No! Peeta I´m not arguing about this again! Get over it!

And with that she´s gone, crashing the door into it´s frame. I know where she´s headed: The woods.

Maybe she´ll even visit the small pont out there. The one place that belonged to Katniss and her father and which held all the memories.

Of the few happy moments she had; of the songs they used to sing, silencing the birds with their beautiful voices;of lessons on the things mother nature offers us and probably so much more moments of which she never told me.

I have seen that place once, but although I felt a certain specialty there, it could´ve never held the same magic to me.

I´m sure she´s going there now.

She always does after today´s topic comes on. She´s escaping.

And I let her, although I miss her the second she walks out the door.

Because even after all these years I´m still scared she might not come back, finally realizing that I don´t deserve her.

Even after all these years I still can´t believe she came to me and helped me- saved me- again.

I settle myself in the armchair besides the fireplace and stare into the flames for comfort.

When I came back to twelve, I wasn´t able to sort out my feelings.

I couldn´t even be sure if the things I felt were my feelings, caused by my memories or if they were theirs.

Their memories.

Their mix of real terror and fiction.

Their twisted reality. Implanted into my brain.

When they took me out and brought me to 13, in those first weeks I decided not to question my feelings and just took everything my head told me for real.

I was like that when I hurt her.

I was like that when these men in white started working on me.

And as they did so I stared to realize that I could not trust my own mind anymore.

That was when I decided on this matter for the second time: Trust no memories at all.

By the time I got back to twelve I already knew neither of these extremes would help me.

Feeling everything overwhelmed me and put others in danger; feeling nothing made me senseless and slowly buried the little leftover fragments of my identity.

so taking the middle road was best. The only problem: I had no idea how to do that.

That´s where Katniss found me.

She pulled me out of my loneliness and started to light lanterns in the foggy dark forest that was my memory.

And as she stayed and trained with me the small glimpses turned into pure strays of sunlight, which formed patterns and cleared the fog.

Her healing fire had survived within her despite all she had been trough.

The whole thing is a process. It´s continuing up until today. Although the forest in my head is now filled with life and soaked in sunlight, there are still shadows and dark holes which trigger what we call 'flashbacks'.

They don´t come often and when they do it´s manageable, but they are a reminder if our past and will always stay.

It´s the same with nightmares.

Katniss has more of them than I do.

She is happy that not all are nightmares, that there are nights with happy dreams.

I´m worried because she´s stopped waking me when she had one.

She used to scream and kick her legs which woke me. Now I have to ask her in the morning how her night has been.

At least she´s not lying about it. Anymore.

With regaining control over my memories I got to clear up my feelings, too.

At first I denied my feelings for Katniss. I told myself I just felt this affection towards her because she was telling me that´s what I did before the chaos: love her.

But soon I realized that even if she´d told me I hated her in the past, I would have fallen for her now.

All this strength and fire and on the other and this insecure, sweet and loving mind of hers caught me all over again.

Luckily she never tried to set me free either, but did only pull me more and more into her so that we were tied up without a chance of unraveling.

We got from sharing evenings to sharing kisses to eventually sharing a bed and finally sharing a house.

I did move into her house in what used the be called 'Victors Village' because she could´ve never left the last place her sister Prim used to call home.

Two years after that we started to share the next thing: last names.

And this time it was real.

It has been almost six years since then.

For almost six years now there has been a Mellark family in District twelve again. Kind of at least.