Stimulus: Stairs

POV: Katniss

Dedication: Suzanne Collins, for providing the best troubled romance that fanfic-ers have had at their fingertips for a long time :)

AN: I really like this one. I hope you guys do too :) I've given up on hounding for reviews now, because it's enough to know that at least 130 people are reading each chapter. Thanks guuuuys :)

-x-

Peeta had always been the stable one. The one who could handle anything. After all, he was the one who recognised that half the battle of the Games is taking on the Capitol audiences and had done it magnificently. He wasn't the one who shot and arrow at the Gamemakers, or pushed his fellow tribute into an urn that broke their hands. Yes. If you ask anyone who knows us, they'll tell you Peeta is the stable one.

I don't know whether or not to be surprised when it becomes apparent that when it comes to not fighting any more, Peeta is… well.

Broken.

Sometimes, like me, he stays in bed and does not move. But while my periods of inactivity last in general only a day, Peeta can stay in bed for over a week at a time, not eating, not drinking, not getting up. I am scared to go to him the first few times for fear that this episode will trigger some sort of flashback at my return to his side. So I stay well away, sending Haymitch in three times a day with tea and food. But when I hear of the way that Peeta's ribs have begun to show, I vow that from now on, taking care of him will be my duty. My responsibility. Haymitch doesn't take much convincing.

I am scared, at first, to venture into Peeta's home – strange, how often he had been to mine but how seldom I have been to his – and am even more scared to find that it is just as Haymitch said it would be. Every blind is closed. A smell of rotting food lies like the Quell's poisonous fog in the kitchen, so strong it makes my eyes water. Peeta lies, unmoving, in his cotton shell upstairs.

Because I am scared, I cannot bring myself to climb those stairs.

So I throw myself into downstairs. I cast open the blinds. I empty the creaking cupboards of their rotting stock and replace it with new, fresh food. I cook, I clean, I organise. I throw myself into a domestic goddess world that I had thought I was incapable of accessing.

When it is done, I stand at the bottom of the stairs.

And then I go home. I cry myself to sleep, because after all that has happened between us I always thought that now, when everything was over, I would at last be able to face the boy with the bread unashamedly and unafraid. In my misery I curse those stairs, hate them for separating me from him. But I know it's not the stairs that are to blame.

I am woken in the early hours of the morning by the smell of baking bread.

Peeta is sitting on the kitchen floor, staring through the glass door of the oven where lies the fresh mounds of golden dough into which he has poured all of his nightmares. As I tenderly move through the kitchen, unsure of the protocol for our meeting here in the home that I had carefully cleansed. He sees me in the reflection of the oven door and speaks. His voice is rough and cracks from lack of use.

"You came to take care of me. Real or not real?"

I nod. "Real."

"You didn't come up the stairs."

"Real."

"Because you were afraid of me."

I cannot answer this because my throat has closed up. I simply nod and squeeze my eyes shut to stop the tears from leaking out. I jump when I realise that Peeta has stood up and is winding his arms around me. He hesitates a little at my stiffness but when I relax into him we melt into one person, he holding me gently and I clutching at him as if afraid he might disappear again and spend another week upstairs, leaving me alone. "That's how I knew I had to get out of bed," he whispers, and my heart aches for the boy who climbed out of his incapacitating misery because I had been afraid. I know at this moment that he is coming back to me. I want to tell him that I've missed him. That I don't want him to go away again. That I will always be here to take care of him, no matter how afraid I am. But I cannot say this. So I say something else. Three little words I've been wanting to say ever since he took me in his arms.

"Peeta?"

"Katniss?"

"You really smell."