Spring becomes early summer. Peeta has been officially discharged from the hospital, and has moved home. Dr Aurelius comes to see me one day, perhaps because I have ignored all his appointments so far. He gives me pretty strict orders about Peeta. "If you don't care about your own mental health, that's your problem, Katniss. I can't force you to talk to me. But Peeta is my patient, and he is talking to me, and I don't want you to destroy all the progress he's made."

So basically, I am ordered to back off, allow him to ease back into his old life – without me.

Peeta is clearly baking. A lot. Every day. He hasn't gone back to his job in the bakery – he owns the business, but thankfully, his employees are able to handle the business without him there. Peeta has always trusted people, and that includes trusting his employees. He gets his reward now – the baker who's now taking care of business, Arko Hantin, knew so much about every aspect of the bakery before Peeta was admitted to the hospital that he was able to run the place on his own. He also respected and admired his boss enough to stay. Peeta is baking for them, though – there is no way that one person can eat that many breads or cakes.

It's heartbreaking to see him sometimes. He's sitting on the porch at night. I've tried joining him, but more often than not he'll ask me to leave, his eyes downcast. The walls between us that we fought so hard to break down many years ago, are back up.

"He's protecting you," Haymitch slurs one night when I come back from Peeta, crying because he didn't want to see me. "That's always been his top priority. He's protecting you in the only way he knows how."

I yell at him and call him terrible things, run upstairs and cry on the bed. But deep down, I know that Haymitch is right.

And where am I in all of this mess? I don't know. Where Peeta says he is happy that he feels something, anything, I try very hard not to. I try to numb my brain with alcohol a few times, together with Haymitch, but body was never able to hold liquor very well – I end up getting sick, and have a terrible hangover every time. Besides, seeing Haymitch and the mess his life has become isn't exactly good advertisement for becoming an alcoholic.

So I hunt, I stay busy, I try not to feel.

But at night, my nightmares haunt me. All the feelings I try so hard to ignore by day return in the dark. They are a big mess of mutts, dying children, Prim, Peeta choking me, fire burning up my skin, voices whispering my name. Some nights I barely get any sleep at all. I sit by the kitchen table in the mornings, deathly pale except the dark bags underneath my eyes, and curse that bastard Snow - the hell he surely currently resides in, can't be much worse than this. I try to avoid sleeping at night, but I'm not able to. And when I do fall asleep, I'm an easy target for the nightmares.

One night, the nightmares are even worse than usual. I'm back in the first Hunger Games, I'm sitting on the Cornucopia. There are mutts all around me, only this time, Peeta is not with me. Instead, every single mutt has his blue eyes. And instead of Cato being slowly tortured to death, bit by bit, by the mutts, it's Prim. I see her blue eyes and blond braids, and hear her screams. She begs me to help her, but my feet and hands are glued to the cornucopia. I would throw myself down to her in an instant to save her, or more likely to die together with her, but all I can do is watch her die, hearing her screams.

I'm woken by someone shaking my shoulders, hard. "Katniss… Katniss! Wake up!" I hear screams ringing in my ear, and as in a fog I realize that they're not Prim's screams, but my own. "Wake up, Katniss! It's not real!" There, in the darkness, is Peeta, in my bedroom. I can just barely make out the contours of his face and body. Still in a haze, I cling to him, crying. My nails dig into the naked skin of his back, I must be hurting him, but he doesn't flinch. He strokes my hair, whispers reassuring words in my ear, like he's done so many times, on so many other nights. The smell of him, of cinnamon and sun and man, is intoxicating. Somewhere along the line I end up crying not because of the nightmare, but because I'm so relieved to be held by him again, for being saved from the darkness. He must realize that the worst is over, because he releases his grip on me, puts some distance between us, while holding my upper arms firmly with his hands.

"I heard you screaming from across the street," he says, almost whispering. "And I just couldn't… Not come. I thought Haymitch would help you, but then when the screaming just continued, on and on, I understood that…"

"Drunk," I choke back, still crying.

"Is he always drunk at night?"

I nod.

"Doesn't he ever help you with the nightmares?"

I shake my head. "He's too busy chasing away his own demons. With liquor. He's practically unconscious every night." Peeta curses under his breath. "Don't me mad at him," I say, I'm suddenly so desperately tired. "He does the best he can."

Peeta nods. He gets up, walks to towards the door, getting ready to go back across the street. To the big, empty bed in our house. Suddenly I can't stand it anymore. "Stay with me? Please?" I can hardly recognize my own voice, I sound like a scared, little girl. Scared of the dark.

Peeta just stands there, frozen. It's too dark for me to see his face clearly. All I can hear, is his strained, ragged breathing. Finally, it's as if he snaps out of it. "Are you sure?" he says hesitantly.

I don't answer, I just open up the covers, and he slips in behind me. He's had years of practice with this particular movement. He wraps his arms around me, like he did for that first time in the cave, in the sleeping bag, so long ago. My slender body fits in perfectly in front of his bigger one. I can feel his warm breath in my hair.

I fall asleep, and this time, the mutts aren't there.

I think I'll just leave this storyline for now - things are looking better for our favorite HG couple. We all know they end up having two children in the epilogue, so there will be a happy ending. I'm not sure I'll write about all the details on how they end up getting back together, as I think they took such an important step in this chapter. I may change my mind about it in the future, we'll see.

The next chapter will take place several years before this one, and it will be FUN! No more angst. And includes a lemon. Yes, the lemons are back! Yay!