-73 days:
But before…
I find him where I always do in the drawn-out hours between midnight and dawn: at the spare easel that now sits in the room he has requisitioned as his own, the smell of oil heavy in the air.
His back goes rigid when he hears the pad of my bare feet, and then his shoulders unlock and he turns around with his gentle smile
"Hi," he says, and kisses me lightly, his hand grazing softly against my waist. "What woke you up?"
"I got cold," I tell him, and peek over his shoulder. He's in the middle of a concoction that looks like it came out of a children's story book: all pastels, airy lines, gorgeous sprays of flowers. "What are you working on?"
A red stain is working its way up his cheeks, and I reach up and tug gently on a strand of the golden hair that is long enough to skim the line of his jaw.
"Come on," I tease him. "If I got out of bed for this, make it worth my while"
"It's nothing," he mumbles. "I was just trying something new."
"I like it," I tell him, taking a step around him and coming up to study the canvas in more depth. "It's better than what you used to do."
"You're biased," he says quietly, and comes up to stand behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist as he tugs me back against his chest. He lifts the hair off of my neck and pushes aside the hem of my shirt, kisses me on the sensitive skin at my shoulder, and I close my eyes as tiny sparkles flare to life in my stomach.
"I'm glad you came down," he whispers against bare skin, and I turn my head slightly, just enough so that my lips can find his, and he smells of paint and strawberries and tastes like home.
"Come to bed," I whisper back, and he laughs and squeezes my waist once, lets me go.
"Soon," he says. "I want to get some more work done first."
I want to ask him why he's transitioned into something so easy on the eyes, why he's traded hard memories for fairy tales, but there's a strange twist to his mouth that makes me stay quiet.
"I'll be awake," I tell him. "Whenever you're done."
He gives me a distracted smile and I leave him in the drowsy warmth of his well-lit room before climbing the darkened stairs back to the room that is freezing with the wind coming in through the open window. Goosebumps prickling on my arms, I crawl back under the thick quilt and punch it around, try to form a cocoon around my body in the bed that is far too cold without him. I can hear him downstairs, the soft tread of his footsteps, the clink of his paintbrush in a glass of water, and despite my promise the quiet rhythm of it makes me heavy-eyed, has me almost asleep by the time I see his blond head materialize out of the darkness.
"Are you awake?" he stage whispers, perching on the edge of the bed, and I sleepily unfold the edge of the quilt in invitation.
"Huddle up fast," I say groggily. "All the warmth is going to escape."
He crawls up next to me and pulls me into his arms, wraps himself around me and throws the quilt around both of us.
The quiet exhale of his breath and then:
"Katniss, are we ever going to talk about it?"
This wakes me up more effectively than a slap of cold water in the face, and I bolt upright, heavy fabric dropping off of my arms to puddle in my waist. His canvas suddenly makes sense: he is pushing away the past in invitation of some rosy impossibility, something that I can never give him.
"It's not something I can just change my mind about," I snap at him, and then realize that I am close to shouting, force myself to take a deep breath before I continue. "It's something I decided thirty years ago, Peeta. What can you say that's going to make a difference?"
"I love you," he says, pulling himself up beside me. He looks exhausted in the moonlight, heavy bags under his eyes, his mouth thinned. "Maybe I can't say anything that will change your mind, but I would hope that that simple fact might have a chance."
"Not a simple fact," I tell him, and he allows me to come closer, to tent my fingers on his chest above the steady thump of his heart. "It's a hard won fact, Peeta. Don't make it sound like it was easy."
"Nothing," he says, and now a tiny smile is coloring his voice, rumbles lightly in his chest, "is ever easy whenever you're concerned."
"You're not convincing me," I mutter, and he laughs.
"Aside from the fact that I love you," he tells the top of my head. "There is also the fact that I would love to share a child with you."
He tugs against my chin until I am looking at the intense gleam of his blue eyes, his fingers warm on my cold skin.
"The one thing you and I never had," he says quietly, "is a future. Together or apart."
His heartbeat is steady beneath my fingers, a tiny thump, thump, thump.
"Think of it, Katniss," he says in awe. "A child. An impossibility that never should have been. Just imagine."
"The only thing I can imagine," I tell him in carefully measured words, "is having to watch while a bunch of other children – children, Peeta – try to kill our child before he can kill them."
When he pulls away, I reach out and grab his arms, looking up into the grim twist of his mouth.
"You're naïve if you don't think they're going to reinstate the Games – or something even worse," I say, thinking of the endless weeks when the only way I could see him was when they dangled him on TV. "And any child we have is going to be their first target."
"You don't think I can protect our family?" he asks flatly. "We made it through two Games and a war, didn't we?"
"We got each other through!" I exclaim. "You weren't there when I had to watch – when I had to, in front of everyone – when they took you away from me one piece at a time, when everything that was sweet in my life, that was good – when it was all gone."
"I wasn't there?" he shouts, and I flinch away from the sudden fiery blue flame of his eyes, from the alien snarl that is marring his lips. "I wasn't there while they took every good memory I had of you and perverted it? When the only way I could make it through the night was to think of the best way to kill you even when the deepest part of me was still trying to remember the way you looked in that arena when I told you goodbye?"
"I'm sorry," I whisper. "I know. It was worse for you. I know. But, Peeta. I couldn't handle going through that again. I'm not strong enough for that."
We stare at each other for several long moments, and then his face crumbles and he reaches for me.
"I love you," he says, his lips against my ear, his words muffled by my hair. "It's okay, Katniss. We don't have to have a baby if you don't want to."
Finnick's rope, stained crimson with blood, hanging in knots like a hangman's noose, and I draw in a shuddery breath.
"There were times," I tell him quietly, "when it would have been easier if they had killed you. Did you ever think that? Can you stand to think that about your child?"
His breath halts in his chest, and when I have the courage to turn my eyes to his face I have to shove away the prick of unwanted tears. His face is drawn, is pale, is devastated; he is shattered in the bloodless light.
"Did you really think that?" he whispers, and I slip my arms around him and hug him as tightly as I can, smelling oil, fruit, vanilla. Smelling what has become home.
But his arms hang limply at his sides and he will not meet my gaze.
"My life is measured by yours," I tell him steadily. "You and I promised that to each other a long time ago. If they had killed you, I wouldn't have been far behind."
Now his arms come up and wrap against me, hold me tightly against his chest, and we breathe in tandem, the beat of my heart against the beat of his.
"I don't know if I can go through that again," I say into his shirt. "I want to, but I don't think I can."
"It's okay, Katniss," he says helplessly. "It's okay."
I can't think of anything else to say, and he is silent beside me, his arms still wrapped around me as his breath calms into the rhythm of sleep, and I stay awake and think of how steadily he has loved me, how well. I think of the nights when he would stay up with me and make me laugh with funny stories about Prim, of the endless hours he has worked over the book just to get his memories right, of how I realize every day that I am stronger when he is beside me. Before I can think about it I shake him awake and kiss him harder than I have ever kissed him, his tired, surprised eyes blue, so blue, in the moonlight.
"Peeta," I ask him when I finally have to pause to suck in air, to calm the staccato dance of my heart. "Do you think that if Finnick was alive he would spend all of his time worrying about how they were going to hurt Kai?"
His slow smile burns me like an autumn fire.
"I think," Peeta says quietly, "that he would spend every moment he possibly could with his son, enjoying every second. It's not a curse, Katniss, it's a gift."
He strokes my back gently and pulls me closer, presses a kiss against my temple.
"After they took me to the Capitol and messed with… with everything, you don't know what it was like to get those pieces of my life back. Every single second with you is something I wanted, even the ones where you were lying through your teeth, or you kissed me right before you kissed him."
"Peeta," I whisper, and he tilts my face up to his and kisses me as hard as I just kissed him.
"All worth it," he tells me, his eyes hot on mine. "Even if you had stayed with him, I would have wanted every single one. There is nothing in the world that would have hurt more than not having every second with you that I could get."
Later, when it's over, when he is curled up next to me and his breathing is almost even, I watch him sleeping with his head cradled onto one hand that is patchworked with burned skin and smooth skin, with the circlet of bite marks that I stamped onto his wrist. The long hair covers the gouge mark on his temple, covers the shiny skin where his eyebrows used to be, and he looks impossibly young.
He looks like the boy who threw me a loaf of bread.
The boy who told the world he loved me.
The boy who saved me while I was busy trying to save him.
The boy who gave me a future I never should have had.
Every moment with him is a gift.
"Okay, Peeta," I whisper to him. "Okay, we can try."