Chapter 21

I want to find a closet so badly I can barely stand it. I'd crawl into our bed and stay there, but Peeta is in it. He's been asleep for hours, thanks to that needle of Haymitch's - a massive dose of morphling straight into his jugular vein, or so our mentor told me before he dumped Peeta onto the bed and went home to get drunk.

It was left to me to remove his shoes and tuck him into bed. I've been sitting in my rocking chair by the bedroom fireplace ever since, waiting for Peeta to wake up. I won't allow him to open his eyes and think he's alone or that he's scared me away, not after the day he's had and how hard he's fought to get his life back.

The sun is starting to set, bathing our room in a warm glow, when he finally begins to stir. His eyes open and stare out the window as the sky behind my old house turns his favourite colour. The sun dips below the horizon and the sky fades to violet before I finally get out of my chair and perch on the side of the bed. I reach out to sweep a lock of hair off of his forehead and he rolls away.

"You should have let Gale shoot me."

My heart clutches. "No. I would never have let that happen. Never."

"It would be better. You would be free of me." I've only heard this hopelessness in Peeta's voice once before, the night he had a flashback in my kitchen.

"Peeta." I try to breathe through the panic that is clawing its way out of my chest. "I need you."

"Katniss, we tried OK? It's no good. I'm no good. I'm too dangerous. I won't be responsible for hurting you again. I think you should just move back to your place."

I'm silent for a moment as an overwhelming rage roils through me. How dare he? How dare he root himself into my heart, with his kindness and his compassion? His arms at night. His goddamn bread. I wasn't looking for love or the hurt that inevitably goes with it. In fact, I made it pretty clear that I didn't want any part of it. But would Peeta Mellark give up? Oh no. And now he thinks he send me back across the courtyard, to that graveyard of a house so I can live out my nightmares for the rest of my lonely and pathetic life while he sits in our home and wishes that I'd just killed him?

I tighten my hold on the reins of my temper as it tries to break free. "And Haymitch was worried about me hurting you," I mutter.

That gets his attention. He flips to his back and stares at me, puzzled. There are black circles beneath his red-rimmed eyes. "What?"

"Haymitch. After you got back in the spring. He told me to be sure of what I wanted, because I could hurt you beyond repair if I changed my mind," I snort derisively. "Neither one of us even considered the possibility that I'd be the one who got hurt."

Peeta takes my wrists in his hands. "Katniss, I am thinking of you. I could kill you with my bare hands someday."

"You won't!"

"I almost did today!"

"No. No. That's not what happened. You made sure we had help because you knew today was going to be a bad day. But this, sending me away?" I pause for a second, struggling against the tears that are threatening to spill over. "You should have just strangled me in the square, Peeta," I choke out. "It would have been better."

"Katniss, you don't understand."

"Peeta, don't you understand? There is no me without you anymore. When you were gone… When I thought you were…" I falter, at a loss for words. "You're the best part of me, Peeta. Can't you see that?"

Peeta closes his eyes and takes a deep breath before sliding over in the bed and holding out his arms to me. I crawl up beside him, and lay my head over his pounding heart. "I'm so tired, Katniss."

"I know. You've said that before."

He chuckles. "Real." We're both quiet for a minute, and then he sighs. "We're such a mess."

"Real." I draw a heart on his stomach with my finger. "I can't tell you how many times I've wished I had two arrows that day."

Peeta lifts my hand and threads his fingers through mine. "Can I ask you a question? About that day?"

I raise up on my elbow and look down at him. "What?" Peeta's jaw is tight, his eyes focused on our fingers. His thumb strokes back and forth across my knuckles. "Peeta, what is it?"

"Snow was so evil, Katniss. Why didn't you shoot him?" He finally looks at me. I can see in his face that he knows it's a loaded question. He wants to know why so many people died in the effort to kill Snow, but I didn't take him out when given the opportunity. He wants to know why I didn't kill his tormenter.

It dawns on me then, that no one knows the whole truth of what happened. And no one deserves it more than Peeta. "Snow was already dead." I can see the confusion on his face. "I saw him, Peeta. I talked to him, just days before the execution."

"What? How? I thought he was in custody."

I slide up so that my back is against the headboard and Peeta rolls over to his side to face me. "He was. In his suite in the Presidential mansion. I was wandering the halls one day and found his living quarters. Paylor's team was guarding the door and she let me in. I found him in his rose garden. His skin was almost green, from the poison in his system."

"Poison? Coin poisoned him?"

"No, he poisoned himself as he was poisoning his rivals. It was to keep suspicion off him. Finnick knew all about it. He explained it in a propos we shot that aired the night the rebels pulled you out of the training centre." Peeta looks at me, clearly puzzled by how Finnick could know all this. I wave my hand. "It's a long story, but you should hear it from Finnick. Haymitch can probably get us the footage. Anyway, Snow's mouth was full of sores and blood all the time. He used his roses to cover up the smell. I think Coin must have denied him access to whatever medicines he was using to keep himself alive. She'd like that, knowing she was responsible for his death even if I was the one to pull the trigger. Snow would die at her hands and Plutarch still got his show."

Peeta fluffs the pillows and uses them to prop himself up against the headboard beside me. "I don't know if it was due to the hijacking or not, but I never trusted her."

"I didn't either." I lace my fingers back through his again and give them a squeeze. "Her or Plutarch to be honest."

"She was afraid of you. You were a threat. We both know that's why I was sent into combat."

But Peeta was stronger than she thought, and so she took a page out of Snow's book and decided to break what was left of me.

"What do you remember about the fire?" I ask Peeta, laying my head against his shoulder.

"You were almost to the palace. I was trying to keep you in my sights. Something was telling me that we needed to stay together and I could tell it came from some place real. So I followed you. I figured I would protect you if I could, and if not, I'd find a way to draw them off you and on to me." I shake my head and open my mouth to tell Peeta the thousand reasons why that was a bad idea, but he stops me with a finger over my lips. "Don't," he says, and wraps his other arm around my shoulder. I wriggle closer to him. "It's what we do, Katniss." He heaves a sigh. "Anyway, I saw you up on the flagpole and I was getting ready to create a distraction, do something to draw them onto me before they noticed you. Then the hovercraft flew overhead and the parachutes fell. All those children…" his voice catches in his throat. "Well, of course, then I realized that no one was watching you anymore. The peacekeepers and the rebel medics were running into the compound. I heard you scream Prim's name and then I lost sight of you for a minute."

"I jumped off the flagpole," I tell him. He looks at me at shakes his head. I can tell what he's thinking. Of course you did.

"You were almost to Prim when I caught up with you. Then the bombs went off again. Your back was on fire and so I grabbed you." There is a hitch in Peeta's breath when he pulls me closer to him. He buries his lips in my hair and plows on. "I carried you over to the fountain and jumped in." He saved me. Again. The voice calling me back from the brink of death had been his. "Your heart had stopped when I pulled you out. So I just kept working to restart it until what was left of Prim's medic team found us."

Oh Peeta, just when I think I can't deserve you any less than I do, when I think I can't fall any farther in love with you; you manage to tip the scales just a little bit more and I slide even deeper. I look up at him and his blue eyes are shining with tears that he's not allowing to spill over. I kiss one cheek and then the other, before pressing my lips into his.

"That day, when I saw Snow, he told me that he didn't drop those parachutes."

Peeta looks at me, astonished. "But Katniss, I saw the Capitol insignia on the hovercraft with my own eyes."

"He said that we both knew he had no qualms about killing children, but he had no reason to kill those kids in front of the mansion. He also said that if he'd had a working hovercraft, he would have been on it."

Peeta thinks about this while he strokes my back. "He said Coin did it."

"Yes."

"You think he was telling the truth."

"I do."

He leans back to look me in the eyes again. "You're certain of it."

"When Gale arrived in District 13, he and Beetee started designing bombs based on Gale's hunting strategies, including one that maimed the victim with a delayed explosion that killed the rescuers as well." Peeta is horrified. "I reacted the same way," I tell him. "I said there had to be limits."

"Gale's bomb killed your sister."

I rush to tell Peeta that Gale and Beetee didn't know that their hypothetical plan had actually been put into action. "It was all a set-up, Peeta. She sent you to the Capitol to kill me, and when that didn't work, she sent my 14-year-old sister to the frontlines where she knew I'd be. Then she used my best friend's bomb to kill innocent children and my sister in a single blow, right in front of my eyes."

Peeta pulls me close again and returns to stroking my back. "She wanted you isolated. She wanted to break you so that you couldn't come between her and her plans. Katniss, why didn't you tell someone?"

"I tried to tell Haymitch, but…"

"But he said something snide and wouldn't listen." I can hear the frown in Peeta's voice. "Katniss, have you ever told anyone this story?"

I shake my head against his chest and as I do, the burden around my heart begins to ease and the my body shakes as the dam breaks inside me and my pent-up emotions release. I've held this in for so long. When I start to sob, Peeta pulls me up into his lap and begins to shush me and whisper that it's over.

When I finally stop crying, he tells me that I did the right thing. Coin and Snow are both dead and we are better off for it. Our country is free again. We have a chance to build a new and better future. Then I tell him that there's no way Coin was creative enough to concoct the plan on her own. That the entire scene was a master work of scheduling, timing and visuals. A horrific end to a gruesome war.

I watch as Peeta relives the moment again, this time through the eyes of a victor. "The parachutes," he whispers. And at last, someone else knows the truth, though I think Haymitch may have guessed.

There is still a war criminal alive in Panem. And he is a Gamemaker.