Four

"They collide, enfold, lose their balance, and slam against a wall, where they stay. Clinging into one being. Indivisible.

A pang of jealousy hits me. Not for either Finnick or Annie but for their certainty. No one seeing them could doubt their love."

(Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay)

It's suicide — or at the very least, seriously impaired thinking — coming down here to see Peeta like this, after midnight and all by herself. Katniss knows that.

Nothing but the medical wing's harsh overhead florescent lighting will be there to bear witness to this second reunion. No one will be there to save her this time if it all goes badly.

Katniss stuffs her hands into her pockets to try and control her trembling. She chooses to ignore Haymitch's voice, screaming at her in the back of her head to get the hell out of there. She forces herself instead to listen only to her soft footfalls against the linoleum floor as her legs close the distance between her and Peeta's makeshift hospital room down the hall.

It doesn't matter that this is almost certainly a terrible idea. Because she has to try. Has to see.

She won't be able to sleep again until she knows.

He's awake when she enters his room.

It's dark. The doctors treating him apparently didn't think he'd need a light for reading this evening.

Katniss can see him well enough, though, even from five feet away. There's enough light coming in from the hallway behind her to cast a sickly glow over his entire body. She takes in his wan features, his tousled hair. The pale, unhealthy appearance of his skin.

She breathes a sigh of relief when she sees he's restrained, his hands firmly handcuffed to either side of the bed. And she hates herself a moment later for feeling relieved.

If Peeta is surprised to see Katniss here he shows no sign of it. He simply stares at her, wordlessly, with eyes that are at once his and not his. He looks at all of her. Her face, and at her disheveled hair. At her neck, where the bruises he left her are finally beginning to fade.

And then his eyes wander down, down, down as they take in her legs. Her ass. Her breasts.

At length Peeta's eyes flit back up to hers, unreadable and cold. Katniss feels herself turning red under his gaze.

She looks away.

The awkward silence stretches between them for several very long moments.

Eventually, Katniss decides that if she waits any longer she'll fly out of her skin.

Before either of them fully realize it's happening Katniss moves across the room in three long strides. Peeta opens his mouth to say something but she doesn't give him a chance to speak. She crushes her mouth to his and swallows whatever it was he was about to say, throwing her arms around his neck and pulling her body as close to his as she can.

This — a kiss not for the cameras, or for the Capitol, but for them — was exactly what the old Peeta would have wanted. Was willing to die for.

But not this Peeta. At first Katniss expects this new, broken Peeta to protest and fight against her with all his strength. And he does protest. A little, anyway. He fights against his restraints, tries to wriggle free from her embrace. To pry her arms away from him as best he can, to cast her away.

But then she roughly deepens the kiss with her tongue, and slides her hands down the front of his body in a firm caress, and he stops fighting.

"Oh," he whimpers into her mouth as the Peeta she used to know — the Peeta she loved, the Peeta she loves — returns her kisses with fervor.

He mouths three words she still isn't ready to say out loud against her lips.

But it doesn't last.

It's over a half beat after Katniss places her hands on either side of his face in a gentle caress.

He grunts loudly and jerks his head to the side, as if finally coming out of a long fever dream, and then bites her lip, hard. Katniss shrieks and pulls away as she tastes her blood on her tongue.

She backs away from his hospital bed as quickly as she can. But it doesn't help.

"Get the fuck away from me you mutt you MUTT YOU MUTT YOU MUTT!" he screams at her. "GODDAMNIT GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME! Doctor! DOCTOR!"

Katniss is gone before anyone can find her there.

She lies awake in her narrow bed for hours, mulling over what happened this evening with Peeta.

The brief moment of connection they'd had was more than she dared hope for when she foolishly snuck down there tonight. Perhaps it was the only moment like it they would ever share.

But Katniss knows now. Her heart is racing with the knowledge, her palms are damp with it. When she thinks of how good Peeta's body had felt underneath her tonight — how his warm, wet lips had tasted pressed up against hers; how his tongue had felt, boldly slipping in and out of her mouth — Katniss' breath starts to come in short, quick pants.

She knows, now, with a certainty, that she loves Peeta Mellark. She knows it like she knows how to breathe, how to hunt, how to take care of Prim.

Knowing is at once a relief — a welcome solution to a troubling problem— and a fresh, new agony.

Resigned, Katniss takes Peeta's pearl out of her pocket, falling asleep with it against her lips.