IMPORTANT NOTE! There's a BIG time-skip here. As in, I skip everything in Catching Fire and a part of Mockingjay. I love fanfiction but I don't like lifting things straight from the thing I'm writing fanfiction about. All the stuff in the 75th Games and most of the last book… it's perfect as it is. So this takes place in District 13 but is not directly from the book. Here's hoping it works anyway!

Chapter Seventeen

"Why did you agree to die for me?"

Katniss Everdeen doesn't beat around the bush. I don't blame her. Even after all that she's been through, all that we've been through, she still isn't shy around me. Sometimes I wish she was. She thinks she's weak. I wish I was as strong as her.

So as we sit in the hummingbird room deep in the heart of Special Weaponry and waiting to find out if Annie and Peeta are alive, she repeats the question – asking again why I agreed to die in the arena if it meant keeping her alive.

I pick at the blades of grass beside me and shake my head. "I wasn't sure of it then and I'm not sure of it now. No offense."

She sighs wearily. "None taken. Doesn't answer my question, though. So what tipped you from not being sure into agreeing to do it? There must've been something."

It takes me a second but I realize the answer is so very simple. "Annie. I did it for Annie. She's strong enough to keep living, keep existing. If I died, I wanted the world I left her to be the best possible place. If you survived and the rebellion worked, if you helped the rebellion work, then I was leaving Annie something better. I suppose that explains."

"You don't sound very sure of yourself," she points out quietly.

"I'm not sure of anything anymore, Katniss. Are you?"

"No, not really," she agrees. "But if you're not sure, that sounds like a good reason. Of course, I volunteered for the Hunger Games when I didn't think there was a chance I could win so maybe I'm not the best person to judge these things."

I laugh hollowly. "I don't think you and I are the best qualified judges of anything."

She shrugs in agreement, or what I assume is agreement. Tearing blades of grass off at their shortest possibly level, she sighs heavily and leans back against the wall. "Annie loves you?"

I answer the only way I can. "I hope so."

"If she does, and I think she does, why do you think she'd be alright with living in a world you're not in? Even if you make it the best possible world you can."

This conversation is making me uncomfortable. I push myself to my feet and pace back and forth across the small room. "It's not that, exactly." But maybe it is. "You make it sound like I willingly walked into the arena fully intending to die so that Annie could live. I didn't. Maybe that was your plan, maybe that was Peeta's plan – it wasn't my plan. Plutarch and Haymitch didn't come to me and Johanna until we were in the Capitol, after the interviews with Caesar. I intended to go home to Annie. I intended to live a long life with her, under Snow if that's the way it had to be."

"But you had to try," she murmurs, dropping her head onto her knees, "you had to try when they asked you to try because you couldn't live with yourself if you didn't."

I collapse beside her again. "Yeah." I feel like there's more that should be said but the word covers every answer I could give her.

"I was ready to die so Peeta could come home," she says, not moving her head. "And he planned for me to come home. On the beach, I don't think you were paying attention, he gave me a locket with pictures of my sister, my mother, and Gale. He was trying to prove that I had something to live for, something to go home to.

"It didn't work. His arguments just made me want him to live more. I'm not worth dying for. When he said he didn't have anyone at home, because he only loved me, it broke my heart. I wanted to give him a second chance at life. I thought there must be some way he could move on from me and find someone to love him in life.

"The thing is… I don't want him to love anyone but me. I want to love him. I never told him I love him. I want to say those words to him and I want him to believe me. I want to say them because I do love him and I want to say them without him thinking I have to say them." She shakes her head and pulls her knees closer to her chest. "I guess I've gone selfish now."

I can't help but wonder if Katniss has ever said that many words at one time before. Saying so would shut her up so I don't. "I said something like that to Mags once," I tell her instead, "and she told me to stop being stupid, that there was no better reason to be selfish than love."

She turns her head, resting her ear on her knee, and looks at me. "That's good advice. Only if he comes back to me, though. And what if he blames me for what he's been through in the Capitol?"

"He's Peeta," I say, shaking my head, "he won't blame you for that. It's not in his nature."

"Are you worried Annie will blame you?"

"No, not really. I'm more worried about what they'll tell her. Or show her. I know a lot of the things Cressida taped me talking about were taped. She knows some of what I did with the women in the Capitol, but I'm terrified they'll make her watch."

There's really nothing to say to that and she doesn't try and fill the silence with empty words. I appreciate that. Instead, we sit quietly and wish for something to happen. Anything.

"What do we do if the rescue isn't successful?" she asks after a long silence. "We fell apart when they ended up there and we ended up here. What do we do if they're never coming back to us?"

I've asked myself that question a thousand times and I'm not sure I know the answer. "I suppose we try and figure out what they'd want us to do and then we try, as hard as we can, to do that."

"And then when we give up," she says as if she's finishing my sentence – and maybe she is, "at least we tried to do right by them."

I scramble around and sit in front of her. "Help me? Help me do that?"

She smiles grimly and nods. "We'll help each other."

"And maybe we won't have to do it at all," I allow myself to add, even though it feels like cursing the chances of it happening. "Maybe they'll come here in a few hours."

It seems like too much to hope for.

We abandon the hummingbird room a little while later. There are too many people in the dining hall, too many people giving us pitying glances – even though it's only in our imaginations because the rescue mission is top secret and even Gale Hawthorne's mother doesn't know where he is – so we get the food we'll never eat and take refuge in one of Katniss' favorite, best hidden closets.

We leave the food on a cabinet by the door and sit on the floor with our ropes. Katniss is pretty good at knots, thanks to her skill with snares. I teach her every knot I know. We trade ropes when she gets hers too jumbled up, and I think it's to blame on the thickness of the rope, and I untangle hers while she makes a new knot.

Her sister comes after a little while and stays until we each eat half our food and then she leaves, promising not to divulge our location to anyone other than Haymitch – because he'll know when the rescue mission is back.