And how much has happened between then and now? Deep in his reminisce it seemed like an eternity between that fateful day and where lay today.

In his cold isolation room in District Thirteen Peeta rested while thoughts swirled in his head like leaves in the wind. The door opened and he turned his head expecting Delly but instead was greeted by another ghost he used to know.

"Why the hell did they decide to let you in?" Peeta croaked.

Michaelis looked thinner than he remembered, with dark circles under his eyes as if he had aged in the last few months.

"Hi Peeta," he said quietly.

Peeta didn't respond.

"You probably don't want to talk to me, huh?" Michaelis took a seat in the chair at his bedside.

"I heard my family didn't survive. How did you?"

"I wasn't in the shop at that time when it happened, I was watching the broadcast in the square."

It figured. Bad things always happened to good people while the jerks got away unscathed.

"So why did the Thirteen doctors let you see me? Don't they know we're not friends?"

"They know, I told them all about how we were enemies during the interview."

"Why?" It was more of an angry statement than a question. "What did I ever to you to deserve all the things you did to me?"

Michaelis sighed wearily, as if he were seventy instead of seventeen. As if he were a man with such a long life that his multitude of memories threatened to overwhelm him.

"Don't you remember, one day when we were six years old we were at the playground during the last day of summer holidays? I was playing on the swings by myself watching as one by one, all the parents picked up their kids until it was just me sitting on the swings alone. I remember looking up and seeing you sitting on top of the slides and then I realized that like me, your mom hit you and you were the unwanted child in your family. I-I was so happy that I found someone like me, someone who understood how lonely I was. I wanted to talk to you straight away, but then you got off the slides and started walking away. I called out to you, but you didn't speak, you ignored me…. and then the distance between us was too much for me to reach."

Out of all the things he expected to hear, this came out of literally the last thing he would have thought of. Peeta was stunned. He tried to wrack his brains for that day at the playground, did he hear someone call out to him? He honestly couldn't remember.

Michaelis' face hardened. "School started, and you could do everything, you had everyone. We were too different, so I decided that I would hate you. But secretly deep down I still wanted to be your friend."

"No Michaelis," Peeta protested weakly. "What are you talking about?"

Michaelis glowered at him, as if resentment was still simmering under the surface.

"I knew that like me, you used to always be alone, just like me, you were shunted aside and ignored by the rest of your family. I was desperate to connect to other people, sometimes I felt so alone I would start hurting. So I did stupid things on purpose to get punished, just so anyone would notice me." Peeta fell silent, his heart began to ache for him, not knowing that Michaelis had been hurting all those years, wishing he had known.

"After seeing you move forward, having fun, making friends, it just started to get to me. I gave up on becoming your friend and decided that we were enemies. I picked on you all the time because I was jealous, because you had something that I didn't. Making you suffer became my goal. It's hard to understand, but it made me happy, that I who had nothing finally had some sort of connection to someone, some sort of relationship."

Michaelis shrugged. "And then you were reaped. And I realized that I was going to lose the one constant in my life, the person who kept me sane. That's why I did everything I could to keep you alive, I even told the interviewers that Gale was Katniss' cousin, to help you with your star-crossed lover act. I don't know why I'm saying all this, you can hate me if you want, but I just wanted you to finally know the truth."

Katniss, she's a mutt! An evil mutt who killed everyone I loved! Some trigger in this brain activated when he heard her name and his body jerked upward. It took him a few minutes and some deep breathing until his mental state returned to reality but Michaelis never left his seat.

"Things would have been different if I had managed to talk to you back then. Not so different though, because Peeta- Katniss is your destiny."

And that's all that she wrote

A/N at the time I was writing this I was heavily into Naruto where I basically ripped their origin story (Michaelis=Naruto and Peeta=Sasuke). Where Michaelis' obsession with tormenting Peeta and also his resolution to become mayor is a cry for attention that that he never got.