My axe slices through the air. Yes, axe. Johanna would be proud. With a hollow thump, the head buries in a stubborn fence post, several inches above my previous attempt. Now Johanna would be laughing at me.

Yank it out and try again.

At this rate, it will take me years to tear down the remaining lengths of fence. It still stands in places, where so many other things in District 12 don't.

I need help—Peeta's help—but here's the problem. Peeta won't come near me with an axe. He won't come near me, period.

It's been a little over a month. One month in which I can barely sleep and can hardly eat and am to the point where I'm about to kick Buttercup if he so much as shows a single tooth. During said month, Peeta has spent his days with Haymitch, as he used to spend them with me, slinking back only at night, awash in a perfume of liquor, sleeping it off on a pallet downstairs.

I miss him fiercely.

The few times we've talked, Haymitch says to just give it time. Yeah, 'cause that worked so well for him. He's had loads of time and not a lot to show for it.

Yank out the axe and try again.

My anger grows with each misdirected swing, until finally I discard the axe entirely and use my hands and my feet, pounding the wood with everything I have until even that isn't enough. Spent, I lean against the post, everything aching, within and without, and gasp. I can't quite cry.

I'm losing Peeta. Losing him just like I lost Father and Prim and Gale.

Any day now, I expect he won't come back to me at all. He and Haymitch can just shack up, drink up, and tend to geese. Two broken souls, the spoils of war.

I can't let this happen.

I can't lose, Peeta, too. Not after everything.

Staring down at the axe, I think: What would Joanna do? The thought makes me sob-laugh. For one, she'd already have chopped down this goddom fence. With her teeth, if necessary.

Time to channel a bit of Joanna's genius. Or madness, depending on who you ask. With a fierce smile, I sling the axe over one shoulder and stride back toward the village.

Ø

Thump, goes the axe, right in the middle of Haymitch's front door. It makes for a satisfying knock, the only warning they get. My plan is to march in, find Peeta, and have it out. He's so good with his words, he's going to use them. Now.

But when I push into the house, I draw up in shock.

The interior looks just like my house. Which yeah, is because our houses are mirror images of each other. But you'd never know it from the way Haymitch decorates, usually with trash and underwear and feathers and the occasional puke stain only half-heartedly scrubbed. I don't remember ever seeing his floor before. Right now, it looks cleaner than mine.

In fact, as I stalk through room after room on the first floor, kitchen to living to dining, I find that my initial impression was right. His house iscleaner than mine. Everything is neat and tidy and geese-free. And where are all the bottles?

Everywhere I look, I can see Peeta. And not the Peeta I expected to see, out of his mind and drooling on the floor. He's clearly not just sitting over here drinking, as I suspected. At least, not all the time.

"That you, sweetheart?" Haymitch drawls, as though I'm right on cue. Like I come busting in here regularly. His voice carries from somewhere below, through the open door to the cellar.

That's more like it. Perhaps he and Peeta have come to an agreement—debauchery in the downstairs only. This is perfect. Nowhere for Peeta to hide. He's trapped.

The thought must occur to him as well, for I hear a bit of a scuffle from below, boots on the stairs. "No you don't," Haymitch says, and I hurry toward the sound.

As I descend the steps, I'm assaulted by the smell. Noxious and chemical.

My mood shifts back to black as I descend into the man cave. Definitely liquor here, and lots of it, from the smell. Bottles of all sorts line every available surface, across the shelves and arrayed on several tables to boot. Looks like Haymitch has been stockpiling for a small army. And there's a machine of some sort in the corner, a homemade contraption of glass and tubes and liquid. I'm pretty sure it's a still, like the very illegal one they used to have down at the Hob, which I'd only ever glimpsed by accident, usually when I was unloading my wares in the back room. Looking more closely, I see that it might even be the same one. Leave it to Haymitch to have somehow sequestered it before the Hob was razed.

I see Peeta now, arranged loosely on a low couch, his face flushed, whether from drink or something else, I can't tell. The neck of his shirt is rumpled, as though Haymitch had recently been yanking him around by it. Haymitch himself leans against a support column nearby, somewhat out of the line of fire but close enough. He's still vertical, so that's something.

Both of them are looking at me.

Haymitch is grinning lazily.

Peeta is not. He looks drawn, nervous, not quite looking at my face.

Too bad.

"What is this?" I demand, waving a hand at the…paraphernalia.

"I'm glad you asked," Haymitch responds. "Peeta here is helping me with my very own en-ter-prise." I'm amused at the thought of Haymitch considering whatever this is an enterprise. Still, it sounds better than the alternative, which is that they've been lying around, incoherent. Which is usually what I imagine Haymitch doing over here.

Looking more closely, I see that some of the bottles are actually jars and that they're not all filled with a clear liquid. Some of them contain strange shapes and colors, difficult to decipher in the gloom. And the smell…a tinge of vinegar. Mother uses it to preserve some of her more rare herbs.

I direct my attention back to Peeta. "We need to talk."

Peeta's face goes dark. "There's nothing to say," he mutters. "It won't happen again." Because I'm staying away from you, his tone implies. His diction is clear.

"Nothing happened, Peeta."

He looks up, incredulous. "Is that what you're telling yourself? You consider that nothing? I could have killed you."

"But you didn't. Not with a gun, not with your hands. You won't hurt me."

"Tell that to your bruises," Peeta scoffs. I'd forgotten the fingerprints that haven't yet faded from my neck. The simple shirt I'm wearing does nothing to hide them.

Haymitch is following the exchange with rapt attention. I suspect this is the most action he's had in months.

"You won't hurt me," I repeat, more emphatically now. "And I'm here to prove it."

Glance over and I see that Haymitch approves. Good. I want him here for what I'm about to do. He doesn't shift from his post, clearly understanding his role. Damage control.

I ignore Peeta's clear distress, stark on his face and in every line of his body. Instead, I stare at him, right at him, and I say a single word.

"Burn." The same word I'd used twice in the kitchen earlier, innocently. The same code word Snow had programmed as a trigger. The word that makes him want to kill me.

His eyes go wide and the blood vacates his face. "Katniss," he hisses. Haymitch looks alive, arms lowering to his sides, swinging free.

"Burn," I say again, louder now, taking a step toward Peeta.

He twitches and then begins to slowly unfold himself from the couch, standing stiffly. Like a cobra preparing to strike. Haymitch takes a step forward. He can be between us in an instant. He's not smiling anymore.

"Burn."

Peeta closes his eyes, fists clenched. Muscles bunch in his jaw.

"Burn!" I'm screaming it now, stepping forward to invade the crap out of Peeta's personal bubble. Daring, taunting him to hurt me. "Burn burn burn!" I'm channeling the heck out of Johanna. I probably look crazy, hands and hair wild, flagrantly goading the beast.

Peeta's eyes fly open.

For one second, one unbearable second, I think he's actually going to do it.

Then he says something, a single word of his own.

"No." His voice is shaky and his hands are still clenched but his eyes are clear. They haven't been swallowed hole. He reaches out to still my hands, holding them close to his chest.

We stare at each other, both fighting for breath. I'm still seeing red, teetering on the knife's edge between furious and confused. But Peeta, Peeta looks euphoric. Not a smile, really, but his expression is lit from within.

I don't understand. We haven't spoken for weeks, and the first thing he says to me is…

He frowns and looks down. "What happened to your hands?" He's peering at my abused and swollen knuckles, the ones I'd tried to treat like hammers against that stupid fence.

I ignore him because really?

"Did you just tell me 'no'?"

"That he did," Haymitch interjects smoothly, effectively popping our little bubble by pushing through us, making us both take a staggering step back. He grabs a nearby bottle and totters toward the stairs. "And on that note, I'll be up here if you kids need me."

Then he's gone, and we're alone.

Haymitch just left me alone with Peeta.

We stare at each other.

Stare and stare.

What just happened.

"No," Peeta repeats, clearly. "No, I will not…b-burn." He hesitates around the word, as if it's difficult to articulate. "And neither will you."

I have no words.

We stare some more.

"It took three weeks," he begins. "Three weeks before Haymitch could say that word without me trying to bash his face in."

And that's when he tells me about what he's been doing for the past month, about his little arrangement with Haymitch, forged the night he'd almost choked me to death in our kitchen. Haymitch would help curb Peeta's instinctive reaction to the code word that has been branded into his brain. In return, Peeta would help Haymitch fix the old still.

"I have a lot of experience with kitchen equipment," Peeta says, as if by way of apology. Guess that extends to persnickety stills. "Oh, and I've also been canning some of the vegetables that Haymitch has been growing in his garden."

Haymitch has a garden. Haymitch has been growing vegetables.

What is this.

What is Peeta saying.

He's saying that Haymitch has a garden and has been growing vegetables. Oh, and that Haymitch has been fermenting those vegetables to develop a new strain of beverage. Together, they've retrofitted the old still (using a couple of choice new components from New Capitol, of course), to enable the revolutionary process. All the benefits of alcohol with none of the side effects. It's called Vegetate, and it's all the rage across the Districts.

Vegetate. It's what I'd smelled on him for so many nights, assuming the worst. I can smell it now, a bit more sweet, more earthy than Haymitch's usual poison.

Peeta had heard about it during the months he spent recuperating in the Capitol. The substance was proving successful in treating an addiction to alcohol. Several of his fellow patients in the hospital had suffered from the affliction.

This story that he's telling me seems impossible. It seems improbable. It seems like the greatest story I've ever heard.

Apparently, as the old regime continues to crumble, all sorts of state secrets are coming to light. So many tactics that President Snow had employed over the years to keep the Districts mired in a devastating blend of hope and despair. For example, he had purposefully impeded the progress of safer drugs and stimulants in favor of the more addictive morphling, white liquor, and the joysticks. The better to control us.

I feel sick.

Peeta sees the shift in my face and helps me sit, keeping me close on the couch. He knows about my Father. For my Father, it had been a match.

"I'm glad Snow's dead," I say, fierce.

Peeta's own eyes go hard. "Yes," he agrees, gathering my hands again. A habit, I suppose, a little act that we had performed many a time for the cameras. "But I'm also glad you didn't kill him."

I wonder where Peeta was, the day I didn't kill Snow.

"So," he continues, his knee now pressing against my own, "I've been helping Haymitch wean himself off the hard stuff. In return, Haymitch has been helping me wean off my own little problem."

His little problem, he says.

"The fact that you still want to kill me."

"Exactly."

"How?" I'm curious. How did Haymitch succeed where a battery of Capitol doctors could not?

"Haymitch used some…unorthodox methods. After I told him what happened, he started saying…that word to me several times a day. Startling me with it, when I was most vulnerable, when I least expected it. Even screaming it at me. The first several times, we really went at it." His gaze goes hazy, remembering. I can easily see the two of them wrestling to the floor, Peeta putting Haymitch in a choke hold. "It was almost unbearable. The impulse to find you, to…" He looks at me again, wets his lips, then looks away.

"Then why…" I begin, but I can't finish. There are so many ways to finish that question. Why did Peeta come back to District 12 in the first place, if there was even a remote possibility that he could hurt me? And then, after his nightmares came true, why did he stay?

He reads between the lines. "You know why, Katniss." The way he says my name, low and almost desperate, sends a tingle up my spine. His thumbs are feather-soft against my skin. He's never used this tone for the cameras.

And I do know why. I know exactly why Peeta does the things that he does, when it comes to me. I've always known. For him, what we'd done for the cameras was never completely an act. Maybe that's why our adoring public always liked him better. The real Peeta shone through in a way that the real Katniss could not.

Peeta half-laughs, a puff of air through his nose. "Haymitch," he says more loudly, directing his voice up the stairs, "has been tossing hints that I'm ready for a trial by fire. But I wasn't so sure. We'd been taking bets as to how soon you'd be beating down his door. He won the bet." Literally.

We regard each other for a moment. My hands itch to reach out and touch his face. I always want to reach out and touch his face.

"You can come home now," I say, and it's not really a request.

Peeta just smiles a wonderful, wonderful smile.

"Hey Mockingjay," Haymitch calls from above. He sounds close, as though perhaps he hadn't gone as far as he'd led us to believe. "Why is there an axe in my door?"

Ø

Peeta does indeed come home, with a promise to Haymitch that they'll still continue their little side business. Apparently, they're making quite the profit. As if that matters here, with nothing yet to buy.

When Peeta does come home, he's still tentative, choosing to continue sleeping down by the hearth until we're absolutely sure that there's no other trigger that will have him at my throat. He's weakest at night, he says. But at least he's here.

It's not quite the same, not the easy camaraderie that we shared before. Peeta continues to hold back, not fully trusting himself yet. Maybe he never will.

Before bed, by the light of a flickering fire, we play "Real or Not Real," reinforcing true memories, expunging shiny ones. Sometimes I practice saying the word burn, and he practices not hurting me. It's the ultimate button I can push, when I'm impatient and on edge and I just want to get a rise out of him, to hurt him. But he never hurts me in return. Oh, he sometimes hurts other things around me, in his weaker moments (an elbow through the wall here, a cracked lamp there), but he doesn't hurt me.

Never again me.

Ø

We're close now.

I can feel it.

But we're still waiting.