A/N: Sorry for the delay! I decided to make it longer than initially planned to make up for the wait!

4
Dream Chaser

He is their gleaming vision. Blond. Blue-eyed. Strong. Well-spoken. Christian. The perfect German.
She is his target.
They are both painfully aware of this fact. But it sits like a bomb in the center of the room that they glance at occasionally and tiptoe around, but never fully acknowledge. Praying it doesn't detonate.
Knowing it will.

XxXx

Katniss turned the water up to what felt like its boiling point. She had never stood beneath a real shower before, and she was going to enjoy every second of it. The clawfoot tub at home was deep and difficult to get in and out of. By the time it filled completely, the water ran cold. Even so, she longed for it during the two years she bathed in a bathroom sink.

The shower was glorious. Although she had no idea of how to operate it, she refused to ask Peeta for help. Luckily, it wasn't as complicated as it first appeared.

Peeta had presented her with some of his clothes so he could wash hers while she showered. She pulled the long sleeves down around her hands and wrapped her arms tightly around herself as she looked around the house for him. His home was built above the bakery, and she walked with a feather-light tread, ensuring that no one below suspected an extra set of footfalls in the apartment. She peered into his bedroom, but there was no sign of him. Down the hall, she pushed open another door. This was also a bedroom, but the room had been ransacked; clothes strewn in every direction, a dresser upended, and the bed frame sat without its mattress. She backed out of the doorway and straight into Peeta, who put his hands on her shoulders to steady her.

"I'm sorry, I was just looking for you."

Peeta shook his head. "It's all right. You can look around. You live here now, too." He let his hands fall from her arms, leaving her with a longing to feel their warmth on her again. He walked ahead of her, beckoning her to follow behind.
"How was the shower?" he asked as they arrived in the kitchen.

"Amazing," she said. "Thank you."

Peeta only smiled at her over his shoulder as he stirred something on the stove. His perfectly combed and neatly styled hair that went along with his HJ uniform was pleasantly disheveled. His blond curls fell over his forehead in the way they always used to when she watched him romp around the schoolyard. Katniss didn't trust the tingling electricity that shot through her veins when she looked at him for too long, and she cast her gaze away.

"Where are my clothes?" she asked.

"Not dry yet," he said. He took the pot off the stove and poured its contents between two bowls before turning his attention back to her. "You should keep mine, though. They look much better on you than me."

She was glad he looked away and missed the blush blossoming in her cheeks. He set the bowls down on the kitchen table.

"Come have some soup."

She looked around, wary of how out in the open she was, but she decided to join him at the table anyway.
They ate in silence for a while before Katniss spoke up.

"Shouldn't I be hiding? In the basement or something? You're treating me like I'm a house guest."

Peeta swallowed a mouthful of his soup. "I could never put you in the basement. It's cold, it's dark, and it's too far away from me. I can protect you up here. I have set up space for you in the attic, but I don't want you hiding out up there unless it's necessary. Otherwise, you live here just as much as I do. Okay?"

Katniss gathered up a spoonful of vegetables in her bowl and dropped them back into the broth, watching them all bob back up to the surface. "Are you going to tell me what happened to your parents?" she asked, and raised her eyes to watch his reaction without lifting her head.

His shoulders slumped and he sat back in the chair. "They were a couple of cities away with the party. There was some kind of celebration for how successful the first few bombings in Britain had been." Tears welling in his eyes choked off his thoughts and he waited until he collected himself to begin speaking again. Katniss had been hearing about the bombings on the radio. The Nazi party was hell-bent on destroying Britain. Apparently Britain was stronger than Germany anticipated, however, because the latest reports were less than enthusiastic about the efforts. Katniss watched a tear fall down Peeta's cheek despite how he tried to blink them all away. "A plane flew overhead and dropped a bomb," he continued. "The entire city- flattened. My two older brothers were with them." He finally met Katniss' gaze with bleary eyes. "Nobody came home."

"Peeta," Katniss whispered. She knew there was nothing else she could say. Even if she knew the right thing to say, no words would provide any comfort. Gale had tried to comfort her with words about her mother. He tried to fill her with hope that maybe her mother got out, maybe she was still alive. But Katniss knew she was gone, and his words only left her with reminders of how alone she really was.

It made more sense to Katniss now why Peeta wanted her around, why he longed for her company. He was so lonely. At least she had Gale and Liesel when she was living in the basement. Peeta had no one.

She pushed back her chair and walked around the table to him. Before she could think better of it, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek to the top of his head. After a moment, she felt his hands at her waist as he pulled her into his lap and embraced her. She ran her fingers up through his hair and they held each other. Two teenage orphans with nothing else to hold onto.

XxXx

"I have to go back to school or somebody's going to come looking for me. I've been gone too long. I haven't been to Hitler Youth or anything since my family… Anyway, it's been almost a month," Peeta said as they sat by the fire after dinner. "So, I think you should stay in the attic while I'm away. I have Haymitch running the bakery during the day and if anyone downstairs hears you up here-"

"I know," Katniss said. "The attic is fine, thank you. I think I should just stay up there permanently, you know? It can't be safe for either of us with me walking around here out in the open. And it's not like I can continue sleeping in your bed."

"Sure you can." She watched as he tore off a piece of bread and dipped it into his hot chocolate. "I'm fine in a chair or the couch. Wherever."

"No, Peeta. Please, just show me how to get up to the attic and I'll stay there. I'd feel more comfortable," she lied. She had never felt more comfortable than she did in that moment, seated beside him in front of the flickering fire with hot chocolate warming them from the inside out. She dipped her last piece of bread in her drink and discovered the reason Peeta kept doing it.

"This is so good," she said as her gaze fell on a stack of books beside the couch. Charles Darwin, Magnus Hirschfeld, Albert Einstein. "Peeta," Katniss began, taking the top book from the pile: Job by Joseph Roth. "All of these these authors have been banned. What are you doing with their books?"

Peeta watched her flip through the pages of Job. "Some I've taken from the bookshop down the road after it was destroyed. It was owned by a Jewish man. My father and I watched them pillage the place and beat the man senseless. My father ran out to stop them before he realized what he was doing. Upstanding members of the Nazi party are supposed to condone that behavior, not stop it, you know? So I cowered behind the curtains and watched both the shop owner and my father get whipped until they could hardly move. Then they tossed the man into a truck and took off." He took a moment to shake the memory of his broken father. "Most of the books were ruined, but I pulled a few from the rubble later on. The others I snatched from piles to be burned at HJ celebrations."

Katniss' eyes snapped up to meet his. How stupid could he be? "You're just trying to get killed aren't you? You're begging for it."

He shrugged and drained his hot chocolate. "None of us are going to make it out of here alive. But I won't let them change me." He picked up his Hitler Youth jacket that had been tossed aside on the floor. "This," he said, motioning to the swastika, "is not who I am. Everybody is so afraid, that they'll do whatever they have to do to stay alive. But what's the point in living if you're going to be their puppet? What the hell is the point of life if you're willing to spit on all you know is right and good just to stay alive? They'll kill me, sure, but at least my life is my own. I'll know that I died as myself, not one of them."

Despite the stupidity, Katniss decided, at least she could respect him.

He poked at the fire and added another log. Katniss tried to keep her eyes from lingering on the way his sinewy muscles moved beneath the t-shirt he wore. All those years of wrestling in school and hauling flour around the bakery had been good to him.

XxXx

"Well, here's the attic," Peeta said woefully.

She had finally convinced him to bring her up. No matter how much he wanted to remain in her company, she said she would feel safer upstairs. He wasn't about to add to her stress by holding her where she felt she was in danger. The attic door had been carefully hidden behind the wall in the hallway closet.

"We never had a finished attic while I was growing up. Even I forget it's here sometimes. It was just a dusty mess full of bags of baby things. My father fixed it up a few years ago when he realized what was going on with the Nazis and the Jews. He thought we might need to help some people and he didn't even want my mother to find out what he was doing. She noticed, though, when he added the small window. He just told her it was a new place for me to paint so I stop making a mess in my room. She never questioned it again since she was always so afraid I'd ruin the carpets."

"He did a good job," Katniss said as she arrived at the top of the staircase. She was shocked by how warm and well-lit it was. A large mattress with thick, plush bedding like Peeta's was set up along the wall. There was even a small bathroom.

"There's no bath in there," Peeta said, catching her gazing into the walled-off area with a toilet and sink. "But you can just come downstairs to shower. Or, any time you want. Okay?"

Katniss nodded. "Thank you."

But she didn't go to him. She had been bathing in a sink for two years, she could certainly continue to do so if it would keep them both safe. If Peeta was determined to run around looking for trouble, she wasn't going to add to his chances of being caught. The only time she saw him was when he brought food to her after school or work at the bakery. He could only keep it open a few days a week with Haymitch as his only employee, but he seemed to be taking in enough money to keep going.

Their exchanges grew to be generally as awkward as they had been when Katniss used to trade for bread. Until one day, Peeta came running home and burst into the attic without even knocking. He carried with him a book in an only slightly familiar language.

"Is this English?" Katniss asked, poking through the book as Peeta caught his breath.

He nodded. "It's Job translated." He picked up the German copy of the book which sat near her mattress. "So we can teach ourselves English. We can figure it out from reading the two side-by-side. They taught us the basics in school, remember? That should help."

"Why?" She wondered. Why would they possibly waste their time learning such a useless skill when there was a deadly war being waged on the other side of the wall?

"We're getting out of here. We'll go to America."

She held his gaze for a moment. He looked so enthusiastic, she felt bad for crushing his spirit. But he couldn't be serious. "It's a nice dream, Peeta, but you know it will never happen."

"Yes it will," he asserted. "I will find a way. I won't let you die here like this."

"They'll catch us. I won't let you die for me. I'll turn myself in before it comes to that." She crossed her arms and shrugged.

"Don't be crazy. There's nothing left for me here. I want to do this for you."

"And you think there's something left for me? I have nothing, Peeta! That's not going to change whether I'm here or across the ocean."

"You have Gale. And I promised him I'd keep you safe."

Katniss shook her head. "My father fought for this country. And they killed my mother, took my best friend, and now I can't even walk outside. You can't keep me safe. Not in this hell."

His elation at the idea of America completely deflated and Katniss felt the sting in her heart.

"I have to go down to the bakery for a while."

Katniss nodded, unable to look at the sadness in his eyes, knowing she put it there.

She fell asleep that night with images of shattered homes and screaming children on the night of Kristallnacht. The pain on her mother's face. The determination on Gale's. The sadness in Peeta's eyes. She was plagued with nightmares as her brain concocted images of the horrors relayed on the radio, imagining Gale in the middle of it, Peeta eventually having to join him, the endless list of torturous ways her mother may have been killed. Through the pull of her dreams, she was vaguely aware that she was screaming, her face wet with sweat and tears. Her dreams turned the dampness of her skin into blood, drowning her slowly.

And then something pulled her free. Something her sleep-addled brain couldn't comprehend, but suddenly, the hellish visions subsided, her screams died in her throat, and she fell into a deeper sleep than she had since before Hitler- which was the majority of her life.

When she woke in the morning, she half-expected to find some explanation for her restful night, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, just her usual breakfast of toast and orange juice by the door that Peeta left every morning before he left.

As she ate, her gaze kept falling to the English book. Although escaping was a silly dream, she supposed it wouldn't hurt to give her brain something new to learn. There was a pencil tucked in the middle of the book which she extracted and looked around for blank paper. Of course, there was none. And she wasn't about to brave a trip downstairs. She glanced up at the wall ahead of her and began scrawling the words she knew onto a plank of wood.

She quickly became so absorbed in the material, she didn't even hear Peeta enter the room.

"Wow," he said.

Katniss jumped, her pencil falling to the floor. The cramp in her hand was the first clue as to how many hours she had spent in this position. She turned to Peeta, eyes wide. She hadn't meant to write all over his walls. "I'm sorry, I was, I mean I just-"

"Hey, it's okay," he assured her. "Looks like you're doing pretty well there." He sat beside her on the mattress and inspected her words. "Does this mean you've changed your mind?"

"About America? No. But, you know, there's nothing else to do all day."

"Right. Well, can I join you?"

Katniss handed him the pencil. "Why don't you circle all the words you don't know on the wall and we can move on together from there."

XxXx

It became a new routine. Each night, her nightmares subsided more and more, clearing her mind for new learning. When Peeta came home from school or work, he brought dinner up to the attic where they slowly but surely became fluent in the English language.

They ran out of wall space and began filling up notebooks with vocabulary, grammar rules, and proper sentence structure. Peeta brought home everything he could find in the English language. By the time they turned seventeen, they could hold full conversations together in English without the slightest confusion.

It was just days after Katniss turned seventeen, she got her first letter from Gale in almost six months. It was addressed to Peeta, but he knew it was not meant for him. Although the letter assured Katniss he was safe, it reminded her of the horror going on outside the walls of Peeta's attic. And the nightmares returned with rage that night.

She woke in the early dawn, the light streaming through the tiny window on the far wall. Despite her wretched night, she felt surprisingly calm. It was then she felt the strong arms wrapped around her, the warm, hard body against her back. Her instinct should have been to scream, to run, but it felt so right she curled in closer. She realized that her fingers were entwined with the fingers of whomever was holding her, and she squeezed a little tighter. Katniss slowly turned her head to face her source of comfort.

Peeta, who always wore such a look of distress, carrying the burden a grown man should never have to bear, was just a seventeen-year-old boy. And seeing his sleeping face, relaxed and calm beside her own, reminded her of that fact.

She watched him sleep, felt his arm tighten around her waist and draw her closer, and she finally placed her palm on his cheek, absently twisting a blond curl by his ear around her finger as she tried to make sense of his presence, of why he was risking his life to keep her, of why it felt so damn perfect to be here wrapped in his warmth.

His eyelids fluttered open just a crack and his eyes focused on her face. A sleepy smile overtook his face for just a moment and disappeared while Katniss was still trying to memorize the way it crinkled around his eyes and made the blue of his irises even more striking.

"Oh, Katniss, I'm sorry," he rushed in his slurred, heavy voice. He untangled himself from her and sat up abruptly, leaving her cold and alone on the mattress.

"No, wait," she sat up and looped her hand around his arm. She felt the muscles tense at her touch, but he glanced over his shoulder to find her bewildered expression.

"I'm usually up and out of here before you're awake. I think I overslept."

Katniss raised an eyebrow. "Usually? You make a habit of sleeping with me?"

A hot blush crept up his neck. "I, uh… I mean, I hear you. At night. You scream and cry with nightmares. It seems to calm you down when I stay with you, even though you never really wake up."

"I'm sorry I've been disturbing your sleep."

He laughed softly. "You haven't."