Peeta's POV

I walk from Katniss's house back to mine in the early hours of the morning, the sun just beginning to rise. I am tired, but the realistic fact is that last night was the best sleep I had gotten since coming back from the Capitol. At least the best that wasn't induced by morhpling, and even those ones just had nightmares impossible to wake from.

Though the night had not been completely peaceful, relative to what I was accustomed to, it seemed like a huge improvement. Back in Thirteen the doctors did wonders on me while the sun was out. I could go through a whole day without yelling at one of the nurses. I could look at a picture of Katniss and, instead of feeling fear or anger, I felt longing. Looking at a tape of her, I felt like the man who I used to be, desperately in love.

Sleeping in the same bed with Katniss again was...awkward. We didn't really know how we should act in this situation. I was fearful that I would awake with the sudden urge to snap her neck. Nights without flashbacks, while rare, were becoming more plentiful, the thankful signs of healing. But in my head I am still the monster that the Capitol created. A thing that should be locked away forever and never let out. So last night I kept my distance from Katniss while in bed. I didn't move to envelope her in my arms like on the train or in the Capitol. I stayed on one side of the bed, trying to think of something to say that would ease the tension. But the words that I thought of were limp, like back at the dinner table.

For her part, Katniss stayed on the other side of the bed. A small part of me was thinking that she was scared of me. The other side, the side that I so vehemently wanted to be, yearned to just reach out to her.

Later, I awoke from my own silent nightmare to her screams of terror. Quickly I moved to wrap her in my arms, waking her, and whispering to her, like a mantra, that I was there. I couldn't bring myself to say it's not real because for her they all are. Sobs shook through her, and as I helped her through everything I realized that this girl, flung into a rebellion only to lose everything she started it for, might have been more broken than I am now. I searched for my sanity, worked my way to it, the grueling process, seemingly impossible, that made me able to live beside the one that used to haunt me. But because I know Katniss, I know that she did not try to return to her state of normalcy. She stuck herself inside her own head and probably hoped that some divine intervention would take her to her sister. She turned herself into a dying star that would consume all it had only to find that it had nothing left to survive with.

That's when I realized I had to do more. That Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire, was going to run out of what she needed in order to burn. Soon she would go into a catatonic state. Maybe find her stuck at the bottom of a bottle, like Haymitch. Or turn to the addiction of morphling, like Johanna. Or maybe, just maybe, she would turn into Annie, crazy from a life where odds were never in her favor.

So when she woke me up this morning with a look in her eye impossible to place, and told me that I should go, I made a choice. She needed help, not in the form of drugs, or alcohol, but actually talking.

Upon returning to my home, I immediately pick up the phone and call Dr. Aurelius, knowing that he works with me as well as with Katniss. While we usually do have conversations weekly, every Sunday, Aurelius rarely hears from me at any other time.

"Peeta," he says, obviously surprised by my call. "Is there something the matter?" he asks cautiously, trying to decide whether or not I'm in the middle of an episode.

"No, Doctor, I'm fine. Actually, I'm feeling much better," I'm sure he can imagine the wide grin on my face right now.

"Well, Peeta, while that's great to hear, it is a bit early where I am, so is there something you needed?"

"Yes, I'm calling in regards of Katniss," I tell him, fidgeting a bit, anxious of what I'm going to say.

"You and I both know I can't give you any information on her case," Aurelius says casually, as if he's grown accustom to having to say this.

"Does she even have a case?" I ask, my words sharp, having a short-temper that just barely grows longer each day. I realized awoke ago that if people are lying to me, or if I think they're lying, I become harsh and impatient.

"She just needs time, Peeta," he explains, though it's not what I want to hear.

"You give her enough time soon she won't have any left," I reason, frustration overwhelming me. He sounds like he doesn't even care, for Christ's sake!

When he speaks, his voice is gentle, trying to calm my rising anger, "Now, you know I can't make her pick up the phone. Katniss is a very stubborn person. If she doesn't want to talk, she won't."

I nod and take a deep breath, exhaling and inhaling slowly. I trust Dr. Aurelius. He has not lied to me. He will not lie to me. I repeat this over in my head multiple times until I have returned to a normal level of sanity. He doesn't trust anybody.

I speak slowly after regaining my composure, "What if I convince her to talk to you?"

"You are still persistent as ever, Peeta," Dr. Aurelius chuckles. Back in Thirteen, when he was working on me and decided to retire for the day I was insistent that we keep on working, concentrated on returning back to my old self. "If you can get Katniss to even pick up the phone, I'll consider you to have done a great contribution to her healing. I will call later. Goodbye, Peeta."

"Goodbye, Dr. Aurelius. Sorry for waking you," I sheepishly add the last part. After hanging up the phone I start my daily routine of making bread. Baking has become a sort of therapeutic activity since the rebellion. Definitely less hijack-inducing than painting. Every morning I bake two loaves of bread, one for Katniss and me, and one for Haymitch - somebody has to make sure he eats.

I move around the familiar kitchen, avoiding some of the broken objects I have yet to clean up, and try to release some of the anger that I felt during the conversation with Aurelius. I go through my time with Katniss and my mind ends up wandering to this morning, not too long ago. I can't say I wasn't surprised when she woke me so early, I didn't suspect she would tell me to leave. The voice in my head tells me that Katniss is ashamed of me, doesn't want anybody to know that we're sleeping in the same bed. Before I know it that's all I can think. She's ashamed. Ashamed that she would ever waste her time with me. Then the flashbacks start. I see her holding Gale's hand. Kissing him in the woods. Her laughing. "It would've never been you, Peeta." I grip the counter, trying to gain control of the images running through my head. Attempting to block out the biting words that this Katniss keeps saying. I see their kiss deepen, and then their clothes start to come off.

And then I'm in a room, filled with different paints and colored canvases. I start painting the white walls, filling them with gruesome images. Prim's body, charred and mangled, the only thing to recognize her is her eyes, still bright blue and innocent. I draw Gale and Katniss over and over again, deep shadows emphasizing their every moment on the wall.

Then I'm at Haymitch's house, my every action erratic and rough. My memory blanking in the oddest places. I grab a couple bottles of white liquor, not comprehending Haymitch's passed out figure. Before I can even make it back to my house, I've downed one half-empty bottle and thrown it to the ground.

The last thing I can recall before my memory gives out is me throwing paint on a wall while drinking a second bottle of liquor.

Coming to, I see the bleary colors on the wall, illuminated by late-afternoon sunlight. I groggily cover my eyes to evade the bright sun. The pounding in my head is almost overwhelming and I can just make out the pounding of a door above it. "Peeta!" Katniss yells, her voice muffled on the other side of the door. Sitting up, I feel the urge to vomit but hastily suppress it, putting my head in my hands and let out a groan. "Peeta?" Katniss's voice perks up at the sound of my own. "Peeta, open the door."

"Go away," I tell her, not wanting to risk another hijacking. I have yet to have a complete one in front of her since coming back and I plan to keep it that way. She doesn't have to see what I've become.

"I'm not leaving until you open the door," she says. Always so stubborn.

"You're gonna be there for awhile then," I reply. I hear her slide down the door to sit on the floor.

After what feels like hours of a standstill, Katniss speaks softly. "I found the empty liquor bottle outside my house," she says. "I thought it was Haymitch's but he said he hasn't left the house in days. He even tried to blame it on his geese." Haymitch and his geese have become sort of a running joke around town. Everybody hates them but they keep Haymitch preoccupied when he runs out of liquor. He says he hates them too but I think they're just a replacement for Katniss and me. "Then Dr. Aurelius called at dinner. I answered him," that's when I really started to pay attention, to become vested in what she was saying, instead of just absently wishing for her to leave. "I didn't really know how to talk to him. I haven't talked to anybody about my life since..." her words trailed off - reminding me a bit of Annie - though I know she is talking about Prim. Those two had been almost inseparable. "I talked to him, though. Told him about my first months back, before you were here. I didn't really do much but wallow around and be force-fed by Sae, you know?" I did know. I would never say it to her and I don't know if she'll ever acknowledge it but she turned into her mother for awhile. I don't even think she was aware that I was back until I planted those primrose bushes and helped her clean up after the whole Buttercup incident. But I did notice her in her post-traumatic state, doing nothing, just like her mother after her father died.

Katniss continued on with her story, no doubt trying to calm me down, though I am calm and just unwilling to put her at risk. "Then I told him about the primrose bushes you planted. I couldn't really go on after that, it made me think of her too much," and even then there was a crack her voice when she said 'her,' as if even the thought of what once was could break her. "After, Aurelius asked me if you were there, said he called your house but you didn't pick up," I hear her laugh a bit and can almost see the small smile playing in her lips. "I dropped the phone, didn't even bother to hang it up before I ran over here. Your front door was opened. The kitchen was a mess; there was a pile of dough on the floor and flour all around. A broken bottle and liquor all around. And on the staircase the walls had streaks of paint, like your hands were just dipped in buckets of colors." I look at my hands, and sure enough they're caked with paint, mostly dark colors that had begun to mix together. "Then I was pounding in your door, hoping that you were still there and hadn't done anything drastic. Hoping that you weren't gone."

"Katniss?" I say.

"Yeah?" her voice is almost impossibly soft for the Katniss that I know. The rough edges of a hard life in the Seam somehow gone. Almost as innocent as Prim used to sound.

"You're still trying to protect me. Real or not real?" I ask, recalling what I once said so close to my hijacked state that I'm not sure if what I'm remembering is even right.

But when she says "Real. Because that's what you and I do, protect each other," I know that it wasn't a dream or in the least bit shiny.

I open the door to her and not a moment later she's hugging me fiercely, in an attempt to apologize for something that wasn't her fault. And when I know she's seen the images on the wall she pulls me impossibly close, muttering 'I'm sorry," over and over again.

I continued to sleep at her house for the next few weeks. Every morning she would wake me up early and I would return back to my own home. It never bothered me because I knew she was just scared. Scared of people finding out, scared of what it meant, and too scared to hover over it for very long. But I never pushed her; I let her get through it because that's what she needed to do to protect herself and what I needed to do to protect her.

Every Sunday evening, Dr. Aurelius would call her and each of us would have an hour session with him, sometimes together and sometimes apart, both taking turns. I could tell the change in her, she seemed to not dwell on the past as long when she was sucked back into it. Her hunting even improved, now able to get a squirrel right through the eyes again.

She talked more, too. About the forest and how the animals were starting to come back, how the geese constantly came into her yard, and she even began to smile and laugh more. And that spark in her eye that had once been permanently engraved was coming back again.

She even began to look healthier. Her face was no longer as gaunt, her cheeks not so sunken in, and under her eyes the purple had gone away, the nightmares finally losing the intensity, and on some nights not even present. Her clothes were starting to fit her better, her dad's jacket doesn't hang as loose now, and her jeans and shirts aren't as baggy as they were before. Life was slowly creeping back into Katniss Everdeen.

I myself was feeling the effects of this new regimen. The flashbacks were less frequent and lacked the previous edge that they once had. I could see Katniss and not worry about what I might do to her if I let my guard down. I even started to help with the rebuilding process going on in town. When I looked at the rubble of District 12, I no longer thought that Katniss caused it. Though I still couldn't look at the bakery remains without violent memories flashing around in my head. Despite that, I was learning to control my hijackings as the other voice got quieter and quieter. I could feel myself turning into the man I was before I was taken to the Capitol. And with that I began to regain my feelings from before.

One day it all just clicked as I watched her take a bite if a cheese bun while I helped cook dinner. It happened just as fast as when she was singing the valley song in music class. It was such a slow build-up and then I was completely immersed, surrounded by these amorous feelings I thought I had lost. I heard that voice inside my head saying to her "You're not very big, are you? Or particularly pretty?" remembering that first conversation with Katniss and knowing how fucked up I must have been to forget how special she was. After months of therapy, months of some of the worst conditions possible, I know that I have come to realize what I knew all along.

I love Katniss Everdeen. I remember, though some things are still shiny. The moment I could remember the bread and the dandelion clearly a voice in my head was telling me I loved her. Now I could truly believe it.

Even when the Capitol tried to make me hate her there was always something that told me I loved her. People who would come to my hospital room that old me stories that only reinforced that love. When Prim came to my room, a bit later on in my life in District 13, a talked about daily life around Katniss. How I would look at her, compared to how I looked at other girls. How I acted around her. Then she would go on to describe how Katniss would look at me and act around me. So different than the way she treated Gale. Painting a picture in my head that could make the biggest skeptic believe that Katniss had loved me. At that moment, I think I was the most skeptical.

"Snow knew," Prim had told me once. "Katniss may not have known it, but even Snow could see how much she loved you, that's why he used you to break her."

I wake up like I do every morning, dawn just breaking and the sun just visible among the horizon, pouring soft light into the room. I've grown accustom to waking at this hour, over the weeks the routine has become engraved into my head. In my arms is Katniss who found her way to me after a bout of small nightmares that would wake her intermittently. She looked so peaceful, the light shining softly on her face, erasing her scars, as if there was never any war, never anything that haunted her. If only that were the case.

I sighed, knowing that I had to get up and return home. If I stayed too long in the morning Katniss would become nervous that somebody would see and force me out the back door and for the rest of the morning she would act jittery around Sae, as if she knew.

I untangle myself from Katniss and quickly get dressed. Though she gets mad when she's late for hunting I decide against waking her, knowing that she needs her sleep. Gently I kiss her forehead and make my way out the front door.

The moment I close the door a voice rings out, invading the morning silence. "Kid!" Shit. Haymitch's slurred speech disrupts the air, causing his gaggle of geese to honk and hiss.

I greet him and give a polite wave before resuming getting back to my house, with no intention of having a conversation or acknowledging his presence anymore. "How was the one night stand with our Mockingjay?" he bellows, amusement evident, causing me stop completely. And just as easily as he knew it would be, I'm on his porch.

"You know nothing happened," I tell him, glaring. He leans against the porch railing, most likely because he can't stand up straight.

He laughs, the alcohol on his breath is almost crippling. "Yeah, you come out of her house every morning at the crack of dawn. Suppose you wouldn't be leaving if anything worthwhile happened." Haymitch walks past me and into his house, grabbing a bottle of white liquor from a cabinet.

"It's not like I want to leave," I say, sitting down at his kitchen table.

"Trust me, if I spent most 'a my day over there with sweetheart I'd be sneaking out too." Haymitch groans and the chair creaks as he takes a seat across from me.

Distressed, and for fear of a flashback, I put my head in my hands, tugging on my hair. "She tells me to leave early every morning. She's scared, I guess."

He laughs, "Boy, the only thing that girl's ever been scared of is losing who she loves." As all of my jumbled thoughts run through my head, what Haymitch said permeates through each one. It sticks in my mind; I'm trying to make clear as to why. I knew this. I knew that she was afraid to lose any more. That's Katniss. That's how she is. She won't change anything if she believes it's sustainable. And it is. But it won't work forever.

But if I change it just a bit...

In a beat, I'm running out the door and Haymitch is yelling at me about how I spilled his drink. I'm barreling through Katniss' door, not even bothering with knocking.

"Katniss," I call, hoping that she hasn't left to go hunting yet.

She emerges from the stairwell, dressed in her hunting gear. "Peeta!" she says, startled by my sudden reappearance. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I say hurriedly, so fast that Katniss looks disbelieving at me. "I just wanted to ask-" I take a deep breath, preparing to plunge into a discussion I had no desire to delve into an hour ago, "why do I have to leave every morning?" I speak so quickly that I wonder if she was even able to understand me.

"I don't-I don't know." she sputters out, obviously caught off guard.

"You're the one that asked me to stay in the first place, so why can't I stay the whole morning? Why do I have to hide?"

"Because I still don't know what you think of me! Last I heard I was an 'ally.' What exactly am I to you now?" she asks, calculating me, seeing which word I will choose from the bank I had built up since in District 13.

"You're Katniss," I say simply, though I know that won't suffice.

She pinches the bridge of her nose and exhales haughtily. Looking up, her eyes are ablaze, making me wonder if I could ever capture that same hue in a painting. "And what does that mean to you? What do I mean to you?" her voice is so full of passion yet at the same time exasperated. I know she wants to have this conversation, be assured of everything, but at the same time I know that this reassurance wouldn't needed to have been asked for before the hijacking. That if we were in this situation now, me without having to cautiously move around her, I would have been telling her what she wanted to hear now, and every day, without needing a queue.

"You're the reason I'm still here, Katniss," I say, shrugging my shoulders. "We've been doing this unorthodox dance for so long that I didn't think you wanted out of it," she casts her eyes down, which up until now had been piercing through me, requiring a sufficient answer. I smile at her; I speak louder, with more courage. "I do. I want to hold you before the nightmares. I want to hold your hand, like Finnick did with Annie, and never let go. I want you to want me to stay with you, not because you're scared, but because you want me around. I just..." I sigh, pausing, trying to decide if what I'm about to say is worth it. Whether it will scare her off or not.

"What, Peeta?" she squeaks out, asking me to go on.

"I want you, Katniss. Not like when we were the star-crossed lovers of District 12," I move closer to her, though we're still an arm's length apart and Katniss has her arms crossed, a defense mechanism no doubt, and a look in her eyes that I can't place, though they still blaze. "But like that one kiss in the cave," the one after she had gotten the medicine and saved my life. I move closer, uncross her arms, and put one hand on her waist while the other holds her hand. "Or on the beach before the lightning struck. When I know you forgot the cameras were there. When it wasn't just me who was feeling something."

"It was never just you," she says, I can feel her hand fidgeting against mine and her head is declined so that she's looking at her feet. "I didn't really know what it was in the first Games but I knew I couldn't leave without you." She looks up and smirks at me, "I still owed you." I knew vaguely of Katniss's idea of owing. It was common among the people in the Seam. You never let a debt go unpaid. And to Katniss, she still owed me for the bread.

"You already saved my life, Katniss. I think your debt is paid." I tell her, returning her smile.

She shakes her head, "I don't think I've ever stopped owing you."

"Then would you be willing to do one last favor for me?" I ask. She looks up, her eyebrows raised in questioning. "Katniss, the only reason I go back to my house is essentially to bake and shower. And even then I bake here sometimes." I even tried to teach Katniss how to bake once, which was a total disaster. "So why don't I just live here?"

"But...what about your house?" I chuckle, her excuse so like Katniss, timid - not willing to say no but still afraid to say yes.

"Katniss, half the things in my house are broken. I will give it to the first person who wants it," I say.

"People don't want charity, Peeta," she says, though I know it's true I can't help but laugh again.

"Fine, I'll trade it for a sock if I have to. Whoever wants it can have it for whatever price." I can see the gears turning in her head. Probably imagining scenarios of us living together. Her face showed no emotion, though, making it impossible to tell what she thought of me moving in.

She sighs, "Do I have to help move your stuff?" a grin plays at her lips but it's no match for mine, which I'm sure is lopsided and goofy. I pull her into a tight hug, practically lifting her off the ground. She laughs into my ear, bright and bubbly, and I'm positive that it's my new favorite sound.