TW for this chapter: mentions of sexual assault

When my eyes open in the morning I see that Peeta is already awake and is looking at me resting on top of him.

"Good morning beautiful," he says, brushing a piece of hair out of my face. I roll my eyes sleepily.

"I want you to know I really am sorry, for everything about that fight," he says softly.

"No," I say. "No, that was all my fault Peeta. All of it." He kisses me slowly and gently.

"What made you come here last night?" he asks when we break apart.

"Johanna, of all people," I say. He looks at me with surprise. "I was doing really badly, and Haymitch wanted me to talk to someone, so he made her call me. I thought it would be a terrible idea, but...I don't know. It wasn't."

"I'm so glad," he says. It's now that I remember a part of my conversation with Johanna that had slipped my mind in all of the events of last night.

"Peeta," I say. "Johanna told me to ask you about something."

"What?"

"I don't really know. She called it the Bad Night." Peeta sighs. I can see the pain clouding his eyes at the words.

"She's sure she's ok with that?" I nod.

"She said you could tell me, but that she didn't want to talk about it."

"Yeah," Peeta says. "Yeah, that makes sense. Um...well it was while we were in the Capitol, obviously. We had been there a while already, but I really don't know exactly how long, I can't place any of my memories from that time that clearly. I can remember that they had already started hijacking me, because I was confused at first, but I wasn't completely lost yet. I remember them throwing me back into my cell after a round of hijacking, and I was exhausted and confused and in pain. I saw them strapping Johanna to a table, which wasn't that unusual. They liked to make us watch other people get hurt, like with Darius and Lavinia..."

I can see that he's reliving something awful, and then he shakes his head to clear it. "Anyway, um, they strapped her down. They had already been torturing her by spraying her with water and then applying electric shocks, you know that. But this particular night was worse. They stripped her down completely naked, they shaved her head. They applied the leads all over her bare body, in the worst possible places. They doused her in a particularly heavy round of water and turned on the current and she was screaming more than I'd ever heard her scream. I know it was agony."

"That's horrifying," I mutter, but he shakes his head.

"Th-there's more. They kept at her with it until she was sobbing, which she rarely ever did. She was really strong throughout our whole time there, impossibly strong, but this night broke her. I was yelling and rattling the bars of my cell, just trying to distract them and make them lay off her. I always tried, and it never worked. They never paid me any attention, they usually just laughed. When they finally stopped shocking her..." he takes a deep breath and clears his throat before continuing. "There were two Peacekeepres, who had been torturing her, with the shocks. One of them, uh...fuck," I can tell he's wincing at the memory.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I've just never talked about this with anyone other than Johanna, not even Aurelius, so I've never had to explain it. It's just a really bad memory."

"It's ok," I say, rubbing his shoulder. "Take as much time as you need. We don't have to do it now, we can finish talking later." He shakes his head.

"No, she wanted me to tell you, and everything about this needs to be her choice. And you deserve to know." He swallows before continuing. "One of the Peacekeepers took off his pants."

"No," I let out, as the realization of where this is headed hits me.

"Yeah," Peeta says. "Yeah. While she was sobbing, and tied up, and in pain, and scared, he...he raped her. She screamed at him, tried to hit him away but there was nothing she could do. The other Peacekeeper at first was just watching and laughing, but then I started screaming at them more and more. I don't remember what I said, honestly, but Johanna's filled me in. Apparently I was yelling at them to get away from her, and saying that they were evil and cruel. None of that phased them, but apparently then I said something along the lines of telling them that they were, uh, "choosing to cause pain in the most violating way because they were sick, depraved power players, and that if they want a real fight and want to cause real pain and deserve it they could come and fight me standing up and not be cowards by hurting someone who can't fight back." Or at least, that's what Johanna says I said."

He rushes through the retelling of his own words, as if saying it quickly will make it not a big deal, that it didn't matter that while he was deep within his own torture he had the courage to call his captors cowards and the goodness to try to draw the pain away from Johanna and towards himself.

"Anyway, I don't think they took well to the "cowards" thing," he says.

"No, I don't suspect they would have," I say, and he gives a small chuckle.

"The other one, the one who had just been watching, came over to my cell and beat me with a club until I passed out. I came to a couple hours later, apparently. Johanna wasn't crying anymore. When I called her name though, she broke down again. She said she thought they might have killed me, and that she was trying to come up with a way that she could kill as many of them as possible, even if she got herself killed in the process. She'd moved past tears and into fury. But I think with the relief that I was ok, and that she wasn't alone anymore, the reality of it all sunk in. The two of us just cried together on opposite sides of the cell wall until they took me away for more hijacking sometime the next morning. When we would talk about it occasionally, I never wanted to use any words that might upset her, so I just took to calling it the Bad Night, and that stuck between the two of us. That's it, I guess."

I take a few breaths as I try to process the horrificness of Peeta's story in its entirety. It's hard to fully conceptualize just how many levels of cruelty there are. My sympathy for Johanna increases even further than it already was, and I mentally berate myself for any moment in which I might have been frustrated by her stealing my morphling or put off by the smell when she couldn't shower.

I also feel a tremendous amount of respect for her given what she said on the phone yesterday. She wanted Peeta to tell me, she opened herself up to that level of vulnerability and pain, because she knew it would help me understand the goodness in him. She's incredibly brave.

"Thank you for telling me that," I finally say. "I'm so sorry that it...that it happened." It's a thoroughly inadequate response, but I don't know what words would be enough in the face of this.

"Thank you for listening," he says. "I realize I haven't told you as many details about my time in the Capitol as I should have. It's just hard because the memories are confused, and then the ones I understand are painful."

"Peeta you don't owe me anything," I say. "If you want to talk about these things I'm always here to listen, but you don't have to tell me anything that won't help you." At this, he kisses me. I'm flat on my stomach on top of his chest, and when he wraps his arms around me we are completely pressed together, our skin in direct contact at almost every point on our bodies.

"That helps me," he says when we pull apart, and I giggle a little bit. We stay where we are for a good amount of time, just taking each other in and enjoying the peace of the morning. I'm in the midst of enjoying the way his golden lashes cast shadows on his blue eyes when our reverie is brought to a crashing halt.

"Ah! What - fuck!" I hear someone yell, and scream myself as I look up and see Haymitch standing in the doorway. The expression on his face is one of deep disgust and mortification.

"What are you doing here?! Why didn't you knock?!" I scream as I flatten myself onto Peeta as much as possible. I am extremely grateful that I'm lying on top of him in the way that I am, because both of our front sides are hidden for the most part.

"Not one single one of us ever knocks!" he says, averting his eyes.

"I knocked when I came here last night!" I retort back. It's entirely irrelevant but I'm just trying to prove a point.

"Well good for you sweetheart, very polite. You knocked before you entered his house, did he knock before he entered you?" I'm screaming some string of insults and denials and obscenities at him, while Peeta stretches his arm as far as it can go and grasps the edge of a throw blanket off the nearby armchair, which he proceeds to drape over me so that I'm covered.

"Haymitch, maybe get to the point of the visit so then you can give us some, uh, privacy to get dressed?" Peeta asks.

"I was just coming over here to make sure you weren't gonna lose it without the girl," he says. He then takes in the state of disarray that is the kitchen, with my chocolate cake still sitting on the counter and all of our clothing strewn around the floor. "I can see I didn't have to worry about that."

"Well, thanks for that," Peeta says. "Can you just give us 10 minutes?" Haymitch disappears without another word to us, but I can hear him muttering under his breath. When the door closes I drop my head down onto Peeta's chest and try to block out what just happened.

"Oh my God," I moan.

"Yeah that was not great," Peeta says with a little bit of a laugh. "Not great at all."

"Ugh, that was so bad I want to disappear," I mumble into his chest, and he laughs again.

"Come on," he says, sitting up a little and helping me up. "We should get dressed. Don't want to give him any more excuse to berate us." I redress in my clothes from last night - I was barely in them, they spent more time on the floor than on my body - while Peeta brings his old clothes upstairs and changes into fresh ones. He's back down soon enough and goes to the door to let Haymitch back in.

"Hello again," Haymitch says. "I will say, I prefer seeing you clothed."

"Likewise, Haymitch," Peeta says, and Haymitch laughs a little. He nods his head at me and I try to avoid eye contact for fear that I'll just combust out of embarrassment.

"Is this good?" he asks Peeta, pointing to the cake still sitting on the counter.

"I don't know, I haven't tried it yet," Peeta says. "Katniss made it."

"Sweetheart made it? You sure it's not poisonous?" Now I do look at him, just to glare and scowl at him.

"Shut up," I say. "It's fine, it's nothing like Peeta's but it's not bad."

"Alright, alright," Haymitch says, and Peeta takes out a knife and cuts each of us pieces. I hear Haymitch mutter something under his breath about wanting to wait until someone else takes the first bite and I flip him off before digging into my slice. It's really not bad. The three of us eat our cake, in what must be the strangest breakfast we've ever shared together, but we enjoy ourselves. Haymitch teases us about not being able to stand a full two days without each other, and goes on unrelentlessly about the compromising situation that was this morning, but other than that we have a good time joking around.

Haymitch leaves not long after, and Peeta and I try to decide what we want to do with the rest of our day.

"I don't think I want to do anything except be with you," he says. "I hated being apart from you like that, even if it wasn't for that long."

"I hated it too," I say, taking his hand in mine. "So much."

It's really warm out today, and the sky is blue but full of puffy clouds, so we decide to just lie out in the grass in Peeta's backyard and just look up at the sky and exist together. It's an excellent choice. We lie with our heads next to each other but our bodies stretched out in opposite directions. I feel a supreme sense of peace here with him, feeling the warm breeze and hearing his voice as we talk.

"Can I ask you a question, Katniss?"

"Anything."

"What was wrong, that night? When we fought, I mean. I know something was wrong, what was it?" I sigh. I appreciate that Johanna tried to assure me my feelings were valid, but I still hate the reason I was mad that night. I fill Peeta in, about the way I was feeling about Annie and my mom, about the misplaced jealousy, about the guilt over Prim. He just listens throughout the whole thing. When I finish he turns his head to look at me.

"I'm so sorry," he says. "That's incredibly painful, and I wish you would have told me so I could have been there for you. You need to know that these feelings don't make you selfish or a bad person. You love your mother, and you love Annie. That doesn't mean that you can't be upset. You being upset doesn't mean you don't love them. Your mother has caused you a lot of pain even though she loves you too. It's awful, but it's all a part of the mess that's been our lives. You feeling angry at one part of your relationship doesn't negate the good in other parts. It doesn't make you ungrateful. I hope you know that."

"I'm trying to learn that," I say. "And you are absolutely right, I should have told you. I think I even knew that I should have told you, I was just scared. Some evil part of my brain was just screaming at me that I was selfish and you'd hate me for it, even though I know that's ridiculous."

"That is a little ridiculous," he says, and I chuckle. "I could never hate you. Even when I hated you, I didn't hate you." I laugh more at that, but a thought hits me when my laughter settles down.

"Can we make a promise?" I ask him.

"Of course."

"Let's do no more secrets. No lies, not anything. We tell each other everything. Almost every mistake I've made recently has been because I've kept something from you and I shouldn't have. I don't want to do that anymore. And I want you to know that whatever you're feeling, you don't have to hide it to protect me. We tell each other everything, good and bad. Deal?"

"Deal." I kiss him firmly before lying back in the grass. This is good. This is really, really good.