What do you do when everything you loved, everything you knew, everything you are just – disappears? When there's no trace of what used to be? No way to remember it? No way to hang on to the sanity that was so firmly rooted in your home?
Peeta Mellark would prefer that to what's happened.
His home hasn't vanished, it's been utterly destroyed. Ashes and bones and desperation are all that's left of the place he grew up. Sure, the Victor's Village was saved. The Meadow wasn't touched. But everything that really made District Twelve worth living in – the bakery, the schools, the Seam – all of that has been blown to dust, engulfed in the flames of firebombs that rained from the sky.
"Wait!" he wants to cry when he sees the ashes being carted away, shining new structures being hammered into place. "Wait, I didn't get a chance to say good-bye." Because he didn't, and now that they're all dead, he never will.
Everything seems so foreign without the crowded streets and world-weary miners heading off to work, the children peeking out of windows, waiting for food that won't come. It wasn't a happy sight, Peeta admits, but it was familiar. It was all he knew.
So now that it's gone, now that new people – the same, but changed – are coming, now that he must eke out a living in a strange new world that's merely an echo of his life, he has to find a way to return home.
It seems like an impossible task. How can he? How can anyone find a way back to the warmth and somehow safe morbidity that they'd lived in for so long? To an outsider, things might seem better now. There's less hunger and less death. But Peeta and everyone he knows has never learned to live another way. How can this ever be right?
The answer, he realizes, is right in front of him. It comes one day as he's watering the flower bushes under the windows and suddenly he's back in that white cell in the Capitol. It's all going wrong, she's going to kill him, hasn't there been enough death already, there must be a cease-fire –
"Peeta? Peeta, come back."
It's her, haggard but healthy, peering down at him with worried grey eyes. The memories recede and the love blossoms in his heart, so much that it hurts. She, Katniss Everdeen, is here. She's with him, alive.
But so many others are dead, and the love is darkened by despair that threatens to choke him. His entire family plus so many others. Cinna, Portia, his prep team, Madge, Prim, Finnick… All gone. He doesn't want to forget, to let them go. Their remains haven't yet been found. The only thing he has left of them is the pain of their empty houses. He can't, he just can't move on.
But with Katniss staring down at him, the echoes of the dead staring out at him from her eyes, he realizes that he already has. With the flowers and rebuilding of his district, he's begun to leave them behind.
He still bakes, still paints. Katniss still hunts. Haymitch still drinks as much as ever. As different as the shining paint and gleaming cobblestones are, as out-of-place as they seem, they're still under the same sky. There are some people left to remember with him. So in a strange, unfamiliar way, he's never left.
He's always been home. It just took a while to see it.