Over the course of the next week or two, Peeta and I spend almost every night together. We still eat breakfast with Haymitch most days, and usually we don't see each other all that much during the day. The weather is warming up a bit as spring is arriving, and I've been going out to hunt more and more. The makeshift market in town is more established now, so I've been bringing more game home for Sae to cook and sell. It's the least I can do after all she's done to take care of me. I order the supplies for Thom, and when I deliver them he and the crew thank me so profusely it's absurd.

Peeta spends most of his time baking or painting, but he also talks on the phone a lot. He speaks to Dr. Aurelius in therapy once or twice a week. I'm supposed to be doing that, too. Peeta's mentioned to me a few times that Aurelius is asking for me, but I don't care. I just don't want to talk about the things that hurt me. I'm finally feeling some degree of better, and I don't want to dredge everything up.

In addition to Aurelius, Peeta talks on the phone to our friends who don't live in 12. Usually it's Johanna or Annie. I don't think I fully realized just how much of a bond the three of them have, the three who were tortured in the Capitol together. Annie was unreachable for the first few months after Finnick was killed, but since she realized she was pregnant she's come out of herself a bit. She wants to take care of herself and her unborn baby, the last piece of Finnick she can hold on to.

Even after days spent apart, we almost always found our way to each other's homes at night. Usually he'd come to me, but sometimes I'd go to his place. None of it is spoken about or planned, we both just know that we don't want to be alone.

There have been a couple nights when, for whatever reason, we haven't been together. One evening I was exhausted after a long day in the woods and I passed out on my couch. He came over, planning to join me in bed, but saw me sleeping and didn't want to disturb me, so he left. I woke a few hours later screaming my head off. One night he called me, saying that he felt as if he was fighting off a flash and didn't want to come over. He's still scared of hurting me. I didn't sleep at all that night, and rather stayed up on my window seat. I saw that the light in his studio never turned off. I remember after our first Games that painting his nightmares helped him keep them at bay. I think he's gone back to that, but with the mutilated, shiny memories too.

One evening, Haymitch, Peeta, and I are all eating dinner together over at Peeta's house. Peeta is in a ridiculously good mood this evening. I have no idea why, but it's been fun. He and I have been locked in a playful war for the past hour or two; I'd take his utensils while he was cooking and he'd have to chase me to get them back, he'd flick little pieces of mashed potato in my direction. It's nice to feel light hearted sometimes. Now, as we're eating and sitting next to each other at the table, he keeps poking my shoulder in the hopes of getting me to turn around. Every time he looks at me with that stupid grin on his face, I just stick my tongue out at him. Haymitch rolls his eyes at us almost unceasingly. Finally, he snaps.

"Oh for the love of God, you two are just painful when you're friends. I think I liked it better when you weren't speaking." There's no trace of a lie in his tone, but I can see it in his eyes. He's happy to see his kids getting along, finding some sort of joy in the world. I'm about to return him a snide remark, when the phone rings. Peeta gets up to answer it.

"Hello?" he says into the receiver. "Oh, hi Johanna! How are you?" He's silent for a minute, then he laughs. He chats with her for a few minutes, just catching up. It seems like it's been a few days since they'd last spoken, and Johanna was getting pissed at him for it. I hear her muffled voice through the phone asking him what he's been doing.

"Oh, not much," he says. "I've been painting a lot, baking and cooking in indecent quantities. Katniss and Haymitch are the beneficiaries of that, they're over here for dinner right now." I can't tell what she's saying, but I can hear her voice grow louder in the receiver. He moves it away from his ear slightly and laughs.

"Sure, sure, one second," he says, and then turns to me. "She wants to talk to you." I get up and walk over to the phone.

"Well hello, brainless," she says. "Nice to know you're alive." I laugh slightly.

"Hi Johanna," I say. "How are you?"

"Oh just excellent," she says sarcastically. "Every day is a joy." I laugh again, more heartily this time.

"I don't care about how I am, though," she says. "How are you? I haven't heard from you in fucking forever."

I feel a bit guilty at this. Johanna and I grew close towards the end of my time in 13, and she has no one for her to depend on at home. She has Peeta and Annie over the phone, but that's about it, and Annie even at her best isn't the most reliable. This is just another way that I've been selfish in trying to heal. I haven't paid nearly enough attention to the people to whom I owe an incalculable debt.

"I know, I'm sorry," I say sincerely. "I...I was not doing well. For a while. I shut myself off from everyone, and I lost myself. Things have been a bit better recently, though. Some days are alright, some days aren't. It is what it is, I guess." I hear her cackling on the other end and I have no idea what she thinks is funny.

"What?" I ask, a laugh in my voice.

"Oh nothing," she says. "Just the fact that you started doing better once Lover Boy came back, it's all so fucking typical. You two are disgustingly cliche." I feel my face flush.

"I - we...we're not...like that," I get out.

"Oh I know," she says with another laugh. "It doesn't mean you don't disgust me." She says the insult with nothing but love in her voice. Johanna is truly absurd sometimes. We chat for a few minutes. The conversation turns to Annie, how she's coping, how her pregnancy is going. It's nice. Johanna, despite how much I might have hated her when I first met her, is one of only a handful of people outside of the two men in this room with me who I genuinely consider my friend. I need to do better by her.

When we finish up, I pass the phone over to Haymitch and they talk briefly too before he finally hangs up. He heads out soon after. I can tell he's itching to drink. He and Johanna both developed dependencies to cope with their trauma, and it is a bond that they share, for better or for worse. Peeta and I are alone now.

"She seems good," I say to him. "Or at least, she seems like herself a bit." He laughs at that.

"She's doing alright," he says. "It's been hard for her, being back in 7. She doesn't have anyone for her there, and Snow set fire to a lot of the woods and they haven't grown back yet. The forest is a comfort to her, she's like you in that way, so she's been struggling with that. And she's clean now, at least from the morphling. She went through a rehabilitation program in 13 after we went to fight in the Capitol. I think it was the same one Haymitch did, she called once while he was over and I heard them talking about it. It was brutal for her, but she's proud of herself. She drinks now, but not in the same way as Haymitch. She'll use it to lose herself sometimes, but it isn't a constant like the morphling was."

"She should be proud," I say. "That's big." Peeta smiles at me and starts to clean up. I start washing the dishes, thinking about Johanna.

I didn't know almost anything about how her life has been since I last saw her at the Victor's vote in the Capitol. I should have made an effort, even just a basic one. I think about Annie too. I realize that, even though it was a different kind of love entirely, she and I both lost the people we loved most in the world. I should have checked in with her, we should have bonded over that shared grief.

When I think of Annie, I think of Finnick, and I realize that by isolating myself I'm not only doing a disservice to my friends that are still here, I'm also not honoring the memories of those that aren't. I should be hearing Annie share stories about Finnick, and she should be hearing mine about Prim. I should learn the names of Johanna's family, learn what they were like before Snow took them from her. We need to remember these people. I think back to Peeta's words from the other night, about Delly's parents: "they deserve to be remembered." They deserve to be remembered. An idea hits me very suddenly.

"Peeta," I say, turning to look at him.

"Mhmm?"

"What if we made a book?"

"What do you mean?" he asks, looking confused. "Do you really want to write about the War?"

"No, no," I say, shaking my head. "I was thinking more like my family's old plant book, except instead of plants, it could be the people we lost. Their names, the things they liked, what they did, the people they loved. We could put in pictures, or you could sketch them or paint them. I just...I want to remember them, all of them. They were too important to forget a single detail." I look at him, slightly apprehensive to find out what he thinks of my idea. The smile on his face is bigger than I could have imagined.

"Yes," he says emphatically. "Yes Katniss, I love it."

We abandon the dishes in the sink; we'll deal with them tomorrow. Both of us want to get started right away. The longer we wait, the more we forget. Peeta grabs some papers and a pencil - he said he wants to start with just sketching first until he gets it right, and then he'll go back in with paint - and we sit down on the floor in front of his coffee table.

"Who would you like to start with?" he asks, deferring to me.

"Rue," I say. I'm not really sure why, but her name just comes to me naturally. Something about it feels right. He nods and smiles, and sets about sketching immediately. I take a page and write her name at the top.

I start scribbling down everything I can remember about her; her stories about her family, her love of music, the way her laugh sounded, her healing and caring nature, the way she hugged me in our sleeping bag, her amazing identification of plants, how her curls bounced when she walked, the way she could soar through the trees. Everything I can remember. I want it all there.

I look over at Peeta and his work is unbelievable. He's captured her so quickly, and it's not just that it's an accurate drawing. It is, but there's more than that. He's captured her. The look in her eyes, it's just so right. He realizes I'm watching him and stops the movements of his pencil, blushing a little bit.

"It's just a draft," he says. "I'll make sure to fix it up before I paint it, don't worry."

"I'm not worried," I say. "It's perfect." Peeta and I spend the evening making pages for all the tributes we can remember from our first Games. We spend a lot of time on Thresh, and on Ridley, the girl from 4, who Peeta apparently befriended during his time with the Careers. I killed her. That's something I have to live with for the rest of my life. We also devote a lot of time on Foxface. Peeta spends ages trying to capture the clever look on her face, and I write down how much I admired her for thinking to hide in the Cornucopia before the Feast. I learn her real name was Finch, and I write that down too. We memorialize even those who were our greatest rivals: Cato specifically, and Clove.

We acknowledge those we killed. I have to take ownership for Glimmer, Marvel, and Ridley. Peeta blames himself for Foxface, even though he couldn't have known, and also for the girl from 8 he killed at the campfire, even though her life was over anyways and he finished it for her out of mercy. We feel as if we are simultaneously both at fault for Cato, and that neither of us are to blame; his death was the cruelty of the Gamemakers, even if my arrow may have been the final blow that killed him. We write down anything and everything we remember about them, respected about them.

In doing so, we feel as if we are breaking the chain of dehumanization that was placed on each of us when we boarded the train after being reaped. We were defined as tributes, identified with district numbers, judged by training scores, ogled over for costumes and makeup. No tribute has ever had the privilege of being acknowledged for who they really are. We are trying to do that for everyone we lost.

We are trying to remind ourselves that every single one of us was more than just a piece in their games.