I find him where I always do in the spun-out hours in between midnight and dawn; find him at the spare easel he has taken to keeping in one of the long-abandoned rooms for the nights when I can sleep uninterrupted and he can't; find him with his blond head bent over an emerging picture of the sunset he can never quite perfect, the yellow-orange of runaway light always just out of reach.
His back goes rigid when he hears the pad of my bare feet, and then his shoulders unlock and he lean forward to add a hint of blush to the corner, his eyes carefully averted.
"You're getting close," I tell him as I come forward to stand behind him, my hand hovering above his neck, wanting so badly to sweep aside the downy hair that is getting too long; selfishly afraid that even that gentle touch will stiffen him against me and rob me of any comfort.
It's easy to see what he's aiming for: the last sunset in our first arena; the blaze of forced color that fell over Cato while we were listening to the mutts tear him apart, their teeth flashing white beneath the dead tributes' eyes. I don't want to tell him that the pink he's using in the corner should be much darker, that blood doesn't dry that soft, so instead I say, "You've almost got it right."
"Almost," he says to his canvas, and then he drops the paintbrush and turns on his seat to face me. His eyes, that strange blue that would escape even someone talented enough to capture the orange that always eludes Peeta, flick up and see my hand still waiting stupidly in the air. A slow smile lifts the corner of his mouth and in his smile there is innocence, there is the Peeta who caught fireflies for me and slipped them into my room so that they burned against the dark; the one who hunted all over the forest he'd never been in to bring me the roses that bear my sister's name.
He wraps his fingers around mine, and when I feel his breath warm on my skin I can finally exhale. It's been two years since we started spending our nights together again, but it still amazes me how something as easy as his touch can no longer be taken for granted.
Two years since his first hesitant entry back into my bedroom; two years since his smiles stopped carrying an edge of ice; two years since he started to teach me all over again how even the smallest sliver of light is big enough to fight against the dark.
For a long period of time my dreams came in colors, and the night that ushered him back in, they were at their worst. Everything was drenched in silver: a parachute with a shiny-round canister full of broth hanging hatefully at the end, the flash of Clove's knife, the bow I had to break out of Glimmer's hands, the tip of the arrow that took down Cato, Coin's long, too-perfect waterfall of hair, a rain of parachutes that hit and exploded, never ending in the dark, the silver never ending, Gale's eyes, Gale's eyes, and the parachutes hit, they hit, they hit.
I didn't even know I was screaming until I felt Peeta's hands on my shoulders, shaking me awake, and then the silver dissolved and everything was blue: the cold light sliding in between the open curtains; the quilt that was wrapped so tightly around my legs that when I sat up I would have fallen back over except for the hands that have always been there to catch me; the eyes narrowed in concern above a pair of dark circles that told me I wasn't the only one having trouble sleeping.
Back then I couldn't look at his eyes for very long. They hadn't just taken out the haunted cast; they had taken everything else out too.
"Why are you awake?" he asks me now. "You were sleeping when I left."
"I dreamt of Prim," I say, my eyes closed, her golden hair flipping in its messy braid against the dark backdrop of my eyelids, her arms always outstretched, her smile sweet.
Peeta rises without pause and pulls me into his arms and again I think of that first night, of how hesitant he was to crawl into bed beside me; of how I had burst into helpless tears that his flour-covered hands had wiped away; of how I hadn't realized that, for a girl so constantly billed as being on fire, I was always cold without him beside me.
"It was a good dream," I tell his chest. "She was happy."
"I dreamt of you," he says to the top of my head, and it hits me that this is how we've learned to talk to each other, with eyes cut to the side as if we're both afraid to see the truth in each other's gaze. "I dreamt that I found a pearl for you, and told Finnick it came from coal."
An unconscious smile twists my lips and I hug him tighter, feel a small sigh slip from his mouth.
"Real," I tell him without having to be asked. "That was real."
We stand in silence for a moment more, long enough for me to study the small details he's hidden in his painting: the rainbow of Rue's tiny hand lost in the curve of a bird's wing; shadows the color of nightlock threatening to overcome to sun; the arch of a silvery bow sketched into the bark of the tree.
Seeing the familiar slant of the tree I flush, guilt rolling in my stomach in a sick wave. I've seen the film after the nest dropped; the cut Cato gave him with barely a second's pause, the geyser of blood that squirted from his leg like one of the brightly colored fountains in the Capitol. It's one of the few memories I've never been able to talk to him about, selfishly not wanting him to know if it was real or not, not wanting him to realize how ugly my motivations were while his were always so beautifully threaded with the truth.
He must realize more than I think, however, because he's never asked about it either.
It took us weeks of pretense before he could come to my bed without a hint of unease, before I didn't have to invite him in with screams that tried to wake the dead; weeks and then months before he would let himself in even if I was already asleep, his face as pale as smoke, his body trembling, slipping in beside me like a ghost only to rise in the morning with apologies on his lips, disappearing as soundlessly as he had come.
Almost a year before we learned all over again that we could sleep much more soundly when his arms were around my waist and I had my ear nestled above the soothing beat of his heart; that it was easier to wake up screaming in the dark when there was someone beside you already awake.
More than a year before he came to me while I was sitting in the living room staring blankly at the dark television, thinking about how best to destroy the grandfather clock that tick-tocked in the hallway and was slowly driving me crazy. Haymitch had come and gone, stumbling like he was half blind - which, by the aroma following him around, he probably was - and the house was pitch black and quiet as a tomb.
It was the only time I've never heard him coming, didn't even recognize his presence until I saw the outline of his white shirt materialize like a phantom from the shadows.
"I'm sorry!" he said immediately when I jumped high enough to knock the blanket wrapped around my legs to the floor, clapping my hands over my mouth to stifle the scream bubbling up the back of my throat. "I'm sorry. I thought maybe you were asleep."
"You still could have said something!" I told him angrily as I landed back on the chair, trying to push back my temper, trying to remember that this new Peeta was not always so quick on the draw. "I think you just halved my life expectancy."
"Katniss," he said dryly. "Your life expectancy has never really been that high."
That startled a facsimile of a laugh out of me, and he offered me that horrible blank smile he used to have as he turned on a lamp, scattering the shadows, scaring away the darkness as Peeta was wont to do.
"I was about to go to bed," I said, leaning over to pick up the blanket. Keeping my face carefully turned away from his, I asked him, "Did you have a nightmare? You're welcome to stay."
"I haven't been to sleep yet," he said, brushing aside a clutch of cat hair clinging to the fabric, his hands coming close enough to mine where I could see the scars that slashed across his fingers, the tiny golden hairs that glimmered in the light. "I thought maybe we could… could try starting the night together. If I keep walking on the wet grass I'm going to catch pneumonia."
I looked at him and he stared back at me determinedly, even though I could see one corner of his eye twitch, see one hand making knots on the fabric of his pants.
"Okay," I told him finally. "Okay, sure."
Then, climbing the stairs, "If you snore, you're out."
It was the first time I'd made Peeta laugh since he came home to Twelve; the first time he hesitantly put his arms around me; the first time we both slept the entire night through.
"You don't like my sunset," he says quietly against my ear, and I flinch, feel his grip loosen around my waist.
"I've never liked your pictures from the Games," I remind him. "You make them too real. They hit too close to home."
I move away from him, take a step closer to the canvas, and trace the clouds that stain the fading sky, my finger skating over the pebbled surface that is the same color as my eyes.
"I don't know why you want to remember," I say. "I would give anything to forget."
"Not everything about them was bad," he says, and I can hear the hint of a smile in his voice. "Eating lamb stew in the cave. Frying nuts on the force field. You and Finnick, painting yourselves like swamp hags and trying to send me to an early grave."
I laugh despite myself and turn back to face him, find him watching me with a small grin toying with his lips. It's so rare to hear him talk like this, to hear him casually rattle off things that he remembers without having to stop to gulp in air. It reminds me of the nights on the train when we were both afraid to go to sleep, when we would sit cross-legged on my bed, our knees touching, and trade our favorite stories until I would concede defeat and go to sleep with his arms wrapped around me.
He doesn't protest when I rise on tiptoe and trace a trail of kisses up against the clean skin of his neck where it always smells of home: of flour and cinnamon, of fresh grass and just a hint of mint. His hands tighten against the small of my back as my lips find his, and he returns my kisses until we're trading short bursts of breath into each other's mouths, until I'm suddenly aware that the nightshirt I have taken to wearing was filched from the back of one of Prim's drawers, that it would have been too short on her, is definitely too short on me. Without the security of a blanket hiding me from his eyes, I find myself suddenly conscious of the uneven thinness of my legs, too aware of the juxtaposition of old and new skin that decorates me like someone's bad joke of a patchwork quilt.
He sees where my eyes have gone and laughs, just a little, one of his hands coming up to rub a faded scar where his eyebrows used to grow. "Katniss, it's okay," he tells me. "I've seen your body a hundred times."
I've also seen the long pants he wears in winter and summer both, wordlessly covering his own relics from the Games and beyond; the way he demurs from cutting his hair because the too-long shaft of gold covers the jagged scar at his temple where the butt of a gun once gouged, but his eyes are too tired for me to point this out.
"Tell me a story," I say to him instead, to distract us both from legs that suddenly feel as though they will not support me, and he takes a step away from me and crosses his arms as though to ward me off.
"What kind of story do you want?" he asks slowly. "I'm not sure that I would even be telling you the truth."
This is how we exist now: buried in flashbacks and memories, Peeta unsure if even half of them are real.
"Tell me about the day you planted the primroses." The words are out of my mouth before I even have a chance to think about them, but they smooth out the line that has slashed across his forehead, and he sinks down to sit cross-legged on the floor, frowning in concentration as I join him.
"I remember coming home," he says. "But it wasn't home."
Remembering all too well the scents that had lingered – my mother's medicine, Prim's soap, even the gloves Gale had left behind that perfumed the floor of a closet with the smell of pine – and how they had seemed offensive in their familiarity, their banality, I nod.
"And I realized that it wasn't the same because I wasn't trying to find an excuse to come see you," he says. "I didn't even know where you were, the way you used to always closet yourself in the strangest places, and Haymitch-"
He laughs to himself.
"I knew where Haymitch was, but it would have taken too long to sober him up," he says.
He falls quiet, and I take his hand as much for my comfort as for his, one of my fingers tracing over the broken circlet of a scar that my teeth left behind, one that he fought the Capitol so hard from erasing that they gave up and left the rest behind as well.
"I thought you wouldn't want to see me," he says quietly. "After the last time we saw each other. One broken heart was enough."
"I did want you-" I start, but he reaches forward and covers my mouth, not unkindly.
"I'm telling the story," he says.
"When Dr. Aurelius let me go, he told me that if I was going to stay here, in Twelve, I needed to find a touchstone to go to when I wasn't sure what was real. And while I was walking through my house, looking at the furniture that someone else picked out, the clothes I knew I'd never wear again, I realized that the only thing that ever made sense to me here was being with your family. Your mom, who always joked with me in the mornings -"
Did she? This is news to me. I always seem to remember a flare of affection in my mom's eyes when she looked at Peeta, but it was so rare for her to make a joke that I can hardly imagine the emotions driving her to be so relaxed.
"You," he continues softly. "Sometimes."
This shocks a rare grin out of me, and he returns it, abashed.
"Haymitch," he says. "Never."
We laugh.
"And Prim," he finishes. "Who beat me at chess every time we played and then looked at me with those big eyes and still managed to convince me to bring over a bag of cookies the next time I came."
"Your mom was gone," he says simply. "Haymitch was worthless."
"Is worthless," I mutter, and Peeta laughs.
"Is mostly worthless," he accepts. "I was too afraid to come find you. So the only thing left that would have made this home was Prim. And since she was gone too, I had to find the next best thing.
"I spent that whole night looking," he says in quiet remembrance. "And when I walked up to your house, I didn't know if I was more afraid that you would come outside or that you would ignore me completely. I just keep thinking of the expression on your face when I took the nightlock pill away from you, and how when they dragged you off you kept screaming his name, not mine."
Caught up in his memory, I flush all over again, sure that if Peeta had been the one going to a certain death my name would have been the last word on his lips.
"Then I looked up and there you were," he says. "And at first I was furious with Haymitch. He promised me that he would take care of you until I was able to, and he was falling down on the job."
"Worthless," I remind him.
"But then I realized that under all of the dirt and hair, I could still see you," he ignores me. "That Haymitch kept you alive, and I could never really depend on him to do more than that."
He falls silent for long enough that I start to worry about him, and then he shakes his head and smiles to himself.
"Beautiful," he says. "You were beautiful."
"I was horrible," I interject truthfully. "I don't think I'd washed my hair in a month. Johanna would have been jealous."
"It didn't matter, Katniss," he says earnestly. "It's never mattered. In mud, or snow, or in that joke of a wedding dress, or dressed up like a gigantic bird on fire – it's never mattered. I don't think you realize how lovely you are to me."
He takes in a breath.
"Haven't you figured this all out by now?" he asks me quietly, and in the dark blue of his eyes I can find nothing to say.
"Katniss," he says quietly. "I was – I am – in love with you."
I've heard those words from him in so many places, in front of so many people, and I still don't know what to say, still don't know the words to describe exactly what he is to me.
"Even now?" I manage weakly, and he looks away.
"Always," he says.