Note: Not like you'd care or anything, but I didn't want Katniss to choose Peeta in the first place... I just felt like I needed to come up with a reason why she did, ergo, this. Don't even try to understand my mind, it won't ever make sense. Like why I'm trying to explain this...
Disclaimer: Come on, everyone on this website knows how these things work already, I don't own the characters/etc., the idea's mine though, I at least came up with that part of it.
Survive
After what I alone referred to as The 76th Games was over, after Prim was killed by what could have been Gale's bombs, after Snow and Coin's ashes were buried deep inside the blood stained earth, after the 1,743 tributes of the 75 Games were long gone, after the Capitol was history, after all the suffering was over, or at least controllable for the time being... I knew I had to choose.
I had to finally choose between my best friend and the boy I'd been pretending to be in love with for years. I think I always knew that he would eventually ask me those words: You love me. Real or not real? I didn't lie when I said real. Because by then, I did love him.
Thousands of times I had thought back to Gales words: Katniss will choose whoever she thinks she can't survive without. I don't think he meant it in a bad way anymore, I think he meant it in a, truthful, heartfelt way, because honestly, it's true. From the Boy With the Bread, to the second victor of the 74th Games, to another piece in the third Quarter Quell, to Snow's prisoner, to one of the few hundred who had come home to District 12: I needed him.
Gale taught and helped me hunt to keep my family and myself alive, we were the perfect team, however as I had proven in the years I had been in the Games and fighting without him, I could live with out him. It was hard to get used to hunting alone, when I was with Gale it was just as silent as when I was alone, except I knew he had my back and was my ally... But I could deal without it.
Peeta though, I couldn't survive without.
It's almost funny, the correlation between my first meeting with Peeta and then Gale. It's always seemed like Gale was the one who kept me alive, but truth is, it was Peeta. The Boy With The Bread was the one who gave me the food that had allowed me to survive long enough to meet Gale. Even if I had never met Gale I would have been able to keep myself and my small family alive, because after the bread, I only needed to hold out until I could sign up for tesserae. It wouldn't have been much, but we would have survived.
The time in the arena without Peeta was the hardest and I had, I had returned to basic cognitive thinking, my only goal was to win, get back home to Prim. But once I found Peeta buried in the mud holding onto only the finest thread of life... I had something else to live for. To fight for. Because when I was alone in that arena, if I lost myself it didn't matter, nothing did, but once I had Peeta, I had what I needed to survive: The Boy With the Bread. In its own way, the act of trying to keep him alive kept me alive. And only with him was I able to survive as myself. In the second arena, I was almost always with him... Almost. The only time I left him, he ended up captured by Snow and I went insane. Gale was there though, and I loved him in my own way, but in the end, I needed Peeta back.
When the bombs that killed Prim went off, without realizing it, I drew an invisible line in between myself and Gale. I knew it was not the most original idea and the Game-makers had come up with thousands of things that played with human emotions before, it was their job after all, and since the whole thing really was one of the Games, it was possible that the bombs had nothing to do with Gale's bombs - but in the end, I couldn't go back to how I felt about him before. And Gale understood - he never came home.
He knew his fight was over, that I couldn't survive without Peeta but I could without him, like I had during all three Games I was involved in. Peeta though, I needed him almost as much as I needed air to breathe, if not more. He was the only one who knew what it was like to be in the arena, the only one who knew what it was like to be flaunted by the Capitol only to see every one around him being murdered for the fun of it. He knew what it was like to lose everything, everyone. But most importantly, he knew what the nightmares were like. He knew what it was like to be crippled in the middle night after waking up screaming and shaking. Even though he never did, because he swore all his nightmares were about losing me, he still would sometimes suffer from flashes of Tracker Jacker venom, so he knew. And when I woke screaming from mutts chasing me, or the spear sinking into Rue's stomach, or the flash or the bombs that killed Prim going off, I saw all of it thousands of times, and when I did, it was always Peeta's arms around me that finally calmed me down. I needed him to survive. And I knew that from the first time I woke up wrapped in his arms after having a nightmare of the Games. And I really did love him.
So in the end, there wasn't even a question about it. And in the end, it was easy as breathing to whisper Real to Peeta when he asked.