A/N: Thanks for the positive reviews! I'm glad you guise like it so much! As always, 2 reviews for the next chapter!
They eat dinner and clean up, after that it is very late. Katniss yawns and could barely keep her eyes open cleaning up dinner.
"Go to bed Katniss. I'll finish clearing everything. You've had a long day." Peeta says.
She gets up and takes wobbly steps to the stairs and ends up sitting on the third stair waiting for Peeta. "I can wait for you," she said in a delirious tone while yawning.
Peeta snorts with laughter, "You just want me to carry you upstairs because you're too lazy to walk," he says jokingly. He finishes putting everything away and picks the now sleeping Katniss up off the stairs. He then brings her to bed and lays next to her, looking up at the ceiling.
After about an hour, she becomes restless and starts mumbling in her sleep. She begins breathing very heavy, then she starts to cry and scream and thrash around from nightmares.
Peeta, who is still awake, wakes her up. "What's wrong?" he asks with concern in his eyes and voice. "You were having a nightmare."
She is still breathing heavily and she looks at him. "Oh thank god you're okay!" she wraps her arms around him and just rests her head on his chest sniffling.
His forehead tightens in almost unnoticeable confusion. She was having a nightmare about him being hurt? Peeta was stunned. He strokes Katniss' hair and asks quietly, "What happened in your nightmare? Maybe if you tell me, it won't happen again."
She calms down a little "I was trying to save you, but I would run to you and you would just get farther away and then, Cato came with the sword then-," she burst out crying and buried her face in his shirt.
"Shh, shhh. It's okay. We're okay," he says as he tries to coax her out of his shirt. "Cato is dead. There's no more Huger Games. There is no one left who wants to hurt us."
Her breathing slows down eventually, and she looks up and hugs him. "Thank you."
Peeta smiled at her, then said, "Why, Mrs. Mellark, what are husbands for?" Katniss smiles and Peeta holds her until she's asleep. When she is asleep, he slips out of their bed, and places a handwritten note in his place. The note reads;
My dearest Katniss,
I'm so very sorry for leaving in the middle of the night like this. I know you wouldn't let me go otherwise, and I can't stand to hurt you more than I have already. In all fairness, you did this to me as well in the 74th. I miss you and I love you very much
~Love, Peeta
P.S. You really are an awful liar. I saw the bruises, and the cuts, and the blood.
By morning, Peeta had already gotten on his final train; District 1 to the Capitol. He had briefly visited Gale and Katniss' mother in their respective districts to tell them what had happened and to beg them not to tell her exactly where he was going, should she come knocking. Both had agreed to help him. On the final train, he thought about Katniss as the sun rose, how she would find his note, and hopefully, she would understand that doing this; leaving her, was the hardest thing he had ever done.
Katniss wakes up the next morning an reaches her hand out to the other side of the bed hoping for Peeta's warm arm but instead, she finds a small folded piece of paper. She reads it three times and starts to look around the house for Peeta. She stops in the middle of the hallway with the note in hand and falls to the floor, crying, realizing what Peeta did.