Reconstruction

by FreshlyCutGrass

Summary:

The "growing back together" story of Katniss and Peeta, as told through the arduous work it takes to rebuild the Mellark family bakery in District 12 after the Capitol bombing.

Post-Mockingjay, pre-epilogue. Peeta's POV.

Notes:

TRIGGER WARNINGS: This entire text will talk in depth about trauma, war, PTSD, suicidal ideation and violence. This will tell the story of Peeta's recovery from hijacking and torture, as well as Katniss's depression and mental health struggles following the death of her sister and close friends. Please take care of yourselves and exercise caution.

Chapter 1: Surveying The Destruction Zone

It takes over a month before I pluck up the courage to enter her house. A month of pep talks from Dr. Aurelius and a month of changing out of my flour-covered baking clothes before I chickened out and refused to trek across our front lawns.

I know we weren’t going to be alone. Sae has been cooking two meals a day for her since Katniss returned to District 12 three months ago. Sae and Haymitch have been designated Katniss’s caretakers here since her mother failed to return. An elderly Seam grandmother and a drunken victor with poor social skills. Those were the only people in the world Katniss could rely on right now.

Buried deep within me is a drive to help her too, a drive to be someone she could rely on. I was that person once. But that Peeta died in a cell beneath the training center in the Capitol. Now, all she has left is a coward who is too afraid to check in on her. I've been carefully dodging her house her since the day I planted the primroses.

Mornings are when I'm the most clearheaded. I typically can't sleep through the night without waking up from horrifying nightmares about needles, roses and Katniss’s normally gray eyes gleaming red. Usually, by the time I see Greasy Sae and her granddaughter Marigold enter the Victors' Village, I have already been up for hours, guzzling coffee and frantically channeling my nervous energy into baking bread for the construction workers.

I'm not sure why I suddenly get the motivation to act on a random Tuesday but I'm halfway up her porch by her side door, fist raised to knock, before I realize what I'm doing.

“Peeta, dear, come on in,” Sae tells me in a friendly greeting, opening the door wider for me to come in.

“Good morning,” I say, but I can't help but hestitate at the threshold. “Does…does she know you invited me? Is she OK with me being here?”

The gentle wrinkles on Sae’s face deepen as she gives me a sad smile.

“Today’s a bad day. I don’t think she is going to make it down the stairs. So you probably will be able to avoid her entirely, which isn’t anything different from what you’ve been doing for the last four weeks.”

Sae’s bluntness is startling, but then again, I shouldn’t be surprised. This was the Queen of the Seam, after all. The legend behind the black market at The Hob. Her ruthlessness kept her family and many others alive for decades.

I grimace but cross into the kitchen nonetheless because the smell of bacon makes my stomach growl.

“It arrived on a train this morning, if you can believe it,” Sae tells me. “The firebombed the hell out of us so they’re trying to make it up with luxurious breakfast foods.”

The inside of Katniss’s house, while identical to mine in structure, seems like a ghost town compared to how it looked before our second Reaping, back when it was inhabited by all three Everdeen women.

The variety of dried herbs hung on the wall by her mother have since dissolved into a pile of fallen flakes on the countertops. The rows of medicinal tincture bottles are covered in dust, the careful handwriting of Primrose Everdeen fading away with time. Just like her sister. There is no cluster of shoes by the front door, no hunting jacket thrown haphazardly across one of the chairs.

“Oh,” I sigh, looking out into the living room to see the nest of blankets on the couch. Clearly, Katniss has taken to sleeping on the ground floor just me. I suspect it is because she wants to be close to an exit, doesn't want to be upstairs near the time capsule that was Prim’s old bedroom. For me, it's because I am uncomfortable sleeping on a soft, plush mattress after my months of detainment in the Capitol. I like the dense firmness of the couch better.

“She’s currently upstairs sitting in her closet,” Sae explains when she sees my gaze drift to the pile of throw pillows strewn across the living room rug.

“The closet?”

“Poor thing hides in there a lot,” Sae continues. “I can’t really get her to explain exactly why. But I would suspect it is because it is a safe place to hide.”

The breakfast plate before me blurs.

Katniss Everdeen was vicious. She was ruthless. She was a convincing, manipulative bitch who had tried to killed me and ruined the entire world. That was what Snow and his henchmen wanted me to believe, wanted me to remember.

Despite months of intense therapy and anti-psychotic medications, those shiny memories still bubbled to the surface daily.

But the startling reality was laying in front of me clearly. This tomb-like house practically echoed in silence. The Mockingjay was currently curled up in her dark closet with only Greasy Sae to nurture her.

It didn’t make any sense.

How am I supposed to reconcile the grieving portrait of a 17-year-old girl with the violent revolutionary she was depicted as?

Dr. Aurelius doesn't have any answers for me when I call him later in the afternoon from my couch. He has me do my grounding technique before we start accessing my old memories.

Naming five things I could see in front of me: Table. Empty mug. Three pill bottles.
Naming four things I could touch: Couch. Prosthetic leg. Tassles on the throw pillow. Phone.
Naming three things I could hear: Hum of my oven, currently cooking another round of cornbread muffins. Birds outside my window. The knuckles I keep cracking.
Naming two things I could smell: Aforementioned cornbread muffins. Soot from my fireplace.
Naming one thing I could taste: Bacon from this morning.

“Why don’t we go through some memories that you have of Katniss and her sister?” Dr. Aurelius begins.

The first one that immediately comes to mind is the Reaping. The actual version of Katniss volunteering, seen from the vantage point of where I stood with the other boys of my age group before my own name was called. The sounds of Prim sobbing while Gale threw her over his shoulder and carried her away.

There's a glimmer on the Capitol’s version, replayed from the angle of the cameras. The version where Katniss gallantly strode forward and pushed her sister aside, demanding to volunteer in the name of the glory and honor the Hunger Games represented. The ruthless tribute who sought blood in the Arena.

I detail more versions of true narratives for the doctor. Katniss and Prim reuniting when we returned home from our first Arena. The two of them sitting outside on the porch swing, taking a break and giggling while Katniss, Haymitch and I trained for the Quarter Quell.

Was I baking sugar cookies for Prim after the Victory Tour because she was the sweet baby sister of the girl I loved? Or was I trying to poison her to save her from Katniss’s inevitable murder spree?

Did Katniss really braid a ribbon through her sister’s hair or did she try and choke her with it?

Dr. Aurelius sighs at this one and I try not to flinch at the disappointment in his tone.

“What do you think, Peeta?” he asks.

I let the memories flicker through like a film reel, discarding the ones with a glossy venom coating.

“I think Katniss loved Prim more than anything in the world," I say slowly. "I think Katniss would have done anything to keep her safe, to keep their family together.”

“I would agree with that,” the psychiatrist says. “But what makes you think that at this present moment?”

“I remember them coming to the store window, of the bakery,” I continue. “Katniss was young, too young to even really see over the front window with the display case. But she would hoist Prim up onto her hip so she could see the cakes and pastries. They never bought one. Could never afford one. But Katniss knew it made Prim happy just to look at them. So they came by almost every day after school.”

I let the dusty, genuine memories fly by.

“My mother hated it. She would always complain about the ’Seam vermin’ standing in front of the shop, making up some bullshit story about how they would chase away paying customers. But my dad always liked seeing them there. A few times, when my mom wasn’t around, he would run out and sneak them a cookie to split. I think he always had a soft spot for them, seeing as how he loved their mother.”

“Your father had treats delivered to Prim every week after you and Katniss were reaped. Real or not real?”

“Real,” I tell the doctor. “At least, that’s what Prim told me.”

“Did you trust Prim?”

I only let myself envision the Primrose in District 13—those memories were completely free of any Capitol interference.

I think of her gentle voice, guiding me down from a bought of hysteria. I think about how she kept stealing brown sugar packets for me to pour into the sludge oatmeal that I was served every day. I think about how she applied a soothing ointment to my wrists when they began bleeding under my restraints.

She cared. She was a beautiful, generous girl who took care of me, even after I almost fatally injured her sister. Even after my fingers had wrapped around Katniss’s throat, Primrose never treated me differently. She could have hated me. She could have left me to decay in that makeshift hospital cell. But she didn’t.

For the first time in weeks, I allow myself to properly grieve for Primrose Everdeen. I grieve for her almost harder than I grieved for members of my own family.

The loss is staggering. The pain is overwhelming. It's no wonder Katniss locks herself away. If I had to deal with the magnitude of this loss everyday, I would be a basket case too.

“I did,” I tell the doctor. “I did trust her. It was kind of impossible not to.”

“Do you trust Katniss?”

The question makes my stomach twist uncomfortably.

“No,” I answer honestly. “I was fighting so hard to get my memories back, I barely could tell you which was was up and which way was down when I first got to 13. When we left for the mission with the Star Squad, I was living in constant fear of her. She was armed, for God's sake. Then everything got so confusing with Coin and her voting for a symbolic Games. I don’t even know her anymore. How could I trust her?”

Dr. Aurelius ponders this for a long moment and, through the phone, I hear him scribbling something on this notepad.

“Tell me about that moment with the berries.”

My sigh of exasperation is so loud, I hear the feedback through the receiver.

The doctor has me do this frequently. He has me recite memories like I am reading from a textbook. He never lets me stray to the Capitol-edited version. He makes me recall facts like I am listing off a recipe.

“Katniss removed the arrow from my tourniquet, which she placed there to try and save my leg,” my tone sounds stiff because I don't really know if I believe what I am regurgitating.

"She fired off the mercy shot that killed Cato after days of the mutts eating him. I said ‘We won, Katniss,’ but nothing happened so we climbed down from the top of the Cornucopia. They made the announcement that the rule change had been revoked and only one of us could win. Katniss pointed her bow at me and I told her to do it. I dropped my weapon and pulled the bandage off my leg.”

It is incredibly boring to tell this story to him for what feels like the millionth time.

“I told her that I love her. That life would be meaningless without her—which is puppy love bullshit because I was 16 and didn’t know what love was.”

“Peeta,” Dr. Aurelius warns, redirecting me back to the facts.

“She put the berries in my hand and asked me to trust her. We agreed to eat them on the count of three. I kissed her and then we put them in our mouths. We didn’t eat any and we spit them out after Claudius Templesmith announced us co-victors.”

I make an addendum under my breath.

“Then we got loaded into a hovercraft and I got my leg chopped off.”

“Your additional commentary, while accurate, is unnecessary at the moment for the sake of the exercise,” Aurelius tells me.

“What is the exercise exactly?” I reply, feeling my patience starting to wean.

“The exercise is an attempt to understand Katniss’s grieving process, her current catatonic state.”

Catatonic.

“Now, after reciting that factually accurate timeline, let’s go over your emotional response to it,” the doctor says.

We have had this conversation dozens of times. The genuine love I felt for Katniss in that moment was so strong that I was willing to die for her. The genuine humiliation I felt afterwards when I learned it was just an act made me ignore her for months. We have discussed at length the victim complex I developed at the beginning of the Victory Tour, having to listen to the fake storytelling over and over again at each stop.

“Why do you think Katniss held out those berries?”

I can almost feel the venom pooling in my bloodstream.

She wanted to start a revolution, I tell the doctor. She purposefully wanted to make the Capitol look weak. She wanted to undermine the Gamemakers and cause disruption in the Districts.

She never loved me. She didn’t care about me. She only wanted revenge. I was a pawn in her game of chess against Seneca Crane. Isn’t it obvious? She shot an arrow at the Gamemakers during her showcase.

“Take a moment to reflect on what you told me earlier, Peeta,” Dr. Aurelius says in a gentle voice.

I could tell I am frustrating him but he remains as patient as ever.

“This is what you told me about Katniss and Prim. You said, ‘I think Katniss loved Prim more than anything in the world. I think Katniss would have done anything to keep her safe, to keep their family together.’ Is that correct?”

I make a noncommittal grunt in confirmation.

“We’re almost out of time for our session today," Dr. Aurelius says. "I would like to leave you with something to ponder about before our next phone call. Katniss loved her sister more than anything. She volunteered to save her, knowingly sacrificing herself for Prim. Her bow was pointed at your heart in those moments before she held out the Nightlock berries. I see two reasons for why she could have killed you in that moment. One, as the Capitol tries to claim, would be to start a rebellion. We both agree now that that probably isn’t true. Two, however, would have been to get back to Primrose. To save herself so Katniss could be reunited with her sister.”

“That seems more likely,” I say with a lackluster tone.

“So why did she save your life?”

The age-old question.

“If Katniss was willing to do anything—anything—" Aurelius stresses, “To save her sister, why did she refuse to hurt you? Why did she save your life, when she could have put an arrow through your heart and been on the train home within days? Why was she willing to die for you? In that moment, she did not choose Prim. She did not choose the Capitol. She choose you, my boy.”

I swallow loudly to prevent myself from having to unpack the riddle he has deposited on my lap.

“Katniss is grieving horrifically for her sister. She is in pain. She is mourning the loss of the one thing she cared about most,” the doctor continues. “I will not divulge more about her condition since she is also my patient but I will leave you with this: You said Katniss was motivated by love. Love for her sister, specifically. But maybe her ability to love was very deep and wide.”

“Something to think about. I will call you on Tuesday,” the doctor says and the phone clicks off.

Fuck him.

Annoyingly, his words do toss around in my head for the night. Katniss is clearly deteriorating without her sister, obviously swimming in an ocean of grief. That is to be expected, especially by anyone who had the privilege of seeing their sisterhood up close.

Why didn’t she just kill me so she could go home to Prim? Why wouldn’t she do it?

I'm tossing around the question when I force myself over to her house for breakfast the next day. This time though, when I knock on the glass door of the kitchen, Katniss is sitting at the table.

She looks terrible and utterly surprised to see me.

The explosion burned off the end of her hair, so it was shorter than I have ever seen it. Her dark hair is greasy and falls in limp strands to the tops of her shoulders blades. Ordinarily, it would actually be a good look for her, accentuating her cheekbones and heart-sharped face. But her face is lifeless and gaunt. She has deep purple bags under her eyes, which look cloudy.

Katniss looks skinny. So skinny. The edges of her chin and her collarbone could slice open an orange rind. She typically only wears a large sleep shirt to bed, no pants. It was something that thrilled me on the Victory Tour but now, it seems to drown her.

“Good morning, Peeta,” Sae greet me, trying to tug me into the house. I stand frozen on the porch, clutching the loaf of bread tightly under my arm.

“Hi, Kat,” I breath.

The accidental and casual use of the nickname I used to call her seems to stun us both.

“Hi,” she croaks back, suddenly sitting up straight from where she was slouched over her toast.

“Is this alright?” I have to ask.

Sae immediately tuts but I keep my eyes glued on Katniss. I tried to kill her. I could understand her hesitation against having me in her house.

She merely nods.

I make polite small talk with Sae and Marigold, who is playing on the floor with Buttercup. Katniss watches me with her uneasy huntress’s gaze that is so startling, I feel like a deer under the tip of her arrow. When Sae finishes fixing me a plate of scrambled eggs with some of the bread I brought over, I slowly creep over to the table and sit as far away from Katniss as humanly possible.

We don't look at each other, only down at our plates. Sae hums an old District 12 folk song under her breath while she frets around Katniss’s kitchen. I quickly finish my plate—man, it had been so long since I had chicken eggs—and wash it in the sink.

Sae and I share a look. I know she can sense my nerves so I chalk up the outing as a mission accomplished and turn back to the side door to leave.

“Are you coming back tomorrow?”

The question knocks me off my kilter. She said it so quietly, I don't know know if she even meant to say it out loud. Based on the embarrassed glint in her eye, it doesn't look like Katniss meant to.

“I, um, well,” I sputter. “Well, the thing is…I…ugh...”

My cheeks flush red and I can feel Katniss’s eyes jump to my blush. Why am I so nervous around her? I used to shove my tongue down her throat for paparazzi.

It is a minuscule motion, one that could have easily missed by someone who wasn’t so trained to monitoring her expressions, but Katniss's mouth quirks up in the ghost of a smile.

“Boy, as long as I’m cooking, you’re welcome,” Sae interjects with a chuckle, trying to save me from the humiliating pit I have fallen into. “I don’t care if it is Katniss’s house. She’ll get used to it. I’m offering.”

Katniss doesn't reject this proposal. She doesn't go running and screaming up her stairs, back to her closet cave. While she doesn't verbally encourage it or offer her own invitation, I interpret her silence as acceptance.

“OK then, yes, thank you,” I murmur to Sae. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I bolt out of the house so fast, Sae’s laugh trails me across the lawn.

An hour later, while I am using my grounding technique to try and calm myself down, there's a knock at my door. I halt my anxious pacing but before I can grab a weapon, Sae pokes her gray curly head in my front door.

“That’s the first full sentence I’ve heard from her in a month.”

With a wink, she's gone.

I spend the whole night making cheese buns.

It was a family recipe, one I can't exactly remember off the top of my head. I assume that the Mellark family recipe book was destroyed by the firebombs but I wouldn't know. I hadn’t traveled into town since I returned to District 12.

The next morning, I warm them back up in the oven and carry the two batches I had winged with me to Katniss’s.

My hands are shaking less today but that doesn't stop me from having to bite down forcefully on my tongue as I knock.

Marigold answers the door this time, staring up at me with her large doe eyes. She can be a bit unsettling in her gaze, the same way I first felt in front of Annie Cresta. But the sweet girl merely smiles and prances back to where Buttercup is curled up by the front door.

“Good morning,” I say, clearing my throat. I purposefully avoid using her nickname again.

“Good morning, dear. What have you got for us today?” Sae asks, slicing up an apple at the counter.

Despite my nerve, I suddenly feel a rush of excitement as I turn to Katniss.

“Cheese buns.”

She doesn’t gasp outright but I hear the sharp intake of breath as she watches me place the basket on table before her. Her hair has been freshly washed and she has a touch more color to her face this morning.

Katniss reaches for one with a slightly trembling hand and tears it apart, a trail of steam rising against her cheeks. I am desperate to know her reaction but I stop myself from blurting out, “Well?”

Sae hands one to Marigold, who munches on it happily. The child says they look like the color of Buttercup and for the first time in a few months, I feel the urge to laugh.

Despite picking at her food the day before, Katniss slowly eats through two of my cheese buns. It makes me feel giddy.

Sae starts to pack up and I take that as my cue to also leave. Realistically, I know I should just leave like I did yesterday, but the absence of her reaction bothers me. Katniss used to moan about how much she loved my cheese buns. I made them every single morning when she broke her foot and she would playfully fight Prim for the last one, going as far as threatening to feed Prim to her own goat, Lady, if her sister cheated her.

“Well?” I say simply, gesturing to the basket. “I couldn’t remember the recipe so I had to wing it. As the official cheese bun connoisseur of District 12, what are your thoughts?”

Why can’t I shut up?

I know my cheeks are flaming again and Sae chokes down a laugh.

“They’re different,” Katniss says thoughtfully, examining another one between her fingers.

“Good different? Bad different?” I press.

“Not bad different, just different."

“I have work to do, it seems,” I say.

As summer transitions into fall, I make it my mission once a week to tweak the recipe. Sometimes, I get closer to what Katniss remembered. Other times, I fuck it up and she only gives me a shy shake of her head.

But each day, we are slowly able to open up more.

I ask about her mom. Tell her about the dumb television shows I have begun watching late at night. Talk out loud after different recipes I'm trying or how I really need a haircut.

She asks about the generic news coming out of the other districts, peppers me for questions about Johanna and Annie when I get calls from them. Katniss tells me about how she is going to rearrange all of her furniture because she doesn't like the set up.

We keep our conversations light and airy, just two acquittances catching up over coffee and baked goods. I never stay for long and we never broach any serious topics that we definitely need to address one day. But it feels good to be communicating with her in such a simple way. I always walk away feelings lighter, brighter.

This cheese bun mission begins to consume me. I spend hours pouring over the few cookbooks I have on hand, even going as far as reading one that was gifted to me by the pastry chef in the Capitol that had been selected to make the cake for our wedding.

That is a bad day. It triggers a massive episode so aggressive and loud that Haymitch comes running into my house with a lamp, thinking I was being murdered.

The flashback involved the wedding dress Cinna made her, which she wore during our final interview before the Quell. But during this venom-induced daydream, she tried to seduce me on our wedding night. She slinked out of the dress, wearing only lacey bridal lingerie, and tied my naked body to a bed. As a newlywed on my wedding night, I was thrilled as she started to climb over me but her eyes flashed red and the mutt began carving me up with a knife.

Haymitch slams through my front door as I am desperately trying to slide my couch across it, hoping to block my main exit point. Hoping to block my path to Katniss.

It's the most vivid and scary flashback I have had since returning to District 12. I'm mortified that my hijacked mind lost control while I was so close to her—just 25 yards away from her front door. I haven't felt that violent since our initial reunion where I almost strangled her to death.

I don’t go over to the Katniss’s house for breakfast for a whole week. I call Dr. Aurelius and ask him to send me several kinds of deadbolts from a hardware store in the Capitol. He wants to talk through the flashback and try to pinpoint what my triggers were. But I am so frantic, I can't even begin to process my panic.

When the package arrives on the train a few days later, Haymitch helps me install it. It's a two-way dead-bolt. One where I can lock myself in from the inside but also be locked in from the outside. It doesn’t feel wise to give Haymitch the key, but he is our only neighbor in the Victors' Village. He is also the only one in 12 who knows the depths of my hijacking, the threat I pose to Katniss’ safety.

“She asked about you today,” Haymitch tells me after we finished the installation.

It was a crisp September evening and the autumnal air felt cooling against my anxious skin from where we're sitting on my front steps.

“Did you tell her I had a meltdown?”

“I didn’t need to tell her. She heard the commotion. Couldn’t make out all the crazy shit you were yelling about her but she rightfully assumed you were having one of your attacks.”

With a deep sigh, I roughly tug my fingers through my hair.

Fuck.

“Did I scare her?”

“On the contrary,” Haymitch smirks. “It was a good thing Sae was there making dinner because she apparently tried to bolt over here to help you. Sae nearly had to wack her over the head with a frying pan to get her to stay put. She only stopped fighting once she realized I was here, so you weren't alone.”

The news feels like warm honey pouring down my veins.

“She wanted to help me?”

Haymitch fixes me with his curious gaze, the kind he gave us on that first train ride to the Games.

“Of course she wanted to help you, boy,” he says. “Despite all the shit she has been dealing with these past few months—well, years really—all she has ever wanted to do was help you. She just doesn’t always know how.”

We’re quiet for a long while as the sun begins to set over the village.

“That’s a hard thing for me to reconcile still,” I say quietly.

My thoughts flash back to the last meltdown I had in Katniss’s presence, in the tunnels below the Capitol after Finnick was killed. That memory is not shiny. It is so fresh and vibrant, I can still feel how rough her fingers were from handling guns, her bow and debris. She had clenched my face so tightly as she begged me to look at her.

“Stay with me,” she had said after pressing her lips to mine.

“Always.”

My reply had been immediate, unwavering. Buried within the cesspool of my mind, I knew even in my manic craze what the answer to our little riddle was.

Haymitch nods thoughtfully, quirking an eyebrow up at me.

“The doctors said it will take time,” he says, pulling a flask from his back pocket. “No one expected you to come out of this immediately.”

“Katniss did,” I remind him.

She seemed so angry at me after my hijacking. She had every right to be—I almost killed her. I had assaulted her. I had violated her trust. I was a monster and because of that, she immediately set out for District 2 with Gale and left me floundering in the bowels of District 13 with a team of terrifying doctors and hijacked memories.

“Katniss was disappointed because she was a wreck without you," Haymitch says. "Don’t forget, she beat the shit out of me when she found out the Capitol took you."

Haymitch points to the light white scar above his eyebrow. “Man, you should have seen the look on her face though, when I told her your rescue squad had returned and we were needed in the hospital. That was a nice moment.”

A hint of a smile graces Haymitch’s rough face.

“She was a 17-year-old girl who had survived two Arenas, was battling PTSD and that gnarly concussion that Johanna gave her. Plus, she was missing her Lover Boy,” Haymitch continues. “It was hard for her to grasp the magnitude of your recovery effort and she freaked out. She was scared.”

“I scared her,” I say. “Of course she wants nothing to do with me. I almost killed her. The thought of killing her crosses my mind every few days. It’s not safe here. I should go. I should leave.”

“Where would you go?”

“I don’t know, anywhere. I could go to 4 with Annie and Johanna. Live on the beach, far away from this depressing hellhole where I could snap and kill her at a moment's notice.”

My fingers began trembling again. This never used to happen to me. I used to have the steady hands of a baker and painter.

“You could go to 4,” Haymitch agrees quietly but his eyes still look guarded.

“She deserves better, Haymitch.”

For a moment, the tone of my voice startles both of us. It sounded like me. The old me, the me that wasn’t tortured in the Capitol. The me that was desperately in love with Katniss and begging Haymitch to save her life.

“She does,” he says thickly. “So do you.”

“Do you think I should leave?”

I can’t believe I have to have this conversation with my drunk mentor who offered me up as a sacrificial lamb on more than one occasion to keep Katniss safe. It is moments like this where I long for my dad, with his gentle, jolly demeanor and big bear hugs.

“If you want to leave, leave,” Haymitch says simply, taking a swig from his flask. “No one is forcing you to stay here.”

“But she’s forced to stay here.”

“As part of the conditions of her release, yes.”

Katniss Everdeen has consumed almost all of my waking thoughts for two years. What initially started as a crush, then love and motivation to keep her safe has since transformed into jealously, rage and hatred. I have been obsessed with her, in more ways than one. She has clouded my every decision, she is in almost all of my dreams and my nightmares. I have been hardwired to kill her.

I should leave, start a new life and leave her behind after all of this death, destruction and pain.

But I can't. I just can't.

Not before I had gotten the recipe right. Not before I coax a smile out of her. I used to pride myself on how easily I could make her laugh, even in the most stressful situations.

“Do you have a gun in your house?” I ask Haymitch suddenly.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I would have put the barrel in my mouth by now and pulled the trigger."

The rationale is sound but it still makes my blood run cold. I probably would have blown my own brains out the other night in my rampage if I had a firearm in the house. I briefly begin to contemplate whether Katniss has tried to hurt herself but my stomach turns to lead.

“If that happens again and she comes near me, you need to just kill me,” I tell Haymitch. “I’m serious. Just do it. Slit my throat, bash my head in. Whatever you need to do.”

“I’ll do it if I have do,” he responds simply.

“Oh, I know,” I tell him drily. “I already know that you have no issues killing me off. You’ve done it multiple times already.”

The drunk is quiet for a long moment, letting the gravity of my words sink in.

“The plan was always to get the two of you out together,” Haymitch eventually says quietly. “I just assumed that when the time came to extract Katniss, you would be with her. I never in my wildest dreams would have guessed that the two of you would be separated.”

“So now my capture is my fault?” I hiss. "For not being a fucking mind reader and automatically following through with your every whim when you never clued me into your plan?”

“Damnit, Peeta, that’s not what I’m saying and you know it,” Haymitch fires back.

“No, actually, I don’t know that. I don’t know how I am supposed to believe anything that comes out of your mouth. Because it turns out that I didn’t know any of you. I couldn’t fucking trust any of you,” I say, raising my voice as I stand to tower over him. “All these people that pretended to care about me betrayed me.”

“You wanted me to save her,” Haymitch says sharply, clearly trying to keep his temper in check as I start to rage. “You were president of the ‘Keep Katniss Safe’ Club.”

“And what did that title ever get me?” I snap. “An amputation, a stint of torture and the firebombing of my entire family.”

“You’re dumber than a bag of rocks if you actually think that,” Haymitch says.

“How am I dumb for pointing out the obvious? While I was bleeding out in a river bed, Katniss was galavanting around with burn ointment and bread."

Haymitch can't help but grimace.

“You know, for everything you kids went through, you should consider yourself lucky that you never had to mentor,” Haymitch says. “You were at the very least spared that horror, that responsibility, of leading children to their death.”

I roll my eyes and sigh deeply, turning my back to him so I can gaze out over the empty houses in the Victors' Village.

“Forty-eight. I was by myself having to mentor 48 kids,” Haymitch says, lost in thought. “You asked me why I didn’t keep a gun in my house. The reason is true, yes, so I wouldn’t put a bullet through my skull to end my misery. But the reason I didn’t do it after all these years is because I had to mentor. I couldn’t…”

His voice trails off and I hear him taking another sip from his flask.

“I couldn’t stand the idea of kids having to go through that experience alone. The Capitol wouldn’t have sent any other mentors for 12. Those tributes, those kids, would have had to go through the entire process by themselves."

Another sip. When he speaks again, it sounds like he was trying to keep himself from crying.

“I know you both drew the short stick with me,” he says thickly. “I know that I was a sorry excuse for a mentor. You got a very decent glimpse of that during our first day on the train."

“You mean when you puked on yourself and we had to beg you to actually give us advice,” I remind him bitterly. “What else? Oh yeah. You punched me in the fucking face."

Again, Haymitch is quiet for a lone time. The war seemed to have mellow him out somewhat. He seems exhausted constantly, a feeling I can at least empathize with.

“I am the first person to acknowledge that I’m an alcoholic,” Haymitch says slowly, like he was talking through a fog. “And I know that I let a lot of people down. A lot of tributes down. But I will swear on whatever you want me to swear on that I always tried to help my tributes. I wasn’t the best, I couldn’t always get them the flashiest sponsors or the most valuable parachute. But I could get them water or food when they needed it. I could get them a warm blanket before a Career came to slit their throat.

“Unlike every other district, who had multiple victors that could vouch for their kids, there was only one of me,” Haymitch reminds me. “So, yes, I had to make a choice. I prioritized Katniss, who had survival instincts. Before the rule change, I could only hope that one of you would survive past the bloodbath and I put all of my eggs in their basket. I won’t apologize for trying to help her, I was just trying to do my job.”

My memories from my first Games are the most hazy. The Capitol had the most footage to work off of there since we were in that Arena for longer. They took their time deconstructing every single second I was in there, from the moment I was in the launch tube to being carried away in the hoover craft. I half-heartedly continue listening to Haymitch as I run through my grounding exercise, pacing in front of where he stayed perched on my front steps.

“Sponsors were confused when you teamed up with the Careers,” he says. “You had confessed your feelings for Katniss on national television but then you allied with the crew that was her biggest threat. Some could see through your intentions, could see that you were essentially playing a double-agent. But some were put off by it.”

I scrub my hands over my face, letting my shiny memories flicker behind my eyes.

“Do you remember the rule change?” Haymitch eventually asks.

“Vaguely,” I acknowledge.

“You did that, Peeta,” he continues, renewed vigor in his voice “The star-crossed lovers angle was so insanely popular with the audience, the Gamemakers literally implemented a rule change that had never been done before because they wanted to see more of you on screen. They wanted to see you and Katniss together.”

“It was a fake rule change.”

“It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that you were so likable, so sincere, so kind towards Katniss, you convinced some of the most bloodthirsty assholes on the planet to essentially play matchmaker.”

I was already camouflaged at that point, weaving in and out of consciousness as I waited for death to claim me. I remember the pain, but not much else.

“Katniss literally yelled your name when it was announced,” Haymitch says and I can hear the smirk in his voice. “You could tell she was thrilled.”

My tormentors had shown me that moment too. They had manipulated me into thinking Katniss’ beaming expression was one of a conniving villain, not a 16-year-old girl who had a chance to ally with a boy from home. When she came to find me, I was tortured into thinking she stepped on my throat and tried to kill me.

I remember making her laugh though. Joking about frosting and kissing. Calling her sweetheart. Why would I have done that?

“The two of you together were like magic,” Haymitch says wistfully, pulling me out of my venom-soaked memories. The tone of his voice makes me curious so I turn around to see him gazing off into the distance, lost in his own memories with a smile on his face.

“It was so fucking wholesome,” Haymitch says. “In the middle of the Arena, fighting for your lives, and you were flirting your ass off, kid.”

His laugh, thick with emotion, bounces throughout the village.

“She was playing nurse, you were trying to schmooze her pants off. She’s flustered like a schoolgirl, instead of the hot-shot tribute that she had been up to that point. It was brilliant. Sponsors were practically falling over themselves trying to get to me,” the mentor jokes.

My memories of the cave are…complicated. The pain is vivid so my recollections are clouded before she got medicine during the feast—the one I don’t understand why she went to in the first place.

“You’re not going to die. I won’t allow it,” she had said right after our first kiss.

That is a genuine memory. It isn’t shiny in my mind. It is one I have turned over in my head a million times even before my capture. One I had dreamed up constantly since I was five years old.

But she had been acting. She was leaning into the romance, just trying to make it out of there alive. It wasn’t a real memory in the way I wanted it to be.

“She was hamming it up for the cameras, that’s true,” Haymitch says like he can see the tornado of confusion on my face. “But the chemistry between you two was electric. That was real. The care she showed you, that was real.”

Real.

“Mentors have to jump through hoops to get sponsor gifts approved. I sent what I could, which was little because they were saving your medicine for the feast,” he says. “Katniss was smart enough to interpret the signals I was trying to send her with each donation. It wasn’t the best system, but it kept you both alive.”

Haymitch slowly comes to stand next to me, hands in his pockets, looking out across the eerily pristine village that has been his home for almost three decades. Off in the distance, down a slopping hill and behind some burned trees, I can see the decimated town.

“Do you remember during your first Games when the two of you were poking fun at me? Joking about how you would both be stuck here with only me as your neighbor?”

I snort.

“We’re more than just neighbors, kid,” Haymitch says solemnly. “We’re all each other have left…We’re family...Katniss and I are here for you. Don’t move away. Don’t shut us out.”

With that, he walks away.

A gentle, autumnal sheen had begun to sweep over the grass. It was one of those warm, beautiful nights where the crickets are loud and cheerful. The kind of night where children used to play in the streets and adults would sit out on their decks until long after night had fallen, soaking in the crisp fresh air of the changing season. I can already tell by the fading sun that it is going to be a beautiful sunset. Deep orange, my favorite color, according to Katniss.

Before I recognize what is happening, my legs were carrying me across the lawn to her front door. My knuckles pound against the wood impatiently.

She seems surprised to see me but I spot a brightened lift in her eyes, like it was a happy surprise.

“Hey,” she exhales, stretching her arm up along her door frame. It almost seems like she is using the door to keep herself inside, to keep herself from launching herself at me. The movement makes me want to smile.

“Hey.”

“Are you OK?” she asks.

“There’s something that I need to do right now but I really don’t want to go alone,” I stammer out. “Will you come with me?”

Katniss blinks and her expressionless face cocks to the side to gaze at me.

“What is it?”

I force myself choke the words out.

“I need to go to the bakery,” I say softly.

“Oh, Peeta,” she breathes.

“I haven’t seen it yet and I need to,” I explain, looking down at my shoes. “I need someone with me—“

I wanted to swallow my next words, the venom in my head telling me that I was being coerced into them. But the truth is standing right in front of me. This woman is standing right in front of me, gazing at me with such a soft, tender expression—the first emotion I have seen on her face since my return.

“You,” I add. “I need you with me.”

She nods instantly. Katniss had walked through the destroyed district several times while it was still smoldering, giving her a sense of closure amid all the chaos and despair. I practically bolted to my house from the train station after I got back and refused to look back.

I need to come to terms with it now. I need to see for myself.

“Let’s go,” Katniss says, her voice light and loving.

I fidget on her porch as she tugs on some leather sandals. She wearing a baggy sweatshirt from the since-destroyed high school and jean shorts that accentuate her long, tan legs. On one thigh, I spy a speckling of a skin graft.

She gestures with one hand for me to lead the way. We are quiet on our walk, standing an awkward distance apart as we cross into the heart of District 12.

The immensity of the destruction hits me like a wave, even though I knew what I was walking in to. Almost nothing remains standing except crispy, blackened walls and foundation frames. The stretch of ash and smoke still hangs heavy in the air.

As we round the block to the bakery, I slow down.

“The Capitol did this after you shot the arrow at the Arena. Real or not real?” I ask her.

Katniss takes a deep breath.

“Real.”

“You didn’t know this was happening. They did this to hurt you, to hurt me. To squash the rebellion.”

“All real,” she says. “I didn’t know about it until I got to District 13. After the rebels took me, Finnick and Beetee out of the Arena—against my will, I might add.”

“You didn’t tell them to kill my family. You didn’t hurt them.”

I know my questions were blunt and hurtful, but I can't help it. She stops walking abruptly, chin quivering as she reaches out a hand to catch my elbow.

This is probably too much for her, considering she has spent large periods of time hiding out in closets. But Haymitch told me to reach out, that she was my family now. I have no one else left. So if she wants to help me, sorting out my memories is the best place to start.

“Peeta,” she starts, gripping my arm tightly and looking me in the eye. “I did not do this. I didn't know about it because I was in the Arena with you. It was the Capitol that did this. It was Snow that did this. When I heard what happened to your family, I was devastated. I would never want them to be hurt. I would have protected them with everything I had, if I could have. I’m so sorry that I failed.”

I believe her.

The gravel path leading up to the bakery is still caked in ash. There isn't much left standing, just charred remnants of my entire life.

I stare at the decimated structure for a long time. The sun is officially setting now and a golden hue fills the empty cavernous space.

“My family died here. Real or not real?”

“Real, Peeta,” Katniss whispers. “I’m so sorry.”

It's hard to look at bakery, now a meaningless pit of walls and wood. I can make out the tangled, molten mess that was the refrigerators, which appear to be the only things to make it out of the firebomb.

Seventeen years of my life, just gone. The bakery that had been in my family for five generations, gone. All traces that Dad, Mom, Rye, Rye's wife Holly and Graham had ever existed, gone.

My eyes zoom around ever inch, my brain trying to guess the exact spot where they were standing when their bodies disintegrated in heat and fire and hell. Is that where my father was standing, watching the broadcast of the exploding Arena on the little television propped up in the corner of the ceiling? Was my mother even watching or was she in the back room, doing the books and pretending I was already dead? Were my brothers in the square, watching on the big screen with the rest of District 12?

My legs suddenly feel weak beneath me and I crouch down, plopping down on my butt in front of the wreckage. Katniss hesitates for a moment before she joins me, sitting down a foot away from me and curling her legs up to her chest.

“I’m the last Mellark alive,” I tell her. “That doesn’t make any sense. I'm the youngest. My name was the one pulled at the Reaping. I was supposed to die first. I wasn’t supposed to be the only survivor.”

Katniss says nothing, which is actually more helpful than any list of generic consolations she could have rattled off.

She only listens. She listens as I talk about my memories growing up here, of my mother’s abuse, of my father’s aggravating silence, of my brothers and their constant bickering. She listens while I talk about the ache in my chest at their loss, the anger I feel imaging their last moments. I can only hope it was quick and painless. She listens while I tell her I hoped they hit this sacred place first, so my family didn’t suffer.

I begin crying at some point and I sense that she yearns to comfort me but she keeps her distance, which is probably a good thing. I feel on the verge of a flashback at any moment.

“I wish I could have buried them at least,” I say through my tears. “I can’t even give them a proper service. None of these people got that dignity.”

Katniss inhales sharply and I wince when I remember that neither her father nor Prim got to have funerals either. They both died in horrific and tragic ways as well, leaving Katniss with no avenue to mourn as well. Prim died in a similar fiery death, one that almost claimed both of us. We somehow only escaped with our scars and skin grafts.

“I go out to the primroses you planted me sometimes,” she says carefully after a few moments. “Usually in the middle of the night, after a nightmare. It helps, I think. Having a little place to grieve her purposefully, like a little memorial. Thank you for that.”

“You’re welcome,” I say, rubbing the tears off my face.

“Do you think something like that would help you? A memorial where you could honor them?”

I turn her question over in my head for a few moments before I respond.

“Yeah, I think so. Here,” I say, gesturing to the vast space before us. “I guess I technically own this land now. I could do something with it.”

Katniss nods and I turn my head to look at her properly. It seems so surreal to be sitting here with her in this moment, after so many months apart. She looks a little better than when I first arrived home and I can't help but wonder if that has to do with me. The thought makes my cold heart flutter slightly.

It occurrs to me that the last time I had a genuine moment of alone time with her—away from cameras, microphones, Capitol henchmen, District 13 goonies or other random people or victors —was probably when she broke her foot and we worked on her family’s plant book.

“Do you still have your family plant book?” I ask.

“Yeah, somewhere at the house. Why?”

“What if we made a people version?”

“A people version?”

“Yeah. I’m not ready to do anything at this site yet,” I explain. “I’m going to come back tomorrow so I can starting clearing the rubble and decide what I want to do with it—if I want to reopen a bakery or do something else here. But in the meantime, I need to be doing something. I can’t just keep living only to make a handful of loaves for the volunteers each day. I need to be productive, I need to make art. I need to channel all of this energy into something beautiful, otherwise it is going to eat me alive.”

“A book of people we lost? One where I write out memories and you draw portraits?” she asks.

“Yeah, something like that,” I clear my throat, watching the various emotions flicker past her eyes.

“Can I be honest with you?” Katniss’s voice is small and timid.

At first, the question makes my skin bristle. The hijacked section of my brain tells me to snap at her, accuse her of always lying to me. But her wary expression keeps me grounded to this scorched earth.

“I would like that,” I finally say with some difficulty.

“I think a book is a lovely idea,” she says and the tension leaves me quickly. “I would love to work on that with you. But I just don’t think I’m ready to do something like that quite yet. Everything is still so new and fresh. I’m still…struggling with only basic things and I worry that would send me into a spiral again.”

“I understand. I’m sorry I —“

“No, please don’t apologize,” Katniss says, finally reaching over to brush her finger tips along my forearm. The touch is quick and soft, a simple reassurance from a person who had touched my body a million times.

“I think that’s a good goal for me, actually,” she continues. “Dr. Aurelius keeps telling me that I need to set routines and goals for myself, reasons to keep getting out of bed and all that bullshit.”

I snort gently at her mocking tone. She sounds so much like herself in that moment, the Katniss I remembered in the depths of my mind, that I almost smile.

“Getting to a place where I’m ready to work on a book like that with you seems like a good goal.”

I nod but decide to press her further. She is finally opening up to me, getting to a place to wanting to talk. I don’t want to push her and cause her to retreat back into her shell. But I want her to keep communicating.

“And in the meantime?”

“I know what you mean about wanting to keep your hands busy,” Katniss says, unraveling from her tight ball and stretching out her legs in front of her. “I don’t think I’m doing well with all this idle time. But I also don’t really want to go into the woods right now. That seems too much, like there’s too many metaphorical demons in that forest for me to face just yet.”

She doesn't need to explain it to me. I can probably guess.

Gale. Gale’s alleged involvement in the death of her sister. Her connection to her late father. Our first Arena. Katniss needing to hunt to survive after her mother checked out on her — the first time. Killing animals, people she’s killed.

“Do you need another pair of hands?” she asks, gesturing to the piles of rubble before us. “Maybe some old fashion manual labor would do us both some good.’'

“I think you’re right,” I say.

Chapter 2: Clearing The Rubble

Summary:

Peeta and Katniss begin the daunting task of removing the rubble from the bakery, a task that leaves Peeta battling intense flashbacks of his torture and imprisonment. But the cleansing spirit gives Peeta and Katniss the opportunity to finally talk through some very important things.

The task of cleaning up the ruins of the bakery feels a lot more daunting in the morning light.

Katniss and I are standing shoulder-to-shoulder now, gazing out over the blackened walls and piles of molding, wet wood shards.

Part of me wants to put this off another day. After all, it had been over a year since the Capitol bombed it, what harm could one more day do? Little bursts of weeds have started gathering by what was the front door. Really only the lower frame of the once two-story building remains.

“You don’t have to do this, you know?” Katniss says quietly. “There’s lumber crews from District 7 and several construction teams that can take care of this.”

“I know,” I say. “But I need to.”

She simply nods and follows my lead into the ruins of my childhood home.

We are armed with wheelbarrows and shovels, including several other tools we stole from Haymitch’s basement. I can feel her eyes on me as I turn in a circle, trying to imagine the last time I stood in this spot.

After our first Games, I rarely visited the bakery. My family had not anticipated that I would return and had already mourned my death. Rye and Holly had moved into a small apartment above the sweet shop across town, being primed to take over for my parents eventually. Graham was still living in our old room. My father was thrilled when I came home and was the only one who attempted to help me recuperate.

My mother was angry. She was furious that I had told the story of Dad falling in love with Katniss’s mother on national television. Within the first week of me leaving the Arena, she had slapped me across the face and told me I had humiliated her. Forget the fact that I was recovering from an amputation and had barely begun walking again. She could care less and told me as much as I packed up my few belonging to move into the Victors’ Village alone.

“Here,” Katniss says gently, pulling me out of my memories. She hands me a handkerchief that she just doused in water from a small metal canteen. I watch as she ties another one around her face.

“Mint water,” she explains, pulling her braid out. “Old miners trick from my dad. Helps with the debris.”

I nod at her thankfully.

We slowly begin the process of shoveling the ash of my former home. Initially, I feel a wave of awkwardness, a push to full the silence with conversation. But I know that I have always been able to be comfortable with Katniss, despite the history between us. This anxiety I feel is because of this space, this graveyard I am scrapping off the floor.

Katniss explained that any bodies that were identifiable in the aftermath of the bombing were solemnly removed and placed in a mass grave at the meadow. No one knows if my family is there or if their bones disintegrated in the blaze. I know the possibility of finding a bone right now is high but I say a silent prayer that their remains were whisked away with a year's worth of rain, snow and wind.

I take a sledgehammer to some rickety frames, feeling a delicious ache in my upper back muscles that have long been out of use. Katniss works behind me, shoveling debris into one of the wheelbarrows. Eventually, she fills it and walks it up the path to the main construction zone by the former Justice Building, where massive collection bins are staged for volunteers.

We’re both out of shape as we haul the soot-covered mess around town. I can see her stretching out her back after a few hours but when I turn to tell her to go home, she waves me off. She wouldn’t leave me right now, even if I demanded it. She knows how comforting her quiet presence is.

A few hours in, I find the remnants of a cookie tin. It is white metal with a dainty blue design. This piece is only a shard of the lid but it still ripples me back in time, to my father quietly opening one in the backroom and pulling out an elaborately frosted cookie. A treat after one of my mother’s particularly awful rampages.

I feel the rush of a flashback start to thread up my muscles, the ghost of tracker jacket venom beginning to make my limbs twitch. I’m on my knees before I realize what is happening.

Visions of Katniss hitting me like my mother, visions of manufactured and cruel insults whipping off her tongue. Across the way, Katniss slows her movements, swiftly lowering her shovel to the ground. I feel a wave of nausea as she almost unconsciously raises her hands to me to show she is weaponless.

I open my mouth to tell Katniss to leave but she’s already one step ahead of me, ripping her backpack open to douse a second cloth in the wet mint water.

Moving slowly, like she was approaching a feral animal, Katniss wipes the clean cloth across my dusty forehead before laying it across the back of my sweaty neck.

“Do you remember hot chocolate? From the train? I think about that stuff all the time,” she says. Even with her lower face covered, I can see that her eyes are bright and teasing. She’s trying to pull me out of it.

“I do too,” I croak out, forcing myself to deeply inhale the refreshing scent. The cloth she put on my neck helps pull me back to the moment I’m in, keeping me grounded.

“We should order some, especially when the weather gets colder,” Katniss says simply. It’s hard to even thing about that now, given how the September sun was pelting down on us.

I’m still having difficulty catching my breath but, seemingly reading my mind, Katniss kneels and pulls off my makeshift mask.

“We got a lot done today,” she continues on, her voice sweetly strained as she tries to keep me present. “I think maybe we should go home, take a break. I smell like a pig pen.”

We had been out here most of the morning and managed to clear a lot. We were both covered in dirt, an epitome of the District 12 stereotype. Katniss hands me another canteen of clean water and I gulp readily.

“Yeah, let’s go,” I sigh.

The venom-induced tightness in my chest doesn’t dissipate though when we leave. Katniss chats quietly as we head back to the village, clearly trying to distract me. But all I can do is count the number of steps I have left until I can safely lock myself in. I thank her for her help and quickly shuffle up my stairs, immediately stripping off my sweat-drenched clothes in my foyer.

Showering has been difficult for me since the Capitol. I can do it, unlike Johanna, who suffered much more waterboarding than me. But the pounding sounds of water still raise the hairs on the back of my neck. It’s too hot to take a bath and I’m desperate to get the stifling dirt from my family’s grave sight off of my body so I force myself in without delay.

A ripple of a flashback comes as I press my hands against the emerald green tiles. I can see a Capitol "doctor” standing over my gurney as they pour water onto my covered face, not completely unlike to the handkerchief I had been wearing earlier. The team of Peacekeepers who strip me naked as they beat me against the sterile white tiles of that torture chamber.

I stare down as my feet as I see the trails of dirty water climb down my shins, collecting at the drain.

The doctor that performed most of the medical procedures on us had dark black hair and tan skin, not unlike Katniss and others from the Seam. I force myself to imagine the coloring of Katniss’s hair now, the intricacies of the strands that reflected various shades of gold and ember when in sunlight. Her hair used to be surprisingly soft when it was untangled from her lengthy and full braid. Despite years of starvation and malnutrition, the thick hair she inherited from her father always felt smooth under my finger tips.

Once I’m clean, I quickly leap out of the shower and take my anti-anxiety medication aimed at preventing the attack from escalating.

I lay on my empty bed for a long time, with only a towel wrapped around my waist. I rarely sleep in this room, still finding the mattress too soft. But for the first time in months, the bed feels comforting under my aching muscles, like a warm hug. I doze in and out for a few hours, letting the weight of my tired body sink into the pillows.

Hunger pulls me out of bed, into some clothes and down to the kitchen as the sun begins to set. The medication makes my tongue feel thick and numb, so nothing in my fridge sounds appetizing. So I settle on a hunk of bread smothered in butter, taking it out onto the porch to soak up the orange glow.

Katniss emerges from Haymitch’s house, shaking her head as she shuts the door behind her.

“He alive?” I call over to her.

“Barely,” she scoffs as she crosses over the grass of my lawn. “I brought him some dinner but he is just now getting up for the day. So I guess it is breakfast.”

As she moves to continue to her own house, I catch her eye and pat the spot next to me on the cream colored cushion of my swing.

Her gray eyes light up slightly as she climbs my front steps. I use my foot to slow the swing so she can settle down next to me. With a gentle push, I send us rocking again as she curls her knees up to her chest.

She has also showered and her dark, wet tresses are pulled back into a fresh braid. I can’t look over the reflections in her hair when it is dark and ebony.

“Tell me about the roof, before the second Games,” I ask her quietly after a few moments.

Her eyebrows raise in surprise.

“You remember that?”

“Yeah, I don’t think they fucked with that memory.”

“That’s surprising,” Katniss says mostly to herself, furrowing her brow in memory. “Surely they had cameras up there.”

“Maybe they just didn’t get to it,” I shrug. “Maybe it was too pure, there was nothing for them to twist.”

Her eyes narrow at my in playful suspicion.

“If you remember it, why do you need me to tell you about it?”

I bite down a grin. Whether the medication has made me loopy or I’m simply drunk off of her company, I feel bold enough to stretch out on arm behind her along the back of the swing. The picture of casual innocence but it is a gesture that brings her body within the open circle of my arms, a place she hasn’t been in months.

“It’s a nice memory,” I say simply.

She hums in agreement and rests her cheek on her knee to look at me sideways.

“It is a nice memory,” Katniss says and I can hear the wistful tone in her voice. “That is…that is the last time I remember being truly happy, even if it was only for a few hours.”

Her statement stuns me for a moment.

“That was so long ago,” I say and almost immediately regret it. It had been over a year since she felt a moment of happiness? The thought makes my heart ache. “We were days away from going back in. Everything was about to go to shit and we were sitting ducks waiting for our deaths.”

“Yeah, but I was with you.”

My breath catches in my chest at the simplicity of what she said, the dreamy simplicity of it.

Her cheeks flush prettily in the glow of the sunset and she turns her face away from me, looking back ahead of us.

“Even if it was just for a few hours, everything was OK,” Katniss whispers into the late summer air. “When we were together, everything was less scary. Everything was more fun.”

The muscles in my bicep flex as I work to keep my arm casually resting behind her. The desire to pull her against my chest, to pull her into a hug, is overwhelming but I keep my hands to myself. Beyond a few finger brushes or shoulder bumps, we had barely touched since that moment we departed at Tigris’s apartment in the Capitol, before the world exploded and nearly ended.

“Yeah, it was,” I say, remembering flickers of the apple we bounced off the forcefield for hours. I think of her hair on that day, splayed out across my lap as I weaved a flower crown into the soft strands. I can still feel the weight of her head against my thigh as she snoozed in the July sun.

“That confuses you, doesn’t it?” Katniss asks with a small smile.

“It does,” I say with a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Peeta,” Katniss says with a kind, quiet voice. It’s the first time I’ve heard my name from her mouth in a while and I let the notes roll over me. “There is so much history between us, so much confusion, so much miscommunication. I’m to blame for most of it. The Capitol, the rest. I wish I could explain it all with a simple ‘real, not real.’”

She grimaces as she raises her finger to her temple.

“But it’s pretty messy up here,” she explains. “It has been for years, but ever since I woke up on that hovercraft and realized you weren’t there…”

I hear the emotion cake in her voice as she drifts off. She tightens her grip on her body. It’s like she’s physically trying to keep herself from falling apart.

This is territory we haven’t touched in the weeks since I returned to 12. Our conversations have always been light and superficial. We haven’t waded into the murky water that is all of the pain between us. Part of me is terrified, but the other part is hanging on to every word coming from her soft, coral lips.

“Will you tell me about it?” I ask the question before I realize I’m doing it.

I feel her body stiffen next to mine and I say a silent prayer that this conversation isn’t going to make her run back upstairs to her closet cave.

“Haymitch said you’re the one who gave him that scar on his face,” I add, hoping the lightheartedness in my tone will ease the tension that has settled between us.

Katniss gives a lifeless chuckle as she glances towards the dark house of our mentor.

“I would have killed him,” she says simply. I can just make out the shape of Haymitch moving around behind his windows. “If I hadn’t just been electrocuted or whomped in the head by Johanna, I would have killed him with my own two hands.”

“Why didn’t you?” I ask. The question is selfish, I know. Asking her why she didn’t kill on my behalf. But I can’t help myself.

“Finnick dragged me out,” she explains and the haunted look returns to her eyes as she remembers our dead friend. “I don’t know how many people it took to finally restrain me to the gurney and sedate me. I…I lost it.”

The weight of her words sits heavily in the air. But something about the tenderness of our bodies, curled around each other on the swing I keep pushing, seems to encourage her to continue.

“It took a few days to get to 13 because they had to avoid Capitol airspace,” she says. “I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink, I couldn’t even talk. I was so angry at Haymitch for breaking his promise to me, for not rescuing you. I was already a numb shell by the time we got to 13 and they told me what happened here.”

Here, the firebombing. The death of my family. The retaliation for her arrow striking the forcefield.

“Who did tell you?” I ask out of curiosity.

She flinches at the memory and simply says, “Gale.”

His name seems to sour the mood, like it always did. It’s the first time I’ve heard her mention him since I came back.

I only nod, twisting to look back over the village.

“Those few weeks in 13,” Katniss continues, watching me carefully like she is trying to hold on to the conversation and not let the mention of Gale wedge between us. “Were some of the worst weeks of my life.”

It’s hard to imagine, knowing the state she’s been in for months since the death of her sister.

“I was labeled 'mentally disoriented,'” she says with a small smirk, trying to lighten the mood again.

“Hey, me too,” I joke and the sound of a cracked laugh escapes her. My heart thumps in my chest. It’s the most she’s talked to me, the closest I’ve gotten to a real Katniss laugh.

“Well, you win that one,” she rolls her eyes and the action makes me laugh too. Ordinarily, joking about what I went through wasn’t part of my coping strategies but it seemed playful with her. She was right - everything seemed better when we’re together.

I have so many questions, so much I want to ask her about. But we’ve seemed to come to a comfortable stopping point so I restrain myself, resolved just to enjoy the warmth of her body heat next to me.

The next morning, I have a call with Dr. Aurelius. We go over all the medications I’m on — anti-psychotics, anti-depression pills, burn cream, pain pills for the healed skin grafts on my back—but I find myself drifting over to the topic of Katniss again.

“I wish I could just get her to sit still and answer all of my questions,” I tell the doctor.

“I understand that feeling,” Dr. Aurelius jokes and I find myself laughing again. “I also understand feeling like you need to sort out all of these memories and categorize them into neat little moments so you can remember how you’re supposed to feel about something. But that will never happen exactly as you want it to, Peeta.”

“Why not?”

“Because Katniss cannot supply all of your memories for you. She’s not you. Over time, with therapy and self-care and memory work, more will come back to you as we undo the damage inflicted by the Capitol,” Dr. Aurelius says. “But Katniss wasn’t responsible for your hijacking and she’s not responsible for undoing it. She helps, of course. She helps piece together the blanks or counter-act the narrative that your tormenters created.

“But I would encourage you to try and live in the moment with her, not the past,” he adds. “Feel whatever you’re feeling in the moment. Don’t let the memories dictate your future. Strive to do what makes you happy and create new memories.”

I’m quiet for a long time, which is usually when he decides to hit me with his deepest questions.

“Does being with Katniss now make you happy? Does her presence bring you comfort and happiness currently, or is it residual feelings of closeness with someone you have shared a lot of trauma with?”

We are obviously trauma-bonded for life, Katniss and I. It is both a blessing and a curse to have someone who knows what it was like to be in my two Arenas with me. Talking to Annie or Johanna or Haymitch helps in a way that other victors can understand. But Katniss understands so much more. She knows about growing up in District 12, about the pressures we uniquely faced together and the odds we challenged. She knows me, possibly more than any other person on the planet does.

But when I think about to the last few weeks we’ve spent getting to know each other again, I feel a wave a calm. Our gentle conversations in the mornings over breakfast, the relief I felt when she opened the door the other day and came with me to the bakery. The deep fondness I felt for her as she spent hours shoveling ash and dirt, simply because I needed help.

“I like being around her,” I tell the doctor. “I feel the most like myself, the most like Peeta, when she’s with me.”

“It’s scary to admit that, isn’t it?” he prods gently.

“Of course, especially about Katniss as all people,” I say. “I remember feeling so much light in my chest when she told me she needed me on the beach during the Quell. I loved her and I wanted to keep her alive, but I don’t think I ever truly acknowledged how much I needed her too.”

“Needed?” Dr. Aurelius asks. “As in the past tense?”

“Need,” I say simply.

Our session ends but I’m feeling nauseous after that conversation, so I can’t even hang up the phone. I debate skipping Katniss’s for breakfast. I could call her and say that I’m sore from yesterday, that I don’t feel good emotionally after such a taxing activity, that I don’t want to go back to the bakery again.

The ringing of the phone startles me out of my pathetic inner monologue and I’m scared to look at the caller ID, hoping it isn’t the doctor calling back to chastise me for needing Katniss Everdeen, the one person I have been programmed to hate.

A flood of relief washes over me when I see Annie’s name flash across the phone.

Katniss may understand me more than anyone else in the world, but Johanna and Annie come in close behind her. Because they will understand a segment of my life that Katniss never will. Those weeks in the Capitol, the torture and pain and sorrow. I can still hear their screaming ringing in my ears, hear the desperate way Annie cried in her sleep for Finnick.

I shake the memories from my head as I answer the phone.

“Hello, my friend,” I say. “Are you calling to tell me your baby is here? I could use some good news.”

Her soft, gentle tone crackles with a pleasant laugh.

“I wish, I feel like a whale,” Annie tells me. She’s almost nine months along. She’s expected to deliver almost any day now. Johanna is there with her in District 4, officially taking Annie under her wing on Finnick’s behalf.

I was floored when she wrote to tell me she was pregnant. She found out when I was still in the Capitol hospital getting psychiatric treatment after the fall of President Snow. I was terrified for her initially, reeling with a sudden pregnancy and single motherhood after the death of her newlywed husband. But something about carrying Finnick’s child seemed to ground her, keep her tethered to reality when he was no longer there to be her anchor. She had a reason to live now.

We chat for a few minutes about how she is feeling so close to her due date. She asks about Katniss, as she always does.

“She’s doing better, I think,” I tell Annie truthfully. “She’s actually helping me clean out the site of my family bakery.”

“That’s very kind of her,” Annie says. She has a bit of a soft spot for Katniss, feeling attached to her in the same way Katniss also feels about her and Johanna. Something about the bond between the three female victors, despite various temperaments and personality styles, has them united together.

“It is,” I tell her. “It’s nice to have her there. It’s…difficult.”

“I can imagine,” Annie says. “How are you handling it?”

“Not well,” I acknowledge with a chuckle. “I had a panic attack in the shower yesterday.”

Annie’s sigh is sympathetic, understanding. I don’t need to elaborate, I don’t need to explain.

“Surprisingly, it helps me to swim,” Annie says. “Growing up in District 4, it was part of me. But after my Arena, I couldn’t swim for months.”

She only survived her Arena and won her Games because she was such a strong swimmer.

“The actual physical activity helped heal me after a few months. Now, I’m even planning a water birth,” Annie tells me. “Do you have something like that? An activity that helps calm your mind?”

“Baking,” I answer reflectively. “But that always felt partially like work or obligation to me. It helps clear my head but there are so many steps and memories associated with it. I used to paint though. I painted a lot after my first Games.”

The doctors in 13 and the Capitol tried to get me to do art therapy but I still had too much venom in my system, was still too angry and volatile to even hold a paintbrush for an extended period of time. I haven’t even gone into the art room I created in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs. I hadn’t wanted to see the canvases of that forest-covered Arena, the look of the Cornucopia, the glint in the mutts’ eyes as they clawed at Cato’s face, the image of Katniss in that cave.

“I could send you some fresh supplies, if you’d like,” Annie offers. “We have beautiful watercolors here, ground from the various seashells. I’d love to mail you some.”

Her offer seems to thaw another frozen edge of my heart.

“I would appreciate that, Annie, thank you.”

Later that afternoon, while we’re cleaning at the bakery again, I tell Katniss about my phone call with Annie.

“I should call her. I haven’t talked to either of them in a few weeks,” Katniss says quietly, pushing her wheelbarrow around what used to be the front counter.

“Did painting really help me before?” I ask her. I know the answer, but part of me constantly seeks validation from her response. Like she’s reinforcing what I already know about myself.

“Yes, it helped with your nightmares, I think,” Katniss replies. She eyes me over her shoulder. We haven’t talked about our dreams.

“They’re pretty bad,” I tell her truthfully. “I think I haven’t painted yet because I’m scared of what I’ll see.”

With our mint masks, we return to our piles that we left yesterday. After a few minutes, she asks, “Do you want to talk about it? What you see?”

This is it.

This is her finally ready to open up to me, finally ready to talk. My mind is spinning with possibilities, it takes me a moment to compose myself.

“A lot of it is surprisingly that in-between period, after they took me out of the Arena but before they started the hijacking,” I tell her. “Before the venom.”

She is moving slowly, methodically around with her shovel.

“I did a lot of pacing, in that cell,” I tell her. “Wondering if you were OK, trying to figure out what happened with the explosion, trying to figure out why you did it. They beat me and electrocuted me but everything was below my neck, to keep my face clear for cameras.”

Her back is to me and she’s stopped moving, clenching the wood handle of her broom tightly within her palms.

“That’s what a lot of my dreams are recently,” I explain. “That white, sterile room. Where I’m holding onto the vestiges of my sanity, the last moments of me before the injections started. Back when I remembered everything as it was, back when I —“

I see the shudder pass through her tan shoulders under her tank top. She knows why I cut myself off.

Back when I still loved you, back when I didn’t hate you, back when I was yours.

Part of me feels like loving Katniss is engrained into my very soul, that it is a muscle memory I couldn’t possibly forget. That’s why I always wanted to comfort her, to touch her head, to pull her body towards mine. But my mind has gotten so far away from me, I don’t really remember what loving her felt like. It is a distant memory, fuzzy under the venom.

“They didn’t tell me where you were. I assumed you were dead before they pulled me out for that first interview with Caesar,” I add on.

I don’t know if she can tell that I’m watching her, because she steels her spine before she answers.

“I assumed you were dead too,” she says in a voice just barely above a whisper.

It’s noisy a few blocks away where a construction crew is laughing and joking with each other while they work. But in the little bubble of this disaster zone, it feels like it is just Katniss and I, in another cave.

“Did you see the interviews?”

“I did,” she says, turning slowly to face me. “It…it was the first time I felt a momentary glimmer of relief, seeing your face. I could tell something wasn’t right, I could tell you were hurt even if it wasn’t visible. But hearing your voice…”

She closes her eyes and exhales deeply.

“Is that when you went to Coin and made the deal for my pardon?”

Katniss’s eyes flew open again in wild surprise.

“You know about that?”

I nod. “Plutarch told me, during your trial.”

“Oh,” Katniss breathes, moving to rest her shovel against the melted frames of the refrigerators. She crosses her arms around her torso, holding herself together again. I want to pepper her with more questions but I want her to elaborate, something she can sense from my silent gaze.

“Yes,” she says simply. “Prim told me that being Mockingjay would give me leverage that I could use. Seeing you gave me the boost I needed to make the immunity deal but it was also the first true glimmer of distrust I had for Coin. Her willingness to criticize prisoners of war…”

Katniss shakes her head angrily, clenching her jaw tightly.

“I played their game for few weeks until the interview where you warned us about the bomb strikes,” she says. “It…you saved a lot of lives, Peeta. Everyone was able to get further below ground to the shelter because of your warning.”

I remember in a flash the pain, the brutal beating that left my blood splattered on the pristine oriental rug in Snow’s mansion. But I still feel a rush of relief at her words, knowing that my warning helped.

“That was a long night,” Katniss says. “A long few days. It was difficult being stuck down there with the explosions, especially after my dad…”

It’s my turn to sigh heavily now. I hadn’t even thought about that.

“To pass the time, Prim and I played this game with Buttercup, waving a flashlight around so he would chase it. It occurred to me suddenly that was what Snow was doing. Keeping you alive, broadcasting you over T.V. He was taunting me, taunting Finnick. Dangling you in front of me.”

She’s right, of course. But the memories of the torture begin flashing in front of my eyes so rapidly, I can barely see her anymore.

“I went to see Finnick, because he was the only one who understood what I felt,” Katniss continues. “He said…Well, he said a lot of things.”

Her faces flushes and I can tell she’s editing herself suddenly.

“But one thing that really struck me is that he said it takes 10 times longer to put yourself back together than it does to fall apart. I fell apart instantly in that hovercraft when they told me what happened to you. And it took me weeks—weeks—to pull myself together again.”

She looks up suddenly and I can see silver lining her eyes. Tilting her head back, she tries to keep them from leaking out.

“They sent us above ground after the attack. They wanted to film me saying some shit about how I was ‘alive and well,’” Katniss scoffs. “But all across the earth were dozens and dozens and dozens of roses.”

My stomach turns. I know immediately what happens next without her having to tell me.

“And I became unhinged,” Katniss winces. “I just crumbled. I knew instantly, in that moment, that being the Mockingjay would lead directly to your death. That Snow would kill you slowly, make me watch, as punishment. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t even breathe, I just started sobbing in Haymitch’s arms.”

She roughly rubs the back of her hands over her eyes, fighting back the tears that are threatening to spill over.

“They had to sedate me again,” Katniss says, her voice a cold sing-song. “But that is when they finally decided to send in the rescue team.”

She’s looking everywhere but me. I can’t take my eyes off of her.

We’re talking about such horrifying things. My torture, my imprisonment, my near death. But I can hear the pain in her voice, hear how the thought of losing me broke her so completely. Despite all the darkness, there is light in the fact that we’re discussing it, here and now. Standing across from each other on literal wreckage. Together.

“I’m sorry,” she finally croaks and I know that, at last, the damns are bursting. “I’m so sorry, Peeta. I should have fought harder. I should have torn the earth apart trying to get to you sooner. I should have demanded everything immediately. I never should have let them separate us in that fucking Arena.”

“Katniss,” I murmur, taking a step towards her but she peels away from me with her hands raised.

“No, I have to get this out. I’m a terrible, terrible person and you should hate me,” she cries, tears at least streaking down her cheeks. “I didn’t try hard enough to save you. I was stupid and weak and I never should have been the Mockingjay. You are the one they should have saved. You’re the good one. The kind one. The pure one. The one too good for this Earth. You didn’t deserve this, any of this. It should have been me that they tortured.”

Her voice is high and tight, flirting with the edge of hysteria.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Katniss chants. “I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m sorry about your leg. I should have just eaten those damn berries myself. Everything would have been fine then. You would be fine then and Prim would still be alive and 12 would still be here and —“

“And I would have had to mentor another set of children into an Arena with Haymitch,” I interrupt her. “The world would be the exact same if I had walked out of that Arena alone. You changed the world, Katniss. You ended the Hunger Games. You brought down the Capitol. You did that. Not me.”

She’s shaking her head so forcefully, her hair starts falling out of her braid. Her chest is heaving painfully with guttural, broken sobs that ricochet through to my very soul.

“They took you. They hurt you. It’s all my fault, everything is my fault,” she heaves.

I feel a moment of regret, for having forced this conversation upon us, for forcing her to reopen these wounds that she has been trying to heal. But she hasn’t really been trying to heal, has she? She’s been going through the motions, pretending to be alive, stuck in this pain that she has kept inside. She must have felt so alone these last few weeks.

“Can I hug you?” I ask quietly.

She laughs through a sob.

“You should go. You should leave 12 and start a new life, far, far away from me,” Katniss cries. “You should hate me. You should never want to see me again. You should go off and fall in love with someone who deserves you, someone who is good.”

The L-word. The word we’ve been avoiding.

“You are good, Katniss,” I say quietly.

Just like the other day speaking with Haymitch, I’m struck by how much I sound like my old self.

She shakes her head again and opens her mouth to rebut me.

“You are good, Kat,” I breath, taking a step towards her.

The use of my nickname makes her take a deep, shuddering breath amid her break down. I crack a sad smile at her.

“You are better,” she moans. “You are the best person I have ever known. This beautiful ball of sunshine and happiness and hope. And I have brought nothing but pain and suffering to your life since the moment I entered it. You should have let me die all those years ago. You never should have given me that bread. Maybe you would be happy. Maybe you would have fallen in love with a beautiful, kind girl who didn’t hurt you so much.”

“Don’t say that,” I urge. “Don’t ever say that I should have let you die. That’s not what you and I do, remember? We protect each other.”

“But I didn’t protect you,” Katniss wails again, suddenly louder. She spins away further from me, marching across the bombed out room. “You needed me. You needed me to be strong and to save you. You needed me after you were hijacked and I was petty and stupid and childish. I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.”

This, I can’t necessarily argue with her against. As the venom left my system and I was shackled again to a bed, this time in 13 instead of the Capitol, I had been drowning in loneliness. My hijacked brain craved her, wanted to unravel her and pick her to pieces. She was the only one who could best help undo all the damage caused by the torture, Aurelius had reminded me of that this morning. Some part of me resented her for fleeing instead of trying to help me with my memories, like she was doing now.

“I attacked you,” I reminded her.

“I deserved it.”

“Katniss,” I hiss. I storm over to her and grip her by the shoulder, turning her around to face me. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. I’m sorry I did that to you.”

“You couldn’t help it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I snap. “I almost killed you. Of course you didn’t trust me. Of course you stayed away.”

“That’s not even why I stayed away, really,” she says, her voice crackling with age-old despair. “I stayed away because I missed you.”

“What?” I breath, taking her face between my hands and making her look at me.

“I missed you. I finally got you back and you hated me,” she sniffed. “Snow won. He took the one pure and beautiful thing in my life and he weaponized it against me. The one person I trusted, the one person I wanted to talk to about all of it. He won and I lost. Seeing you in 13, even when you looked at me with such hatred and contempt, hurt more deeply than any Arena he could have thrown me in to. All I wanted was to collapse into your arms and have you tell me that everything was going to be OK. And I couldn’t do that. So I stayed away, like a coward.”

I whisper her name again as I lean down to rest my forehead against hers.

“I’m a selfish, terrible person,” Katniss says again. “You should hate me.”

“I can’t,” I tell her truthfully.

“Why?”

“Because, you’re my Katniss,” I say softly, wiping the tear from her cheeks. “You’re all I ever wanted. You’re all I have left. I need you now.”

The shimmering flecks of silver flecked in her gray eyes sparkle at the memory, of our time together at the beach. The last time we held each other so delicately. But something in her, something deep and festering, can’t accept what I’m telling her. She shakes her head out of my hands.

“Not anymore,” she cries. "This person that I am now, this shell of a human being…There’s nothing tying you to me anymore. No more Games, no more schemes. You should go start over.”

She keeps trying to push me away but I'm not going to let her.

“Fine, you want to start over. Let’s go then,” I snap, taking her hand in mine. I begin forcefully dragging her through the beams and piles of debris until we’re back outside the shell of the bakery. She is huffing and complaining as I pulled her along until she is standing beneath the apple tree behind my old house. It is charred and nearly half of its branches have been burned off, but the tall towering tree remains standing.

Just like us.

“Here,” I say, situating her near what was the pig pen. “You were about right here, right?”

“What are you doing?” Katniss demands.

“We’re starting over,” I explain. I take a few steps back and let her take in the scene. Through her tears, she slowly realizes what I’m trying to do.

“Hi, I’m Peeta Mellark,” I say, holding out a hand for her to shake. “We go to the same school but you have no idea that I exist. I’ve had a massive crush on you for years and it makes me really sad that your family is struggling. So I’m going to purposefully burn this bread for you, even though my mother will hate it, because I want to make sure that you’re OK.”

“Peeta,” she says with a small chuckle, rolling her eyes.

“Damnit, Kat, play along,” I instruct. “We’re starting over.”

Her eyes roam all over my outstretched hand, like she can’t believe I am offering it to her after everything. A lifeline, like the one she offered me when she found me in that riverbank and held her hand out to me. She wasn’t trying to hurt me, like the Capitol wanted me to believe. She was trying to save me. Because that’s what we do.

“Hi, I’m Katniss Everdeen. This is the first nice thing anyone has done for me since my father died and it will keep my family fed for a week. I’ll be eternally grateful to you but I’ll be unable to thank you for it properly because I’m a terrible communicator.”

Her small hand comes up to rest in mine and I hold it tightly, with everything I have.

“You are a terrible communicator, but thankfully, I’m a witty conversationalist and we’re going to get to know each other like normal people because there is no such thing as the Hunger Games and we have all the time in the world now,” I say playfully, giving her hand an enthusiastic shake.

A small smile graces her lips.

I can’t resist anymore. I use my grip on her hand to tug her body towards me, enveloping her in a hug that we have both craved for over a year. Her shaking arms wrap around me tightly and she presses her face into my chest.

I inhale deeply. One, two, three, four, five times.

She smells like rosemary and salt and fresh air. She smells like home.

Chapter 3: Laying The Foundation

Buttercup loves me and Katniss hates it.

Every morning when I cross the threshold into her kitchen, he is waiting on the counter, tail swaying with excitement for my arrival.

Yesterday, she threw a balled up napkin at him. Today, a Saturday, she simply hisses, “Traitor.”

“You’re just jealous,” I say by way of greeting, dropping a loaf of sourdough on her table.

“Jealous of what? The fact that that flea-infested nightmare has a crush on you?”

“Yes,” I say with a simple grin, scratching the cat behind the ears. My smile widens as he purrs loudly and her mouth drops open.

“I have kept him alive for years, he could at least be a little grateful,” Katniss pouts, crossing her arms across her chest. I quickly avert my eyes so I can’t luxuriate in the way her breasts press together.

This has become the new common occurrence that I’m struggling with. The fierce resurgence of my physical attraction to Katniss Everdeen.

It’s always been there, ever since we were kids. My innocent childhood crush turned into filthy raging desire for her the older we got. The first boner I got during school hours was during sixth grade math because she dropped her book and bent down to pick it up. I still feel warm thinking about it now. I can’t stop thinking about her, not when I have felt that warm body pressed against me in bed, not when I’ve felt what it’s like to really kiss her.

As I work through my cloudy memories of my feelings for Katniss, the one thing abundantly clear is that the Capitol wasn’t able to change how stupidly beautiful I think she is.

She is still scowling playfully at me as I stroke Buttercup’s spine, her gray eyes sparkling as she challenges me. It’s late October and she’s wearing a tank top under a massively thick cardigan that is wrapped around her like a blanket. But my eyes still spy the delicate dip of her collarbone, speckled with a healed skin graft under a curtain thick, black hair that is shining in the early morning sun. Her olive skin is smooth and delicate. I’m overrun by an intense desire to press my lips to the soft triangle of skin beneath her ear.

It happens suddenly.

One minute, I’m gazing at her features with longing and the next I’m envisioning the way it felt to have my hands around her neck, the resistance of her vocal chords as I crushed them with my fingers. The way her eyes changed from hope when she saw me in that hospital room to pure, unadulterated terror.

I flinch aggressively and press my back up against the door, trying to put as much distance between us as possible.

“Peeta?” Katniss breathes instantly, standing from her seat in worry.

I raise a hand in the air to stop her.

“Just give me a second,” I say through gritted teeth, clenching my jaw.

It has been a few weeks since I had a flash this powerful. A few peaceful, calm weeks of getting to know Katniss Everdeen in an authentic and genuine way. It took several days for the two of us to finish clearing out the rubble from the bakery—a project that re-sparked our friendship— and the lot now sits empty. I haven’t decided what I want to do with it yet.

Sae has pretty much stopped coming to feed her and I’ve taken on that responsibility myself. I bring over bread that I’ve baked fresh that morning and we drink coffee together as the sun is rising. She’s usually already gone hunting and back by then.

We both enjoy the rush of physical labor so we spent lots of time with Thom, Mick and the other volunteers who are rebuilding the city center. We’ve helped clear debris, reinforce beams, plaster walls and install windows. I see it everyday—the haunting look in Katniss’s eyes that makes her feel responsible for this destruction. But participating in this rebuilding process that reinvigorated her, helped given both of us a reason to get up in the morning.

As the sun begins to set, we walk back to the Victors’ Village and split off to take showers.

Early evenings are spent quietly enjoying each other’s presence. Sometimes she sits with me in my studio and reads a book while I paint away my nightmares. Sometimes we play the “Real or Not Real” game.

We cook dinner together and usually end up on my porch swing. Instead of sleeping, I typically spend my nights alone rubbing myself into ecstasy thinking about the look of her sweaty body and toned muscles coming back to life.

“Not real, whatever you’re thinking about,” Katniss says cautiously, standing stone still across the kitchen from me.

I chuckle darkly, squeezing my eyes shut.

“Unfortunately, this was real,” I sigh, scrubbing a hand over my face. Three years after my prep team scientifically stunted the growth of my facial hair, a light dusting of a beard is starting to regrow on my face. I like it because it was a reminder that life is moving on, that more and more time is passing from the moment I first entered that Arena.

Katniss says nothing and just listens as I take a few calming deep breathes.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I reassure her. “But I’m going to go, OK?”

“Are you sure?” I hear the disappointment in her voice.

It’s the weekend and, as part of the new federal perimeters, there is no non-essential work to be done in any of the Districts on the weekends. Work weeks are capped at 50 hours and all citizens are entitled to sick days and time-off. Usually, on Saturdays, we lounge on her couch to recuperate from all the heavy lifting we’ve been doing and I make something sweet for us to munch on. Today, I was planning on cinnamon rolls.

“Yes, I’m sorry. It’s for the best.”

I turn to leave and I hear her about to speak. She wants to argue. She doesn’t want me to leave. She wants me to stay with her. The thought sends a rush of happiness through my veins like sweet honey. But it is quickly followed up by dread.

“Katniss, please, it’s not safe today. I need to leave,” I say sternly and power-walk back to my house, bolting myself inside.

In comparison to some of my other violent flashes, this one is relatively tame. I was able to de-escalate the situation and walk away, keeping her safe. I was able to ground myself back into reality with a few calming breaths. I debate on calling Dr. Aurelius or Annie, each someone who would fill me with gentle praise and soft appreciations. But neither of them have killed someone.

I held Katniss’s neck in my hand the same way I held Brutus’s when I snapped his thick neck in the Quell. This brilliant, beautiful woman who I had once loved so much. I had almost killed her and that flash of violence permeated the safety of her warm kitchen today.

So I call Johanna, the only person besides Katniss who could possibly understand that rage.

“Hey, Lover Boy,” she coos and she sounds distant, like her phone is propped in the crook of her shoulder while she’s doing something else.

“Jo,” I gasp. I can hear drawers clothing and a few rustles of cloth.

“What happened?” Her voice is closer now and stern. I got her attention with a single word. After spending weeks in adjoining cells, we had gotten very good at assessing each other through voice alone.

“Nothing happened,” I tell her immediately and I hear a small sigh of relief. “I left before anything happened.”

“What was the trigger?”

“Her neck.”

“Her neck?” Johanna questions and I could just imagine how her thick eyebrows are probably quirking up in delight.

“Her neck, how I strangled her,” I clarify, feeling my face heat up.

“Why were you looking at her neck?” Johanna asks, her voice devilish and no longer tense with concern.

“I—I, she was…I was in her kitchen and she—nothing really,” I stammer and my friend bursts out laughing.

“What, were you dreaming of giving her a hickey?” Johanna cackles.

"Technically, no,” I huff.

“So you were thinking about how you wanted to lick her like the lapdog you are?”

“I’m hanging up now,” I snap and pull the phone away to disconnect the call, but I hear her chanting my name through her chuckles. “This isn’t funny, Jo. I could have snapped again.”

“But you didn’t,” she reminds me. “I’m assuming you ran away with your tail between your legs?”

“I made it home. She actually listened this time when I told her to back off,” I note, surprised.

“So what is your plan? You just going to hide out there forever. Brainless will eventually come knocking.”

I sigh deeply and regret my decision in calling her.

“I don’t know why I even allow myself to entertain the possibility that there could maybe be a future for us,” I say sternly. “I put my hands on her. Around her neck. I almost killed her.”

“Katniss has not and will not ever hold that against you,” Johanna tells me. “You had been tortured to the point of insanity. It was done purposefully to break her and her only. She knows that it wasn’t you.”

“I used to be her safe person, the person who could chase away her nightmares,” I sigh. “I became the nightmare.”

“Look, the way I see it, you may have been tortured out of loving Katniss but she wasn’t tortured out of loving you,” Johanna says in an unnaturally soft tone. “She never stopped, even if there was a period of time where she was scared she would set you off. If that time has passed, I don’t see any reason why you can’t try to be that safe person again.”

“Katniss doesn’t love me,” I murmur. “We’re just friends now, that’s all.”

Johanna laughs. Loudly.

“You are dumber than a bag of rocks if you believe that,” Jo says. “There is no scenario in this world where Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark will ever be ‘just friends’ and nothing more.”

“Jo, you know the whole wedding and baby shit was made up—“

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Joanna says breezily. “Technically, yes. But the obsessive need you both have to protect each other, the connection you have, the way you both spent so much time undressing each other with your eyes, that was real.”

“Wait, what?” I stammer.

“Like I said, the idiot was obsessed with you,” Johanna says. “She used to track everywhere you went in 13, kept tabs on you constantly. When you’d train in the same room as us, she’d watch your body like a hawk. Plus, don’t forget, we were roommates, she would moan your name in her sleep.”

“She has nightmares—“

“These weren’t nightmares,” Johanna snorts.

“Jo—“

“Peeta, shut up and listen to me,” she barks, suddenly impatient. “I understand if you don’t want to have romantic feelings for her anymore or you don’t want to get all caught up in that goddamn mess of a relationship with her again, especially now that’s she’s a nutcase. But don’t insult my intelligence and insinuate that neither of you have feelings or attraction for the other. Anyone with fucking eyes can tell the difference.”

“Snow didn’t think so,” I murmur. “We couldn’t convince him. That’s why he sent us into the Arena again.”

“God, you really are an idiot,” Johanna sighs. “You do realize that there was no scenario in which you could have convinced him, right? You could have fucked her slowly right in front of him and you both would have gone back into the Arena.”

I am momentarily distracted by her use of the phrase “fuck her slowly” and have trouble concentrating, but Johanna persists.

“You two were a threat. You undermined him. He forced you to play up the charade as a way of controlling you. But regardless, whatever the fuck she set in motion with Rue and those berries was never going to be stopped. He needed to take you both out. You were dead men walking the second Claudius declared you co-victors.”

“But Katniss said everything in the first Arena was an act?”

“You told me that she specifically said not all of it was, but you didn’t give her a chance to explain, remember?” Johanna fires back. I’m annoyed by the fact that her memory of my own memories are stronger. “You were butthurt and ignored her like a child who didn’t get his way.”

“I lost my leg and was fucking traumatized, Jo,” I snap. “Don’t dismiss that.”

“I get that, bonehead, but you didn’t even give her a chance to explain or work out how she felt for you. Then all of a sudden, Snow shows up at her house and threatens everyone and you jump into a fake relationship. You never gave her a chance to explain the whole ’not all of it’ thing.”

I have to stop fucking calling her if she’s going to use my own memories against me.

“But Gale—“

“Is non-existent in her life now,” Johanna argues. “She thinks he participated in weaponry that killed her sister. She wants nothing to do with him anymore. She hasn’t talked to him in months.”

“But—“

“No buts. You are the one she spends every day with, not him.”

I, unfortunately, have no comebacks for that.

“I don’t know why I’m debating this with you,” Johanna sighs. “Katniss is the one that needs to go over all of this with you, when you’re ready. If you’re ever ready. But the point remains, you’re the one she willingly spends almost all of her waking hours with. You’re the one she mentions constantly on the phone. You’re the one she almost died for numerous times.”

“She mentions me on the phone?” My voice is far too giddy for my own liking and Johanna seizes on it.

“You’re so fucking clueless, holy shit.”

“As always, it was a pleasure talking to you, Johanna.”

“I have to go anyways, Lover Boy. I’m supposed to meet Annie for Nick’s doctors appointment.”

She keeps laughing.

“Maybe you do need to fuck her. That could release all of the sexual tension,” she adds with a devilish cackle.

I hang up on her after that.

I spend the rest of the day in my studio, trying to paint away the memory of Katniss's bloodshot eyes. Shiny memories whip past me so fast, my hand rattles with nerves and pent-up energy. I feel on the verge of a major flash all day and fight the urge to destroy all of the furniture in my house instead.

Unfortunately, I’ve recently discovered that one of the easiest ways to calm me down from one of these haunting fences between sanity and insanity is to imagine Katniss Everdeen’s body. My attraction to her has been so fierce for so long, it is actually grounding to envision the touch of her skin, the feeling of her lips. Masturbating to the feeling of her body pressed against mine on the Victory Tour train combats the Capitol manufactured feelings. However, I usually end up more confused by the time I'm done.

After, I take a short, freezing shower and eat some leftover rabbit stew that Katniss made last night.

The whole day, I miss her desperately.

Johanna is right. We’ve begun spending most of our time together. From our separate homes, we usually wake around the same time. The hunter and the baker. I see her scamper off into the woods before the sun rises, hoping to fight off the hot afternoon sun. She usually returns with some kind of catch, most of which she had already dropped off at Sae’s or the butchers by the time I’m taking the first loaves out of the oven.

From breakfast on, we’re together most of the day until we split off at bed time. But given the ever persistent purple bags under her eyes, I don’t think she’s really sleeping.

The small trickle of foggy rain from this afternoon has turned into a torrential downpour with pounding thunder by the time I finish eating dinner. The sound makes the hair rise on the back of my neck after an already tense day alone.

My lights flicker suddenly and I hear the whirl of my power shutting off. The Victors’ Village is the one area of the District 12 that has always maintained a steady stream of electricity. The rest of the District with the luxury of lights and heating, including the old bakery, used to be very familiar with the periodic blackouts caused by faulty Capitol lines and inconsistent coal manufacturing. But I’m not sure Katniss has really handled one before, given the fact that her house in the Seam didn’t have electricity.

The thought of her sitting alone in that massive house in the pitch-black makes my heartache.

I tug on my boots and take off across the lawns, the wet, dirt sludge splashing up onto the legs of my jeans. I pound up her front steps and shake my body like a dog before I open her unlocked front door and cross into her threshold calling her name.

“Peeta?” her voice sounds as she rounds the corner from the dark living room. “God, it’s pouring out. What are you doing here?”

I’m soaking wet and fat droplets are beginning to pool at my feet on her hardwood floor. She’s gazing up at me with an incredulous smirk.

“I didn’t want you to be alone,” I say simply, shrugging my shoulders.

Her steely eyes soften and she smiles delicately, one of the hidden ones reserved just for me.

“Well, come in, close the door,” she instructs.

I grin and pull off my jacket, hanging it up next to her hunting coat on the rack by the front door. She disappears for a moment while I tug off my boots, returning with a big, fluffy white towel.

“Here,” she teases, opening it up and throwing it over my head. I laugh as she roughly rubs it through my hair, drying it by sheer force.

I playfully bat her hands away.

“You’re going to make me go bald,” I warn, wiping the dripping water off my face and newly-growing beard.

“You’re not going bald, look at how thick your curls are,” she teases back, pointing at a thick tendril splattered to my cheek.

My heart patters gently as I think of her noticing my hair. Does she examine mine like I do hers? I’m not sure how to respond to that but luckily I’m saved by a fierce lightening strike that illuminates her face through the windows. A heartbeat later, a deep thunderous roar shakes the house.

“Perfect timing, you go start the fire,” she tells me with a smirk as she heads off to the kitchen.

After I coax the hearth into a roaring fire, she returns carrying a tray with two mugs and a plate of the chocolate chip cookies that I made the other day. As she settles onto the couch next to me though, I notice the liquid in the mugs. It isn’t tea like I expected, but hot chocolate topped with whipped creme.

My eyes flash to her face, where she is watching me with nervous optimism.

“You ordered some?” I gasped, pulling a cup toward me and letting the thick, chocolate aroma calm my frazzled nerves.

“I did. I called Effie,” Katniss tells me, relieved by my thrilled reaction.

“Wow, what’s the occasion?” I quip as I take a deep sip, closing my eyes as the rich liquid coats my lips.

“Well, in about an hour, your birthday,” Katniss says, squinting in the dark toward the grandfather clock in the corner of the room that read 10:51 p.m.

My mind blanks out entirely for a moment and I gape at her. Today is October 20, meaning that my 19th birthday on October 21 is just moments away.

“You—you remembered my birthday?” The words come out so quietly, so soft, I’m almost embarrassed.

She flushes, clearly pleased with herself as she gazes down at her own mug. A single strand of black hair drops out of her braid and caresses the side of her face.

“Of course,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to celebrate so I was going to feel you out today, get a sense of how you were feeling about it. But hot chocolate is enjoyable regardless.”

“I’ve never really celebrated my birthday before,” I tell her truthfully. “My mother wasn’t exactly thrilled by my birth so she usually just ignored it. My dad would usually save me a cupcake and my brothers sometimes pooled their resources to get me some paint or chalk. But it was never a big thing.”

Last May, while we were training for the Quell, we had celebrated Katniss and Prim’s birthdays that happened to fall on the same week. I had baked them a big two-tier cake. One layer was forest green with silver stars for Katniss, one was light pink with gold bows for Primrose. We had all gathered together at the Everdeen’s house, including Haymitch and the Hawthornes, for a delicious venison dinner and night of raucous card games. I remember being sad that night because I was being stripped of the opportunity of joining their family.

“I’m sorry,” Katniss tells me, reaching forward to grip my knee gently through my wet jeans. “For what it’s worth, I’m thrilled by your birth. Everyone who knows you is.”

“Oh yeah?” I say with a chuckle.

“Yeah,” she says and she flashes me the most brilliant smile I have ever seen.

“You’re just saying that because without my birth, you wouldn’t have access to cheese buns,” I tease.

“I would be dead about 10 times over if you had never been born, Peeta,” Katniss says seriously, her eyes dancing in the light of the fireplace. “So, yes, I think your birthday is something that should be cherished.”

“Not 10 times,” I mumble quietly, trying to deflect the tsunami of emotion in my chest at her words.

“You saved my life with a single loaf of bread,” Katniss says, her face blazing with determination as she starts tallying off the instances on her fingers. "You saved me from the Careers after I dropped the nest. You fought Cato to protect me. You were ready to sacrifice yourself so I would walk out of that Arena alive. You jumped in front of Peacekeepers who were about to lash me. You volunteered to go back into the Arena to protect me. You saved me from the monkeys. You warned District 13 about the bombs.”

She’s at number eight but she pauses with two more to go. Katniss swallows thickly and locks eyes with me as she finishes her list.

“You pulled me out of the fire at the Capitol,” she takes a deep breath. “And you stopped me from taking the nightlock pill.”

We haven’t talked about those last two yet.

Her eyes glaze over as she remembers but she blinks them away, triumphantly holding up 10 fingers.

She sniffles softly as she smiles at me.

“10,” she says confidently. “And those are just the physical instances.”

I cock my head at her, wanting to hear more. She tenses, suddenly uncomfortable with having to discuss this with me. As she told me in the bakery, she is a terrible communicator. But ever since that mutual meltdown that had us sobbing in each others’ arms behind my family’s destroyed home, she’s been making a conscious effort to open up to me more.

“You’ve saved me a million times over in little ways,” Katniss whispers so quietly, I can barely hear her over the patter of heavy rain and the crackling fire.

“How?” I breath back softly.

She studies me for a moment with her huntress’ gaze before standing up and fishing in the front pocket of her jeans. With a gesture to open my hands, she slowly drops an object into my palm and settles back down on the sofa next to me, closer than she was before.

In my hand rests a hefty, shiny pearl.

My memories start flashing rapidly around me and I cling to the solid ones.

“I gave you this, on the beach. Real?”

“Real,” she says with a shy smile.

“You’ve kept this all this time?” I ask, amazed that she was able to hang on to such a tiny, slippery object.

“Yes,” she breathes.

“I remember giving this to you,” I tell her, reflecting back on that genuine moment, fighting off the Capitol counterparts. "It was just a nice little gesture. I didn’t really mean anything important or special by it. Why did you keep it?”

“Precisely for that reason,” Katniss says simply. “Because it was a sweet gift from you. Yeah, I had the locket you gave me. But that had a meaning and motive behind it. This was just…”

She gazes down at the pearl’s soft reflection.

“This was just you, this little piece of you that I had even when you were ripped away from me,” she explains. “It was all I had of you in 13. And I clung to it like it was your life. Like I could keep you safe by holding tight to this little pearl.”

The thought makes my throat cake with emotion, knowing she was holding onto this in silent prayer while I was in the Capitol, where I was conditioned to think that she was a mutt.

“What happened to the ring I gave you?”

I’m not sure where the question comes from but I ask it before I could stop myself. The simple gold band, etched with leaves, with a rectangle cut emerald of the deepest green. Simple, gaudy enough for Capitol standards but something I picked out for Katniss and paid for among the row of options Effie provided for me. The engagement was a sham, that much I knew. But the thought I put into selecting a ring she would wear for the rest of her life—that was real.

“I gave it to Cinna in the launch room, since I could only take one token into the Arena with me,” Katniss whispers. “I asked him—“

“Asked him what?” I encourage when her voice trails off.

“I asked him to make sure it went back with me, when my body was shipped back to 12,” Katniss says. “So I could be buried with it. And I asked him to make sure you knew that. I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened to it.”

I nod slowly, absorbing her words. She was really prepared to die in the Quell to protect me. Haymitch has said as much, so has everyone in District 13 like Delly. But hearing her reflect on how prepared she was for her corpse to be sent back home in a cold, pine box makes my heart break.

“Cinna wasn’t executed on T.V. with Portia and the other stylists,” I say, feeling a deep flash of pain remembering my stylist and dear friend, the only person who put energy into me and only me before that first Arena.

My torturers had forced me to watch the livestream.

“No, he was already dead by then,” Katniss whimpers, her voice like gravel.

“What happened?”

“I guess I never got to tell you in the Quell, since everything happened so quickly,” she reflects, slumping back against the couch. “Peacekeepers came in when we were in the launch tubes. They beat him right in front of me and dragged him away as I was frozen in the tube. Presumably, they killed him shortly after as punishment for making my wedding dress into the Mockingjay dress.”

My blood runs cold.

“Oh Katniss,” I sigh, reaching up to run my hand across the back of her head. “I’m so sorry. That’s horrible. I’m so sorry you had to witness that at all, let alone right before we went in.”

Two tears slip out from her shimmering eyes and trail down her cheeks. I reach up a single knuckle and brush them away gently.

“I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately,” she says. “Thinking about all of them. I think I’m ready to start on that book you were talking about a couple of weeks ago. A memorial book, if you’re still interested.”

Happiness ripples through my stomach like popping corn.

“I’m definitely still interested,” I tell her and she nods.

“Good, I was hoping you would say that because Aurelius already sent some supplies. Part of your birthday present from me,” Katniss admits with a shy smile and I laugh brightly.

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” I tell her, before holding up the pearl again in the light. “This was literally free.”

She snatches it back from me with a dramatic eye roll and cups it protectively in her palm.

“And I’m petrified of losing it,” she says.

I eye her for a moment before I respond. Katniss, having grown up in poverty, never wears jewelry on a day-to-day basis. The library on her ground floor, which was converted to hold all of Cinna’s beautifully crafted clothes, is probably full of various jewels but she never takes any of them out. In the summer, she wore delightfully tiny shorts and tank tops. Now that the weather is getting cooler, she dresses simply in thick jeans and soft sweaters.

But I decide to offer but the suggestion nonetheless.

“If you’re so scared, maybe you could ask Effie about getting it strung onto a necklace or something. That way you always have it somewhere safe,” I say hoarsely, suddenly too awkward to even look at her cradling the pearl like it’s a precious diamond.

She doesn’t respond right away and I eventually lose my nerve. When I look up at her, she’s gazing down at the pearl with a soft smile.

“I think that’s a great idea, Peeta,” Katniss says, carefully placing the pearl back in her pocket before taking a chocolate chip cookie off the plate. “Although, I don’t take it out as much now that you’re here.”

Whatever sentimental itch she has today in honor of my birthday is making me want to cry.

“Well, just in case I’m not always around, having it in a necklace seems sensible regardless.”

Even in the light of the gentle fire, I can see her face pale with uneasiness.

“Are you…are you planning on going somewhere?” She asks hesitantly.

“Quite the opposite actually,” I say, plucking up the courage to finally tell her what I’ve been toying with in my head for weeks now. “I want to rebuild the bakery.”

Instantly, her face brightens again.

“Really?”

“Yes, I’ve thought about it a lot,” I say. “That empty lot has just been sitting there and I’ve been using my own kitchen to make huge batches of bread every day. It makes me happy, I enjoy doing it. It gives back to the community and District 12 is my home, I’ve really enjoyed working on the other projects. Plus, I never envisioned actually getting to own it one day. It was going to go to Rye and Holly, since he was the oldest. Truthfully, I was probably destined for the mines myself, if they ended up not needing both me and Graham working there full time. So I would really like to rebuild it, as homage to my dad and the rest of my family.”

I’m a little misty-eyed when I finish telling her and she leans over to grip my shoulder excitedly.

“Peeta, I think that’s a wonderful idea,” she chirps happily, biting down on the cookie she’s still holding in her other hand.

I laugh at her antics before picking one up myself, dunking it in the last drops of hot chocolate at the bottom of my mug.

“Good, because I’m going to need a lot of help,” I tell her truthfully. “I don’t know the first thing about actually running the business.”

“Well, I’m not much help there either but I can be your official taste-tester,” Katniss sighs, resting her head along the back of the couch to gaze up at me.

“An important role, obviously,” I play along. “But I meant more like moral support.”

“I can do that too,” she nods seriously.

Just then, the clock strikes midnight and lets out 12 quiet chimes that echo through the dark, empty house.

“Happy birthday, Peeta,” Katniss smiles and leans up to kiss my cheek.

“Thank you, Kat,” I grin back at her, brushing her wayward curl back behind her ear.

“You are officially too old to be reaped into the Hunger Games. What are you hoping for this year, your 19th trip around the sun?” She asks playfully.

“Well, I’m going to become a small business owner, apparently. And I’m going to work on this book of paintings with you. And I’m hoping for many boring and uneventful and lovely nights with you here on this couch, because heaven knows I like the peace and quiet,” I tell her truthfully.

“Hear, hear,” she crows, raising her mug of hot chocolate at me. Over the lip of her mug, her eyes dance brightly at me.

“Your probation is up in April, right? You could leave 12 then?” I ask her suddenly and her gaze jerks up at me confused.

“Yeah, it should be unless I break some more laws or murder any more interim presidents,” she says with an eye roll. “Why do you ask?”

“Maybe for your birthday in May, we could go on a trip somewhere,” I offer. “Go to District 4, lounge out on the beach. See our friends and your mom.”

Annie had given birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy named Finnick Jr., affectionally referred to by his nickname. Johanna was there for the birth, assisted by Katniss’s mother who was in the District helping establish a new hospital. Annie and Jo video-call routinely every Sunday night and since Katniss and I had been spending so much time together, we usually answer together. Sometimes Haymitch joins, as we’ve begun impromptu “family” dinners on Sunday nights.

“I could find you as many pearls as you want,” I add on jokingly.

“Why are you already planning my birthday that is months away on your birthday?” She barks.

“Because I like celebrating your existence too, Everdeen.”

“Well, stop it, not today,” she orders with a dramatic eye roll. “Today is about you.”

“So bossy,” I sigh and she elbows me in the ribs. I make a dramatic show of rubbing my side before I stretch out, sighing contently as my arm rests along the back of the couch. Again, we’ve found ourselves cocooned around each other protectively, peacefully—even though a massive burst of thunder causes Buttercup to skitter out from under the couch and run up the stairs.

“Just stay here tonight, it’s too gross outside for you to be running home,” Katniss offers, a light blush dusting her tan features. “There are plenty of bedrooms upstairs for you to pick from.”

The offer makes my chest warm. My instinct is screaming at me to say “yes,” to stay as close to her as possible. But I can’t stay and I tell her as much.

“I don’t think that is a good idea.”

“Because of whatever happened this morning?” she asks tentatively.

I nod.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly,” I snort.

“Should we talk about it?”

Her emphasis on “should we” is reassuring and I jokingly glare at her.

“Probably, but that doesn’t mean I want to.”

The corners of her lips tug up in the semblance of her new smile. I’ve gotten her to crack a few genuine grins in the last few weeks but nothing like the genuine Katniss beaming smiles that I miss so desperately. Those were usually reserved for Prim or moments when we were alone, just the two of us.

“Everyday gets a little easier but I don’t know if I will ever really get over it,” I tell her, staring into the embers of the fireplace.

“There is no getting over it, Peeta, any of it,” Katniss murmurs. “We can only get through it.”

“I see you’re finally talking with Aurelius like you’re supposed to be,” I tease.

She knocks her shoulder against mine, settling more into the couch cushion under my raised arm. We’re still not touching but we’re close.

“He’s occasionally said something helpful,” she admits.

“Is is weird that we have the same therapist? Isn’t that kind of conflict of interest normally frowned upon?” I ask.

“Probably,” Katniss shrugs. “Does he tell him all of my deep dark secrets?”

“No, but Johanna does,” I say.

Katniss bawks and sits up quickly.

“What do you mean?” I can practically see her hand twitch towards the phone, ready to ream out our friend.

“I’m teasing, relax,” I tell her, resting a calming hand on her knee. “She just said you mention me on the phone a lot.”

Katniss’s signature berry blush begins spreading across her cheeks and I try to stifle my laugh.

“I do not,” she protests.

I simply shrug.

“It’s an average amount,” she continues, flustered. “I see you everyday, it’s not like I’m abnormally discussing you.”

“Whatever you say, Kat,” I say. My nonchalant tone is clearly riling her up.

“What, so you never bring me up in any phone calls? No one knows we spend basically all of your time together?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So you also talk about me in phone calls. You were clearly talking about me with Johanna.”

“I do.”

“So what were you talking to her today?”

“The flash I had in your kitchen.”

That makes Katniss pause her pestering and I can see the wheels turning in her mind. I think it makes her sad that there are things I don’t feel comfortable talking to her about, like there are secrets I share with Annie and Johanna that she can never understand.

“Oh,” she sighs.

I don’t ever want her to think I’m hiding things from her. We’ve done that too much already.

“We agreed to always tell each other the truth, to not keep secrets from one another, right? In District 11?”

She looks momentarily relieved by this. “Real.”

“I had a flash to what happened in 13 after I was rescued,” I say, trying to use the most nonthreatening reference to her almost murder. “That’s the reason why I don’t think it’s a good idea if I stay here tonight. Even if I’m in another room. I’ve been on edge all day.”

“But you still came over anyways so I wouldn’t be alone?

I cannot deny this truth. That as exhausted and taut my body has felt trying to fend off the dark thoughts, I still instinctively find my way back to her. Although Katniss is what threw my entire world off orbit, she is still my gravity, this magnetic forcefield that I can’t seem to fight off.

We sit in silence for a few minutes. I really should get up and fiddle with the dying embers in the fireplace, but I can’t bare to move myself an inch away from her. Her rosemary and salt scent is so deliciously potent here, curled up on the couch, the warmth of her body radiating next to me.

“Just try. For tonight?”

“It’s not safe, Kat—“ I begin saying.

“You’ve been right here and everything has been fine,” she says, waving her hand to emphasize the close proximity of our bodies.

“I don’t think we should risk it.”

“So we’re just—“

She cuts herself off but her unspoken words seem to hang in the electric air between us. So we’re just never going to stay in the same bed again? So we’re just never going to sleep next to one another? So we’re just never going to bring each other that kind of comfort?

“We used to sleep in the same bed, on the Victory Tour. Real or not real?”

Her dark eyelashes cast down, her fingers plucking a ball of lint on the sleeve of her sweater.

“Real.”

“Why?”

I want this question to be open-ended.

“We both slept better when we were together. You comforted me, after my nightmares. It helped you when I was there when you woke up. It was the only way we were able to sleep through most of the night.”

She still doesn’t look up as she answers and I find myself desperate to look into her eyes. She must feel it too, that magnetic pull between us, because she glances up at me. We vowed to always tell the truth.

“I’m scared,” I finally tell her. “I’m scared to open myself up to you in that way, to be vulnerable with you like that again. Not only because I don’t want to end up with my heart broken, but because I’m afraid to let my guard down and unleash these demons on you. I could never live with myself if I hurt you again.”

“I’m scared too. I don’t want to get my heart broken either, seeing as how my heart as already been smashes into dust a million times over,” she says, before adding a small lift in her voice. “I also don’t want my vocal chords broken.”

I know she’s trying to lighten the mood, since Katniss usually shies away from these conversations. But the guilt gnaws away at my stomach, shame bubbling to the surface in a sob I can barely maintain.

“That’s not funny. This is serious,” I moan.

“I know it is, I know,” Katniss whispers, sensing the abrupt anguish in my tone. Slowly, like a deer in headlights, she slides her body off the couch until she is kneeling on the floor in front of me.

Our gazes lock as she reaches forward to gather both of my shaking hands in hers, raising them up until she places my fingers on either side of her smooth throat.

“Katniss—“ I gasp, immediately flinching and wanting to pull away. But her grip is gently firm on my wrists, keeping me in place.

“I trust you,” she says, her warm chocolate-scented breath coating my face.

“Katniss—“ I try again, my fingers shaking against her skin.

“You’re not going to hurt me,” Katniss says strongly. “Because I know you, Peeta Mellark. I know you in my bones.”

I can’t help it. My muscle memory kicks into gear and my thumbs gently caress her.

“Do you trust me?” she asks.

I think back to what Dr. Aurelius asked me in early August, when I first started going to Katniss’s house for breakfast. I had immediately answered no. I was so angry, so full of hatred for her and Snow and the Capitol. I could barely even see straight.

“I don’t even know her anymore. How could I trust her?” That’s what I told the psychiatrist.

But now? It had been weeks of us getting to know each other again. Weeks of us eating meals together, of working side-by-side at the bakery or on construction efforts. Weeks of us going through my memories while we watched the sunset on my porch swing. Weeks of me taking mental tallies of what she likes and dislikes, what she can’t yet bring herself to talk about. Weeks of counting how many hours of sleep she probably got, weeks of envisioning what kind of underwear she was wearing under those tiny shorts.

Weeks of getting to know Katniss Everdeen as she was right now. Not the idolized version of her I had imagined before the Games. Not the shell of a girl after. Not the Mockingjay or the revolutionary. Not the mutt or the demon I had been forced to envision. Katniss, Kat, as she is today.

“Yes, I trust you,” I finally admit to the both of us.

“Then let’s go to bed,” Katniss says quietly, using the grip she has on my wrists to stand us both up. Without breaking our contact, she brings me to the stairs.

The third step creeks, the second from the top makes out a gentle moan under the weight of my prosthetic.

She’s only just started sleeping in her old room again, the first door on the right, where I visited with her after she had broken her heel. I had carried her up and down these very steps. I ask her about it.

“Real,” she says. “You brought me cheese buns and we worked on the plant book.”

We stop outside of her room and she points to the door right next to it.

Prim’s room is across the hall, as well as the master suite where Katniss’s mother once slept. Now, all those rooms sits as tombs to the loved ones gone. But the guest room next to hers is untouched, waiting for a guest a like me.

“I think I have some of your old T-shirts, back from when we were training for the Quell, if you want to sleep in one.”

I normally just sleep shirtless in my underwear but I’m curious about these relics she has supposedly saved, so I take her up on her offer. I hover in her doorway as she rifles through her dresser drawers.

“You were wearing this one on the day we practiced wrestling moves with your brother,” she murmurs, handing me the worn out gray shirt from the wrestling team. “It got all dirty and Hazelle was over talking to my mother about ear ache remedies for Posy, so she offered to help get all the grass stains out for you. It somehow ended up in my laundry.”

“I remember,” I tell her, holding it up. “I don’t even know if this would fit me now.”

She laughs as I press it against my body, to showcase how it barely covers the surface of my torso. This was from another life, back when I was 16 and the wrestling team was the most important thing to me. Today, on my 19th birthday after two Hunger Games and months of manual labor, my entire chest, back and shoulders have filled out immensely.

“I guess not.”

Rain is still pouring outside but the light of the moon illuminates the shirt enough that I can see a single long, black hair dangling from the collar. I gently pluck it up, holding it up in front of my face.

Katniss blushes again and knocks the hair out of my hand.

“I may have worn it a few times,” she says quickly. “It’s like a dress on me, even though you’re a giant now.”

My mouth drops open at her words. Not only has she worn my shirt, which is incredibly endearing, but she’s also noticed the change in my body.

“Keep it,” I tell her, handing it back. “I’ll be fine without it. Plus, I’m sure it looks better on you.”

She nods sheepishly, chewing on her bottom lip.

“There’s extra toothbrushes under the sink in that bathroom,” she says, jerking her head back toward the guest room I am to stay in. I can understand I am being dismissed.

“Thank you,” I tell her, moving back through the door. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Peeta,” Katniss says with a shy smile, cradling the ratty old shirt in her hands. I really hope she wears it tonight.

In the guest room, I barely crack the window open so I can get a bit of a fresh stream of the richly scented rain smell. I brush my teeth with the spare toothbrush and strip down to my boxers before crawling into the stale, unused Capitol sheets. They’re soft and cool but this bed is ridiculous plush. I spend hours fidgeting and twisting but Katniss was right, the thunder and lightening do not lighten up. I watch the streams of light flicker across the bedspread as I contemplate just how she managed to rope me into staying here.

I’m drifting off finally around 3 a.m. when I hear it—the inevitable sound that I was subconsciously staying awake for. That shuttering, breathy cry that Katniss makes when she’s having a nightmare. I would recognize it in an auditorium full of people, in a market clamoring with life. I could pinpoint that sound anywhere. Out of bed almost immediately, I’m at her door just as the cry heightens to a full-on shout.

“Kat,” I whisper, kneeling one leg up on the bed to start untangling her from the sheets. “It’s just a dream.”

Her face is ghostly pale and tears are brimming along her dark eyelashes. I can barely see her since she kept her curtains closed and the room is almost pitch-black. I try flicking the lamp on her bedside table but the electricity still hasn’t kicked back on.

“Katniss, wake up darling, it’s just a dream,” I tell her forcefully, cupping her face in my hands. “Wake up. Wake up.”

Her breathing is erratic, coming out in short spurts through her nose. One hand slides behind her head and raises her face off of her pillow, pulling her upper body up until she’s against my chest.

Once her nose is pressed against my bare shoulder, she wakes with a wild gasp.

“Peeta,” she sobs, her strong arms coming around my back to clutch me tightly.

“You’re OK, everything is OK. It was just a dream. You’re safe,” I tell her, rubbing soft circles on her back.

She is wearing the shirt, I realize with a start. The shirt and nothing else but her underwear, exactly how she slept all those nights on the trains.

Katniss shoves her nose almost painfully into the crux of my neck, inhaling deeply against my bare skin. Her fingers dance against my shoulder blades, reacquainting herself with my body and also the smooth glassy skin of the large skin graft I have on my left side. The skin graft I got from pulling her out of the Capitol fire, almost a twin to the one she has on her right shoulder.

“Please tell me it wasn’t about me and what happened in 13,” I beg into her scalp. If I triggered this kind of nightmare by discussing my flash this morning, I might vomit all over this old wrestling t-shirt.

“It wasn’t, it wasn’t,” she croaks, running her hand down the length of my spine.

Her voice is suddenly so solid, so firm, I can’t help but believe her. Feeling relieved, I left myself grip her tighter, brushing my lips against the top of her head.

“It was the hovercraft, when you weren’t there,” she murmurs against my collarbone, wet tears pass from her cheeks to my skin.

I shush her gently, trying to qualm her anxiety that is already bubbling back to the surface.

“I’m here now,” I tell her. “I’m OK.”

And it is true. I am OK, especially now that I finally have her back in my arms after months and months and months. I haven’t held her like this in a dark bedroom since the night before the Quell, over a year ago.

“I swear I didn’t try and convince you to stay just so you would be here when I had a nightmare,” she croaks and the sound is watery and so devastatingly sad. How in a million years could I interpret this heartbreak as manipulation?

“I know you didn’t,” I reassure her, brushing a large hand along her ribs. She’s still far too skinny and I feel the ridges of each one. I make a silent declaration to make more cheese buns, to ramp up the amount I am feeding her.

Despite the fact that we’re both scantily clad, I shift her away from me and readjust so I am laying on her bed and propped up against her pillows. Once I’m comfortable, I tug her back to rest against my chest.

The sigh of relief she makes once she collapses into me makes me want to weep. She melts against me, curling around me like a child clutching a parent’s leg full of love and desperation. A reunion so sweet and tender, she lets out another small sob of joy. Katniss’s arm is tight and secure around my hips.

“You’re staying with me?” she whispers into the dark.

We both know my response before I even say it.

“Always.”
____________________________

We’ve slept in. I can already tell by how relaxed my muscles are, how far I’ve sunk into Katniss’s mattress. My bakers senses are all thrown off, telling me I’ve slept for much longer that I typically do. Which is fine, because A) I don’t bake on Sundays. B) Today is my birthday. C) I was up in the early hours of the morning rocking her to sleep after her nightmare. And D) Katniss is still curled around me, a delicate nail trailing along a scar near my heart.

I want to crack a joke, make this interaction friendly and less sensual. But it is quite impossible with the feeling of her bare leg tossed over my thigh, the goosebumps she raises as she trails her finger along my chest.

She knows I’m awake even though I haven’t opened my eyes. I can feel her gaze on me from where her head still rests against my bicep. I filter through what icebreaker I will use because “Good Morning” seems to placid and “You Need To Move Before My Morning Boner Flourishes” is too abrasive.

“No more nightmares?” is what I settle on.

“None,” she murmurs, her voice husky with remnants of sleep.

When I finally pluck up the courage to open my eyes, she is still gazing up at me with those piercing gray orbs that are clear and well-rested. Her skin is bright and her dark tresses are draped all over my body after falling out of her braid.

“You’re not allowed to make breakfast on your birthday,” she tells me, propping herself up on her elbow to look at my face.

“Yes, ma’am,” I chuckle, trying to discreetly pull the sheet higher up my body so she can’t see what she’s doing to me.

“Pancakes or eggs?” she asks.

“Am I not allowed to have both? Why is this an either/or situation?”

“Both it is,” she laughs while climbing off her side of the bed. With a streak of uncharacteristic boldness, she adds, “But you have to put pants on.”

The blush hits my hairline and it makes my groin twitch but her playfulness makes my heart soar so I counter fiercely with, “So do you.”

She, of course, is already one step ahead of me and slips on a pair of shorts before I finish talking. Her gaze is fierce and challenging.

“Pancakes and eggs, coming right up. Over easy or scrambled today?” She asks.

“Surprise me,” I say and she disappears out the door.

Johanna’s words suddenly come back to haunt me: “There is no scenario in this world where Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark will ever be ‘just friends’ and nothing more.”

I take my time sneaking back into the guest room and getting dressed again, waiting for my morning wood to simmer before I go downstairs. Part of me doesn’t believe last night even happened, except the two empty chocolate-lined mugs still rest on her coffee table before the fire.

And there she is, a goddess glowing in the late morning sunshine. Puttering around her kitchen in my old shirt, making me breakfast while she gently sings a song to herself. My heart clenches tightly with affection for this woman.

“I went with cheesy scramble,” she says with her back turned, sensing his presence. My prosthetic clunking down the stairs was a dead giveaway.

“Buttercup’s favorite,” I chirp as the cat jumps up onto the table, next to my now unofficial seat.

“Oh, would you look at that, I burned it all,” she deadpans and my laugh is bright and cherry.

This whole scenario seems like an out of body experience. It’s been a little more than a year since I was rescued from the Capitol. One year of deconstructing my hijacking, one year of intensive therapy and drugs. And now the subject of my hijacking was looking radiant as she made me a birthday breakfast, seven months after the end of the war.

For the first moment since my name was announced at the Reaping, I feel genuinely hopeful.

“Did you hear that Buttercup?” I tease, giving the cat a scratch behind the ears. "She knows how much you love the crispy bits, she burned it for you on purpose. She loves you so much.”

Katniss huffs as she sets the plate of perfectly cooked eggs down in front of me and I unleash my most dazzling smile on her in thanks.

“So what do you want to do today on your birthday?” she asks, sitting down next to me. There are already two mugs of tea steeping in front of us. A splash of milk in mine, no sugar. She knows me.

The truthful answer is I want us to strip down to what we woke up in and go back up to bed.

“I want to go find Thom and talk about the bakery,” I tell her instead. She spears some eggs onto her fork with happy enthusiasm.

“I think you should paint the building orange,” she says and I snort.

“The building doesn’t exist yet, I have no idea what it will look like, but I should prepare to paint it orange?”

“Yes, bring some color to the square,” she says simply.

“I’ll take that into consideration, Ms. Everdeen, thank you.”

She smiles again and I want to pinch myself. This was the same girl who had been a walking skeleton when I came back six months ago. Was this mood simply because she had a good nights sleep or because we had a brutally honest, heartfelt conversation last night in the midst of a thunderous blackout?

I suddenly feel a wave of nerves at how wonderful this snapshot of life is.

“When we were on the roof of the training center, I told you I wanted to freeze that moment so I could live in it forever,” I ask. “Real or not real?”

We have already established that I remember that moment perfectly, that the Capitol hadn’t used those memories during the hijacking. So she can see through the veneer of what I’m really asking.

“Real,” she says simply, taking a bite out of an apple slice.

“Will you come with me to find Thom?” I ask her. “Start your moral support duties?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” she tells me solemnly.

An hour later, we had both showered at our respective homes and met back up to walk into town. Despite it being Sunday, we find Thom at the trailer erected at the old site of the Justice Building where all of the District 12 affairs are being carried out of in the interim. Plans for a new town hall were already approved and construction had just started.

Thom had been democratically elected mayor last month.

“Good morning, you two, what brings you here on a weekend?” he says cheerfully, gathering all of the paperwork haphazardly thrown across his desk at the sight of us. We plop down into the two chairs across from him.

Thom is only three years older than us and had been close friends with Gale, working in the same mining crew as him. Yet, he has an old soul and is the perfect person to oversee the construction of District 12. His heart beats and bleeds Seam pride and loyalty to his hometown.

“I have decided what I want to do with my family’s lot,” I tell him, my knee bobbing nervously. Katniss immediately places her hand on it to settle me. “I want to rebuild my family’s bakery.”

Thom beams with excitement and literally hoots with happiness.

“I have been praying for the day you come here to tell me that,” he says and sets off into a filing cabinet to pull out paperwork. “Everyone is always asking me when you will expand past bread. As much as we all appreciate it, we are desperate for some cake.”

“'Desperate for some cake,' that could be your new slogan,” Katniss says.

“So many suggestions from you today,” I joke and she nudges me with her knee.

“Since the two of you cleared the lot, we could get crews in this week to start laying the foundation. The teams from District 7 are insane and could probably even get a frame up before the weather turns bad.”

He places a stack of papers in front of me.

"Paylor’s administration is granting massive loans and grants to small businesses now. I’m sure they would expedite the process for you, of all people,” Thom continues. Although he means well, the thought makes me bristle. I don’t want any special treatment, especially with money from the Capitol.

Katniss senses this change and begins asking Thom questions about the application process, giving me time to take a deep breath and look over the forms in front of me.

“Of course, you could go the old-fashioned route and finance it yourself with investors,” Thom says, eyeing me warily.

One of the first things instituted by Paylor as president was what she called the Mockingjay Accords, which honored all of the pre-existing commitments made by the Capitol to the living victors. This meant that our houses were still our property that could be passed down to our childre. We got to keep the pool of our initial prize money and our monthly stipends would continue until our deaths. There were only seven of us now—me, Katniss, Haymitch, Enobaria, Annie, Johanna and Beetee.

I had money to build this entire bakery from the ground up and probably pay myself back relatively soon in profits.

“I’d prefer to do it myself,” I say.

“Any investors?” Thom asks, taking notes on a yellow legal pad.

“Myself and Haymitch Abernathy,” Katniss says confidently.

I balk at her and she grins at me sharply.

“I want to help and Haymitch owes you,” she says simply.

“I don’t want your money, Kat,” I begin to say but she cuts me off.

“You will reimburse me with a lifetime supply of free cheese buns, cinnamon rolls and sourdough loaves,” she explains and Thom chuckles.

The word “lifetime” seems so good rolling off her tongue. A lifetime with her. A lifetime of things for her to look forward to. A lifetime of growth and healing.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“Positive.”

“Well, I guess that settles that, although Haymitch will have to take a chunk out of his liquor fund,” I say.

Katniss wiggles her eyebrows at me conspiratorially.

We go over some more details and eventually get to what I want to name my business.

This is technically a fresh start, a new bakery that is entirely my own. The previous one had been in my family for generations and was run down, barely holding together. This will be all mine and brand new. I can do with it what I want. But I already know what I want to name it.

“I’m the last Mellark so I’d like to keep the same name as before. ‘Mellark’s,’” I say simply and Katniss’s hand finds my knee again.

“Excellent,” Thom says with a flourish of his pen.

I sign several documents and soon we leave with a folder full of things I need to process and prepare.

“I’ll see you both later,” he says, giving Katniss a fierce wink.

I’m about to ask her about it but she cuts me off.

“I am so excited,” Katniss tells me as we walk back through town.

About 500 people have returned to District 12 at this point, including an additional 100 volunteers from other Districts who are helping with construction. Another wave of survivors are planning on returning from District 13 once this wave of construction on homes is over. The town square has freshly-installed cobblestone pathways and it is bustling with people on this sunny Sunday afternoon.

A few vendors are out where the Hob stood with stalls made from plywood and sturdy tarps. There are some novice vegetable farmers selling the last of their fall garden harvests, some clothing distributors sifting through donated goods from Capitol citizens. Sae’s stall for food and game is empty today. Hopefully, she and Marigold are taking a well-deserved break.

“I am too,” I tell her. “Thank you for coming with me.”

“Of course,” she says, giving my hand a tight squeeze before she steps away from me, letting our clasped hands rise high between us.

“I’m going into the woods for a bit. I want to see if I can find some herbs for Sunday dinner tonight with Haymitch,” she says and I notice for the first time that she has one of her leather bags with her. “Come over at like 7?”

“Sure, do you need any help?”

“Nah, I’ll fine. I’ll see you tonight,” she says with a smile before she turns towards the woods.

Since we woke up so late, I only have a few hours to kill before dinner. I spread out all of my documents on my kitchen table and start making lists of things I need to do and buy. As the sun starts to set, I hop upstairs to shower, tame my curls and change into something nice.

I settle on a pair of dark khaki pants and a dark green long-sleeve button up, wondering if Katniss will like the color. In the mirror, I admire how much weight I’ve put on during the last few months.

My heart tugs for my dad, wishing he was here to tell me how proud he is, calling me his “Little Man.” Although today, on the day I would finally be safe from the Reapings while sporting a new beard, he would probably amend that to just “Young Man.”

At 7, I make the trek over to Katniss’s and almost fall to the floor.

“Happy birthday Peeta!” the chorus cheers.

Katniss is beaming at me, along with a whole crew of people. Haymitch is there, like usual, his salt and pepper hair clean and pulled back for the celebration. Thom, Mick and Bristel are both there, as well as several of the other guys who we have become friends with while working on construction. Sae and Marigold are in the corner, curled up together with Buttercup on an armchair.

I almost topple over when I realize that Effie is here from the Capitol, as well as Johanna and Annie with baby Nick cradled in her arms. They are all standing under a homemade banner and colorful streamers are hanging from Katniss’s bookshelves.

On the television, there are more folks gathered over video call. Mrs. Everdeen is on one of the little video bubbles, as well as Cressida and Pollux in another. Beetee and Delly are both on and so are the Hawthrones, with one conspicuous member of the family missing.

Embarrassingly, tears immediately spring to my eyes.

“What the hell is this?” I gasp out with an incredulous laugh.

Katniss gratefully steps forward and daringly wraps her arms around my waist, a move I’m not sure she would have done if we hadn’t woken up together this morning.

“This is your birthday celebration,” she tells me happily, tugging me into the living room. “I told you, your birth is very important to a lot of people.”

Johanna comes sauntering over to us, raising her eyebrows suggestively at how Katniss has her arm around me.

“Doctors appointment for Nick, my ass,” I bark at her, remembering how she rushed me off the phone yesterday.

“We had a train to catch, idiot,” she says, pinching my bicep playfully.

The night passes like a dream too good to wake up from. Sae spent the day roasting chickens she had meticulously traded for, as well as crispy potatoes and green beans grown by a local refugee.

Several pitchers of Haymitch’s favorite ale are passed around the guests. Even though Katniss, Johanna and I are not really supposed to drink on all the medications we’re on, we give ourselves one night to indulge with friends. Since I’m typically responsible for deserts, Annie brings in a variety of fruit tarts and cupcakes from a bakery in District 4. I make a wish on a candle.

“Thankfully, we’re going to have a new bakery in town soon,” Thom chirps and the conversation turns to my new business venture.

Nick is an excellent baby and falls asleep in my arms while we all eat and catch up. The child looks so much like Finnick, my heart squeezes painfully as I look down at his long strawberry blonde eyelashes. His father resuscitated me in the Quell and helped guide me through the early stages of my rehabilitation. I owed my life and Katniss’s life to Finnick Odair, so I make a silent pledge to be the best uncle possible to this baby.

Just like Katniss’s birthday last May, Haymitch pulls out a deck of cards. This is when I learn of all the planning coordination.

Annie and Johanna took the train in last night and thankfully made it into town right before the massive thunderstorm rolled in, settling into one of the empty houses in the Victors’ Village. Haymitch had picked up Effie from the station this morning and they had seen us walking to Thom’s, hiding behind a building until we passed by.

“So when you said you wanted to get a feel for how I felt about birthdays,” I begin to ask Katniss.

“Just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t go running and screaming,” she jokes over her beer.

I shake my head at her playfully, full of emotion.

Annie takes the baby home around midnight, when Sae and Marigold also say goodbye. The cards keep going with the men in the living room but eventually Johanna and I step out onto Katniss’s porch to soak up the fresh autumnal air.

“I can’t believe you let me rant like a lunatic when you were on your way here,” I tell her as we settle onto the swing.

“Well, I didn’t want to ruin the element of surprise. Katniss would have shot me in the esophagus if I ruined it,” she says.

“How long ago did she start planning this?”

“About three weeks ago,” Jo says. “Shortly after you finished cleaning up the bakery. She was worried you would feel really sad and lonely on this first birthday without your family. She was all alone on her birthday this year because you hadn’t come back to 12 yet.”

The thought of Katniss in her closet cave on her 18th birthday—the week of what would have been Prim’s 14th birthday—makes me desperately sad as I listen to the crickets humming under the stars.

“I can’t believe she planned all of this for me,” I admit. “We had been doing really well the last few weeks but she was still so sad and distant.”

“I think it’s been good for her, having something to look forward to,” Johanna says, propping her legs up on the porch rail.

“The last 48 hours have been so amazing, I think that I’m dreaming.”

“If you fucked her, I don’t want to hear about it,” Johanna jokes, before adding, “OK, that’s a lie. I do want to hear about it, but probably from Kat. Girl talk and all that shit.”

“Stop it,” I bark at her, desperately looking through the windows to see where Katniss is. She was still perched on the floor leaning against Haymitch's legs, probably several pints deep trying to win back the money she gambled away hastily.

“My head is just whirling,” I groan, resting my forehead in my hands. “I had that horrible flash and avoided her all day. But then I came here so she wouldn’t be alone with the blackout and we just talked and it was so…”

“Disgustingly wholesome and lovey-dovey?” Johanna provides and I whack her on the thigh.

“No, just…” I can’t find a word other than “perfect” but Jo will roast me for that so I go with, “Hopeful.”

Johanna snorts.

“You sound like Aurelius,” she says and I can’t help but laugh. Another person with the same shrink as me and Katniss.

“Can you believe that soon it will be the New Year?” I ask, feeling goosebumps gather on my arms from the chilly late October air.

“Good riddance,” Jo says, taking a swig of her ale. “This has been the longest and the worst fucking year.”

“That’s for damn sure,” I say, clinking my glass with hers.

“This next year of your life will be significantly better,” Johanna tells me. “I can already feel it.”

My throat constricts at the sweetness of her words.

“Are you getting soft on me, Mason?”

“Don’t make me get my axe,” she says stonily, back to her typical self.

It’s almost three in the morning by the time the party finally clears up.

“Happy birthday, boy,” Haymitch tells me gruffly as I say good night to him by the front door.

He holds out his hand for a handshake but I’m feeling so full of love and happiness, that I pull him into a hug. Haymitch claps me on the back and I feel him swallow thickly as he grips me tightly.

“Love you, kid,” he mumbles into my ear before releasing me.

“Love you too, asshole,” I tell him and he laughs wildly. Effie, decked out in all orange, tuts at our manners but I can see tears shimmering in her eyes as she throws her arms around both of us, holding her “two boys” tight to her chest.

Surprisingly, I watch with awe as Effie goes with Haymitch back to his house. My mind is reeling with this information, so I turn to find Katniss.

Just the two of us again, I find Katniss cleaning up in the living room with several empty ale bottles dangling between her delicate fingers.

“Who knew you were such an excellent party planner?” I say, leaning up against the doorway.

“I’ve spent too much time with Effie,” she says.

“Who, coincidentally, just went to the home of our mentor.”

Katniss’s eyes widen comically and her jaw drops as she bends over the coffee table.

“You know, I always wondered if he had a thing for her,” Katniss muses. “He enjoyed bickering with her too much.”

“Apparently,” I say suggestively, wiggling my eyebrows at her until she laughs.

She deposits all of the bottles into the bin that she’s dragged in from the kitchen.

“Leave the cleanup for tomorrow,” I tell her. “It’s late. Let’s go to bed.”

The softness in her gaze makes my knees go weak, but thankfully, I’m still propped up in the door frame.

“You’re staying again?” She asks, a sparkle of a challenge in her gray eyes.

“Isn’t that way ‘always’ means, Kat?” I push back and her smile ignites deep parts of my soul that I thought would be forever dormant.

“Alright then,” she says simply, dropping the bottles into the bin with a flourish and making to walk past me towards the stairs.

Perhaps it is the ale or the emotional turmoil of the last few days, but I catch her around the waist and pull her towards me.

“Thank you for everything,” I tell her as I squeeze her tight. She hugs me back just as fierce. “This is the best birthday I have ever had.”

“Oh no, I’ve set too high expectations for myself. How will I top it next year?” She mumbles into my chest and I laugh into her hair.

“Better start planning now,” I tell her.

There are no fake displays of me going into the guest room today, except for me to collect my new toothbrush. After taking turns in the bathroom, we slowly fall into bed, utterly exhausted but happily content for the first time in years.

And I fall asleep with Katniss in my arms, exactly as I wished I would when I blew out my candles tonight.

Next week, the crews start work on laying the foundation for my new bakery.

Chapter 4: Walls Go Up

Notes:

Tell a friend to tell a friend, she's baaaaaack.

The letter from President Paylor appears in the middle of November.

I read it out loud while leaning against the counter in Katniss’s kitchen. She chops an onion, preparing it for a big batch of rabbit stew. The weather has turned cold and dreary, the beginning of winter rolling in through the mountains surrounding District 12. The fire is crackling quietly behind us, and I focus on the quiet sounds of her moving around her kitchen, the domesticity of the moment, compared to the gruesome details within the missive.

It is addressed to both of us.

Katniss and Peeta,

I hope you are both doing well. I’m writing to inform both of you that the remnants of the Arena from the 74th annual Hunger Games has been located in District 7.

As you may be aware, the new government of Panem has been working through the classified documents of the Gamemakers, attempting to archive their work for historical and educational research purposes, as well as preserve any documents that may be used in criminal proceedings. These documents were highly sensitive, and the details about the planning of each Hunger Games were restricted to those with only the highest security clearances. We are in the process of trying to identify the other Arenas, which are believed to be behind privacy forcefields.

Many of the Arenas were reused for multiple games, but as you know, several of the high-profile ones were saved for tourism initiatives by the previous regime. It is my understanding that the Capitol was preparing to preserve your first Arena and open it up for visitors. They were in the process of building a visitors' center and a gift shop at the time of the Quarter Quell. Our researchers discovered hundreds of boxes of apparel and merchandise of the “Star-Crossed Lovers of District 12,” including replicas of your uniforms, Katniss’s bow and arrow, bouquets of the flowers used following the death of Rue, and even a tourniquet kit like the one used on Peeta’s wound. Noticeably, there is no reference to Katinss’s Mockingjay pin in any of the recovered items.

Pamphlets discovered at the site promised an exclusive VIP tour of the cave featured in your Games, as well as the opportunity to book sunset dinner reservations on top of the Cornucopia, where you spent much of your last night. It is believed that they were also preparing to launch extravagant elopement packages for those Capitol residents who wished to be married on the river bank where the two of you reunited after the rule change.

I understand the gravitas of what I’m writing to you must be startling. The purpose of this message is to inform you of what the investigation has uncovered.

Since most of the victors have perished in the Quarter Quell or the Revolution, the Panem Parliament has decided to destroy those corresponding Arenas and turn them into memorials for the tributes who died there.

Living victors whose Arenas have been recovered will be offered an opportunity to weigh in on what happens next. Therefore, how the government of Panem moves forward with the site of the 74th Arena is up to you. No matter the cost.

Think about it. Let me know what you decide together.

Sincerely,
Paylor

We go over it for hours, sitting at her kitchen table, long after the sun sets and the inky black night fills the first floor of her house. We contemplate the idea of turning the Arena into a hospital, a library, a school, tearing it down and turning it into affordable housing. We debate on calling Johanna, who is the only surviving victor from District 7, to see what she would recommend. We almost summon Haymitch, to see if he got a similar letter about his own Arena.

Both the male and female tributes from District 7 died in the Cornucopia bloodbath during our Games. We don’t even remember their names, which sends Katniss into an emotional tailspin.

I write our response shortly after midnight while Katniss stands at her kitchen sink, staring off into the night.

President Paylor,

Thank you for your message. Katniss and I have decided together that the 74th Arena should be destroyed, just like all of the other Arenas that have been uncovered. Our role in the proceeding events after the 74th Games should not take away from the grave memorial that belongs at the site to honor the tributes who died there.

Please burn it to the ground and treat it with the same solemn respect that the government gives to the other Arenas. Katniss and I would like to personally pay for the memorial built there, listing the names of the 22 tributes. Our only request is that the memorial features wildflowers in honor of Rue.

Sincerely,
Peeta Mellark and Katniss Everdeen

I fold up the letter and leave it sitting in an envelope overnight. We agreed we would sleep on it and send it in the morning.

“Go to bed. I’ll be up in a little bit,” I tell her. I’m on edge, teetering on the precipice of a flashback.

She doesn’t fight me, surprisingly. She just takes the bottle of anti-anxiety medicine I have left in her kitchen, placing it gently on the table next to me. Her hand hovers over my shoulder, and I can tell she wants to squeeze me, a gentle reminder of connection. But Katniss must sense my unease because she doesn’t touch me.

I keep my muscles tense, gripping the table as I listen to her footsteps go up the stairs and into the bedroom we’ve been sharing every night. It’s only when I hear the door close that I let myself relax. I do my grounding technique.

Five things I can see in front of me: The letter from Paylor. The response I wrote. The pen I used to write it. The napkin Katniss used during dinner. A droplet of gravy that I had accidentally left on the table.
Four things I could touch: The wooden chair that has become my spot at Katniss’s table. My prosthetic leg. The pill bottle Katniss placed in front of me. The pills inside of it.
Three things I hear: The grandfather clock ticking in her living room. The hoot of an owl outside. The fire embers barely crackling in the living room; I will need to put it out completely before I go to bed.
Two things I can smell: The smell of onions she had chopped earlier. The lemony scent of the dish soap we use.
One thing I can taste: The bile that has risen in my throat.

The medication kicks in quickly, and I eventually feel safe enough to follow her upstairs. I debate going into the guest room, but the tension of a potential flashback has faded. Right now, all I want is to feel the comfort of her body pressed against mine. I cannot fathom the ache of an empty bed right now.

I expect her to be asleep, but I can tell even in the dark that she is still awake, lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. She had cracked the window for me, letting the room fill with the crisp, pine-scented breeze of a winter night.

She is silent as I climb in next to her and get settled. I mirror her body language, looking up at the still ceiling fan. Only then does she break her silence.

“They would have sold us together, wouldn’t they?” She whispers into the night. “Like how they sold Finnick, trafficked the other victors to the highest bidders. We would have been a package deal.”

My mind flashes to the ornate, ostentatious bedrooms that we stayed in at the Capitol during the Victory Tour. My stomach roils at the idea that I would have had to watch another man touch her, would have been forced to pretend that it turned me on. The idea that I would have had to touch her, fuck her while someone watched. The most intimate moments on display for a check. A forced marriage of teenagers, a couple sold off for eternity as a two-for-one special.

Suddenly, the distance between us in the bed feels cavernous. I lift my arm, and Katniss immediately rolls over to me, resting her head on my chest. I hold her tightly to me.

“We’re safe now,” I remind her.

And we drift off into tortured sleep, my nightmares full of haunting woods, a throat slit to impress the Careers, a cave by the water.

The next day, we finally agree to sit down and start on our memorial book.

We decide to keep her family’s heirloom plant book separate, so I crack open the spine of a fresh sketchbook that Dr. Aurelius sent. The paper is thick and sturdy, bound by a simple brown leather cover.

“Who should we start with?” I ask Katniss as she curls up at the end of the couch, looking into the flames of tonight’s fire.

We had spent the afternoon at the bakery site, watching as crews of professionals laid down the sewer and plumbing lines.

“No family, not yet,” she says simply, and I have to agree. I could not paint my father or Prim right now. Not after last night and the deep, shuttering ache I still feel thinking about our Arena.

“Thresh,” I suggest softly. “He spared you at the feast. I’m alive because you were able to get me medicine. Real or not real?”

“Real,” she confirms and nods softly, curling the thick wool blanket tighter around her shoulders.

Katniss watches as I sketch out his face, the slope of his strong jawline, the arch of his brows. Some details are shiny — the Capitol had shown me different versions of what Katniss had done at the feast and fake motivations for her drugging me with sleep syrup. Her soft voice corrects me when I get the shape of his eyes wrong and then compliments me when I begin painting and end up matching his rich skin tone on the first try.

When I finish, I set the book down and let the paint dry, walking instead into her kitchen to fix us some mugs of hot chocolate.

While I prepare our drinks, I realize that it has been over a month since my birthday and I have spent almost every night in Katniss’s bed. I still return to my home daily to shower and change clothes, but my house has become just my bakery. My kitchen is where I spend my mornings, mass-producing bread for the residents of District 12, but my afternoons and nights are spent here.

Her kitchen looks brighter now than it did when I first returned. Over time, Katniss has slowly removed the wilting branches of her mother’s herb collections and replaced them with her own. Prue’s tinctures have been relocated to the shelves in the pantry — not removed entirely, just away from the hustle and bustle of where we have been cooking our meals. She has been sleeping in her bed again, instead of the pillow nest she had been in on the couch. Her home reflects her more now.

It has been almost six months since I returned to District 12.

She is doing better. I’m doing better.

“I notice you’ve cleared your mother’s things out of the kitchen,” I tell her as I return to the couch with our mugs.

Katniss shrugs and blows on her steaming hot chocolate to cool it.

“She’s clearly not coming back for them,” she says, a hint of disdain in her tone.

“She’s in District 4, right?”

“Yup, haven’t seen her since we left District 13 with our squad.”

That startles me.

“She didn’t come to see you after everything? Before you came back to 12?”

“Well, they didn’t let me see anyone,” she reminds me, and I see her eyes going glassy, haunted by whatever she remembers from that period during her trial. She doesn't know that I watched it every single day, that I testified on her behalf. She doesn't need to know that yet.

I glance down at my hand and see the two little silver marks on my knuckles from where she had bitten me, trying to access her nightlock pill after shooting Coin.

“I do understand a bit more,” Katniss says timidly, looking into the fireplace. “How she acted after my dad died, the shell she became.”

Katniss has never spoken to me before about her relationship with her mother. It is obvious to everyone in District 12 that Astrid Everdeen slipped away following the death of her husband — otherwise, why else had her young daughter suddenly become the primary breadwinner for the family? The interactions I had witnessed were always cold and unloving. Nothing like the open hostility between my own mother and I, but it was easy to see that Katniss did not hold much affection for her mother, not like how she had loved Prim.

“She calls every couple of weeks,” Katniss continues. “She seems to like it in 4. Annie said she was there at the hospital when she gave birth to Nick. She said my mother was pretty helpful postpartum.”

I feel a sense of indignation rise within my face, thinking about Katniss’s mother supporting Annie right now, but not even her own daughter.

Katniss must sense my change in mood because she looks over at me, her dark eyes assessing me from the top of her mug.

“I doubt she would be much of a support system to me anyways,” she says softly. “She never really was one to begin with.”

“But she’s your mother,” I huff back immediately. “She should be here for you. She shouldn’t have left you alone with only fucking Haymitch for company for months on end.”

“Haymitch isn’t my only company anymore,” she reminds me, her lips quirking up in the hint of a smile.

I can't help but smile back.

Around 9 a.m the next morning, I being cleaning my kitchen after completing my morning bread delivery to the construction workers in town. I’m wiping flour off my kitchen counter when I hear a knock at my door.

It’s irrational, really, how quickly I grab a knife. Anyone from the Capitol coming to kill me probably wouldn’t be polite enough to knock first. But I still keep the handle gripped tightly in my fist as I round the corner to my front door.

The fear spurts out of me like a cannon, and I’m at the door in a flash, leaving the knife deposited on the table in the entryway the second I see a flash of yellow curls behind the window.

“Hello, stranger,” Delly Cartwright beams as I meet her on my porch, wrapping her up in a big bear hug.

“Hello back at ‘ya,” I crow as I swing her around in a circle, earning ripples of laughter from her.

I set her down and lean back to look at my oldest friend. She looks better than the last time I saw her in District 13, where her face was gaunt with grief after the bombing of our hometown. Her plump face is flushed with the cold winter air, and her blue eyes are bright with happiness.

“What are you doing here? Get inside; it’s freezing out here,” I say as I usher her over the threshold, noticing a sprinkling of snow starting to fall behind her.

“I’m moving home,” Delly says, and happiness tumbles down my chest.

I’ve been faring pretty well lately, following my routines and spending time with Katniss. The construction guys have become an excellent source of entertainment, and we have weekly dinners with Haymitch. Life has been moving at a beautifully slow and unchaotic pace.

But I’ve known Delly since childhood. She’s one of the only people from town to survive the bombing, the only pre-Games friend I have left. She knows both pre-and-post hijacking Peeta and was always quick to call me out on my shit, especially given how poorly I was behaving toward Katniss in District 13 after my rescue.

“You’re moving home? You’re coming back to 12?”

“Yes,” Delly says confidently, unwinding her scarf from around her neck. “Duncan and I are moving back. Thirteen has been incredibly hospitable to us, but I need to be above ground again. I need fresh air! I need sunshine!”

“Man, that is so good to hear,” I tell her, bringing her in for another hug.

I corral her into my kitchen, and we sit at my kitchen table while I make a pot of tea for her. She prattles on happily about how she got a job already working under Thom in the mayor’s office, working as a liaison to organize and distribute the shipments of aid coming in from the Capitol and other districts.

“It’s a salaried job, with regular hours and benefits and everything,” she tells me, dunking her tea bag. “I can actually build a life here again, doing whatever I want. No shoe store or coal mines for me.”

“That’s amazing, Dell, I’m so happy for you. How did you even hear about that job down in 13?”

Her round cheeks flush again prettily, and she blushes down into her mug.

“Well, Thom and I got to know each other in 13. We’ve kept in touch,” Delly says, suddenly quite shy.

My grin spreads wide.

“Oh, you don’t say,” I tease coyly.

“I’m not coming back here for him,” Delly says sternly. “I’m coming back because I found an excellent paying job that can support me and my little brother. Plus, the government is giving additional stipends to those moving back to 12, so I can build up a little savings fund.”

“Of course, Dell, of course,” I say patiently and watch as her blush deepens.

I reach across the table to grab her hand.

“In all seriousness, Thom is a great guy. I’m happy for you."

She thanks me and squeezes my hand back.

“Tell me about you, what have you been up to?”

I give her the run-down of opening the bakery again, lightly glossing over the details about seeing Katniss daily and entirely leaving out the fact that I’m sleeping in her bed.

“The crews are slated to start putting the walls up this week,” I tell her. “I’m not changing the design much, keeping it almost identical in structure to how it was originally built by my great-great-grandfather. Luckily, there were still blueprints in the 12 archives of the Capitol somewhere; that’s why we’re able to move so fast.”

“You’re not going to live above the bakery like your folks did, though, right?”

“No, I’m staying here,” I tell her, gesturing around my kitchen. “The apartment will still be there, but I’m changing the entrance so it will be on the outside, around the side of the main entrance. It won’t be connected to the bakery at all, so I’m extending the back office to accommodate all my business needs and storage. I am probably going to open it up for renters.”

“Rent it to me when it’s done,” Delly says.

I blink at her.

“Really? You’d want to live above my bakery?”

“Why not?” She says. “I grew up living above my father’s shoe shop. It would be like a little piece of my family came back to 12 with us. It would be perfect for Duncan and me. Plus, I’m sure you’d be an excellent landlord.”

“Wait, where are you living now?”

“One of the relief trailers they’ve set up behind district hall,” Delly says. “They’re huge inside, you wouldn’t believe it! Dunc and I have our own rooms, and it came fully furnished, with heating and air conditioning. Excellent quality and all ours — our first stable home since the bombing. I was actually wondering if could nab some of your paintings for my walls to liven the place up a bit.”

“Delly, I’d love it if you lived above the shop. That would be so meaningful to me. We’re not set to be open until July, at the very earliest thought,” I explain.

“That’s actually perfect,” Delly says. “They’re hoping the new school will be built in time for the school year to start in August. That would give me and Duncan plenty of time to move and get settled in.”

My heart does about five backflips in my chest. My childhood friend, living above my bakery, which will be rebuilt with all the love and patience this District has earned.

I’m still beaming an hour later when I walk over to Katniss’s house, practically skipping with excitement. I’m late for our normal breakfast time, and I can see her standing at her kitchen window when I approach her side door.

“Guess what?” I say in lieu of a greeting, depositing her daily loaf of bread on her counter. “Delly’s back.”

“I just saw her leaving your house,” she says simply, taking a sip of tea.

“Yeah, she was going to come over and say ‘hi’ but she has a meeting at District Hall at 10:30 to sign the paperwork for her new job,” I prattle on. “She told me she's going to stop by to visit you tomorrow, so be prepared. She’s going to be working with Thom, doing aid distribution. And get this — I think they’re a thing.”

Something in her shoulders relaxes just a touch at my words, and she turns to sit down nonchalantly at her table.

“That’s great, I’m glad she’s back. Delly’s lovely,” Katniss says.

“Yeah, it was so good to see her. I also promised to lease her the apartment above the bakery when it opens.”

“Nice, already snatched up a tenant before the walls even went up. Quick thinking, Mr. Mellark,” she teases, and I drop down into the seat across from her, reaching over to pluck an apple slice from the plate she had been picking off of.

I really am late for our regular breakfast date, I realize with a twinge of guilt. I never stray from our routine, she was probably stressed that I hadn’t arrived on time.

“Yeah, well, I can’t promise her a place to live until July. Which I kind of hate. She’s living in one of the relief trailers in town. She says they’re nice though on the inside, and she’s happy that she and Duncan have their own place.”

“Why don’t you just let her stay in your house? It’s practically empty since you’re here all the time.”

Katniss says it casually, a genuine question and suggestion.

But the casualness with which she says it makes my blood run cold.

“What?” The single word comes out sharp and brash.

Katniss looks up at me and notices the stillness in my features. It’s only then that she seems to process what she asked me, and her cheeks turn pink.

“I just mean, you really only do your baking there. You’ve been staying here overnight,” she stammers out. “It was just a suggestion.”

I take a long time to formulate my response, flipping through the different versions this conversation could go in my head.

“You want me to move in with you?” I settle on.

“I mean, you practically live here already,” she responds. “Most of your stuff is here, besides your clothes. Your books, tons of your art supples — “

“It’s only been a month, Kat,” I quake out, trying to keep my tone from rising to a sense of hysteria. “Don’t you think that’s a little fast?”

“Fast for what?”

Those three words douse out whatever confused excitement rose in my ribs.

Of course.

All this time, I’ve been making careful machinations in our relationship, desperately trying to toe the line, keep myself in check, keep her happy, keep her well, and keep myself sane. I’ve been bending over backwards again trying to hold myself together for Katniss Everdeen, so that this soft, little life we were building for each other could last.

And she doesn’t give a fuck.

I’m just a roommate to her, someone to keep her occupied, someone to keep her mind off things. What difference would it make if I lived here permanently? It wouldn’t be any different at all if this was the place I called home, if her bed was our bed.

“That’s not a good idea,” I say flatly. “I’m still having regular flashes. I must have my own space to go to so I don’t hurt you.”

“Your medication works fast enough — “

“Not if I wrap my hands around your throat again,” I snap, standing up and walking to the door.

“Peeta, wait, why are you angry all of a sudden?”

Truthfully, I don’t even really know the answer. One second, I’m freaked out because I think she’s moving too fast. The next, I’m disappointed she isn’t. And then, finally, I’m angry that it apparently isn’t fast enough for me. I’m suddenly frantic, feeling a cold sweat break out on my neck.

“What are we doing, Katniss?”

The question comes out with a quiver, whispered into the frosty pane of her kitchen window. My hand is still on the door knob.

“I thought we were having a conversation about Delly, and now you’re leaving — “

“No, I mean, what are we doing? You and I.”

I hear the sharp intake of her breath.

There it is, the lingering question that always seems to hover between Katniss and I. Johanna's voice flashes in my head: “There is no scenario in this world where Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark will ever be ‘just friends’ and nothing more.”

It’s one thing to spend all of our free time together, reading and baking and softly getting to know each other again in our healing journey. It’s another thing to live together permanently, sharing a bed every night with no sense of boundaries or direction. Those are two different things, and Katniss does not seem to understand the ramifications of what she asked me.

“I don’t know,” she whispers.

It comes to me immediately, the memory. Standing on the train tracks. The sun on my back. Flowers clutched tightly in her hands. Having an almost identical conversation on the way home from our first Arena.

Suddenly, I’m furious. It’s an ancient hurt, a familiar rejection that simmered at the surface for years, no matter what the Capitol tried to do to me.

“Well, let me know when you work it out,” I bark out again and slam the door behind me.

Notes:

*Shows up late to a meeting with Starbucks in hand*
"Hey, sorry I'm late, traffic was crazy."

 

So, it's been almost TWO years since I last updated this story. I promise that I was reading all of the comments that came in - it means so much to me that this story has resonated with so many of you! I've been getting sucked back down the Hunger Games rabbit hole again since I read "Sunrise on the Reaping" and I decided I hated how I originally left this story (insinuating that Haymitch and Effie would become a thing, now that I know about Lenore Dove.) I have already been toying with the idea of coming back to finish this long abandoned fic, and then the coolest moment of my life happened ... I learned that there is fanart of THIS story. Someone DREW a scene from a FANFIC that I WROTE.

LOOK AT THIS MASTERPIECE: https://www.tumblr.com/devildogdemon/763885224937553920/she-shakes-her-head-again-and-opens-her-mouth-to?source=share

Shoutout to SmallPapers on Tumblr for this beautiful rendition of THE Breakdown scene from Chapter 2. It was amazing to see something that started as a pet project for me come to life in art. Shout out to @tristonanan for bringing it to my attention a few days ago. And a shoutout to @devildogdemon for requesting it — I did see your message on Tumblr. Thank you so much for your kind words. They brought me to tears. You inspired me to finally dust off the ole’ keyboard and finish this story. This is for you.

I don’t have an official timeline for posting, but I have the rest of the story loosely outlined. It is very different than the original way I intended it going — hopefully the time away helped the creative juices.

Happy to be back, folks <3

Notes:

I've been tossing this idea around in my head for a few days. My whole TikTok algorithm is "Hunger Games" content and I'm seeing the whole story in a different light now that I'm an adult. I know there are SO many "so after" stories that take place in between the final chapter and the epilogue, but wanted to add my take here! Please comment!

 

The timeline of my proposed story:
July 4 - Quarter Quell reaping
July 13-17 - Katniss and Peeta are in the arena; Katniss is rescued by the Rebels and Peeta is taken to the Capitol
End of July through September - Katniss recovery in hospital, is released to make propos
Mid-September - Peeta appears in first interview with Caesar Flickerman
October 1 - Peeta appears on TV looking significantly worse, gives warning to District 13 about bombing
October 6 - Rescue operation
October through January - Peeta’s tentative recovery in District 13, Katniss trains, Finnick and Annie get married
End of January - Squad ships out for Capitol
End of February - Prim is killed in explosion, Peeta and Katniss recovery from their burns
March 15 - Vote on Hunger Games using Capitol children
March 16 - Snow’s execution, death of Coin
April 15 - Katniss is cleared of murder charges and allowed to return home to District 12
July - Peeta returns to District 12 and plants primroses
August - Where this story begins (One year after the beginning of Mockingjay)