Burn me with fire, drown me with rain.

Part II: Peeta

My first episode while being in twelve, happens exactly one week after my return. I'm baking cheese buns for Katniss in her house and when the first wave of flashbacks hits me, I tighten my grip on the bottle with milk so hard, it shatters into pieces in my grip. It startles Katniss form her spot at the kitchen table, but before she manages to approach me, I yell at her to go away, stay back, leave the house. She takes ten steps backwards and curls into a ball against the wall whimpering the Valley Song and leaning back and forward, back and forward, until I'm back, weakly calling her name.

She is at my side in less than a second, taking my hands in hers and picking the pieces of glass from the wounds. Only when they're wrapped in bandages and taken care of, we sit together at the couch in her living room and she speaks.

"I'm sorry." She says in barely above a whisper and I look at her not knowing if I've heard her right.

"You are sorry? It was me who nearly ruined your kitchen while trying to stop myself from strangling you." I answer bewildered. She sighs at looks at me in sadness.

"You could bleed to death and I was too much of a coward to approach you and stop the bleeding." She explains, taking one of my bandaged hands in hers and laying it on her lap.

"Katniss…" I whisper, trying hard to entwine our fingers together. "You're not a coward by trying to protect yourself from getting hurt." I try to reason with her. "It's better that you didn't come to me or I could've hurt you. I don't want to hurt you Katniss. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did it again." She looks like she wants to say something but can't quite find the right words. "And… the singing helped a lot."

For a couple of following weeks I have to fight my confusion more than usually and, without a single complain, she answers every "real or not real" question I have.

Some of them are simple, like the one I had been so desperate to find an answer for, that I run to her house long after I left for the night. She opens the door with hair still damp from the shower and confusion written all over her face.

"My favorite pastry are cinnamon rolls, real or not real?" I pant, leaning on the doorframe. She smiles at the question, or maybe more at the answer, and ushers me inside.

"Real. You can eat the whole batch of them without even noticing." She replies with a grin. I'm excited to see her smile. "My favorite are cheese buns, but I won't say no to a cinnamon roll, you know?" She adds and I laugh a little at the insinuation.

We end up baking cinnamon rolls together in the middle of the night.

Some of the questions are hard for me. Like when I sit at her couch one afternoon and doodle mindlessly on a piece of paper while she cleans the squirrels she caught that morning in the woods. Buttercup jumps on the table and starts rubbing his head against my arm. He always liked me better than he likes Katniss and she wheezes at me every time I try to spoil that cat. She has no idea she and the cat are making exactly those same noises while angry.

"When I was seven I found a dog in our back yard. I named him Carmel and kept him secret from my mother for four weeks, real or not real?"

I look at the confusion in her eyes, and her desperate attempts to find anything in her memories, that would let her give me an answer, but I already know she won't find it. She looks sad when she tells me she can't answer that question.

I go crazy.

Literally. I can't help it, and I only hope she doesn't think I'm mad at her. I just need the answer. Desperately. She tries to calm me down as I struggle to catch my breath and feel myself slipping from reality, so she leaves and I'm confused between being grateful, that she- for once- thought about her own safety and left the house, and being concerned that I really scared her off for good.

What I don't know, is that she runs all the way across of what remains of our district and when she comes back, it's with Delly Cartwright in tow and tons of new answers.

"Real." Is the first thing Katniss pants out, when she bursts through the door and into her living room where I sit, still slightly crazied, but a little bit calmer.

Other questions are very hard for her, and it pains me that I have to ask them, but I do. I have to, if I want to go back to being myself.
Like the one I ask her when she teaches me how to braid her hair, after I begged her for it for about three days. She thought it's ridiculous, because she doesn't need anybody to do it for her, but I know she changed her mind when I run my hands through her hair and see her relaxed expression anda little smile gracing her lips.

I don't intend to ruin the moment. The question just slips from my mouth before I'm able to stop it.

"Your dad had dark hair too, real or not real?" I see and feel her stiffen on the floor, where she sits in front of the couch where I'm seated, her back against my legs. I drop my hands from her hair onto her rigid shoulders, but when I open my mouth to apologize, I hear her answer in a whisper.

"Real." I rub her shoulders gently and she relaxes a bit under my touch, but I know she's still upset. I don't have to see her face to know that.

"I'm sorry." I whisper and I feel her shake her head as if trying to tell me I don't need to be sorry for asking her question. She doesn't speak, but only when I feel her arms jerk up a couple of times I know why. She's crying.

In a second, I'm on the floor beside her and she looks away to hide her tears. I'm not going to let her hide her emotions.

Not from me. Not anymore.

Using only a bit of force, I turn her body towards mine and wrap my arms tightly around her shaking frame. It's probably the first real physical affection we've shared since I returned to 12 and it feels like I'm drawing strength from that embrace. She has no idea how much she still means to me. She has no idea how much she does for me without even realizing.

"I'm sorry." I repeat into her hair. "I just couldn't quite remember how he looked like." I add and she looks at me with those huge, gray eyes. She looks heartbreakingly sad, but explains- in all details- her father's looks. I listen, picturing him in my head, but I still can't see it as I should. It unsettles me a little, but maybe I just didn't remember him so well in the first place. I was still a kid when he died, and we weren't seeing him so often before either. She notices that I'm still confused and she grabs my hand and drags me upstairs to the bedroom that used to be her mother's. I watch her movements with interest as she pulls out a drawer from a wooden commode and places it on a bed beside me. She starts to look through the papers and suddenly, her movements stop as she pulls a black-and-white photograph from between two sheets of paper.

The moment I see his face on the photo, memories start to pop into my head as if she broke a wall in my head by showing it to me. I remember him waiting for her in front of our school when we were little. I remember him passing me and my father on a street, nodding his head in acknowledgement. I remember him returning from the mines with others, covered in coal dust and sweat. Dark brown hair, big grey eyes.

She looks like him, only prettier.

She breaks up into pieces and cries herself to sleep that night.

I leave her in her mother's bed.

The next morning the idea of the memory book is born.

One of the most emotional questions, I ask one day after I almost freak myself out to death. She leaves in the morning to go hunting like she does nearly every day. I'm outside hanging my laundry and I see her passing my house. I wave to her hesitantly. She waves back. I'm a baker, she's a hunter so neither of us is surprised that we've already started our days at six in the morning. I start to get worried when it's noon and she's still not back from the woods. Dark clouds are hanging low in the sky and I know, I just can feel it in my inexistent leg, that it's about to rain and it won't be a drizzle.

The storm starts half past twelve and by the time it's in full blow I'm already greatly freaked out. I do the only thing I can think of and I bang against Haymitch's door till he stumbles out half drunk and half asleep. I swear the moment he sees my panicked face, he's completely sober. I choke on the words as I try to explain to him that Katniss is in the woods in this hell on earth. He curses under his breath and orders me to stay put while he runs into the city to organize a searching party. He grabs me by my shirt and threatens he's going to kill me if I go alone into the woods and get lost too.

It's not even five minutes since he left and I know that I can't stay safely in Haymitch's house, while Katniss is out there, maybe lost, maybe hurt, maybe…

I grab one of Haymitch's coats and run outside throwing the hood over my head. I won't go into the woods. Haymitch is right, I will only get lost and cause even more trouble. I plan on waiting in the meadow for the searching party to arrive, but the moment I get close to what remains of the fence, I see a dark figure stumbling from tree to tree, barely managing to stay on their feet. If I wouldn't already know it has to be Katniss, I would have guessed from the bow, hanging limply from her shoulder. I scream her name and in a few long strides I'm by her side.

"Peeta?" She asks weakly, stumbles and falls forward straight into my arms. I catch her with ease, she's petite and light as a feather.

"It's me. It's okay, you're safe." I say, not sure if I'm trying to calm her or myself as I take off Haymitch's coat and wrap her shivering form tightly in it. I notice she's not only soaked through, but pretty banged up as well and I want to ask her what happened, but instead scoop her up into my arms to carry her to safety as fast as I'm able too. She whimpers when I do so, and I'm pretty sure I hurt her by touching some sore spot. "It's okay Katniss, just don't fall asleep. We're gonna be home soon, I promise." I tell her, hoping she can hear me through the howling wind. I feel her snuggle closer to my chest and it feels good to know she does it because it makes her feel safer, better, warmer. I hear shouts and male voices when we're about to leave the meadow and I holler Haymitch's name. I need to let them know that she's here, that I've found her. She startles at my loud yell and I make shushing noises and cradle her tighter against my chest and she relaxes for a moment. Haymitch appears at my side shouting questions and profanities at me for leaving his house. I don't even know how but I finally reach my house and stumble through the door and up the stairs in a record time.

Only later when she's dry, checked by the doctor for injuries and safe in my bed, we find out what actually happened. She was forced to run from a pack of wolves and ended up climbing a tree and being stuck on it for a good couple of hours. She fell off of it when she tried to get down because the branches were already so wet, she slipped and ended up falling a few feet down and hitting the ground.

Of course she caught a nasty cold to top it and of course I decide to stay by her side all night, trying to help her through her coughing fits.

It's when she is laying between my sheets, looking so small, fragile and beautiful, that I ask her the question.

"You've never wanted to kill me, real or not real?" I don't expect her to answer, because I'm sure she is asleep, but it appears she's hovering at the edge of consciousness as she mumbles to me.

"Real."

Despite the fact that, in theory, I knew the answer to that question, I feel like a giant weight was lifted from my heart at her words, so I caress her delicate cheek as gently as I can, trying to put her back into the state of oblivion. "I've never wanted to kill you. I would never be able to do so and live with myself afterwards." She adds, right before falling asleep.

She stays at my house for the entire time she's sick. At the beginning I sit on a chair watching her struggle with a fever at night, but after some time, when she starts to feel slightly better, she invites me to sleep with her, saying that it's ridiculous that I'm sleeping on a chair while she sleeps in my enormous bed alone. So it stays like that until she's good enough to get out of bed and I am pleasantly surprised to find out that I've barely ever dreamed and only once had a nightmare while sleeping with her. She reminds me it was the same during the Victory Tour and before the Quell.

I hesitantly ask her to stay with me, at my house, in my bed. She doesn't respond verbally, but takes off, making me think I fucked everything up, only to return fifteen minutes later with a packed duffle bag.

It's that night in my bed, our bed, when she hesitantly snuggles to my side and I ask her a question that has been bothering me for a long time. Asking it brings a blush to my face.

"We've never done anything more than sleeping in the same bed. I wanted to, you didn't. Real or not real?"

Her head snaps up to look at me and apparently it makes her blush even more to answer the question than it made me to ask it. I watch with amazement as she struggles to form an answer.

"Partially real." She replies and I feel a shiver run through me at the thought that something might have happened between the two of us and I don't even remember it.

"What?" I choke and she gets even redder.

"We've never done anything more than sleeping in the same bed…" She replies and the relief floods me, because if something is to happen between Katniss and I, I want to remember every single second of it. "You wanted to, I might have wanted once or twice as well."

My body freezes but my mind runs with a crazy pace as I can't stop staring at her for about fifteen minutes.
She, on the other hand, can't look at me without blushing for a whole week.

Yet, she always answers every single question I ask her. Even those two, most important ones that finally define her feelings for me, the ones I ask three weeks after we started to practically live with each other.

It happens at night, when she wakes up from a nightmare and seeks comfort in my arms, through my lips and my body. We start something we've never did before, when she sneaks her tiny hands under my t-shirt and down to the waistband of my pajama bottoms. It's an raging inferno between us, but I have to make sure she knows what she's doing. I use the only thing I can think of to find out for sure, I play the game we came up with during the worst of times.

"Katniss. You want me, real or not real?"

"Real." She gasps against my lips and burrows her hands in my hair. "Real." She repeats just before claiming my lips again.

We're completely lost in each other for the first time in our lives. Hot kisses, cold feet, roaming hands and awkward movements, but then, probably the most beautiful sight that can be seen, probably the most wonderful feeling that exists.

So, in the morning, when I realize that despite my worries, she didn't run away after realizing what happened at night, but lays sprawled across my chest running her fingers up and down my arm, I don't hesitate to ask her the question that I crave the answer to more than anything in the world.

"You love me, real or not real?"

The movement of her hand stops abruptly, she tenses a little in my embrace and lifts herself on her elbows to look at me properly.

I swear she looks more beautiful than ever when she looks me in the eye, caresses my cheek, kisses my lips lightly and answers as if it was the most obvious thing on the planet.

"Real."

THE END

|AN|: Of course Peeta is more eloquent than his beloved :D

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Disclaimer: Everything that you recognize belongs to the one and only Suzanne Collins.