author's note: Soo...this was supposed to be one whole chapter but because the conversation that follows what I am now posting as Chapter 34 is pretty involved and lengthy, I decided (with the helpful prodding of my bestest friend/beta-who-hates-when-I-don't-warn-her-about- chapters-with-sex-scenes-that-she-may-or-may-not-b e-beataing-at-work!) to chop it in half and you will get half tonight and the other half this weekend or Monday at the latest. Enjoy! And as always, reviews are great and I respond to all of them as long as you are signed in! (Which sucks because I have gotten some really nice reviews from guests too!)

Chapter 34 Part I

Well, I won't give up on us
Even if the skies get rough
I'm giving you all my love
I'm still looking up

"I Won't Give Up" –Jason Mraz

It was an hour before Katniss lost the wild, desperate look in her eyes and an additional 45 minutes until the tremble that had been coursing through her body finally ceased. I was thankful that Zale was asleep because I didn't know how I would have been able to deal with both of them at the same time.

Just as I was appreciating that detail, I got a flash of a future where Katniss and I did have children. In my vision I was standing in the upstairs hallway, my head swinging back and forth between our bedroom door where Katniss lay in much the same condition as she was that afternoon and the room across the hall where I could hear a baby, our baby, crying scared and alone.

I pushed down the awful vision of having to choose between my wife and that crying child when Katniss sat up from my arms suddenly and asked where Zale was.

"He was exhausted when we got home so I sent him to bed until dinner." I said quietly and Katniss looked at the clock before digging the heels of her hands into her eyes with a groan.

I could tell that she was already rebuilding that protective wall around her heart. The one that had signs hung on it that read 'no entrance' and 'trespassers will be shot on sight'.

"Well, we better get dinner ready then. It's just about time and you know that kid can eat his body weight in food so we…"

I cut her off by grabbing her at the crook of one elbow.

"Katniss…." I said sternly and she shook her head and looked into my eyes shamefully.

"Not now, Peet…I can't talk about it right now but I will. Later." She promised and I slowly relaxed my grip on her arm before pulling her close and hugging her tightly to my chest. I breathed in the familiar scent of her shampoo from the day before and stroked one hand over the back of her head to smooth out her tangled hair.

The way her breath hitched and her arms came up around my neck tightly told me that she was barely holding on so I didn't press the issue. I decided the discussion could wait at least until Zale was in bed for the night but no longer.

If there was one thing I'd learned about Katniss in all our years together it was that she could over think an issue until it lay bloody and beaten at her feet begging for a quick death. The faster we dealt with whatever nightmare had led to her insistence that we not have children after telling me years ago that she would never again say 'never' to the idea, the better. As her husband, I had an idea of what the nightmare had been since she'd been having variations of the same one for as long as we'd been sharing that bed, and I glanced toward my bedside table where the item I thought might be a solution lay.

"Sure, we'll talk tonight." I whispered and pulled back to look down into her tired eyes.

"You wanna sleep a little until dinner? I can handle it myself." I offered and she shook her head, leaning in close to me again.

"No, no…I'll go with you." Katniss said quickly and then climbed off of the bed.

"I should probably get out of this room a little today. It might help." She mumbled and I got the distinct feeling her reasons for leaving the room were less about being productive and more about not wanting to be alone.

"Sure." I said with a smile that didn't quite reach my eyes.

"While I cook I'll tell you, with as little graphic detail as possible that is, about the great Peeta Mellark sexual growth and development lesson I gave Zale." I said trying to lighten the mood.

Katniss raised her eyebrows and I smirked back in answer as I climbed off of the bed and followed her to the bathroom door.

"So he did want to talk to you?" She whispered as she set a clean pair of pajamas down on the sink and pushed the door only slightly closed so that we could continue our conversation while she changed.

Following Katniss's lead, I went to my dresser and pulled out a pair of long khaki shorts and a clean t-shirt so I could change out of the sweaty spice and flour covered clothes I had worn to work that day.

"Yeah, he did. We had a really nice talk and I set some things straight for him that he was confused about." I said changing my clothes and throwing my dirty things in the hamper by the bathroom door just as Katniss was coming out.

Aside from changing clothes, she had brushed her hair and washed her face which made her look a little less haggard than when I had first found her huddled among the bed sheets.

"So…he did want to know about…" She grimaced and I laughed slightly at the fact that she couldn't even finish the sentence she was trying to say.

"Yes, Katniss, he wanted to know about sex which makes him a normal adolescent boy." I said softly and pulled her into my arms for another hug, unable to get enough of touching her after how I had found her a few hours earlier.

"I'm just glad he was comfortable enough to ask me rather than trying to figure things out for himself or, help us all, asking other kids his age." I murmured against the top of her head.

Katniss pulled back slightly but held onto my hand as we slipped out the bedroom door and headed downstairs together quietly to start dinner.

"Yeah, me too." Katniss nodded and went about setting the table for dinner while I start boiling water for pasta.

Knowing how sad Katniss was about Zale coming of age, I figured that I could at least tell her one detail from the conversation that might make her laugh as well as ensure that she still had a few years left to think of him as a little boy like she wanted to.

"And you'll be happy to know that when I described the nitty gritty details of sex to him he was pretty grossed out and decided that's not for him right now," I said, while taking a now thawed left over container of sauce and meatballs from the last time we had spaghetti out of the fridge.

I grinned as Katniss's eyes widened.

"You told him exactly how sex works?" She asked sounding a little shocked and I took the sauce and meatballs to the stove and put them in a pot to reheat. I shrugged as I took a quick peek into the pot for the spaghetti to check if the water was boiling yet.

"He asked me, Kat. I wasn't going to lie to the kid or make it something dirty that he'd think he should be ashamed of." I said defensively and moved to the table to finish helping her set the dishes out.

She looked skeptical but nodded slightly as we heard the bedroom door upstairs opening and then the sound of the bathroom door opening and closing.

"Just in time," I smiled and placed the hard spaghetti noodles into the pot of boiling water and turned down the pot of sauce and meatballs to let them simmer until Zale came down.

He appeared a minute later and Katniss and I both smiled at him so that he wouldn't suspect anything about the breakdown she'd had earlier. True to form, Katniss bravely walked over to Zale as he entered the kitchen and hugged him tightly.

"Hey! So how did you do at work today? Pretty tiring, spending a whole day there, huh?" She teased and Zale nodded as he made a beeline for the stove and lifted the lids to see what was cooking.

"I'm sooooo hungry!" He said sighing and closing his eyes as he took a deep breath of the cooking meat in the sauce.

I smiled at Katniss and rolled my eyes as Zale took another whiff. Another thing I remembered about being a young kid going through what seemed like one growth spurt after another was how consistently hungry I was at every hour of the day.

"Hey! Stop breathing all over my dinner, Kid," I scolded and took the lids from his hands and used one to shoo him over to the table.

Zale laughed and smiled up at me with a different kind of affection I'd ever seen from him before he scurried over to the table and sat down. Katniss, who rarely missed a thing, glanced between the two of us with a secret smile of her own.

"Hey, Zale," She said opening the oven up and pulling out a large loaf of bread wrapped in foil with an oven mitt and held it up as she walked over to the table.

"Have you ever had garlic bread before?" She asked waving it under his nose enticingly and I could almost see his mouth watering at the smell coming from the foil.

Once again, Zale impressed us with his ability to pack a large quantity of food into a relatively slender little body. It was actually the most I'd seen him eat all week and Katniss had to tell him to slow down no less than 3 times over the course of the meal as he told her about his day at the bakery with Calen and myself.

When we finished, Zale volunteered to clean up from dinner and Katniss and I headed into the living room to relax on the couch. Despite anything we were feeling following Katniss's episode that afternoon, we still enjoyed cuddling up together after a long day and just holding each other. I was amused to see Zale less squirmy about Katniss and I being affectionate as he entered the living room and jumped over the back of the couch right on top of us.

"Hey!" I bellowed reaching around Katniss to grab onto Zale, wrestling him off of us so that he fell sideways off the couch and landed with a thump on the floor beside it.

"We were going to let you choose a movie to watch since you cleaned up from dinner, but now I don't know…" I teased and Zale sat up with a grin before he grabbed the sleek silver viewing box that housed the movie selections. As he watched the choices flash before his face in a whirlwind of color, he climbed back up to lay at the other end of the couch from where Katniss and I were.

"No, no! I'll be good!" He chuckled and folded an arm behind his head as he relaxed back into the cushions.

Looking around, I took in the relaxed scene of the three of us resting at the end of a long day and it warmed my heart. Even after Katniss'ss earlier frantic declaration that we couldn't ever have children, with my wife in my arms and a boy stretched out with his feet overlapping mine comfortably on the couch, I couldn't help myself picturing a child of my own in Zale's place.

I'd survived the Hunger Games, my hijacking, and the war. I'd accomplished the goals I wanted to professionally by putting my family's business back together. I painted in my free time and was married to the only girl I'd ever loved.

But still, there was something missing. I decided right then and there that if I was to have any chance at the family I so desperately wanted with Katniss, then I was going to have to fight for them. It had been 5, then 10, then 15 years of cautiously broaching the subject and I decided that, after all I had been through during that time, I deserved this one selfish wish to be fulfilled.

I didn't realize that both Katniss and Zale were staring at me, waiting for a response to a question I had been too zoned out to hear, until Katniss said my name again.

"What? Huh?" I asked and Zale chuckled and nudged one of my feet with both of his own.

"I asked if you were okay with this movie?" He asked raising his eyebrows toward the projection.

"Maybe you should have taken a nap after work too." He teased and I nudged his feet with mine. With a smile, I told him to turn up the volume and we all settled in to watch.

Zale, who had gotten his second wind following his afternoon nap, made it through the whole movie and asked if he could stay up for a bit and continue to watch T.V. quietly downstairs for a while.

"Sure, just don't stay up too late." I said.

Katniss got up first and went about closing the first floor down for the night and came back to the couch to lean over and kiss Zale on the forehead.

"Not too late." She said echoing me and Zale smiled. "You go hunting with me tomorrow and that's a pretty early wakeup call too."

She winked and Zale nodded and promised to go to bed as soon as he got tired.

We both watched Katniss head up the steps and I turned back to Zale as the kitten appeared and jumped up onto the couch with him. As the kitten settled itself on his chest and kneaded Zale over top of the t-shirt he was wearing, he smiled in that gentle way that always pulled at my heartstrings because of how much he looked like Finnick.

"Alright, well don't you two get into too much trouble down here alright? Go to bed when you're tired." I said and patted his head lightly as he petted the kitten's back and it purred happily.

Zale nodded and then glanced at the stairs where Katniss had just gone up to bed.

"I will." He promised and then grinned.

"Think you guys'll do it tonight?" He asked in a loud whisper and I couldn't stop the surprised laugh that popped out of my mouth if I tried. I decided the next discussion we'd have to have when I took him to work with me again that week would have to be about when it was and wasn't appropriate to discuss sex.

"Uhh…no, probably not." I answered honestly, looking up the stairs myself. "We have some things we need to talk about."

Zale looked back down at the kitten still snuggled into his chest and shrugged.

"And anyway, you know, girls like the whole talking thing just as much as us guys like the other stuff…" I winked. "It's important to keep a good balance."

Zale blushed slightly and I knew even without him having to say it that having to talk to girls was the least of his worries with all the other changes he had going on.

Leaning forward, I touched the side of the projection machine and lowered the volume slightly.

"Goodnight, kid." I whispered and turned the lights off on my way out of the room but left the stairway light on so that Zale could find his way up to bed later.

"Night, Peeta." He called after me quietly as I headed up the steps and into mine and Katniss's bedroom.

Katniss was already in bed, sitting up with her knees pulled to her chest under the covers and an expectant look on her face as she waited for me to come to bed so we could talk about her episode. She had changed again from the pajamas she had on around Zale into a simple nightgown with thin straps and a neckline that dipped low, revealing the valley between her breasts. She looked young and carefree, a stark contrast to the dark thoughts I knew to be chasing each other around and around in her mind.

I didn't say anything at first, just smiled appreciatively to thank her for waiting up for me so that we could talk and then went to the bathroom to pee and brush my teeth, going over in my head what I was going to say. It was almost too warm for nightwear so I just left my boxers on as I pulled off the rest of my clothes tiredly and left them on the floor. I glanced down at the discarded clothes, reminding myself to take care of them before the morning lest I cause Katniss to trip and fall into the shower curtain during her 3 a.m. pee. Before I left the bathroom, I stood in front of the mirror over the sink and stared at my reflection, trying to pump myself up for the discussion we were about to have.

I stared at myself in the mirror, at the burn scars that criss-crossed my body, the artificial leg, the tiredness in my eyes that wouldn't likely ever leave me completely after all I'd been through. I looked at each one in detail, running my fingers over the lines and ridges of my scars, the crease where my real leg ended and the false one began. I even touched the lines around my eyes that told the story of every horrible moment of my hijacking and the episodes that have plagued me ever since. Despite all of that, I still looked young which I found pretty impressive since I was set to turn 30 less than 2 weeks.

All of these atrocities I'd suffered and lived through, every scar, a missing limb, a broken mind were like different chapters of a story that, I decided, entitled me to a happy ending.

It was no secret that during and after the Games I was widely seen as the weaker of the star-crossed lovers from District 12, but that was nearly 14 years earlier. I had old scars and new wrinkles but what it boiled down to was that I'd spent so many years being patient and understanding with Katniss because I was so afraid of scaring her off and losing her forever, that I had accidentally begun to lose myself and the man I had always wanted to be.

Despite everything wrong about my childhood, the one thing that had always been good and right and reliable in my life had been my father. In the recipe of our family, my father was like… the eggs. In baking, the eggs act as a binder, holding together all of the other ingredients in the mix. They are needed in almost everything a bakery sells and even if you can't always taste them in the delicious pastries, cakes, and cookies filled with stronger more delectable flavors, the eggs are always in there holding things together.

From the time I began baking with him, that was always the way I thought of my father, especially since he typically wore white jeans and an undershirt beneath his white apron and topped it off with a white scarf to hold back the wavy blonde hair that my brothers and I had all inherited from him. That was my father, the egg; plain as could be, but much stronger and more important than he projected himself to be to the people of District 12.

I was my father's son and I wanted to be that man to a family of my own for as long as I could remember. And for almost just as long, I had wanted that family with Katniss Everdeen.

I stared at my reflection hard, giving myself a look that said 'Grow a set, Mellark' with the appropriate amount of force behind it and then turned to open the bathroom door.

To be continued in Chapter 34 part II.