that I’m stalling, as I stare at his shoes.

“Under the counter in the kitchen, behind the big mixing bowls,” he says without pause, with a completely straight face.

He might be joking, but I like the idea of Peeta, too young to be in school yet with a mop of blond hair, crawling into a kitchen cabinet, tucking his double knotted leather shoes underneath him, and holding his breath so that no one hears him.  It sounds right.  A kitchen is probably the one place Peeta would feel safe.

“How tall was it?” he asks, leading me gently back to the task.  “Did it throw a shadow over the grass in the sunlight?”  “Did its branches sweep the ground?”  One question after another, each asked unhurriedly, as he works to bring what he never saw to life.  I paint him a picture with words, and that evening he sketches it all out with his pencil, so we can add it to the book.  When he does a watercolor rendering, it will bring out the colors like I remember them, real enough that I will almost be able to smell the sweetness of the honeysuckle blooms.  I know that’s how it will be, because he’s made everything else in that book almost come to life.  He’s assured us both that it was real—once, and for better or worse.

“There,” he says, as he finishes laying in a shadow with quick, precise strokes.

It’s beautiful.  The place he captures with his imagination and skill might even be more beautiful than I could properly appreciate when I was a little girl, more consumed with hiding than appreciating the beauty of the natural world around me.  Peeta must understand, because he’s created it so realistically that it’s as if he was there with me, his hand in mine, two unlikely children crouched together in a place of refuge.

“If everything hadn’t been burned away,” I begin to say, my voice wavering, as I feel tears prick the corners of my eyes, “if that honeysuckle bush was still there, it could be our place.”

Because I don’t just want help remembering, I want someone—not just someone, Peeta—to share it with.  To share whatever refuge we can find in this world.

“I’m too big to fit someplace that small,” he says with a lopsided grin.

“I’d make you fit.”

I’d have to, because my world is intolerable without Peeta.

“That sounds like a threat,” he jokes, as he hands the book to me, so I can take a closer look.

I can feel something between us.  Like the hum of an electrified fence.  I stare down at the page, trying to imagine myself at age five, crouching beneath the honeysuckle bush, trying to ignore this charged feeling that threatens our careful balance, when Peeta’s hand reaches out once more, hovers for a moment as if he might touch my cheek, and finally settles on my shoulder.

“There’s nothing to hide from, anymore.”

I softly exhale.  “There’s always something to hide from,” I correct him, and he squeezes my shoulder as I say it.

It’s hard to know where Peeta finds that kind of optimism, why it hasn’t been crushed by the horrors of our past experience, but I’m glad he thinks we don’t need to hide, that the only monsters are those that creep up on us in our dreams.

“Anyway, we’ve got a place,” he says with a nod of his head to indicate this room, this house, maybe.

I’m a little startled to think that Peeta might think of my house, as this place, as ours.  I don’t even think of it as mine half the time.  It’s just a place I’ve been handed, an unspeakable reward that has inexplicably survived in this new world order.  But if Peeta thinks this is our place, I can’t help but wonder why he doesn’t even take his shoes off, when he’s here.  Maybe he doesn’t feel like he has the right.  Maybe I need to invite him, I think, as I frown to myself.  Yes, he’s come this far.  He came to my door.  He’s sat at my table.  All without much encouragement, but Peeta will never push all the way in without some sign from me that I want this to be a place he can find sanctuary.  It might not only be a lack of refreshments that mark me as an inferior hostess.

Effie would be so disappointed.

I realize he’s watching me and make an effort to relax the muscles in my face.  I’m nervous and a little overwhelmed by his sketch and his words, not angry, but my emotions sometimes read wrong to Peeta, and it makes him jumpy, makes a muscle in his cheek twitch and his knuckles go white, and there’s no chair-back for him to grab onto.

For a long time I thought backing away from him, giving him space was the only thing that would help him in those moments.  It was what he told me to do—shouted at me to do—after all.  But I eventually came to my own conclusions about his episodes.  Running away just confirms to him that one of us is a threat to the other, and nothing could be farther from the truth.

“Peeta?” I say, just to make sure he’s here with me in the moment and not getting sucked into a hijacked vision of the past, where I trick him into thinking I care, trick him into believing we share things, just so I can bite him and drain him of his life’s blood with fangs as pointy as arrow tips.

His hand slips from my shoulder and points to the page, dragging the book down slightly with the pressure of his index finger.

“It’s a good thing we’ve don’t need a place, because you’re small, but you might be too big to fit too.”

His smile is sweet and teasing.  It’s his smile from before, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that just shoving my feet underneath him isn’t enough, and it’s a quick fumble of pushing the book aside and reaching out a hand to grip his in mine.  I grip it hard enough to hurt, which is probably insane, but he grips back and tugs me forward, as if he understands the jumble of feelings that are all centered on him and means to give me what I need.  I could lean forward into his arms, it’s probably what he intends, but as he pulls me forward, I find myself crawling into his lap, crawling over his thighs in what really is a burst of madness, because I don’t spare a thought for how he might react to this boundary crossing, how he could panic and snap my neck or throw me half way across the room like a sack of flour.  I’m driven by need, a need that is as pressing as the worst hunger or thirst I’ve ever known.

The way his arms—warm and solid, wrapping me in tangible security—move without hesitation to encircle me once I’m tucked into his lap tells me that I was right not to be afraid: we’re not entirely broken.  Peeta is still the boy with the bread, and if he still wants me in any way, it might be worth the trouble to search for hope amongst the living instead of sifting through the ashes.

Chapter Text

Chapter Five

I’m awakened, hearing my name whispered in sleep roughened tones.  Nothing but nightmares and sunrises have awakened me since I moved back into this house alone.  My head jerks upward and forehead meets something solid—a chin—hard enough to make my arms flail, as I’m certain someone is attacking me, that someone’s found me asleep in a tree, and I’m falling backward.

“Katniss,” the voice says again, and I realize my eyes are still closed, squeezed tight with fear that radiates from my gut, making my heart race and my teeth grit together.

“Wake up,” the voice insists, sounding desperate.

I obey against my instincts, opening my eyes to the morning light, and it’s Peeta staring down at me, looking like the red spot on his chin I’ve given him and my windmilling arms are about to tip him over into a hijacked memory.  My fear will be well founded then.

I whisper my apologies, I’m sorry, slipping out over and over as though if I say it fast enough, time will reverse.  I want to feel his arms go around me, pull me in tight, so I know everything is okay, but he’s disentangling himself from me, where now I can see we fell asleep last night on the sofa.

“Peeta,” I manage to say, stopping my litany of useless apologies, as he reaches my door.

“I should have started baking an hour ago,” he mumbles with his eyes cast down, his words almost obscured by the squeak of the door as he opens it and disappears, leaving me alone with two cold mugs of tea sitting before me on the coffee table.

An hour ago, I numbly think, craning my head towards the kitchen window, where I can see how high the sun is in the sky.  The slight movement alerts me to the fact that my neck aches, and when I go to rub it, I brush my cheek.  I wrinkle my nose, because I can feel where I drooled, awkwardly slumped into Peeta’s shoulder.

I don’t remember falling asleep.  What I do remember is the boneless feeling of fatigue that came over me while we talked, or Peeta talked, and I listened.  We weren’t even working on our book.  Not really.  Peeta was telling me a story from school, something about Delly and their childish games, sweet memories from childhood untainted by torture or death, because Delly’s alive, Delly survived and where ever she is, she’s probably still smiling.

But I know I slept and slept hard without nightmares and that has to be a first since, well, since before.  The unaccustomed feeling that I blink through to fully wake is restfulness.  I actually slept through the night, and I know without question that it was because Peeta was there beside me with his arm slung over my shoulder.

And then I nearly forced him into attack by waking with a start, because nothing between us can be normal if there ever was a normal.  I grimace to myself as I stand and stretch, because the idea of normal is so absurd.  What we did last night was a mistake, one that could have been dangerous on so many levels.

As I jog up the stairs to shower and change into my hunting clothes, I begin to tick off the reasons that last night can’t happen again.

Peeta could attack me unknowingly in his sleep.  I’m not so much concerned about my own safety, my sense of self preservation isn’t what it should be after everything I’ve been through, but I know it would destroy him to hurt me.  He doesn’t feel like he did about me before, but I am important to him, I know that in my heart, and I know Peeta doesn’t ever want to hurt the people who are close to him.  Even after everything he just doesn’t have it in him.

If I let it happen again, if I didn’t make sure that Peeta left when our eyes grew heavy, I could get used to it.  I could come to depend on it like a morphling addict, and I hate depending on anything outside of myself.  I already know that I need Peeta, but that need can’t compel me to make bad choices like asking for and wanting things that I probably can’t have.

I watched what wanting me did to Peeta.  Or rather, what loving me did.  I watched what it did to my mother.  I don’t want to prod my feelings, determine what this empty ache is, which calls out for him, because I don’t want to shatter.  Sleep isn’t so important that I should bargain my fragile mental state on it.  There are those little blue pills from the Capitol that are supposed to make me sleep if I’m really feeling desperate, I remind myself, and that’s a safer drug to be hooked on than Peeta, because he can withdraw the drip without a moment’s notice out of fear, hatred, or contempt from false, shiny memories or real ones, where I let him down, where I didn’t deserve his devotion.

If I reach out for him, he could say no.  He has every right to say no.  He should say no.  So, I decide for him.  It’s safer that way.

I retreat to the woods to hunt, focus more on my breathing and this terrible wakefulness that a good night’s sleep has left me with, when all I want is numbness, and shoot nothing.  I stomp through town, heading for Peeta’s house with my speech all rehearsed, my cool retorts planned in case he has the bad sense to suggest what happened last night wasn’t a monumental mistake.  Boundaries—I’m going to clearly mark them, and he’s going to have to respect them, for his own good, for mine.

When I burst through the door, Peeta’s eyes meet mine from the kitchen, but he’s not alone.  Greasy Sae’s granddaughter is at his side, looking down at something with her lower lip caught between her teeth.  I didn’t know Greasy Sae ever left her with Peeta.  I don’t really come around to know something like that, and it feels as if I’ve just walked into an intimate scene, a family scene, and I’m the strange intruder, who doesn’t have enough manners to wipe her feet or say hello.

“Even pressure,” Peeta says to the little girl, who isn’t quite as little as she once was, the top of her head just reaching his shoulder, but his eyes remain trained on me as he speaks.

I’d turn on my heel and walk back out the door, but it’s as if I’m fixed to this spot, held by his gaze.  He smiles—just a little crook of one side of his mouth—and it feels as if he dares me to run away.  Coward.

I slip my quiver off my shoulder and place it and my bow on the back of the sofa.

“We’re flooding some butter cookies,” he says, as I approach the kitchen, and Greasy Sae’s little girl finally looks up at me and smiles.

Flooding cookies sounds like nonsense to me, but as I lean against the counter, I can guess at what he means.  There’s a tray of cookies before them, little butter cookies in the shape of hearts, already outlined in a thin line of red icing that looks like the consistency of toothpaste.  She works with a plastic bottle with a tip like a thick pencil, squeezing out thinner, pinker icing, which floods all the little blank spaces until the cookies are shiny and slick looking, like ceramic tiles.

“She has a very steady hand,” Peeta says, as he clasps her on the shoulder, and she beams up at him, basking in his praise like he’s the brightest star in the night sky.

Greasy Sae’s little girl adores Peeta, I realize, she loves him, and my chest tightens.  This isn’t the first time she’s spent the day here, it isn’t the second.  This is normal for them.  He’s probably taught her how to bake and mix colors and decorate.  Despite what the Capitol has done to him, Greasy Sae obviously trusts him with her simple little girl, and I can see why.  Peeta would be a very good father.

The thought threatens to overwhelm me, so I force myself to speak, asking, “Who are these for?”

“Us,” he says, picking up a cookie that's dried and offering it to me.

It’s a little too on the mark, him holding out a brightly iced heart cookie for me, but my mouth is already watering at the thought of all that sweetness on my tongue, so I snatch it from him and begin to nibble off the edges until it doesn’t resemble a heart at all anymore.

“You want to give it a try?” he asks, nodding towards a second bottle, which is filled to the top with violet icing.  I hesitate, swallowing the last of the cookie, the buttery crumbs melting at the back of my mouth, and he continues, “You don’t mind, sharing, do you?”

Greasy Sae’s little girl shakes her head, her focus still intent on the cookies before her, and I reluctantly take the bottle from his hand.  This is Peeta’s thing, and just like he doesn’t belong in the woods, I don’t belong icing a cookie, but with this little girl standing between us, I don’t feel like I can voice my usual objections.  Just like I can’t voice the objection, which was my purpose in coming here.

I squeeze too hard, when the tip nearly meets the cookie, and the bottle makes a squelching sound that makes Greasy Sae’s granddaughter giggle.

Peeta moves behind her and I feel his fingertips in my back, as he murmurs, “Even pressure.”

Except with his hand on me like that, I can’t concentrate at all and I put the bottle down and look up and sideways at him.

“I had something I wanted to tell you,” I say.  I sound irritable, but he just smiles down at me, that same knowing smile that forced me not to run a few minutes earlier.  “And now I can’t say it.”

“I know,” he says, his smile getting wider.

I huff and pick the bottle back up, but his hand’s still there in the small of my back and when I squeeze again a violet river of icing flows right over the icing dam and onto our work surface.  I’ve ruined the cookie.

“It’ll taste just as good.  That’s the beauty of making them for us.  No one will care,” Peeta explains as he reaches for a little spatula.

I go to move away, so he can attempt to fix the mess I’ve made, but he traps me with his body, standing behind me and reaching around with both arms to work with quick swipes to remove the excess icing from the cookie, as my fingers grip the counter before me.  I could duck out under his arm, escape from this closeness, but I let my shoulders sink down, let the warmth of his chest seep into my back, let my eyes drift closed, as I feel him press a kiss to the crown of my head.

It might be dangerous, but I want to trust Peeta to make his own decisions.  I don’t always have to be in control, not with Peeta.  And that night, as I slip into unconsciousness with my head in his lap and his fingers trailing through my hair, it feels like he’s choosing me.

Chapter Text

Chapter Six

It’s just as I feared.  I become dependent on Peeta.  Falling asleep together just the once quickly becomes our new routine, a routine that Haymitch has noticed and ragged Peeta about, according to Peeta’s awkward confession to me over tea.  Despite the ribbing, he spends every night slumped on my lumpy sofa, my body draped over his.  It’s such a relief to wake feeling as if I’ve gotten some real rest, to see the dark circles under my eyes slowly disappear that I can’t work up any objections to the arrangement that has left me dependent on someone else—a fate I thought I wanted to avoid at all costs.

It’s also why I stare dumbly back at him one night after he’s gently elbowed me awake and suggested that we move to my bed.  I must look like I’m still confused from sleep, because he repeats himself.

All I can say in response is, “Upstairs?”

“It’s just that you looked uncomfortable, and I’m not exactly comfortable either,” he says, shifting his leg.  “If this crick in my neck becomes permanent, I’ll end up a hunchback.”

Though he rolls his neck for emphasis, I realize that’s probably not what’s bothering him.  I try not to glance at his artificial limb; I focus instead on a loose thread on the hem of my top, pulling and unraveling the seam.  It’s the first time I’ve considered that Peeta would probably be more comfortable if he took his artificial leg off, and that I could be so selfishly focused on my own comfort makes my face flush.  It can’t be that I gave everything I had to give, trying to save my little sister, trying to save this world. Surely I have something left, something to give to Peeta in return for what he gives me.  If he could stretch his leg out on a bed, it might be better, or he might even take it off with sheets to cover what he’s lost, what I caused him to lose.

“Can’t have that,” I respond flatly.  “You’re the best looking boy in this bombed out place.”

It’s true, of course, but I don’t know why I said it.  I try not to think about Peeta in that way.  I try to think of him solely as a friend, to forget about our false romance and the reality behind it, to forget about the dreams I have about him, when I wake in his lap with his warm hand resting on my middle.  Jokes can be a useful if cowardly defense against intimacy, but that kind of joking does very little to alleviate the tension that occasionally flickers between us like a distant imitation of past burn.

His brows arch over wide, blue eyes that look back at me in unabashed shock, as if he can’t figure why I said something like that either.  “Is that right?”

I shrug.  “If you don’t mind skinny.”

Peeta’s not exactly skinny anymore: he’s finally gaining some of his weight back, as we stuff ourselves on his baking efforts, but the only way I know how to get him to stop sizing me up is to undermine my poorly timed compliment with a dig.  And it does the trick.

Peeta clears his throat.  “We used to share a bed sometimes.”

It’s a statement, and yet, when I look up at him through my lashes, I can see the unspoken question in his eyes born of uncertainty planted there by his false, hijacked memories.  We don’t talk about those things.  We don’t talk about our kisses or embraces, or whatever else he might confusedly think passed between us before.  I’m never going to willingly bring any of it up, and he has seemed content to do the same.

I manage a stiff smile.  “Yeah.  Sometimes.”  On the Victory Tour and before the Quarter Quell.

I wonder if he remembers what those nights meant to him.  To us.  How at times we felt like those were our last hours on earth, and all he wanted to do was spend them with me—even in his sleep.  It’s all I wanted too.  I was always just too blind or too stubborn to see it as clearly as Peeta did.

The idea of sharing a bed with Peeta without him probably understanding what that used to mean, how he used to love me, makes me skittish and sad.  Now it’s just about an old sofa being too uncomfortable, because Peeta won’t ever feel how he used to about me.  They made certain of that, and this is just further proof of that.  The fear that he might start going home again if I say no, leaving me alone with my nightmares, is far worse than the pain of that comparison, however.

“I promise I won’t steal the sheets,” he says with a lopsided smile.

I give a nod and push off of the sofa, heading for the stairs.  There’s only a moment’s hesitation—maybe he’s not as calm about this suggestion as he seems—before Peeta’s heavy steps follow behind me, climbing the stairs.  When we cross the threshold into my bedroom, the unmade bed seems to loom before me, not nearly large enough for friends to share, but I force myself to walk to the window and throw it open.  I wouldn’t sleep with the window open—it being a little too cool at night for my taste—but Peeta likes it that way.  I’m not being particularly selfless or thoughtful and I’ve proven time and again that’s not me: the action simply keeps me away from the bed for a moment more.

When he thanks me, I turn around to see him already sitting on the edge of the bed.  He’s facing away from me, pulling his white cotton t-shirt over his head, exposing the planes of his back.  The muscles underneath his skin flex with his movements.  His bread orders are increasing, which means more heavy lifting of sizable flour sacks, and with his weight gain, maybe in a few months Peeta won’t look so much like a victim of the Hunger Games and the Capitol’s torture.

He glances over his shoulder at me, his hands on the buttons of his pants, and I realize I’m staring at him.  In fact, the toothy smile he gives me confirms it.

To escape Peeta’s teasing smile, I grab an oversized, threadbare t-shirt and head for the bathroom, where I can change without having to ask him not to look, which would seem blatantly hypocritical considering the way I’ve been gaping at him.  I take an unnecessarily long time brushing my teeth, washing my face, and staring into the medicine cabinet mirror without really seeing my reflection.  I even brush out my hair and braid it again, pulling the lengthening hanks of hair over my shoulder as I plait it into a somewhat uneven side braid, made sloppy by my shaking hands.

When I run out of ways to avoid going to bed, I come back to a darkened room, which helps me make the short trip to the bed without turning around and ending up back in the bathroom.  My eyes haven’t totally adjusted when I crawl across the bed and slip under the sheets, carefully perched on the edge of my side so that we don’t accidentally touch.  Peeta’s too close to ignore, however.  I can hear his every inhalation and exhalation and the bed sags under his weight, relentlessly pulling me towards him.

My fingers curl into the white fitted sheet, trying to hold on tight, as I say the first thing that comes into my head, my mouth running ahead of my brain.  “I haven’t changed these sheets in weeks.”

There wasn’t much point, once Peeta started letting me fall asleep on his shoulder or in his lap on a nightly basis, but I’m embarrassed to have him sleeping in stale sheets.  I try to keep my house in some kind of order, cleaning and straightening the things around me with purposeful intensity, better than I can the thoughts inside my head, but I’ve let this one thing go, and now he’s seen what a mess I am—inside and out.

“S’okay,” he says, sounding as if he’s already falling asleep, slipping into the slumber that alludes us alone.  “They smell like you.”

It sounds like something he would have said before, the way he says it like it’s something good, but this is different.  We’re not going to die and no one is making us pretend anymore.  Whatever this is, it’s real.  I know it must be.

His hand settles in the middle of my back, between my shoulder blades, and traces the length of my spine, raising goose bumps over my bare arms.

He’s barely whispered, “Come here,” when I’m turning over to face him, reaching out my arms to his, giving in to the pull.

I fall asleep in Peeta’s arms, my head tucked under his chin, my lips to his chest, because how can I refuse, when he’s accepted me as I am?

Chapter Text

Chapter Seven

I’m not always blessed with the most restful, peaceful sleep even though Peeta’s at my side, which he is—every night.  Sometimes I still wake screaming from nightmares of mutts and lost children.  I imagine I always will.  But with Peeta sleeping beside me at night, his arms are there to comfort me.  His arms are strong and reassuring, and when he holds me tight and slowly rubs my back through my t-shirt, my sobs peter out and goose bumps replace tears.

And eventually his lips comfort me too.  The first time his lips find mine is so startling that I cut myself on a shard of glass that I have gripped in the palm of my hand.

Haymitch has his good periods and his bad.  In the good he takes care of his geese as if they’re his children and shouts at us from his porch, and sometimes we all have dinner together—hot stew and crusty, freshly baked bread.  It’s a strange kind of normal between us three.  We’re an odd sort of family, bonded by unspeakable things.  Which is why it sometimes gets bad for Haymitch, and when it’s bad, it’s as bad as it ever was before.

A niggling suspicion that the reason the geese are all over my yard squawking and hissing is because Haymitch is drunk draws me to his house one afternoon, when it’s so hot I cut the sleeves off of an old t-shirt in desperation earlier in the day for relief.  I enter without knocking and the state of the living room confirms to me that something is wrong.  Calling his name elicits no response, but I finally find him slumped on the ground against the painted kitchen cabinets surrounded by shards of glass from a broken bottle of white liquor.  Whatever was left in the bottle before he dropped it is spilled out across the white tiles and soaked into his pants.

He’s much too heavy for me to even attempt to move, so I phone over to Peeta’s house.  I could walk, it’s what I usually do, but Haymitch’s breathing is shallow and funny sounding, so I don’t want to leave him.  I cursed him for being a drunken idiot when I found him, but I don’t actually want him to die.  I don’t think I could stand it if something happened to Haymitch.  The menace of another personal loss sets my teeth on edge.

Peeta comes into the house with flour on his apron and his hands, looking as if he didn’t stop for anything before jogging over to help.  “Where is he?”

“Kitchen.”

I feel safer when Peeta’s around, and I try to tell myself that Haymitch is safer with Peeta here too, but neither of us know enough to actually save him if he needs medical assistance.  I follow Peeta into the kitchen and watch silently as he shoves Haymitch forward and hooks his arms under his armpits.  Even Peeta can’t dead lift Haymitch, but he drags him into the living room, which somehow seems like a better place for him than the kitchen floor, and while Peeta tries to wake him up and get him to drink some water, I work at cleaning up the broken bottle.

It takes me a full ten minutes to locate the dust pan and when I do the little broom isn’t with it anymore, assuming at one point it was part of a set.  I have to use the full sized broom I find in the pantry, and the handle is broken off half way down, as if it was used for some much more violent purpose than sweeping.  The broken broom, empty kitchen cabinets, and dusty curtains remind me that there’s no one to take care of Haymitch.  He’s alone in a way Peeta and I will never be so long as we have each other.

Peeta used to say that I was Haymitch’s favorite.  In truth, I think he despises me a little bit, because I’m too much like him—it’s like looking in a mirror and the reflection isn’t particularly flattering.  As I kneel, careful not to push my knobby knees into the glass, and angle the dust pan against the floor, I wonder where I would be without Peeta.  If my future would lead me to a place very much like this.  Something would end up being both my crutch and my undoing.  If not white liquor, then morphling or those little blue sleeping pills prescribed by Dr. Aurelius.  I used to hold the bottle and read the label—Katniss Everdeen—until I had the dosage memorized.  I’ve felt the weight of them in my hand, which is barely more than a feather, and I used to hear them whispering to me from the medicine cabinet before Peeta.

Before Peeta.

Now it’s the after Peeta that frightens me.

It’s awkward wielding this too big, broken off broom, so I finally give up and gingerly pick up the pieces of glass, depositing them in the dust pan.

“That doesn’t seem safe,” Peeta says.

I hear his words before I look over my shoulder and see his feet planted at the entrance to the kitchen.

I stand, still holding a shard of glass in my hand, and turn to face him.  Giving my head a toss to free myself of a lock of hair that keeps falling in my face, having freed itself of my braid, I prepare to ask him about Haymitch, but as he looks at me, his brows draw together and his hand goes out to brush my arm.

“Hey, he’ll be okay,” he says, squeezing my elbow.

He’s staring at me so queerly that my left hand goes to my face reflexively, and that’s when I realize there are tears wetting my face.

“Damn,” I curse, twisting away to swipe with my bare forearm across my cheeks.  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“You’re tired.”

He’s right.  Last night wasn’t one of my good nights either.  I’m selfish enough to think that Haymitch could at least time his episodes opposite mine.

I lean against the counter and take a deep breath.  “You’re probably right.”

“I’ve got a big loaf of rye about to come out of the oven.  That’ll soak some of that liquor up.  He’ll hate us, but he’ll be okay by tomorrow.”

“We should check in on him more,” I say, rubbing my forearm under my nose once more with a sniff.  “He’s alone.”

Peeta nods.

I look down at the glass in my hand, tilt it until it catches the light, the bright afternoon sun streaming through the window.  This liquor means a lot to Haymitch.  He’s dependent on how it makes him forget or numbs him for at least a space.  It’s the reverse with my dependence on Peeta—I’m desperate to feel something—but if he was gone, I might also settle for the nothingness a bottle could give.

“I might end up a drunk too.”

“No, it tastes awful and the headache after isn’t worth it.”

I scrunch up my nose, wondering if Peeta speaks from experience.

He leans against the counter next to me and bumps his hip against mine, offering me a half-smile.  “No way you’d end up a drunk, Katniss.  You’re strong.”

“So is Haymitch.”

It has nothing to do with strength.  Still, it’s nice to hear.  Especially since I feel as delicate as the now smashed bottle beneath my feet half the time.

“It’s just that he doesn’t have you.  Or, I mean, not you specifically.  I have you and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be strong,” I fumble.  “That’d be me,” I say, gesturing towards the living room.

I’m staring at the wet, glass strewn floor when he tilts my chin up so I have to face him.  His eyes are so full of understanding as they look down at me that I feel tears begin to leak out of the corners of my eyes again, and I desperately blink to try to stop them, which seems to only make them fall faster.

“You’re wrong if you think you couldn’t live without me.”

My mind goes back to the conversation I overheard in the Capitol, when I was supposed to be asleep.  Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can’t survive without.

“It’s more than that, Peeta.”  I’d survive without Peeta, but it wouldn’t be living.

“Well, don’t worry about that.  I’m not going anywhere.”

I roll my eyes at this well worn insistence of his.

“Where would I go?” he says with a teasing lilt to his voice, as he moves around me, his feet on either side of mine, so close that the small of my back presses hard into the counter and my toes curl in my boots, as his hands skim over my bare shoulders.  “I’m useless on my own.”

“So am I,” I whisper back, and by the time the words leave my mouth, his lips are touching mine.

It’s like a jolt of electricity and my hand clenches involuntarily around the glass, which digs into the soft, fleshy part of my hand.  My gasp makes him pull back, although his hands still grasp my arms.  I open my hand and grimace at the red blood that runs in thin rivulets down my wrist.

I’m about to complain about the damage I’ve done to myself, when his grip on me becomes painfully tight.  I drop the shard to the floor, and my eyes dart to his face, which is lined in rigid concentration.

“Don’t move,” he commands much too loudly.

I want to wriggle free of him, find a dishtowel and wrap up my bleeding hand, but his nostrils are flared and I can hear the grind of his teeth against each other.  Darting away could make everything go to hell.

“Peeta?”

His eyes squeeze shut, as he says, “It’s the blood.”

I tuck my bleeding hand behind my back and wait for it to pass, wait for his face to soften, while he squeezes my arms so tightly that my fingers begin to tingle.  When his hands finally flex against me, releasing me from his hold, I slip away, turning on the faucet and grabbing for a towel in one quick motion.  I exhale as the cold water runs over my hand.  When it’s numbed some, I turn it off, and in the silence I can hear his breathing evening out as I wrap my hand up.  It could probably use a stitch, but a butterfly bandage will do, and I can manage that much on my own.

“Are you okay?” he asks and he sounds so much different than he did a few minutes earlier.  His episodes take a toll; they wear him out, even these little ones that don’t really bloom into something terrible.

“It’s fine,” I say, holding up my blue checked towel wrapped hand.  “I’ll be okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“I ruined that, didn’t I?”

The kiss, he means the kiss, and as I realize it, my eyes are drawn to his lips, which in that brief moment had felt soft and pliant.

“No.  It was my fault.”

I watch him swallow, watch the roll of his Adam’s apple above his soft white t-shirt, and for a moment I picture him without it.  He’s got a hint of a farmer’s tan from sitting out on the front lawn with me sometimes in the early evening.  I know about that tan, because he only sleeps in his shorts, so I see his skin in the slanting moonlight, when his skin’s warm against mine.  Warm like an open oven.

“Can I try again?”

If I wasn’t thinking about running my hands over his naked chest, I might have said no.  The shock of the pain in my hand has dried my tears and he doesn’t have me cornered.  I’m not as vulnerable as I was a few minutes ago, so I could say no, but I don’t.  I nod yes, and he closes the distance between us in two steps.

His arms reach me first.  They slip around my back, his large hands pressing into me until I’m flush against him and I’m certain he can feel my heart beating out of my chest.  For a moment we stand like that, his head tilted down close enough to kiss me, his lips slightly parted so I feel his breath ghosting over mine.  He smells like dough.  It’s a good smell, a reassuring smell, and I know his stillness isn’t an episode.  His face is never this relaxed during a hijacked memory, and though his eyes are closed, I can see they don’t track quickly behind his lids the way they do when he’s reliving a nightmare.  But he waits as if for some sign.

I murmur his name, and his lips find me.  They close over my lower lip, pulling, gently working my mouth open.  I’m rusty at this and slow to catch on, but I finally think to return the favor, sucking at his lip until he slants his mouth against mine.  At the stroke of his tongue, I make an embarrassing sound, which I don’t have time to regret, because he’s already drowning my noise out with one of his own.  I feel it rumble through his chest and in my mouth as much as I hear it, and I grip his arms to keep my feet, to prevent myself from sinking right down into the minefield of glass below.  Another sweep of his tongue and I chase after him, my heart skipping and thrumming against my ribs, as I desperately breathe through my nose so I don’t faint.  The lightheadedness has to be oxygen deprivation.  It has to be.

A curse and a crash from the living room make me jerk free of his arms, and Peeta groans angrily, his empty hands fisting in the air.

“Why can’t you sleep it off, damn it,” he mutters under his breath.

I’d laugh at his frustration, which is sort of sweetly amusing, but I’m ready to yell at Haymitch myself.  I don’t know where we were going with that kiss, but it felt good.  It felt so real, and no one was watching.

“I should…we should...” I stammer before sidestepping him and walking towards the living room.

It would seem that Haymitch knocked over a table and its lamp in trying to scramble off the floor, but despite the upturned state of room, he appears more interested in me than the damage he’s caused, while I right the table with my uninjured hand and test to see if the lamp still works.

Peeta stands behind him, his arms crossed over his chest and still looking irritated.  Maybe he can’t bring himself to help quite yet.

“I interrupt you two?” Haymitch asks with a cough.

I straighten up.  I look from Peeta back to Haymitch with his bleary, bloodshot eyes.  I can feel my cheeks heat, and I wonder if it’s written all over my face, if my lips are swollen or…

“You have flour all over your ass, sweetheart.”

Looking down, I can see that it’s not just the seat of my pants.  Everywhere that Peeta touched me, everywhere our bodies pressed together I’m dusted with white, and if Haymitch wasn’t staring at me I think I’d like to leave it be.  I think I’d like to just goggle at the patches of white that suddenly seem like proof that against what initially seemed like insurmountable odds, Peeta and I are growing back together.  They tried to ruin this—tear us apart, make an enemy out of Peeta—but they failed.

Chapter Text

Chapter Eight

“We don’t have a television anymore,” I tell Haymitch after having sat alongside him on his porch in companionable silence for at least an hour.  The sun has just set and Haymitch’s porch light flickered to life, so we’re not sitting in complete darkness, but something about the dim light finally has given me the courage to speak.  “It’s broken.”

“The boy have a bad one?” he asks, and part of me hates that he’s figured it out so readily.

Peeta’s been so much better.  I don’t even think in terms of the old Peeta and the Peeta who replaced him anymore.  Haven’t for months.  There are still moments when he clutches the back of a chair and hangs on until the flashbacks are over, but I’m certain that Peeta’s come back to me.  Except, he just broke our television.  Or rather, he broke the television in my house, where we spend all our time together, where we share a bed, where we’ve taken to kissing on the couch like a couple teenagers.

We are teenagers.  I have to remind myself of that on a regular basis.  Just a couple of teenagers with irreparable mental damage and a patchwork of scars.

Haymitch looks away from the geese, which crowd his yard, to give me a long look.  “How’d that come about?”

“He saw something he didn’t like.”

Gale.

Gale in District Two, looking sharp and powerful.  He flashed a smile at the camera, and Peeta turned slowly towards me with an eerie gleam in his eye that had me scrambling over the back of the couch and up the stairs, taking them two by two.  I usually stay with him during the flashbacks, call out his name, grip his hand, but there was something different about the person that stared back at me this time.  I couldn’t stick around to see who Peeta was in that moment.  He was ugly and jealous and vulgar.  He wasn’t the boy with the bread, and when he came back to himself, he would have hated it if I’d stayed with him.

“Nothing good is ever on anyway, sweetheart.”

“I think that was pretty much his feeling on the subject as well.”

I scuff my boot heel on the floor of the wooden porch.  It needs to be whitewashed.  The paint is flaking and completely worn off in spots.  Another good rub of my foot and I manage to work a sizable flake off.

“Footage from the war?”

I flip my braid over my shoulder and run my fingers through the end, where the hair is split and in need of trimming.

“No.  Spokesman Hawthorne.”

He whistles through his teeth, and I don’t look up, because I’m sure he’s smirking at me.

“No wonder lover boy flipped his lid.”

“Don’t,” I say sharply.  “Don’t call him that.  He doesn’t feel that way anymore.”

He repeats my last sentence under his breath, breathily laughing as if he can barely get through it, it's so amusing.

Before I can jump up, Haymitch leans over and brushes my collar to the side.  I swat at his hand, but it's too late, and his laughter fills the empty square.

“Tell your boy not to bite quite so hard.  Gives people the wrong impression.”

I could say it wasn’t a bite, it was more like a wet, hard suck, but I’m not telling Haymitch that.

There are all different kinds of kisses.  There are the kisses he gives me when we go to bed.  Short, dry, gentle kisses to my brow, my cheek, my shoulder, which ease me into sleep.  There are the ones that wake me from my nightmares.  They start out desperate enough with brows pressed together and murmured names to call back sanity, but they turn soothing as consciousness returns, as soothing as the kisses that put me to bed.  I can give those too.  We’ve a lot of practice at those.

It’s the kisses on the couch that are rarer and rawer.  They’re tongues and teeth and hands that tangle.  They don’t happen all the time, but sometimes the memory book is set aside and I lose myself in Peeta.  It is impossible in those moments to feel sad or angry or anything but the heat that we generate together.

“So, you up and ran?  Left him alone to hurt himself?”

“He’s over it.”  Wore himself completely out.  He’s probably still face down on the couch, snoring, where I left him.  “But, I’m the last person he wants to see right now.”

I didn’t exactly respond well, when he tried to apologize afterward, pleading through a closed bedroom door.  We never know quite what will set him off, and I know I can’t blame him, but his reaction seemed wholly unfair.  Gale killed my sister.  So, why does Peeta get to be the one to throw a frying pan through the television screen?

“Doubt that.  You’re always the person he wants.  Damned if I know why.”  He shifts in his chair and clears his throat.  “If you were having a bad time of it, you wouldn’t find him over here.”

Lectures from Haymitch on relationships.  I scowl at him, although the effort is wasted, because he’s staring out into the darkness.

“He’s asleep, and I just thought I’d keep your drunken ass company.”

“Don’t bother on my account.”

I huff, as I find my feet and stomp down the stairs.  I know this is what Haymitch intended, that he wants me to go home.  He usually would rather be alone with a bottle at night, but he’s also probably concerned I’ll muck it all up with Peeta, hurt him worse than I already have.  Haymitch doesn't want to admit his fondness for anyone, but I can see through his thin act.

I could be stubborn and refuse to concede, but doubt has begun to creep in.  What if Peeta isn’t sleeping?  What if he’s trapped in a nightmare?  What if he needs me?

When I enter the house, Peeta immediately swivels on the couch.  Buttercup is in his lap, and Peeta’s scratching behind the cat's half torn ear.  Buttercup is too selfish to purr in thanks, but he’ll head butt your hand if you stop.  Not that I ever give in to such tactics.  Peeta obviously does.  The three of us share a bed on most nights and it’s Peeta that feeds Buttercup in the morning.  So, the old tom likes Peeta about as much as he likes anyone now.

“Are you okay?” Peeta asks, his voice ragged from screaming.

He screamed some really crazy things.  Vile things about me and Gale.  Either that was just the hijacked memories talking or Peeta really doesn’t know the truth.  I don’t particularly want to pick at that scab, but that’s part of the deal—honesty.  Peeta needs it, so he can sort through the blanks in his mind and construct a future.

I rub the back of my neck and perch on the arm of the couch.  “I’m fine.”

His eyes dart over me like he’s checking to make sure that what I said isn’t a lie, like he might be able to find evidence of some mark he left on me, but it was all internal.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asks, when he’s finished with his visual appraisal and is looking past me to the right of my shoulder.

“No,” I say, slipping down over the arm and curling up at the end of the couch with my knees to my chest, just out of his reach.

Buttercup seems annoyed that I have interrupted his evening with Peeta and jumps down.  It leaves Peeta with nothing to do with his hands, and I can see the strain from the episode still making the muscles jump under his skin.

“I can make us some tea.”

“You don’t deserve this,” he says, burying his face in his hands.

I sigh and scoot over, scoot right into his side and rest my head on his shoulder, letting my bony chin dig into him.  “I’m too tired to argue with you, so don’t say stupid things like that.  Just bring that television of yours over tomorrow morning and we’ll call it a wash,” I say, nudging his side.

He’s entirely firm.  No jutting bones and no flab.  Just muscle underneath hot skin that burns through his white undershirt.  He’s still growing taller and broader, and that’s such a strange realization—that this boy, this man that he’s becoming, hasn’t even grown into his body yet.  Our personas as adults were forged much too soon and our bodies are still playing catch up.

“I’m a terrible consolation prize, Katniss.”

I’d shove him, but he’s so fragile after an episode that I could easily trigger another one.

“Neither of us are prizes,” I respond dully, and his shoulders shrug in a silent laugh.

It's not quite gallows humor, because there's no real mirth.

“You really think I’d rather have Gale?”

He sits back, sighs, and runs his hands through his hair.  It’s too long and always hanging in his eyes.  I don’t think he’d let me cut it.  Capitol mutt Katniss Everdeen with shears held up to his head sounds like a classic setup for a flashback, but maybe Haymitch could do it or Greasy Sae.  Maybe even her granddaughter with her steady hands.  But it looks soft and silky, and I have the urge to run my hands through it, so I chew on my thumbnail to keep my hand from doing anything stupid.

“Not now you wouldn’t,” he finally answers me.

No, not now.  Not after what Gale did.  He may have never thought through what he was creating, never imagined the possible consequences, but that doesn’t make it any better.  He was capable of it.

Peeta makes things that bring smiles to children’s faces, he fills people's bellies and gives them hope.

What I need is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred.  I have plenty of fire myself.  What I need is the dandelion in the spring.  The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction.  The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses.  That it can be good again.  And only Peeta can give me that.

He’s what I need.  He’s what I want.

“Peeta,” I begin, breathing deeply through my nose.  “It was never like that between me and Gale.”

That’s all I manage.

I will him to say something, to either end the conversation or push it along with a string of questions that would actually give me some direction.  I’d happily play real or not real with him right now if it meant not grasping vainly for the right thing to say.

But he just stares back at me.

“We kissed…”  The hand on his thigh twitches.  “And it never felt…it never felt right.”

His voice is completely flat, when he asks, “What does that even mean?”

I shake my head.  I know what it means, I’ve felt it, but I can’t make him feel the difference and I’m not good enough with words to express it properly.

“Does it ever feel right with me?”

I can’t say it always felt right or that it always leaves me feeling the same way, but my cheeks flush when I think of the kisses on the beach.  The ones I dream about in better moments.  In my dreams we’re not interrupted and no one is watching.

“Yes.”  Yes, it can feel so very right.

He doesn’t have far to go to reach me, to press his lips against mine.  It’s one of the rare kisses, the hot kind that make me unfold my legs and twist my hands in his undershirt.  It’s exactly what I need.  All thoughts of Gale, my sister, cameras, the Games, flashbacks—all of it—drains out of me, leaving me heavy and moldable.  I’m like dough, I think, and something like a laugh bubbles up from inside and comes out as a gasp of pleasure against his mouth.

His lips tugging on mine, his hands slipping under my shirt, where they never dare to go even in these moments, tracing my sides high enough that his knuckles graze the underside of my breasts, convince me I need to be in his lap, closer, now.  He must have the same idea, because once I’ve got my knees planted on either side of him, where they sink into the couch cushions, and my hands firmly against his chest, he still pulls me closer.  My chest deflates, as my breath leaves me in a rush, as his hands settle on my hips, urge me forward, and I feel him.

You don’t sleep curled against a teenage boy and not sometimes feel the hard arousal I feel now through his pants, along the inside line of my thigh.  They can’t help it.  Or, I think that’s the case, that we learned something like that in school in our scarcely informative section on human biology in science class.  On the other hand, maybe I just heard someone whisper and giggle about it, but I’m fairly certain that it doesn’t mean much when I wake to that insistent pressure in my back.  It helps to think of it as pure biology, because then I don’t feel the crushing embarrassment I might otherwise.

I’m not embarrassed.

Our lips have stilled with our shared breath hot between us, when I rock against him.  His eyes are shut and his fingers flex against my hips, unmoving.  I try again, mimicking an act I know next to nothing about with both our pants in the way.  Actually, the pants make it easier, make me braver.  I don’t have to worry about what I might look like to him, what he looks like, or what might happen, the way I would if he rubbed between my legs like this in bed stripped of our clothes or out by the lake naked in the grass.

Another roll of my hips, and I’m about to whisper that I don’t know what I’m doing, but he saves me, coming back to life.  His hands slip over the seat of my pants, helping me rock against him, holding me against him and the friction is good and real.  When his mouth finds my ear, his teeth worrying my earlobe, his breath against my wet skin raising goose bumps along my arms, I’m convinced I’m going to feel it again.  What builds in my gut must be the first flickers of heat from the beach and this time nothing will stop me from chasing that feeling.

His head flops back against the couch, his mouth gone slack, exposing his neck to me as he begins to rock up into me, and somehow without his lips on mine, on my neck, at my temple, I begin to slip inside my head.  My body continues its motions with his help, but I can’t feel anything.  I’m floating above myself, watching him.  He’s beautiful and I wonder why I ever think of him as broken, but it’s just the sound of his shaky moans and my thoughts rattling inside my head, no feeling, no rush of heat.

Does he love me again?  Like before?  Or like an echo of that love?

If this is all it will ever be, teenage necking and whatever this restless rubbing is on my couch, will it be enough for him?  I can’t have babies—not even with Peeta—because I am my mother somewhere deep down, and if I lost him, I’d be a shell, an empty husk, not good for anything.  Can I take away Peeta’s chance to have a family by holding onto him?  Does the depth of my selfishness know no bottom?

I’m pulled out of my fog, when he says my name with urgency, his head snapping forward to bury itself in my neck.  His hands push down hard and though I try to keep the rhythm of my hips, his movements grow erratic underneath me.  I can feel his lips moving as if he speaks silent words against my skin.  It’s a relief to feel his lips.  I’m not lost.  I’m here with Peeta and it’s right.

But too late.

It’s over, I realize, as he pants sharply into my shoulder, his arms snaking around my back to hug me until I’m almost concave against his chest.  I struggle to free one hand, so I might run it through his hair.  It’s stuck to his head, damp with sweat.  His heart pounds as hard as it does when I wake him from a nightmare, beating a tattoo against my breasts.  But this time it's okay.  This isn't the pulse of fear.

I just wish I hadn’t tripped and let him run ahead of me without calling out to let him know he’d left me behind.

Chapter Text

Chapter Nine

He says it to me as I curl into his side—Katniss, I need time—and it hurts as bad as anything has these last couple of months.  I don’t even know what he meant by it, but I keep hearing it replay on a loop in my mind until I go rigid with anxiety all over again, because I can’t lose him and in that moment even with his arm wrapped around my shoulder it felt like he was backing away.

I need Peeta.  I need him.  Want him.  The way I’ve never needed or wanted anything or anyone before.  What I feel for Peeta is like the pang of hunger, but it’s located in my chest, where I thought I was hollowed out by the grasping hands of the Capitol and incapable of feeling anything anymore.  I never intended on allowing myself to feel like this about anyone.  I feared being paralyzed, of being rendered helpless by it.

I very nearly am, which is exactly why I have to embrace it, chase after it, because it’s the strength of my feelings for him that make me want to get out of bed on my darker mornings.  With Peeta there’s the hope of the next day being better with him at my side.

Five days pass and he still sleeps stretched out beside me, but the gulf between us feels suddenly wide again.  The kisses he gives me, when I wake strangled by screams caught in the back of my throat, don’t even feel natural or reassuring anymore.  It’s like he’s looking at me with unspeakable questions in his eyes and holding me just far enough away that I can’t rest my head against his chest until I catch my breath.

I reconstruct the hours leading up to the moment he pulled away, but I’m hopeless at self-reflection.  It’s why my conversations with Dr. Aurelius so often lead nowhere.  It’s easier to hunt, but not just the usual squirrels and rabbits, because that wouldn’t drain me the way I need to be drained, so that my mind slows like the sap in a thawed out tree.  I shoot a big doe, field dress her, and drag her back home by myself.  It takes me all day and leaves me so exhausted that my muscles burn like I’m on fire again.  It’s not enough.  My head bobs at the dinner table and my eyes slip shut the moment our heads hit the pillow only to awaken hours later to Peeta’s furrowed brow and tentative touches, while I wipe sweat from my forehead and kick the terror twisted sheets from between my legs.  I can’t escape the nightmares anymore.

On the sixth day, my muscles shake so bad from the previous day’s efforts that I can’t even set any snares and my stumbling around in the leaves makes me as loud as Peeta tromping through the woods.  I flop down on the damp forest floor and only last a few minutes in the silence before my fears overtake me, and I’m forced to toddle back home on my wobbling legs.

I have to keep busy, so I’ll clean.  I’ll clean every surface in every room of the house.  I’ll put it all in order, bringing form to my quickly crumbling reconstructed life.

When I get home Peeta is gone, though the early morning hours have passed and he should be back from his bread deliveries.  Being alone in the house only makes it worse, and that’s how I end up in the room I’ve done my best to avoid ever since I came back to District 12.

I move slowly through her room, almost afraid to touch or sully anything but wanting to see every last thing she left behind.  The room is full and still totally empty, because Prim is gone.

And I’m going to lose Peeta all over again.

Closets make me feel safe.  The walls close in around me and I can shut the door and rock until everything else disappears.  Prim’s closet makes me feel nothing but the bleakest misery.

My name spoken urgently in my ear and someone’s arms dragging me upright pull me from what feels like the dark sea of unconsciousness.  I blink and realize I’m still in Prim’s closet.  The last thing I remember is pulling out each of her dresses, trying to picture her in them, trying to imagine how big she would be now, whether any of them would even fit.  Now my tongue feels thick in my mouth, my eyelids swollen, and my head pounds.  Through the fog of my mind, it takes me a moment to recognize that it’s Peeta’s arms that have twisted me around and tugged me out of the closet, setting me on my feet, and it’s Peeta’s blue eyes that look down at me full of concern.

“What happened to you?” he asked, his thumb ghosting over my forehead.

Even his light touch hurts.

“This is quite a lump, Katniss.”

I brush away his concern with a shake of my head that makes me sway on my feet.

“You were passed out in there.  I wouldn’t have found you if it wasn’t for Buttercup’s caterwauling.”

Buttercup? I look around and see the cat weaving between Peeta’s feet.  Why would that stupid cat want to save me?  Maybe his wails were just him mourning Prim too.

“Katniss,” he says more sharply, making my head snap up.  “Did you eat today?”

Swallowing drily, I finally manage to speak.  “This morning.”

“You didn’t eat one lousy bite this morning.”

I don’t know if that’s true.  The morning feels a long way off.  Separated by more hours than can be possible if the slant of the sun coming through the window is any indication.

“I’m fine.”

Peeta crosses his arms over his chest and sighs, his feet planted shoulder width apart on the barely walked upon carpet beneath our feet.  This room is hardly lived in.  It’s a permanent memorial to my dead sister and what might have been.

I am exhausted enough that I must have collapsed, but it’s not entirely from lack of food or the hunting or the nightmares.  I’m exhausted from waiting for him to leave me, for the time Peeta needs to morph into something much worse, much more permanent.  When he leaves me, what rooms will I choose to memorialize him in?  The kitchen, where he rolled out dough and iced the cookies that we shared?  The living room, where he sketched at night and let me tuck my cold feet under his thighs in the reflected glow of the television?  The bathroom that smells of his soap?  Our bedroom?  What will be left of the house after I close off all the rooms that remind me of him?  What will be left of my already damaged heart?

I take two steps over to my sister’s bed and sit down on the edge, not trusting my legs to hold me for much longer.  Buttercup follows, curling up at the foot of the bed.

“I just need to rest.  I’ve been pushing myself too hard,” I say, as I pull my braid over my shoulder and force myself to look up at him.

He looks unconvinced, his posture stiff, the veins in his forearms standing out like ropes underneath his skin.  The only thing softening his stance is the dance of dust motes that float around his head in a sunbeam that falls over half his face.

“If you wanted to go through Prim’s things, you should have told me.  It’s too much to do alone.”

He’s right.  We need each other to shoulder these burdens together, but he’s been pulling away and I don’t know why.  I’m flailing at the edge of a cliff without him.

“I wouldn’t have known where to find you.”

It’s a barb, but he absorbs it without missing a beat.  “I was looking at the footprint of the old bakery.”

I cock a brow at him.  He’s one to lecture then.  My sister’s room is no more daunting to me than the ruins of the Mellark bakery are to Peeta, but apparently he spent the day there without me.

There’s just the hint of a smile pulling at the corners of his lips, when he says, “I know, and I promise I’m going to take you.  There’s something I want to show you.”

I start to move to stand and he steps forward, his arms uncrossing to press me firmly down by my shoulders into the mattress.  “Just not today, sweetheart.  You’re not going anywhere right now.”

I’m too tired to protest, so I mumble my consent.

“And while I’ve got you captive, Dr. Aurelius says we need to talk.”  He looks pleased with himself, having managed to trap me like this, but the amusement that quirks his mouth is quickly replaced by a blank look, as he begins.  “I’m having a lot of shiny thoughts lately.”

Of all the things I thought Peeta might say, this isn’t one of them.  Gale’s image filling our living room triggered his most recent episode.  It’s the night we ended up short one television.  Before that Peeta had been so good, his episodes less intense and further apart with each passing month.  It isn’t that I thought he was fixed, because neither of us can be fixed exactly, but I thought he was better, patched up like our bodies.

I shouldn’t be relieved to hear that it’s hijacked memories that trouble him, but it’s a problem I can deal with.  I know how to help him with this.  We can defeat this together, use all the little tricks we’ve developed to make it okay.

“Not full blown episodes, but thoughts that creep up on me.  Like nagging whispers that make me feel twitchy.”

I nod slowly, letting him pause to breathe, waiting for him to finish what it is he needs to confess.

“I don’t want to hurt you, while I’m confused like this.”

He scrubs his face, and I finally understand the tortured look he’s worn during his late night attempts to soothe me this week.  I can only imagine what the whispers say about me or what they urge him to do.  Peeta doesn’t always like to speak aloud the ugliness that comes to the surface in his hijacked memories.  I think he’s trying to shield me, but his silence is motivated by shame too.

“It’s not your fault, and I’m not afraid of you.  You’d never hurt me.”  He must know this, but he needs to know I believe in him.

I’ve never actually asked him why he came back.  I’m fairly certain it wasn’t for me; at least not initially.  District 12 was his home, just like it was mine, and it’s probably as simple as that.  He wouldn’t have come though, wouldn’t have moved into what was the Victors’ Village if he truly believed he was capable of losing control and harming me.

The Capitol tried to make him into a weapon.  They succeeded to a certain extent, but violence runs contrary to everything that is intrinsic to Peeta.  In spite of every blow he received as a result of his mother’s vicious temper, that gentle boy still grew into the good man before me, who refuses to give in and desperately fights his own delusions.  He has violent, twisted thoughts, when he’s lost in a flashback, but his nature, his true nature is so gentle, so warm.

“Dr. Aurelius says it’s probably normal for me to be a little confused since we…”  He stops to gesture between us, as color floods his cheeks.

If my legs weren’t rubber, I’d run now that he’s hinted at that moment on the couch, when our kisses turned into something more.  In a dream, Prim’s bed might cooperate by swallowing me up, but it doesn’t and I have to satisfy my need to run and hide by pulling at my sleeves, tugging them down over my hands in the suddenly too hot room until only the tips of my fingers stick out.

I can’t blame Peeta for telling Dr. Aurelius about us, but I hate that anyone else knows the details of our shaky intimacy.  It reminds me too much of the Games.

“The whispers make me feel like before, when I thought everything between us was a lie.  If I listen to them, it starts to feel like you are faking with me.”

I was faking that night.  It didn’t start that way, but I ended up going through the motions, because he was there beneath me and looked so beautiful and it was me making him look that way.  There were no cameras to play to, but I ended up faking it just the same.

I want it to be real for the both of us.

I consider what I might say to make things right.  I could explain how I got stuck in my head while he rocked against me, floating outside of my body, filled with doubts about how he feels about me.  I could even say that he was right about me being woefully innocent or ignorant, and I don’t understand my body, let alone his.  But I’m bad with words, as likely to irritate the wound as to heal it with my fumbling attempts at clarification.

What I really want is to show him how I feel.  Show him that I’m not faking.  What I feel for him is intensely real and the whispers are wrong.

I stretch out my hand to him and he steps forward, offering me his, pulling me up, and steadying me on my shaky feet with a firm grip on my elbows.

He starts to ask if I’m all right, but I stop him with a hand to his cheek.

His eyes dart a little too quickly from my hand to my lips to my eyes and back again, as if he can’t decide whether I’m going to kiss him or hit him, as if he’s desperate to read my mood and quite nearly failing.  His grip on me tightens, but not enough to hurt.

He would never hurt me.

I tip forward on my toes and bring my lips to his cheek.  It’s smooth.  It will always be smooth, I guess.  Gives me fifteen extra minutes to watch you sleep, Peeta joked once, but I think it bothers him.  Razors might be a hazard we can’t really afford to have lying around the house, but his boyish complexion is another reminder of the ways the Capitol changed us forever.

I’ll never feel the rough of his beard against my neck.  The thought makes me swallow.

Peeta tends to direct our kissing: fast and needy, slow and deliberate, teasing and giddy.  He is always the one to tip my head to the side, so he can trail kisses down my neck, while I clutch his shoulders.  Not this time.

I trace the angular line of his jaw.  I can feel the tense, clenched muscle bunched there under his skin as my fingers skim over him.  I kiss him again.  Lower, just below his jaw, where the hardness of his jaw gives way to tender, sensitive skin.  It makes me gasp when Peeta kisses me here.  The sensation might be the same for him, judging by the flutter of his pulse against my lips and the way his hands creep up my biceps.

“Peeta,” I whisper against his skin, kissing him again and again and again until my other hand tugs at the neck of his shirt so I can kiss the hollow of his throat, the target of my mouth’s hot path, without interference.

He whispers my name, pleading for something.  My fingers hover at his chin and I unfurl them to lightly cover his lips, to prevent him from telling me to stop, when I still need him to understand.  I can feel the roll of his Adam’s apple against my brow, as his tongue darts out to wet his lips, wetting the tips of my fingers as well.

I’m too tired to burn the way I might otherwise, but I scramble against him, trying to crawl inside of him.  I’d climb him if I could, wrap my legs around his waist and curl my arms around his neck.  Maybe then the words would come easy, my heart pounding in time with his.

“It’s real.”  It’s so real it hurts.  I couldn’t possibly fake this.  “Can you feel how real?”

He pulls me roughly against him, his arm wrapping around me to press me hard into his chest, his other hand tangling in my hair, loosening my braid as his fingers hold my head against him.  But it’s fine: I fit here with my head tucked once more into the space between his chin and chest.  This is where I belong.

I shouldn’t ask him.  Not again.  It’s not fair to ask more of him.  But I need him and I need to know.

My voice is muffled by cotton fabric and hard muscle that makes me almost unintelligible, as I curl my fingers into his chest.  “Will you stay with me?”

I don’t have to wait for his answer.

“Always.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Ten

I wake up, roll onto my back, and realize I’m alone.  Not alone in the house, but alone here.

Peeta is baking.  The smell of yeast has already reached our bedroom.

The sun slants through the window.  Too late to be asleep.

I roll onto my stomach and press my face into Peeta’s cool pillow.

…

The uneven thump of Peeta’s tread on the floor draws me from my sweaty slumber.

“Katniss?”

I groan into the pillow.  I’ve drooled in my sleep and the cotton of the pillow slip is soaked through.

“You getting up?”

I kick my legs, freeing myself of the scratchy sheet that covers me.  The room is getting too hot to sleep.

In a minute I’ll get up.  Just a minute.

I hear the water in the bathtub run.  Sometimes he takes a shower, but the balancing act is awkward.  When he’s tired, it’s easier to soak.  I know I kept him up late last night, fighting sleep with dark thoughts of Prim crowding everything else out.  He must be exhausted.

I wait to hear the door shut, but it never does.  Peeta sometimes has a striking lack of boundaries.

“You want to join me?” he calls, his words echoing on the tiles of the bathroom.

It’s probably a joke.  Maybe.

…

“Hey.”

My eyes open, and I cringe at the light, rubbing at the crusty sleep that’s collected in the corners of my eyes.  Peeta sits alongside me, his hair slicked back, wet from his bath.  There are little beads of water clinging to his shoulders.

“You need to get up, Katniss, and eat some breakfast.  I made cinnamon raisin bread.  It’s still warm.”

I wrinkle my nose.  The cinnamon part would be good with melting butter, but the thought of picking out the raisins sounds like a lot of work and wasteful.  I try not to be wasteful, but sometimes I just can’t stomach anything.  Lately that’s been the norm.

Peeta traced the outline of my hip not so much with teenage enthusiasm as concern last night, but at least he was touching me.  After our one real foray into intimacy, he’d pulled away from me.  He just needed time to trust himself, to quiet the voices, but I needed the ghost of his touch even if it wasn’t the kind to ignite a fire.  It was probably better that way.  If he lit a fire in me now, I might collapse into ashes.

“I’m just going to sleep a little while longer,” I say slowly, coming to the conclusion as the words leave my mouth.

His hand closes around my wrist.  It’s too warm in this room to be touched, but I manage to resist jerking my hand away.  I just close my eyes again, and it’s almost like he’s gone.

“I need to make my deliveries.”  There’s a long pause, where I wait for him to let go of me and get off the bed, so I can get back to the business of sleeping.  “Are you okay?”

“I’m hot,” I mumble, finally giving into the urge to reclaim my arm with a sluggish tug.

His hand presses to my forehead.  “Do you feel sick?”

I flop over, putting my back to him.  I can wait him out.

…

I’m not sure, but I think he checks on me twice more before I find myself weakly fighting him, as he kneels over me in the sheets, dragging me upright.

“You’re going to sit up and eat some of this or I’m going to call your mother.”

The threat pulls me from my lethargy.  The room is dark except for the gentle glow of the lamp on the bedside table.  A bowl of stew steams on the floor with a thick piece of bread balanced on the rim, soaked half way through, darkened from the stew, and probably soft enough to fall apart in my mouth.  My stomach doesn’t so much as growl.

It can’t possibly be nighttime.

“What time is it?”

“Time to eat,” he insists stubbornly.  He leans over and brings the bowl up to my hands.  I take it from him, but make no move to touch the spoon.  “I’m not going anywhere.  You can’t ignore me.”

I can try.

He runs his hand through his hair, leaving clumps of curls standing upright.  “I mean it, Katniss.  You eat this bowl of stew or I’ll call your mother.”

He wouldn’t call her.  He wouldn’t.

But he’s got this determined set to his jaw that makes me toy with the spoon.  If I take a few bites, there’s a chance he’ll leave me alone.  I let the stew fill the spoon and then tip it enough that it pours back into the bowl.

My mother didn’t choose me.  She chose a new life.  I’m the one that keeps the memories close.  I’m the one left to remember Prim.  Doesn’t he know how that makes me feel?

I let the spoon drop.

“Why would you even say that?”

“Because you’re frightening me.”  I look up from the bowl and see the tension written in the furrows of his brow.  He’s been on edge lately, and my behavior today can’t possibly be helping.  “She lost Prim too.  She’s the only other person that understands what you’re feeling.”

Peeta looks angry—his lips a thin line, his blue eyes slightly narrowed.  Not on the verge of an episode angry, but as if he’s as angry with my mother as I am, for leaving me, maybe even angrier.  He didn’t leave.  He chose me.

The reminder is sharp; it causes a feeling to well up inside of me that cuts through the dull darkness.

“That’s not true.”  I let the hot bowl come to rest in my lap.  “You understand.”  Better than anyone.  We remember together.  We share that burden.

His hand closes on my bare thigh.  “Then let me help.”

He ends up making me eat two bowls of stew and promise to call Dr. Aurelius the next morning.  I know Peeta trusts Dr. Aurelius more than I do, because he helped Peeta gain control of himself, so he could return home and return to being the boy he once was.  Or something close to it.  I’d normally put up more of a fight about calling the doctor, who I’m always afraid will suggest new pills to dull my senses, when I’m experiencing some kind of set back.  That feeling of wanting to sleep endlessly, of wanting even Peeta to fade into the background, so I’d be alone with the darkness, frightens me enough that I do as he asks.

I am my mother.  The mother who is so deadened by grief that she can’t even choose the daughter she has left.  If it was just me, I could slip into that same abyss, but there’s Peeta, and I think he needs me as much as I need him.  He promised me he’d stay—Always.  I can’t offer him any less; I can’t just give up.

“Make a list,” Dr. Aurelius says.  “A list of all the good things.  All the things that make getting up worthwhile, that make life worth living, and then read it over when you feel like you’d rather stay in bed.  The next day write a new one, add something to the list.  Focus on the good.”

It sounds hokey and sentimental, and I’m terrified I will have precious little to write on that list, but when I try for the first time, the list ends up filling the front of a yellowed sheet of paper.  Peeta appears on it more than once.  More than three times.  Peeta’s at the heart of the list.  That’s no surprise to me.  Peeta is the bright spot in my sometimes dark world.

I make a list for eleven days in a row, and although on the third day I don’t pull myself from the bed until late afternoon, I manage to slowly free myself from the grasping hands of darkness.  The list helps.  I don’t forget about Prim or the mausoleum that is her room, which awaits my attention some day in the future, when I’m feeling stronger and Peeta is at my side to tackle it, but the sadness associated with her memory settles into the back of my mind, letting light back in.

On the twelfth day, I awaken to the sound of the shower.  Peeta must be finished baking and is washing up before he heads out on deliveries.  I consider pulling the sheets of blank paper out of the bedside table drawer, where I have them stashed along with a nub of a pencil with a chewed off pink eraser.  But something is different about this morning.  I want to get up without having to list the reasons why it is worth it to me to face another day.  In fact, I know exactly what I want to do now that I’m awake, and if I lay staring up at the ceiling here in bed, I will miss my chance.

I slip from the bed and pad towards the bathroom, the sound of running water growing louder as I toe the door open and step over the marble threshold.  Taking a deep breath, I yank my t-shirt over my head and hold onto the towel bar as I kick out of my white cotton underwear.

Lists are good.  Routines are good.  But if you want to add something to the list, something new, you have to break with tradition.

I peak around the curtain and Peeta’s back is to me, facing the showerhead and working shampoo through his curly hair with one hand while the other hand splays against the tiles, helping him balance.  I don’t let my eyes dip below his shoulders, where the muscles bunch as his hand scrubs back and forth.

This is a lot all at once.  Too much probably.  Most probably too much for him—he was having problems with our increased intimacy and this is definitely intimate—and without question too much for me.

I am about to duck back out, when he asks without turning, “Admiring the view?”

I huff and roll my eyes.  “You did invite me to join you,” I say, pulling the curtain open a little further.

“I did.  So come on in.”

“Don’t turn around,” I instruct him, as I step over the edge of the tub.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

I can hear the smile in his voice, and though my heart is racing, the thought of his smile keeps me from retreating, when the spray of the water spots my skin and my eyes skirt over the small of his back and lower.

My skin heats and it’s not just the steam from the shower.

I stare down at my toes in the puddling water and grab hold of the end my braid, which is messy from sleep, pulling until it comes loose, raking my fingers through the tangles.

Peeta clears his throat.  “This is all backwards.”

I reach for the shampoo, perched on the edge of the tub, as I ask him what he means.

“I mean, it’s nice.  It would be nicer if you let me look,” he adds, as he turns his head to the side.  Not far enough to see anything, I don’t think, but I cock a brow at him in warning just in case.  “But, we’ve skipped a few steps.”

“We’ve skipped a lot of steps.”  I flip the top of the shampoo and squeeze.  The pearly, glistening shampoo pools in the palm of my hand.  It’s Peeta’s, but I haven’t used anything but his shampoo in months.  “We live together.”

We share things like shampoo and drool on each other’s pillows.  We hold each other up.

“Do we?”

I think so.  “You’re not going to go back to your house, are you?”

“No.”

“Then we live together.”

I soap my scalp, though standing at the back of the shower, I’m barely wet enough to get suds to form.  Peeta stands unmoving before me.  He’s obviously finished with his shower, but shows no signs of climbing out of the bathtub.  I don’t know how I’ll rinse this soap out of my hair with him standing there like a sentinel, his broad back blocking the flow of water.

“Do you want us to live together?”

He places stress on want.  Maybe it’s important to him that I want this, that it isn’t just about survival.

“Yes.”  It’s strange, but I’m able to say things with greater ease that would normally make my insides twist with us both naked and within arm’s reach.  There’s something about the intimacy of the moment that makes whatever I have to say seem much less daunting by comparison.  “I want you here.”

I can’t imagine not waking up alongside Peeta.  My list would suddenly be greatly abbreviated if he left my side.

“Can I please turn around?”

It’s my turn to smile at the unfiltered need in his voice.

My consent is barely spoken above a whisper, but he must hear me, because he maneuvers to face me.  He doesn’t need the wall to balance, not with his arms sliding around me, wet and solid.  He tugs me under the spray of water, pressing our bodies together.  Water runs over our heads, down over my lips, as his mouth finds mine.

It’s the brightest morning in months.

Chapter Text

Chapter Eleven

I have my dark days, but I have Peeta and when I forget what that means, I have the list.  Our routine is much the same, settling back into our own brand of normal.  Until one morning, while I dip hunks of sweet potato bread into the hot chocolate Peeta ordered for my birthday as part of our bimonthly supplies shipment from the Capitol, he looks up from the dough he’s kneading and announces that he wants to take me to the part of town where the shops have gone up.

The new merchant area.

I scowl, pushing the bread between my lips.  The bread is sweet enough that the last thing it needs is hot chocolate, but now that I’m feeling better again, food has become my only real indulgence.  I don’t indulge my sadness or the urge to sleep sixteen hours a day, but I feast upon whatever my greedy hands can reach, most of which is prepared by Peeta.  Pies bubbling to the brim with fresh berries I picked in the woods, carrot cake cupcakes iced in thick swirls of cream cheese icing, sugar cookies dusted in giant, sparkling sugar crystals, stacks of pancakes we eat for breakfast or dinner drenched in sticky syrup, salty pretzel bread dipped in honey mustard, flatbread spread with goat cheese mixed with herbs, and greasy cheese buns, always cheese buns.  Half of what Peeta makes I’ve never tasted before, but it’s all delicious.  Even the things he declares disasters seem good to me, and I simply can’t get enough.  I’m his best customer.

“I’ve seen it,” I say, swallowing the bread I’ve been chewing.

The changes happening in our district have gotten harder to avoid.  I don’t hate them in the same way I did initially.  I accept the new houses and little shops that make it harder to remember what came before.  It’s part of the thorny path towards healing.  But if Peeta wants to give me a grand guided tour, I’m not particularly interested.

“You haven’t seen this,” he assures me, as he pushes the heels of his hands into the ball he works on the floured surface of our kitchen counter.  “And I’ve wanted to show you for a while now.  After deliveries?”

I lick a drip of hot chocolate off the side of my hand, and he smirks before dropping his attention to the dough.  Peeta’s very businesslike about making his deliveries as promised—even though half his customers can’t pay—but I think I could distract him enough to forego punctuality or at least enough to burn a loaf or two.  Of course, that would probably only delay this little surprise.

“I don’t like surprises.”

“I know.  This is good though, I promise.”

I can hear a hint of nervousness in his voice that he tries to pass off as enthusiasm as he grabs for a pastry cutter and flashes me another smile.  It’s his anxiety that convinces me.  Whatever this is about, Peeta needs me.

I spend half the day wondering what it is that Peeta needs to show me.  If it’s good, I don’t see how we’ll find it in the merchant side of town, where his lost family and lost friends burned.  That’s what I associate with the shops that line the street in that part of town even as the past is slowly erased and replaced with the new.  But it can’t be about the past: he promised it would be a good surprise.

A good surprise.

I chant that to myself to keep my nerves from fraying, as I walk alongside of him.  It keeps me from fleeing, keeps me following him right into the center of town.  I try to ignore the heads that turn as we walk by.  We don’t often go for strolls together like this, where people are more likely to see us.  They’re more accustomed to Peeta out and about on his deliveries alone.  I’m almost a stranger, keeping as much to myself as possible.  So, it’s no wonder we draw some attention.  It’s District 12 though, and people are good enough not to approach us and let us go about our business unmolested.

What our business is, however, I’m not sure, even as Peeta slows his steps and looks at me with his brows arched and mouth drawn tight, expecting me to say or do something.

I glance around and the only thing I see is a fresh concrete foundation poured with just a quarter wall constructed around three sides.  There’s no way of telling what it will be once it’s finished other than a merchant building, but Peeta’s eyes keep darting over to it like it’s important somehow.

“This is it,” he says, walking towards the bricked wall.

It is important to Peeta, because this is the surprise.  I scan the construction site to see if I’ve missed something.  “This?”

If this is meant to be a good surprise, my response is lackluster at best, but if he’s disappointed, he doesn’t show it.  He’s almost giddy.  That’s the only way to explain why his hands clutch my waist without warning and lift so that I find myself deposited atop the wall.  Like a sack of flour.

I glower down at him, mostly trying to hide the fact that heat is rising up my neck and cheeks, as his hands slide to my hips and linger longer than need be.  His whole maneuver was completely unnecessary.  I’m short, but not so short that I couldn’t see this incomplete merchant building without being perched atop an incomplete wall.  What’s worse, anyone could have seen him hoist me up here, which only heightens my embarrassment over the hot twinge I felt at his ridiculous show of strength.

He gives me a broad smile like he can read it in my face.  He’s getting good at that again—the ability to read people almost effortlessly.

He rubs his chin and gestures to the building site, tools left scattered about, bricks piled at the ready next to empty tubs for mixing mortar.  “I copied the footprint of the old bakery, but I decided to build here, instead of over the old one.”  There’s a twitch in his cheek, and without having to say it, I understand why he’d choose to build somewhere else.  “It won’t be quite as big either.  With no one living here, it seemed wasteful.”

There’s a fair chance he says more, but my attention is now firmly fixed upon the building.  The world grinds to a halt as I try to make out how this will become the Mellark Bakery.  I inhale slowly, as I try to absorb the realization that Peeta’s well enough that he can resurrect his family’s bakery.  The meadow turns green and Peeta will hang a Mellark Bakery sign above a new store.

Peeta, the boy with the bread.

His back is straight, his chin lifted as he gestures to something, as he no doubt sees the bakery taking shape in his mind, according to the plans he has devised, and the setting sun catches the pale gold of his lashes.  He looks proud.  He should be.

“Katniss?”

I rest my hand on the back of Peeta’s neck, drawing my fingers through the curls there, forgetting for a moment that people might see us, letting the worry that we’re always being watched slip away for a moment.  “You never breathed a word of it.”

He slides hands into his pockets, rocking slightly.  “I wanted to make sure I could go through with it.  But it feels good.”

I don’t like the distance between us, where I stand atop the wall with my head unaccustomedly higher than his, so I plop down to sit and let my legs dangle into what will someday soon be a warm bakery full of beautifully decorated cakes and cookies and nourishing bread.  I nudge his shoulder with mine and attempt to smile though a strange sense of loss that floods my chest, a selfish wanting that threatens to eat away at the happiness of this moment.  This bakery will be his world, not mine, not ours.  It will take him away from me.

Peeta kicks at the wall with his prosthetic and his shoe makes an odd hollow sound.  “The bakery could take care of us.  We wouldn’t have to depend on the Capitol.  I thought that might be better.  For both of us.”

There’s an appeal to not relying on the Capitol.  I’ve never been comfortable with it and the revolution didn’t change that.  Still, part of me wants to say that it isn’t his responsibility to take care of me.  Of course, we’ve been taking care of each other for years now.  That’s what we do, even if we’re not really married, even if we’ve never toasted.

If I could learn to let him take care of me in this new way, where would I fit in, sitting at home, trying not to sleep the day away, and occasionally slinking off into the woods to hunt or stare into the middle distance?  I don’t want to be a burden, someone who profits off Peeta’s hard work with nothing to contribute.  “What about me?”

“I want this for us.”

“The customers won’t want my biscuits.”

Haymitch’s geese rejected the last batch.  He claimed they were afraid they’d break a tooth on them.

“As fond as I am of your brick like biscuits, I don’t think they’d be a big seller,” he says with a grin.  “But I’ll need help in front, dealing with customers.”

I side eye him, quirking one brow at this very bad idea.  “You want me to work in the front?”

“With your sunny disposition, you’d be perfect.”

I roll my eyes at him, but his teasing helps soothe the wanting, the fear of losing him to this place, to the people of the District who need him.

He pulls his hand free of his pants pocket and places it on my thigh, squeezing.  His touch is warm.  I can feel the heat of him through the thin fabric.  This constant heat he radiates must be why we have to sleep with the windows open.

“You’ll keep me from making horrible decisions that bankrupt us.”

“I might not be terribly good at that job either.”  Yes, I often point out to Peeta that he gives away as much as he sells, but in truth, I admire that about him—the ability to be generous after everything.  Pain and loss haven’t made him hard.  That generosity saved me once.  It could save someone else.  “But, I’ll help if that’s what you want.”

“I want,” he begins, but stops, tapping his pointer finger on my thigh.  A group of children runs by, shrieking with joy, playing at some game and completely oblivious to our presence.  As they pass and silence envelops us once more, I can hear him swallow.  “I want the sign above the door—Mellark’s—to mean you too.  I still want that.  Or I want it again.”

It’s not a proposal.  But it’s a confession of sorts, and unlike before, it doesn’t make me feel guilty or confused or uncomfortable.  I thought the Capitol had taken Peeta’s love from me, but it’s still there.  He wants me.  Again.  Always.  He just had to remember.  And maybe I’ve been so worried about him not ever truly remembering, of us being too broken or patched together like sad ragdolls that I forgot to notice all the signs that he’d remembered a long time ago.

I hop down from the wall.  “Let’s go home.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, it’s really good.”

I can’t even bring myself to feel bad about feeling this surge of happiness and relief and want.  I want to go home with Peeta.  I want to be inside with the door shut and the windows open and I want him to kiss me until I can’t breathe.

He laces his fingers through mine, and I don’t care who sees us as we walk home.

As the door to our house closes behind us, Peeta opens his mouth.  I can see from the line between his brows that he’s about to question me about the bakery, about dragging him back here with an urgency I can see he’s misunderstood.  I stop him with a tug on his shirt, bringing his lips down to mine.

Just a brush of my lips over his, and I feel the tug, the spark light me up from the inside.

Whatever protest he intended on making, it withers on the vine, when I say I want to go upstairs and add a please for good measure.  Peeta’s not exactly known for his speed, but he makes it up the stairs quick enough, and I don’t have to worry about further explanation, when he catches me in his arms and backs me into our bedroom.  With his hot mouth latched onto the sensitive spot below my ear and the backs of my knees hitting the bed, it seems he’s figured out what I want.

It’s a flurry of fumbling fingers and panted assurances, and finally I’m staring up at Peeta, as he breathes raggedly against my brow, the both of us stripped to our underwear.  He’s on top of me like I wanted, heavy and solid with the smell of his soap in my nose and his curls brushing my forehead.  I want to ignite the fire between us again, I want to burn.  My hands skate over his firm stomach and toy at the band of his shorts, my fingers trailing through the hair that peeks just over the edge.

He whispers my name, his hands balling up the sheets on either side of my head.  It doesn’t feel like the beginning of an episode, but I peer up into his eyes to be sure.  Blue eyes dominated by huge pupils stare back at me.  He looks like he doesn’t quite believe we’re here.

I blindly slide his shorts further down his hips, holding his gaze.  “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I don’t want a repeat of the night, when I’d rubbed against him on the couch and ended up spending the next hour scouring the kitchen, while I listened to the shower run upstairs for three times longer than usual.  I’m not sure he understands the depth of my ignorance, despite having teased me once for being pure.  It was a mix of shame and fear that made me clam up that night.  Still straddling him, while he pressed kisses along my neck, I had no response to his question, “Did you?”

I still don’t know what he meant by his question.  It’s like Peeta was talking in code and I’m at a complete loss to solve it.  I didn’t have the nerve to ask him what he meant, but I know I want tonight to end differently.

He lowers his lips to mine, kissing me as if I hadn’t just warned him that whatever his expectations, he better lower them.  His one hand slides behind my back, pulling me into him, where I can feel him hard against my stomach.  I may only have the barest notion of what we’re about, but the feel of him only confirms it: I want more.  I imagine what he might feel like inside of me and it’s like a jolt of electricity, sending my heart racing.

I arch my back, pressing into him.  I like the sound he makes.  It’s the best sound this little bed has ever heard, all raw and needy and good, and I want to hear him make it again.  I hook my leg up and rock against him, and for a moment we’re moving together and he’s nipping and kissing and sucking and everything is so right.  But then his hand clutches at my hip, stilling my eager movements and his lips leave my skin wet and dotted with goose bumps, and we’re not moving, we’re not heading towards that thing I’ve chased.

“I need to know something.”  He breathes purposefully through his nose.  “Why?”

Why do you want this?  Why me?  Why now?  It’s all packed into that one heavy word.

Once that question would have been almost impossible for me to answer, a superhuman task of trying to unravel the mess of my feelings, tangled up in guilt, fear, and loneliness.  But it’s not experimentation, it’s not proximity, it’s not pity or an escape or the base need to feel something.

“Because I want that too.  The sign on the bakery.  Our home.  Our bed.  I want that.”

“You want that,” he repeats, and the look of wonder on his face is almost too much and I let my eyes slip closed.  I’m not worth all that marvel, all that joy, but I understand, because I feel it too, I feel that same thing that brightens Peeta’s face.  I feel it for him.

My yes is as much an agreement as an encouragement, because his lips are on me again, hot and driven by an impatience that I share.  I feel that thing again, the hunger that overtook me on the beach.  The sensation inside me grows warmer and spreads out from my center, down through my body, out along my arms and legs to the tips of my curling toes.

He doesn’t ask permission to run the flat of his tongue over my nipple or slide his hand down my stomach, under the elastic of my underwear, down to the source of the heat, and I don’t have the breath to give it if he did.  Instead of satisfying me, the kisses have had the opposite effect, making my need greater.  I never quite understood why people wanted each other like this.  I thought I was something of an expert on hunger, but this is an entirely new kind.

“Like this?”

I don’t know if the slow circle of his finger over me is what I expected, but it feels new and good, so I nod my head vigorously.

I desperately want him to feel what I’m feeling, so we’re together in this, sharing goodness instead of pain.  My hand snakes down between us, and I fumble to reach into his shorts.  His throaty whispered nonsense, as he tilts his head to watch, makes me smile against his curls, when my wrist twists to wrap around him.  I can barely move with his chest pressing into me and our arms tangled together, but the strangled noise Peeta makes in the back of his throat makes me think it doesn’t matter that the angle is awkward and I’m completely inexpert.

I was naked with him in the shower once, but I’ve never touched him like this.  I’ve never touched anyone like this.  His hand on me, my hand on him makes my stomach feel like it’s dropped and my chest heave.  I writhe underneath his touch, wanting more, more, more.  More of him, more of us, now.

He echoes my thoughts, his fingers dipping inside of me, and my mouth runs ahead of my brain, as I stutter and shake.  “Underwear.  Take them off,” I demand, tripping over my words, while my legs wrap around him and probably make it impossible for him to comply.

When he tells me to hold on and extricates himself from my clawing hands, leaving the bed and moving towards the dresser, I experience a moment of panic, my newfound confidence shaken.  I cross my arms over my chest and scoot up towards the pillows.  He doesn’t look like he’s leaving, but I can’t figure out why he’s gotten up to dig through his drawer.  I wanted him to remove clothes, not put them on.

“I, um…”  Peeta turns and his cheeks are tinged pink.  He holds out a box and walks back to me, his erection obvious in his shorts.  “I should probably use one of these,” he says, settling back on the bed with the neon orange box between us on the sheets.

It says it boldly in black on the box, so I know what it contains even though I’ve never actually seen one.  Condoms are something people in the Capitol had access too, but you couldn’t even get them for sale in the Hob before the rebellion.  Procreation—particularly in the districts, which labored and made possible the lifestyle enjoyed in the Capitol—was too important for Panem’s future, for anyone to have access to contraception of any kind.

I’m staring at them like he’s just produced a hoard of treasure—they’re about as rare and potentially as expensive—from his drawer, where he keeps his undershirts and shorts.  “Where did you get these?”

“One of our Capitol shipments.”  My eyes widen, as I picture him putting in an order for condoms along with flour and sugar.  “I’m not the one who ordered them.”  He opens the box and pulls out a square foil wrapper.  “Haymitch gave them to me.”

I pull my legs up to my chest, my face twisting into a grimace.  “That’s…unsettling.”

“You didn’t have to sit through the tutorial.”

A laugh bubbles up from my stomach, making my eyes crease and my naked flesh jiggle.  My laughter proves to be more contagious than the tears we sometimes shed at night in each other’s arms.  I hope he’s joking, but whether or not he actually endured a sexual education seminar from Haymitch, our laughter cuts through the tension, and I can feel the panic oozing out of my muscles.  When his hand wraps around my ankle and pulls, my legs unwind willingly, my limbs pliable in his hands.

Underwear tossed off the side of the bed, breathless kisses, and a slightly clumsy opening of a packet leads us to the moment where it’s clear that Peeta really did learn at some point how to use a condom, and then I’m caged by his arms with my heels pressing into the small of his back.

He shifts and wraps his hand around mine, guiding it down.  “Help me.”

Together, together, together.

My breath catches in my throat as he slowly pushes into me.

“Slow,” I warn him.  It’s only just occurred to me that this is probably going to hurt.

At first it doesn’t.  It’s all anticipation and thrill that this is really happening, when I didn’t think it was possible for me, for us.  And then it almost feels like too much, a strange intrusion that my body doesn’t know what to do with.  I squeeze his bicep at the feeling of thick fullness that overwhelms me, as our bodies meet flush together.

I’ve known real pain and this isn’t anything like that, but it’s uncomfortable.  It’s a nagging pinch where we’re joined.  I’m about to tell him not to move, when I realize that his face is contorted and the muscles in his arms are visibly tensed.  I draw my fingers through his curls, trying to get him to open his eyes.

“Okay?”

“You feel so good…I’m not going to last.”

I’m not romantic.  I never really fantasized or had expectations about this moment.  All I want is for this to be real, for both of us.  Nothing false, nothing contrived, just us together.  The rest will come.

I dig my heels in, urging him to move.  “S’okay.”  That’s what the rest of the box is for.

He doesn’t last, but for as long as he does, I kiss his cheeks, his lips, his nose, and when his eyes screw shut and hips falter and I feel his exhale as if it comes from inside of me, I whisper his name, because it’s just us and it was always supposed to be this way.

He rolls off of me to the side.  His breathing still hasn’t quite slowed and his eyes fix on me with intensity that makes my legs squirm in the sheets.  I can almost see him thinking, planning something.  When his hand steals between my legs, I almost protest.  The loss of him inside of me isn’t the relief I thought it’d be.  I can feel the dull ache but also a strange emptiness I’ve never known before.  Whatever it is, it makes me think to stop him, imagining it might hurt, but his touch is gentle and his fingers slip over me without pain.  It might be his hand or it might be the promises he whispers against my temple and the unspoken things I hear in his voice, but suddenly I’m not chasing that thing anymore.  Suddenly it’s upon me and my whole world collapses in on itself.  My body is wracked with waves of pleasure that make me grip tight to Peeta’s shoulders, my nails digging crescent moons into his flesh, and all I see are the bright stars behind my closed lids.

It’s early yet, but my limbs are heavy with a good sort of exhaustion, when I flop onto my back, brushing wisps of hair off my face with the back of my hand.  There’s a shyness that steals over me, thinking over what we’ve just done, as he fumbles alongside of me—probably with the condom.  There’s been a shift between us, and I don’t know if I have adequate words to explain to Peeta what this meant to me, what he means to me.

I lean over the edge of the bed, grabbing for whatever I can reach to slip on over my quickly cooling skin.  It happens to be his t-shirt—white and soft and smelling of the cinnamon he used in baking this morning—that I pull it over my head.

He’s still watching me, when I turn back to him, and his hand reaches out to brush my hip, where the t-shirt pools, too long and too wide for me.  His other hand is right above the place where his prosthetic fits over what’s left of his leg.  It’s an angry red, I realize, and he’s unconsciously rubbing it.

“Here,” I say, moving to unlatch the prosthetic and remove the source of his discomfort.

I’ve watched him remove it time and again, I know what to do.  Compared to what we’ve just done, this isn’t what most people would call intimate: it’s just a piece of metal and plastic, it’s not him, not really.  But he goes still under my questing fingers, as I undo first one latch and then another.  The ragged breath he draws, when I finish and prop the leg up by the bed, makes it sound like he’d been holding his breath, and maybe he had.  Maybe we’ve both been holding our breath for months.

“Katniss,” he whispers, his hand slipping up into my messy braid.  “You love me.  Real or not real?”

I didn’t know whether I was capable of loving someone like this, and there aren’t really words enough to describe my feelings.  But, I don’t need flowery speeches.  I don’t need the right words.  I think he already knows, because I think we both know for certain; so, I only need one.

“Real.”

THE END