What? A story that's not Static Shock? Huh? What is this madness?

Yep. HUNGER GAMES. This is set after the war, in what I have come to call the 'grow together' period. I always wondered about if Katniss ever thought about everything that Peeta had lost, not just herself. This is my way of hashing that out. Written in Katniss's POV.

Disclaimer: I don't own THG trilogy, that honor goes to Ms. Collins. I am just trying to treat some of my Peeniss feels and fill in the emptiness that Mockingjay left me with. Tears forever.

I try to move, but all of my motions are restricted. My arms are held in place, my legs jerk forward but make no progress. Behind me, I am sure, there is an unspeakable horror, a muttation to the likes of which I have never witnessed. My guess is greeted with a confirming and terrifying howl that shakes the darkness around me. Within moments it will be upon me, its claws ripping my fragile body to ribbons, the vessel that houses my screams being devoured until there is nothing left. There is nothing I could ever do to save myself. Everything I have worked for, everything I have done in my life is rendered meaningless in this moment. I will be dead soon and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. I am helpless. So helpless.

I feel my body quake uncontrollably and abruptly. This is the end; surely this is where I die. Surely it is, finally, after losing so much already…

Suddenly I feel my eyes spring open.

I'm greeted with the half-light of morning, young and gray, the sun having not fully risen in the sky yet. My entire body is covered in a cold sweat, the bed sheets tangled around me, binding me in place like a straightjacket. One tether of the blanket is wrapped around my neck, reminding me of Peeta's hands so many months ago, the hatred in his eyes, his cold expression fixed upon my face as my body went limp.

'No don't think about that.' Whispers a voice in my head. I force my mind to regain control over my body, to come back to reality and calm the hammering of my heart in my chest. Thinking about Peeta would only exacerbate this. I force him out of my mind and pull the covers from my neck.

I blink a few times to adjust my vision to the absence of impending darkness. I remind myself that Peeta is not here. The muttations that chased me through my nightmares are not here. The horrible crushing darkness is not here. I force myself into a sitting position in the bed and brush the rest of the restricting blankets off of my body. I take a deep breath and speak to myself aloud.

"My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am alone in my bed in my house in Victor's Village. I am safe. I am home." That last sentence leaves a strange taste in my mouth. "…as close to home as I am going to get right now." I amend, feeling no better for my efforts. I have no home. My home and just about everyone in it was destroyed by the Capitol and sent to a place where I will never have them again.

'Stop that.' Murmurs that voice in my head once more, attempting to soothe away the lingering darkness of the nightmare.

I want to go back to sleep, but I know that is not an option anymore. Sleeping is no longer safe for Katniss Everdeen. It hasn't been for months now. Every morning I wake like this, before dawn, my voice rough from screaming in my nightmares, the bed sheets tangled around me like netting from a snare. I haven't had a good night's rest since I came back from the capitol months ago and it shows on my face, a little more every day. I vaguely wonder what my prep team would think of the prominent dark circles under my eyes. I can almost hear Octavia's tsking as she hurries off to find a suitable make-up to hide the marks on my skin.

I swing my legs over the side of my bed. I know sleep will not come to me anymore today. A small part of me rejoices, because in the absence of sleep, there is also the absence of nightmares. And while my reality at this moment is not perfect, nor will it ever be, it is far better than the horrors I face in sleep.

After splashing my face with some water from the bathroom, finding some relatively clean clothes to wear, and coercing my hair into its braid, I run down the stairs to the front door, unafraid of anyone hearing me. I live alone these days, my only reliable and slightly constant company being the occasional Greasy Sae, Haymitch, and Peeta.

I pause for a moment at the foot of the stairs.

'Peeta.'

Right now he is in the house next to Haymitch. He was discharged from the Capitol months ago and took up residence in his old home in Victors Village. Like me, he had nowhere else to go. For a moment my mind lingers on our common fate, wondering if he knows that we share it.

I walk into a kitchen and attempt to procure a breakfast for myself. Greasy Sae stopped coming to make my breakfast a little while ago, at my request. These days I was usually out hunting until noon at the least, so I almost always missed breakfast and lunch. It was Peeta's return in the fall that had woken something in me, a survival instinct that had forgotten I had. He had suffered many of the same terrors as I had, yet he managed to be as productive as he was able. Everyday he was baking, painting, and more recently planting; anything to occupy his troubled mind. I took to his example and forced myself out of bed every day, coercing myself into doing the simplest of tasks at first, and then working my way onward. After a while I started to hunt again, taking advantage of my inability to sleep until dawn. At first it was only for an hour or two, but now I could stay in the woods all day, almost forgetting everything in my past, dulling the pain until it was almost nonexistent. It seemed that everything in my life had changed except for the forest, my oldest and most enduring friend in midst of all this uncertainty.

Sae only came in the evenings now. And more often than not, Peeta came with her. Sometimes he would come over a little early in order to water the primrose he had planted for my sister at the side of the house. But most days he came at twilight with Sae, carrying his baking apron and a sketchbook. He baked fresh bread in the oven in my kitchen, and coaxed warm flames into my fireplace. He played simple games with Sae's granddaughter, patiently attempted to teach her to knit with the blue ball of yarn I had given her, and drew in his leather sketchbook when she fell asleep. Sometimes we talked while Sae cleaned the kitchen, but we always avoided uncomfortable topics. Whether that was for Sae's benefit or our own, we left ambiguous. When Greasy Sae left for the night, scooping up her granddaughter as she went, Peeta would often leave with her, except for the few times when he didn't. Sometimes he would be so absorbed with his sketches he wouldn't hear her leave. On these nights I never reminded him to go; instead I would lay on the couch and wordlessly watch him, allowing myself to be calmed by the sound of his pencil on paper, waiting for the moment when he looked up and realized that we were alone. Sometimes I would fall asleep before this happened and later find myself in my bed, knowing that he must have carried me there and left before I woke up. On these nights I would always lie awake thinking about how my father would do the same thing when I was little, and wondering how Peeta managed to be so quiet as not to wake me. Other times he would nod off on the couch in front of the fire and I would cover him with a spare blanket I kept in the hall closet just for such occasions. But when I returned to my living room in the morning he would always be gone, having left soundlessly in the night, folding the spare blanket and leaving it on the couch in his absence.

On those mornings, I often sat on the couch for a moment, closing my eyes and letting my hands run over the spare blanket repeatedly. It brought a comfort I couldn't describe.

I found that in the months that had followed his return, Peeta and I had grown closer, little by little, night by night. At first I had been apprehensive, wanting so badly to believe he was still the boy I had survived both Hunger Games with, but still completely untrusting of the Capitols lasting effects on his mind. Getting too close to him would only make his inevitable relapse more painful for me. Eventually however my doubts slowly faded away. He had moments where darkness clouded over his eyes, reminding me that he was just as scarred from his past as I was with mine (if not more so), but he was quick to dispel them, shaking his head as if to clear them from his mind. Sometimes he excused himself and I didn't see him until the next day. But when he returned, within moments or within hours, he was the same Peeta I remember, more or less.

We had grown to be friends, or something like it. I choose not to think of us as anything more, feeling it was far too soon for me to consider anything like that, after all I had lost. Love or anything closely resembling it seemed out of place in a world where my little sister was dead, my mother a hundred or more miles away at any given time, and my district in a constant state of reconstruction. Love seemed incomprehensible in this new and strange place, if not impossible. Sometimes I wondered how people could move on so quickly. How they could move on at all.

Other times I wondered why I couldn't move on with them. Sometimes I felt like I was trapped in one place, stuck against the current rushing past me.

I decided to scarf down the rest of the bread Peeta brought me last night for dinner and a bit of goat cheese. I packed a few apples for later, grabbed my father's worn hunting jacket and headed for the front door. The morning chill greeted my face like an old friend. The air was crisp, but it was also fresh and helped clear my head. I closed my eyes and breathed it in, letting it dispel the lasting fear from the dream, clearing away all the darkness I had taken with me from the bedroom and leaving only Katniss behind.

I looked instinctively to my left, towards Peeta's house, as I did every morning. It was something of a habit. Part of me just wanted to make sure it was still there in the morning, that he was still there in the morning, and hadn't disappeared from my life like he did my couch on those sleepy nights. I noticed a light was on in his kitchen. He was already awake. Smoke was coming out of his chimney already.

It was always this way. When I asked why a few weeks ago, his eyes flickered away from mine and he said he liked to bake early in the morning, that it was a leftover habit from before the 74th Hunger Games. I had wondered why he didn't mention his family's bakery, but I never got around to asking.

I also wondered if he was plagued by nightmares like me, and if that was a contributing factor to his early baking. I wonder if he tries to escape rabid mutts in his dreams like I do. I wonder if he tries to escape me in his dreams. I wonder, but I never get around to asking.

I shake my head, as if that will physically banish those thoughts from my mind.

I take my eyes away from his house, remembering that I am wasting precious hunting time. The woods are calling my name, I can hear it in the branches when the wind blows through them, and I will not keep them waiting any longer than I have to.