"Tell me what you were thinking," I say, "the morning of the reaping."
Peeta's knife clatters onto the butcher-block tabletop with a metallic clang, leaving behind a skid of reddish jam that gleams like blood as the flash of the sun hits the silver and temporarily renders me blind.
When my vision comes back, I see him gaping at me wordlessly, a hunk of blond hair hanging limply over his eyes. I start to reach out to tuck it back behind his ear and then reconsider. His eyes are huge in his pale face, are like saucers above the thin slant of his nose, and I'm afraid that if I touch him he might scream.
"Katniss," he says weakly. "Where did that come from?"
"It's been seven years," I say kindly, grabbing instead a napkin from where they are piled carelessly on the end of the table and held down with a rock. "We're way past real or not real here," I continue as Peeta tweezes the paper from my fingers and goes to work on the jam that is already drying into a sticky tack. "I just want to know what you were thinking."
His forehead creases as he keeps his eyes resolutely from me, and then he exhales in one great whoosh and tosses the napkin to the side before wrapping the fingers of my hand tightly in his.
"I think I was in shock," he says in resignation, and when his blue eyes flip up to mine I see the pale sheen that always comes over him when he's trying to decide if what he's saying is the truth.
"First when they called Prim's name and then when-"
His throat convulses in a quick movement.
"And then when you volunteered," he says quietly.
"You thought I was a goner," I accuse him, and I can see the flick of a smile that he immediately hides.
"No I didn't," he protests. "I just knew that when you got back after winning, you'd be too rich and important to look at me."
"I am too rich and important to look at you," I mutter, and he laughs and leans over to kiss me in the drowsy sunlight coming in through the window behind him.
"And then," he continues, long moments later, his warm breath stirring the hair resting against my cheeks, "Effie called my name."
Any good humor immediately dissipates as I remember the shell-
shocked look on his wan face, the one I had attributed only to his name being drawn; the one that I now realize must have been partially for my benefit too, and I turn away from him, not trusting myself to keep an even face.
"I almost expected him to volunteer to take my place," he says quietly, and there is no need to ask who he is; even here, even years away, miles away, Gale's presence haunts us like a ghost.
"Then I realized that you would have killed him. He needed to take care of your family, right? So it was up to me to take care of you. And for a few minutes I was almost pleased."
"You're crazy," I interrupt him, and he shakes his head gently and puts his hands against my cheeks, holding my face in place so that I am forced to look him square in the eye."
"You still don't understand," he says, "how much I loved you. How much I love you."
My cheeks go warm beneath his palms, and I shyly reach for an apple to evade his gaze. Time, it seems, will never teach me how to respond when he says things like this.
"And that's it," he says, turning back to his breakfast. "That's what I was thinking during the reaping."
"What about the second reaping?" I demand, and Peeta throws his hands up in the air.
"Katniss!" he says sternly. "Enough. Okay? I don't want to think about stuff like this."
"Okay, okay," I say, tossing the apple from one hand to the other before finally flipping it back in the bowl in the middle of the table. "Pardon me for caring."
He turns back to me with his eyes narrowing, one hand loosely clamped on a knife he is using to cut the still-warm loaf of bread.
"You-" he says with a frown, and then the door behind him bangs open and sends Peeta skittering from his chair, a tremble already working across his back as he dives beneath the table. I start to go after him, a furious word for Haymitch on my lips, and then see the most wonderful thing I've ever seen: the door, much too light for the toss he has given it, has rebounded against the wall and knocked Haymitch off of his feet, sending him sprawling down two wooden stairs and into the puddle of mud at the bottom that never seems to dry.
Time halts as I look at him in dazed understanding, and then mud slips into his still-open mouth and I go incoherent with laughter.
Peeta leaves me doubled up over a chair, and I can hear the low comfort of his voice and Haymitch's higher growl, the beat of their footsteps on the steps as Peeta helps him up.
"Your door's broken," Haymitch informs me as he appears in the kitchen, Peeta holding his arm, both of them splattered with muck.
"You're getting mud on my clean kitchen floor," I counter when I'm finally able to speak. "I should make you mop it, you old drunk."
"You should thank me for even allowing you to live here when I was here first," he snaps back. "Why do you two still live in this house? You should take the one that's furthest down the block."
"You'd miss us," Peeta plays peacemaker, grabbing a towel from a drawer and running it under the water. He tosses it to Haymitch, who promptly drops it. Peeta rolls his eyes and grabs another to pass off, waiting until it is safely in Haymitch's hands before he turns and pulls out a third, using it to wipe the mud off of his own forearms. "Who else would you go to talk to when the liquor runs dry?"
Haymitch opens his mouth, closes it, looks at me, opens it once again, and then frowns.
"Okay, so let me see it," he says finally, turning to look at me.
Over his shoulder I can see Peeta's face go white, but the words mean nothing to me, so I just raise one eyebrow and look at him blankly.
"See what?" I ask him patiently. "Are you hallucinating again? Because this is really happening, Haymitch."
He turns to look at Peeta, who pinches his mouth together and gives a sharp shake of his head, then turns back to me and all of a sudden I understand.
"Not again," I say to Peeta over Haymitch's shoulder. "I told you, we are not getting engaged. We already got engaged on television. We announced our marriage to Caesar Flickerman. I wore a wedding dress in front of Caesar Flickerman. There's no one in the Districts more married than us, we don't need to do it all over again."
Haymitch rolls his eyes to look at me, then shifts them back to Peeta.
"I told you she'd take it like this," he says conversationally, and Peeta takes him by the arm and shoves him toward the door.
"Thank you, Haymitch," he says shortly as he pushes him through the kitchen and deposits him on the step outside. "Thanks for coming over. Always a pleasure."
"I'll be back!" we can hear Haymitch call as the door slams behind him, and then his laughter, an swing of song as his shadow goes meandering past the window.
"I told him I wasn't sure about this," Peeta tells the door, and I stand up and go to him, slipping my arm through his.
"I love you," I tell him, and he looks down on me in surprise; in the past three years I've said the words few enough times I could count them on both hands. "You know how I feel about you; I just don't see why you think some ceremony is going to make it better."
"It's not going to make it better," he disagrees, running his hands through his hair as he looks up to avoid my eyes. "Nothing would make it better. I just feel like we never got to do it right. The first time I said I loved you, I didn't even get to see your reaction. I had to ask you to marry me in front of a crowd of people who barely knew my last name. I want to tell you these things in person, in front of people who care about us, when you actually know what I'm going to say."
"It would be nice to know this time," I tease him, trying to wipe the miserable cast from his face. "I mean, I found out you loved me at the same time as everyone else in the Capitol. Found out we were married. Found out I was pregnant. Maybe this time I could be in on a few things too."
He stays silent long enough that I tug on his arm, stand on tiptoe and place my fingers on his cheek, turn his eyes to face me.
"Hey," I say softly. "It's okay, Peeta."
He keeps his gaze locked on my face for long seconds that stretch out like eternity, and I watch emotions flow over his face like a river.
He looks away first.
"I'll be back in awhile," he says abruptly. "Okay?"
"Sure," I say, startled, falling back down on my feet. "Where are you going?"
"I don't know," he says, grabbing his jacket from the hook by the door. "Maybe I'll take Haymitch down to the lake and drown him."
The door slams behind him, leaving me looking at the bleached wood warily, wondering how in the span of ten minutes we could go from teasing at the table to being separated by something we've talked about so many times it's almost become a joke.
His first proposal came one night just weeks after he gave up pretense and officially moved into my house, when we were wrapped up in a cozy cocoon of blankets and satiated desire, his arm snugly around my waist, my ear nestled above the steady thump of his heartbeat. His hand was running idly through my hair and I was half asleep, unafraid for once to see what my dreams would bring.
"Katniss," he whispered, and I blinked sleepily and propped my chin up on his stomach, raising an eyebrow in response.
"Marry me," he said quietly, his eyes glowing in the moonlight, his hair a golden corona above the pillow it no longer seemed strange for him to claim. "Will you?"
The chill that went through my stomach killed any thought of peaceful sleep, and I clenched the bottom sheet until my fingers went white.
"Peeta," I said lamely. "Marry you? Didn't we already do this?"
He face tensed and smoothed in less than a second, and then he pulled me up until our foreheads were resting against each other, his eyes to mine, his mouth so close to mine that we were trading air.
"For real this time," he said. "No fire, no costumes. No audience."
I thought of life married; of wearing a ring on my finger that claimed me as belonging to someone else, and the thought drained my breath until I was wheezing against Peeta's cheek, until he sat up suddenly and turned on a lamp, creating a safe circle of light against the onslaught of darkness.
"Okay," he said, and gathered me up into his arms, holding me close until my breathing evened out, until I could block out the pain in his voice because I was so focused on my own. "Okay, it's alright. Okay, okay, okay."
The house is suddenly too quiet, and I give the dishes on the table a disinterested look and pass them by, leaving them for someone else to clean later. Bounding up the staircase, I head into the room that houses the few things I care about and pull the door halfway closed.
The dresser sits in the middle of a puddle of sunlight that pours in through the open window, and despite the autumn chill of the air outside it's warm when I duck down and pull open the bottom drawer. Tossing aside t-shirts that cover the silver parachute that contains the things that have traveled faithfully with me, I open the fabric and let my fingers take stock: Cinna's gloves, the spile from the second arena, the locket Peeta gave me, one of Prim's blue ribbons. I know it's not here, so I don't know why my fingers weave through the mesh as if some secret compartment will open, as if the pearl will fall out.
I haven't seen it since that last day in the Capitol, the last time I could look at Gale without hating him, the last time I saw my sister, the last time I was anyone who mattered. It disappeared the same day I went up in flames, as if it, like everyone else, could no longer stand to be around me.
Shifting slightly on my knees, I sneak a look over my shoulder to make sure the door is still blocking me from view and then creep over to the nightstand that is on Peeta's side of the bed, next to the window he keeps open even in the dead of winter. He told me once that he can't sleep without fresh air, but I've been a part of his nightmares. I was with him in the cave where he almost died.
I'm with Peeta: if I'm going to die, I want to do it where I can see the stars.
Gritting my teeth and shoving aside the internal urge to stop while I still can, I yank open the top drawer a few tugs at a time and find only books. Shutting it with a gentle creak, I duck down and open the second, unaware that I am holding my breath until it all gushes out at once.
Peeta has a drawer of memories too.
My mockingjay pin, half-melted. The crown that Snow twisted apart, neatly marking Peeta and I each as one half of a whole. The thick stack of plaques from the Districts. A tiny silver canister: the one that held the medicine that saved Peeta's life in the first arena.
A cup I recognize instantly as belonging to the train that took us on the Victory Tour: a silver cup that we used unfailingly during interviews, passing it back and forth, always turning it to make sure that our mouths touched at the same place, as if to emphasize that where one of us went, the other would follow.
The nightlock pill he grabbed to save my life.
The second proposal came a few days after the first snow of the season, one of those days where it feels like winter will stretch out forever, and nothing will ever be warm again. Peeta spent the morning outside, ostensibly chopping firewood. From what I saw through the window, however, it looked like he had spent the majority of the time throwing his axe into the forest to see if he could nail a tree.
The pile of wood next to his feet was pretty bare when I went out with a cup of hot tea and a wool hat, and I kicked a log and looked at him with a sideways smile, forcing back a laugh when he rubbed his neck self-consciously and accepted the cup with a nod.
"You try chopping wood with one leg," was all he said to me, and I came to stand next to him, relaxing with my hip against his while we both looked at the smoke curling from Haymitch's chimney, the hat hanging forgotten from my fingers.
"You think he's okay?" I asked idly, and Peeta snorted.
"The train came yesterday," he reminded me dryly. "I brought him some wood so that he wouldn't freeze to death in his house, but he was already pretty far gone. Help me remember to go over tomorrow and make sure he ate."
I snorted, and Peeta turned to look down at me, his blue eyes sparkling playfully above his red nose.
"How would you feel," he asked me conversationally, "about playing a trick on our esteemed mentor?"
I made him take a thirty-minute break before we got started, made him sit in a recliner with his leg propped, gave him two hours when those blue eyes slipped shut and his head lolled to the side.
He kept my hand in his as we walked back outside, the sharp wind cutting through our clothes, our wool-covered heads close together as he told me what to do. It took us hours, long enough for my legs to creep past frozen and into numbness, long enough that I kept swiping at my nose, sure that icicles were dripping from the tip, long enough that Peeta's face wheeled from bright red to pale white, bleached of enough color that I almost called a stop to the whole thing.
It was gorgeous, though, what he created. A veritable army of snow creatures, their arms raised in aggression, thick branches hanging menacingly from icy fingers, stacked deep enough that it looked like a score of hostility ganging up in front of Haymitch's steadily dilapidating living room.
While Peeta sat down and rested his leg, I dropped down on my knees and crawled towards Haymitch's front window, my knees screaming with cold as the snow soaked into my pants and froze.
I pulled myself up on the window frame and looked inside. All of the lights were doused save one, but I could see the outline of his frame in a chair by the fireplace, could hear his drunken snores as they fell carelessly out of his open mouth.
"Haaaaaay-mitccccccch," I cupped my hands to my mouth and howled. "Haaaaaaay-miiiiiiiiiiiitch."
He coughed once, gagged, and then shook his head before resuming his snores.
"Louder," Peeta stage-whispered from behind me, and I waved a hand at him impatiently and settled back on my haunches before putting my hands against the window and pressing my mouth up to the glass.
"HAYMITCH ABERNATHY" I shouted. "WE'VE FINALLY COME FOR YOU."
He jerked in his chair and then fell, a bottle shattering as his hands scrambled for purchase against the suddenly wet wood, and as he found his footing and lurched toward the curtained window I leapt backward and skittered off to sit next to Peeta, inwardly counting
One….two….three…four….five….six….sev-
And then Haymitch's door slammed open and he stumbled out with a knife in one hand and the broken head of a bottle in the other, his eyes on fire, his hair sticking up in a bird's nest of a mess around his face, clad only in a pair of graying underwear and one sock.
Peeta and I looked at each other, and I had a chance to notice the snow sparkling on the tips of his eyelashes like fairy dust, how his lips curved up like the first peek of the sun above the horizon, and then I was laughing hard enough that I couldn't keep my balance, that I was tumbling back into the snow, that Peeta, his hand caught in mine, had no choice but to fall back with me, and then Haymitch was there, the broken bottle glittering above me like a constellation.
"I am going to murder you," he said to me without fanfare. "You are trespassing and that means that anything I do to you is fair game. You're going to die."
"And you!" he roared, turning to Peeta. "You're no better than her! What good are you if you can't keep her in line?"
Peeta's face had gone purple as he wheezed with laughter, as he struggled to draw a breath, and he just shook his head wordlessly, his hair falling against his eyes like a golden flag of surrender.
"I am going to get dressed," Haymitch said, suddenly calm, turning from us and knocking the head off of one of Peeta's snow creatures with one swift jab of his bottle, "and then I am going to come to your house and kill you."
He left us in a weaving wave of alcohol, and I turned to look at Peeta with wide eyes, both of us holding on to each other, pulling each other down, pushing each other up, until at last we were both on our feet.
"We might as well get warm before we die," Peeta said finally. "Do you want a cookie?"
Our wet clothes were deposited in the kitchen sink and the kettle was on the stove when Peeta looked over at me with a strange gleam in his blue eyes.
"Katniss," he started, and I interrupted him without knowing why, knowing only that the sudden intensity of his gaze was making me uncomfortable.
"I'm going to go put on new clothes," I told him. "Aren't you cold?"
He looked down at his bare legs, a sight I have seen few enough times I could list them on one hand, and shrugged.
"Why don't you come with me?" I added. Maybe he was just going to tell me that I was a sincerely awful snow artist. Maybe he was just going to ask me if I would shoot a bear for dinner.
His eyes were still bright with that alien glow as he pushed himself from the table and followed behind me, his fingers threading through mine as we navigated in the dark, as I pulled him behind me up the staircase.
Buttercup surprised me on the ninth stair, a fat fluff of fur that simultaneously howled like it was being burned alive and clawed my bare shin until I felt like I had been skinned, and I whooped in surprise and ducked down to try to pitch him over the banister, forgetting that Peeta was attached to me, forgetting that I was on a narrow stair until I fell off of it and bumped back against a sturdy chest, sending both of us sprawling, sending me down half of the stairs in a graceless leap, leaving him shoved against a wall, both of his hands reaching for my waist to stop me in mid-flop.
For several long seconds there was no sound but the puff of our heavy breathing, and then Peeta exploded again with that laughter, the kind that was so rare as to leave me helpless to do anything but stare at him blankly, waiting for him to stop, worried that I had driven him insane.
He collapsed with his laughter while I waited, long enough that finally a grin twitched on the side of my mouth, and then he lifted me up the stairs until I was snug against his waist, my legs straddling him, my head tilted up so that my eyes met his, gray to blue.
"I love you," he told me, and an icy burn drizzled down my spine and turned my feet back into blocks of ice. "Marry me, Katniss. Don't just be my best friend. Be my wife."
I looked at him, long enough that all traces of laughter fell away, that he was left finally with just the bare planes of his face, with no emotion other than the steady darkening of his eyes, his hands loosening on my waist.
"Katniss?" he said, and I had trouble identifying what I heard in his voice, until I realized that there was nothing there.
"I can't," I told him bleakly, and stood without a backwards glance, jumping nimbly over the hissing cat as I fled up the rest of the stairs, leaving him behind.
I hear the footsteps a few seconds before the door opens, and in my haste to shove the drawer closed get it stuck instead; find myself on my knees, shoulder pressed into the wood that stubbornly refuses to move as Haymitch comes in the room and looks down at me with eyebrows raised.
"So we're snooping now, sweetheart?" he asks, and I blow a strand of hair from my eyes and turn around, righting the drawer back on its track before I turn back to face him.
"I was looking for something," I answer him defensively. "What are you doing here anyway? You do know this isn't your house, right?"
"Shut up," he says amiably. He looks around for a place to sit and, seeing only the tangle of sheets that our nightmares always creates, shrugs and comes to sit next to me on the floor.
"I saw Peeta go stomping past my house," he says as I look at him sideways, wishing the floor would open up and he would drop out of sight.
"Are you sure you didn't imagine it?" I ask dryly, and Haymitch's mouth thins into a severe line.
"Drop it, Katniss," he snaps. "I want to talk to you, and I can't do that if you're acting like a five year old."
"Okay," I say, surprised. "Okay, Haymitch. Talk."
"I always seem to be the one who has to come shake some sense into you," he mutters, shooting me a glare. "I thought we'd be past all of this now."
"What do you want?" I ask, exasperated. "Past all of what?"
"You're still tiptoeing around him," he bellows. "Still not opening your eyes and seeing what you're missing."
"Because I won't marry him?" I ask, nonplussed, taken aback. "That's such a big deal for you? We're as good as married, Haymitch."
"Not in his eyes!" he says furiously. "He didn't get to propose to you the way he wanted to, he didn't get to say vows in front of the people he cares about. All that boy wants to do is tell you he loves you in front of the people he needs to have hear it. What does that cost you? Nothing. And you're too selfish to do it."
"So it's only about what Peeta wants?" I ask, stung. "You've always chosen him over me, you know. Why can't you understand that maybe there's merit in what I want, too?"
We are both standing now, our noses only inches apart, and I watch as his face contorts.
"I can't," he says through gritted teeth, "when what you want hurts him for no good reason."
The third proposal came last summer, when we were outside together working on Prim's roses. Peeta was buried in the bushes, only the tip of his golden head visible through the leafy branches and flowering buds, one hand poking out occasionally to deposit weeds on the grass beside me.
His voice when it came was muffled by leaves, but his words were clear enough.
"How in the world," he said, "did your parents decide to name you and your sister after flowers?"
The question jabbed me straight in the chest, and I spit a blade of grass from my lips and winced. I have talked to my mother twice since I came back to Twelve. Even thinking about her hurts.
"Katniss isn't really a flower," I said lamely, putting off the answer to his question. "More like a plant."
"Okay," he said, and then his body was retreating through the branches, tiny scratches gleaming red on his exposed arms, a single rose caught in his hand as he dropped down onto the grass and presented it to me. "How did your parents decide to name you after plants?"
"My dad," I said slowly. The memory of him does not hurt nearly as much. "He told me and-"
Ah, but she does. As if he knew, Peeta's hand found mine and he squeezed.
"Me and Puh-, and Prim, that if we could find ourselves, we'd always be okay. We'd never starve, anyway."
I turned the rose over in my palm and saw the tiny bead of red where something had pricked him, this boy who never had a problem finding himself until he got tangled up with me. It smears when I rub my thumb over it, a splash of crimson where he shed a piece of himself to bring me a piece of my sister.
"That's sensible," Peeta mused. "I wouldn't mind doing that."
I shot him a quick glare, found him looking back at me with his eyes as calm as lake water.
"Why do you say that," I asked him quietly. "When you know that it is never a possibility?"
"Why not?" he asked sensibly. "Katniss, they're never going to bring back the Games. We're safe here. You're safe with me. Our kids would be safe."
I could feel my hands start to shake, and struggled to keep them still as the quiver spread up my arms.
"Even if they don't bring them back," I said, choked, wheezed. "It would be something else. They would never be safe, Peeta. Never. Anyone who loves me is never going to be safe."
He fell silent, watched as I ripped the petals from the rose and scattered them into the wind.
"I love you," he told me finally, and my hands stilled, waited. "I love you, and I would love to have a little girl with my eyes and your stubbornness, or a little boy with your eyes and my willingness to put up with your stubbornness."
This startled a laugh from me that sounded suspiciously like a sob.
"Katniss," he said, finally defeated. "I want to marry you."
My legs tensed up, and, as if he could feel the flex of muscle Peeta turned in a sudden rush and grabbed my arms with an unexpected harshness, fingers digging into flesh.
"We're going to talk about this," he shouted. "I am sick and tired of you running from me all of the time. You and I are fine right now, but if you take off again we might not be. Do you understand that?"
I looked up at him in amazement, and his face dawned with sick realization as his hands went limp and fell off of my shoulders.
"Talk to me," he said, much more quietly. "Tell me why not."
As if could be that easy.
"Anyone who loves me is never going to be safe," I told him again, and he shook his head.
"It's not that simple," he said grimly. "I've already suffered a lot for loving you. What else are they going to do to me?"
The question hung between us as my eyes slipped unbidden to the tiny dent in his pants where real flesh flowed into fake.
"I-" I started to say, and then had to stop, cough, shake my head, do anything.
"I spent so long," I said finally, quietly, avoiding his eyes, "belonging to everyone else. My mother. Prim. Ga-"
Another hard swallow.
"Gal-Gale. Snow. Coin. The districts. I never got to belong to myself, Peeta. And now that I'm finally figuring out how to do that, I'm not sure that I'm ready to give it up and belong to you."
He didn't respond, just trained his eyes on the blue sky that skated along above us without a single cloud as blemish.
"So you think," he said finally, "that if I put a ring on your finger and we said a few words, you would belong to me in a way you don't now?"
"Yes," I said lamely, and his head shook slightly.
"No," he said flatly.
He waited me out, watched the sky race by, stayed by me as the first few streaks of red started to stain the perfect blue, and then turned to me with an expression of dull expectancy that sent a jolt through my stomach.
"If you don't love me," he said quietly, "then I won't ask you again. Is that what this is all about?"
A breath caught in my throat and for a hellish second I couldn't talk. His face contorted, he started to stand, and then I reached out with a trembling hand and tugged at his leg.
"No," I managed. "No, it's not that."
A dozen different emotions danced across his face before it evened out, and he knelt back down beside me and looked at me with those blue eyes.
"Then," he said quietly. "What?"
I shook my head.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know why, but I can't do it, Peeta. I'm afraid. I'm afraid that I'll ruin your life. I'm afraid that if I love you, if everyone knows I love you, they'll do something about it that will hurt me even worse. They'll hurt you. They'll kill you. They'll kill our kids. They'll-"
Something pricked at my eyes, started to burn, and I fought it resolutely.
"Right now they think they've broken you, that they've taken everything that I have," I said as evenly as I could manage. "If I marry you, the scale tips in their favor."
That time he was the one who left, his footsteps fading into the darkness, and I was left surrounded by petals that were already starting to wilt.
Haymitch disappears without a further word, leaves me breathing heavily, furiously, and I can hear the lower murmur of voices from below and then a second set of footsteps on the stairs, preceding Peeta's blond head around the doorframe.
"Hey," he says as he sees me standing there, and if he notices the strangeness of my position he doesn't comment on it, instead comes towards me with a white napkin folded across something round.
"Hi," I say quietly. "I take it you saw Haymitch."
"He let himself out," Peeta says. He takes a few steps closer and sits on the edge of the bed, holding his hand out to me. "Will you come sit with me for a minute?"
I take his hand and go to him, and when I'm sitting down beside him he unthreads his fingers, extends my palm up and places the napkin on top, causing my fingers to sink with the weight. I look at him curiously and he gives me his gentle smile.
"I love you," he says. "I was going to come back here and say a bunch of other things, but in the end that's really all that matters. I love you, and I want you to have this."
He laughs quietly when he sees me still looking at him, baffled, and tilts his head pointedly at my hand.
"You can look, Katniss. It's not going to hurt you."
I peel back the edge of the napkin and then turn my eyes up at his, even more confused than before.
"Peeta," I say. "It's coal. You want me to have coal?"
"I want you to hang on to it," he corrects me. "Coal turns into pearls. Or diamonds, if that's what you'd rather have. So you hang on to the coal, and when you feel like the scales are going to stay balanced, you let me know. And if that never happens, that's okay too."
I don't have any words, so I make a noise at the back of my throat and Peeta grins.
"That was not an answer," he teases me, and I look at him and think of how he always wakes up before me so that there's warm bread coming out of the oven by the time I make my way down to the kitchen; the way he reaches for me in his sleep, the crease in between his eyes smoothing out once he can touch my skin; the way he looks at me when he jerks awake in the middle of the night, like he's jumped from a nightmare into the best dream of his life.
Suddenly I find my voice.
"Pearl," I say. "I want a pearl."
"When you're ready," he says gently, and I shake my head.
"When can you get one?" I ask him, and those eyes start to sparkle.
"Today," he says quietly. "Right now."
He slides off the bed and opens the drawer I have just been snooping in, pushing aside the things on top until I see what I dismissed as a t-shirt, a piece of white fabric that I now recognize from Cinna's impossibly gorgeous wedding dress. He pulls something tiny and silver from the folds and comes back to stand before me, crouching down until we are eye to eye.
He tries to say something and I see his throat work, convulse, as the words get stuck, and I lean forward and take his cheeks in my hands.
I can still hear echoes of the proposal he brought the Capitol to tears with, one I only half-heard as I stayed focused on beaming, on maintaining an appropriate level of joy:
"Someone who was famous a long time ago used to say that you can't blame gravity for falling in love."
"It took almost dying to make me realize why I wanted to live."
Over-the-top romantic sentiments, not at all what I would have expected him to say, but they had lapped it up like cream.
Suddenly I am on fire with a desire to know what he really wanted to tell me, what he would have said if I had been the only one listening.
"You don't have to say anything," I lie to him. "You've said it all already. No costumes. No audience. Just you and me."
"No," he disagrees with a shake of his head. "No, I've waited too long to say this to you."
A long moment of silence and he curses under his breath.
"It doesn't seem like enough anymore," he says with a sheepish grin. "Words I've been practicing since we were five and all of a sudden I don't know what to say."
"You don't have to say anything," I say again, and he leans forward until his forehead is against mine, and kisses me once.
"I love you," he says, his eyes close enough to mine that I can see the pupils dilate. "I think that's the only thing in my life that I know for sure is real anymore, because it's been a part of it almost from the beginning. And you'd think-"
It goes quiet as he struggles once again to get the words out, and he kisses me again.
"You'd think that having only one real thing in your life would be awful," he says quietly. "But I think that maybe it's just enough."
He shifts, just a little, and I feel his hands take mine.
"Katniss," he says gently. "Will you marry me?"
To my horror I find my throat being blocked with tears that are threatening to prick at my eyes, and I swallow, hard, and force myself to answer.
"Yes," I tell him, "Of course I will."
He leans forward and kisses me a third time, his lips warm and salty with our mixed tears, and when he finally puts the ring on my finger I look at it and immediately recognize the stone.
"I picked your pocket," he confesses. "When I took the nightlock pill. Are you mad?"
For a long second I can't think of a thing to say, and then I tell him the truth.
"I'll be fine," I say.