A/N: All right. I have been working on this, on and off, for about six years now (!), and now that the Hunger Games fandom has risen from the ashes and I'm remembering just how much I love this pairing, I've decided to do my best to actually sit down and finish it. At the moment I have 15 chapters outlined, and 7 written, so I HOPE updates will be consistent and there won't be a huge gap between chapters.

A huge thank you to everyone who's written Growing Back Together stories in the past, because though I did my best to come at this from a new angle and not copy anyone, I was definitely motivated by all those stories and the many ways Everlark could have found their way back to each other.

Thank you to everyone who chooses to check this story out, and I hope you enjoy!

Disclaimer: The Hunger Games trilogy was written by Suzanne Collins, and any quotes taken from those works are obviously not my own. No copyright infringement is intended. Page numbers referenced are from the paperback versions of the trilogy.

Prologue

THG Pg. 22: "I volunteer!" I gasp. "I volunteer as tribute!"

They escort her to the observation room. There's glass, one-way, Plutarch explains, and she walks right up to it on trembling legs. Now, here, she is the audience, watching, watching, watching as the tribute inside is prepped for a fate he has no power over.

He's tied up. Restrained. Bound. Whatever they want to call it. (He's trapped.) He's lying on a bed, and he cannot get up, and her skin itches with the need to break through the glass and free him. To put her hand in his, and squeeze until their blood has to fight to circulate just so that he'll know, at least, that he is not alone.

But he is alone. She is here, part of the audience now, and he is in an arena she was plucked out of, has scars she cannot match, endures nightmares she has no part in (at least, not as anything other than the specter haunting him), and it's not them, together, anymore. It's just him, there, and her, here, and he can't even see her.

She rests a hand on the glass between them. Some part of her, quiet and tamped down, thinks that he will know she is there. He will sense her. He will be as intuitive as he has always been, and he will look at the glass, and he will feel her there, and know that she is close. Know that she is there for him (like he was for her, that night in the Games before, standing guard beneath her tree between sleeping Careers, watching over her), even if there is something thin and impermeable separating them.

But he does not sense her. He does not feel her. He does not look (like he did, before, through rain and distance and a red welt on his cheekbone) and find her.

He just lays there. Limp. Solitary. Frantic, if the constant frenetic movement of his hands is anything to go by.

A prisoner. A victim.

A tribute.

He always has been, hasn't he? She was too, but she volunteered, and he was reaped, and that is its own form of intangible separation. A barrier they both ignored and pretended away, but in the end, she had a choice and he did not.

In the end, he was always restrained to this path, and she always flew free ahead of him (a canary who didn't die and so couldn't save). Flew to destruction, just like him, but she went there of her own power and rarely looked back to see that he was being dragged.

Maybe she'd never noticed because, before, he walked of his own volition, let the rope around his neck hang limp between him and his fate. He kept his eyes fixed on her, listening to her song, and did not trip or protest or falter (did nothing to break the charm that dazzled him).

But now. Now he kicks and screams and drags his feet and leaves behind furrows in the earth, open wounds that sprout dandelions of their own.

There's a reason they call it the reaping, she knows. Because once the scythe chooses you, you fall to the earth. Used up. Withered. Dead.

The glass throws up a faded reflection of a face she doesn't recognize. She looks past that reflection (the washed out girl with hollow eyes and scarred soul) to the withered face of the boy she shook hands with on a stage, in front of the whole world. And she thinks the same thing now that she did then.

Not him.

It's as useless today as it was on that reaping stage.

Chapter 1

THG Pg. 48: "It's okay," Peeta says to me. "I'll take it from here."

She watches, the glass between them. Prim washed this glass; Katniss remembers coming home from a Sunday in the woods to find Prim scrubbing. "You don't have to do that," she said (but, oh, what she wouldn't give to have Prim doing it again, here, alive to wash clean the fruits of her older sister's murders). "It's ours now," Prim had said, "and Buttercup's nose keeps leaving prints."

Katniss crosses her eyes but sees no sign of feline noseprints, nothing but cold glass and faint reflection (she's fading, fading, fading away, and she hopes that if she just sits here for an indeterminate while more of nightmares and regrets, she will, quietly and simply, cease to exist). Slate-gray sky beyond, the clouds impartial wardens to her new prison, lingering slush churned up and ugly with goose droppings and feathers and webbed prints.

And Peeta.

Peeta (who's here now, she has to keep reminding herself, when she smells bread and it's actually there on the table; when she sees him in the morning, sitting at the table and talking to Greasy Sae, and Sae actually responds as if he is more than just a hallucination brought on by loneliness and grief and what-ifs-should-have-beens).

Peeta, who's leaving Haymitch's house with an empty basket, pulling the door closed behind him while shrugging deeper into his jacket.

It's wrong, that she is here and he is there. One Victor sitting, hollowed out and emptied and left to bleed dry. The other baking and giving and talking and visiting. One Victor with blood on her hands and screams in her heart and a dead sister forever and ever in her past, in her present, in her future. The other Victor, the one who never should have been reaped, who never should have volunteered, who never (above all else, this certainty ranked on the same stage as a little sister turned from little duck to roasted sacrifice), never should have been left behind.

He's here. He's back. She still doesn't know why (she cannot bring herself to know lest the answer destroy her; lest the answer give her a reason to exist).

And there's glass between them, again. Katniss sits, a spectator, an audience made up of one, observing and watching and butting into things too good, too innocent, too pure for her blood-stained hands to touch or her emptied eyes to see.

She thinks she's about to turn away (to move, though her bones are creaky and her joints are rusted and her impetus is all used up), when Peeta trips in the slush.

He falls.

Katniss stiffens, her achy muscles tensed in preparation to propel her forward. They're allies (always), and if one falls, they both stop (she will never leave him behind again: running flat out for the cornucopia; heading for the beach with a coil of wire in her hand; fleeing anger and truth and the absence of always in favor of vengeance and death). She has to help him, has to pull him back to his feet and try to get him to run ahead of her (though he never will, he never has: even while hijacked and mad and begging for death she didn't yet realize was a mercy; even in those dark tunnels with mutt voices hissing her name and echoing through his lips…even then, he pushed her ahead of him and waited for her to run).

The snow collects around his fists, which are planted in the ground. Katniss blinks and she's back in that day, so long ago, that day she thought was so awful before she learned what true tragedy was, when she ran to greet him (for the cameras) and he opened his arms (for love of her). When he fell under the weight of her and let her lips pin him to the ground, a specimen for all the world to study (and judge and dismiss and condemn).

She's back on the Victory Tour, back to the days she was held together by strong arms and steady hands and solid devotion.

But she forgot: she and Peeta are no longer joined.

She got out of the arena. He didn't.

His back arches, tenses, a wall curled forward over his fists, gripping snow so hard it melts into droplets that steam (like smoke left behind by a tribute on fire) in the cold air. She cannot see his eyes, but she knows they are black, pupils fully dilated.

Nightmares writhe beneath his skin.

Peeta's back, and she thought that meant he was recovered. She should have known better. It is not so easy to leave the ghosts and scars behind.

He's hurt, still, wounded so much deeper than the burns that took his eyebrows and left him patchwork and marked.

Fear turns her veins to ocean water, surging and boiling within her. Katniss sits in her chair, and watches, and is afraid that Peeta is gone forever. He was safe, in that cave with her, kept warm by her manufactured love and healed by their kiss-engineered sponsors. He was safe, on that beach, with her arms twined around his neck and her heart beating fast against his chest. But this is an arena she doesn't know. An arena she is afraid to enter.

Real or not real?

Then, something miraculous.

Peeta's hands uncurl and splay themselves out, wide and vulnerable against the frozen ground. His shoulders rise and then relax, thin and shaking but still so strong (resettling that burden crafted in a moment—not with a slip plucked from the reaping ball—but in a single conversation, with wild onions in her hand and confusion in her heart and a gaping wound opening in his eyes). He lifts his head (she thinks he glances toward her house, but it's far and her eyesight is blurred and who can say for sure), then collects his basket, and rises to his feet (alone, unaided, because Peeta has always been left behind to fend for himself), and resumes his walk back to his house.

The Capitol took him from her. They hurt him and twisted him and turned him into something she didn't recognize (but then, there's always been so much in him she couldn't understand, couldn't define, didn't know to name).

But he's fighting. He's trying. He's still refusing, even now, after everything, with nothing and no one left, to be a pawn in anyone's game.

Katniss lifts her shaking hand and pulls the curtain closed. No more glass. No more passive audience.

She remembers a long time ago, the first train ride, before any of this was ever even a thought in her head (the only clear thought she had, then, that she did not want to be the one to kill the boy with the bread). Haymitch vomiting and passed out (trapped in his own nightmares with no ally, no co-Victor, no one to share the weight of his Victor's crown), and Katniss and Peeta (partnered for the first time even before they spoke a word to each other, all that was between them a song she'd forgotten and two loaves of bread he thought inconsequential), together, dragged their mentor to his room. Katniss remembers the bathroom, the shower, the liquor-soaked burden dragging between (connecting) them. And then Peeta volunteered to clean up alone.

He's never really stopped, Katniss thinks. Haymitch's mess. Hers. District 13's. The aftermath of that burning battle in the Capitol and the last vote between Victors. And now, still, he's cleaning up alone (the mess they made of his mind, the wasteland they left of his heart, the desolation that's all that's left of his future). Katniss doesn't know how long she's been back here (condemned to the place where ghosts haunt her and give her memories of her sister between nightmares of fireballs and little torches), but in all that time, she hasn't seen Haymitch once.

It's Peeta who's over there. Peeta who's feeding him. Peeta who's putting himself back together, one shiny piece at a time.

You and I protect each other.

Katniss rises from her chair and tilts it away from the window.

Real or not real?

They're only scared, broken children when they're alone. Damaged and weak and unsteady.

Together, though, they are unstoppable.

She has volunteered for an arena before (for Prim).

She will do so again (for Peeta).

Real.

THG Pg. 57: "That's against the rules," says Peeta.

"Only if they catch you. That bruise will say you fought, you weren't caught, even better," says Haymitch.

She's never been to Peeta's house. It looks, simultaneously, exactly the same as hers (victors, for all their spoils, are still just cattle in a pen waiting for slaughter, there only by the grace of Snow) and wholly different (Peeta can never leave anything he touches unaffected; she remembers morphlings and paint and her own scars turned into a field of wildflowers). The kitchen is where she sees the fruits of his sleepless nights and his desire to be better. The closed door of the study, a wooden barrier not quite able to mask the smell of oil and turpentine, is, she imagines, where he hides away the damage of nightmares and trauma and his fears that nothing will ever be enough to heal him.

"Peeta," she says, because as much as she didn't feel the need to knock, she also doesn't want to startle him. (She does her best not to think about how, before, that desire would have been mere courtesy, but now, avoiding surprising him into a hijacked episode might be essential for her survival.)

His shoulders stiffen, tremors playing across his back, and she can just see his hands frozen in a lump of dough. Flour sifts through the air, caught like tiny dancers in the sunlight pouring through the open windows. Katniss watches the sunbeams as she sinks into a chair, small and silent and as harmless as she knows how to be.

Eventually, his shoulders relax, his muscles ease, the tremors steady (though he keeps his hands in the flour; she does not begrudge him this camouflage). When he turns to face her, there are dark hollows under his eyes, but they are blue and clear and bright.

A lump rises fully formed to her throat, threatening to choke her (it won't, she knows, because death is too easy an escape for her).

"Katniss," he says, cautiously, as if testing out his hypothesis.

He used to look at her and know her. Or...did he? He looked at her and that was enough, anyway. He looked at her and she felt seen and known and understood. But maybe he was always watching her because he didn't understand, because she was impassive and impervious and impermeable, like a glass barrier always separating them so that he never knew where he stood, never sure if he was seeing through the glass to reality or just staring at the scattered reflections of his own dreams, his own nightmares.

"Peeta," she says, her own form of answer (she only feels like herself, anymore, when she is looking back at him). "Hi."

"Hi." Confusion shines there, for just a moment, before he blinks it away and nods to a tray atop the oven. "There are cheese buns. I think I got the recipe right."

Now Katniss remembers. She remembers exactly why she's stayed away, why she hasn't followed him from the breakfast table, why she's sat in a chair and let glass and distance and pain come between them. This hurts. It stings like tiny glass dust in her chest, pricking and burning every time her heart turns over or skips or strains toward Peeta.

(Is that what it was doing every time it hurt before? How did she not know?)

"Thank you," she mumbles. Pain or not, she can't stop herself from snatching a cheese bun or three.

"Don't thank me yet." He turns back to kneading the dough that hides the tremors in his once-steady hands. "I'm not sure if they're exactly the same."

"It's the same," Katniss whispers, then shoves a whole bun in her mouth to pretend that it's food she's talking about.

There's silence for a while, which truthfully, Katniss is probably more comfortable with than Peeta. But he lets her sit there and eat, lets her avoid trying to put into words her reason for coming over here (for her reaching out to him when, for so long, it has been the other way around).

Finally, when the dough is set aside to wait, its bruising hidden by cloth, Peeta joins her (slowly, so very slowly) and sits opposite her. He takes a cheese bun, but mainly he just tears tiny pieces off until there is a pile of cheese and bread (more camouflage, she thinks, to conceal the tremors in his hands).

"Katniss," he says. Just that. Just her name. Just exhalation of defeat and breath of hope and swirl of confusion (and he sounds so much like the old him, after the train; the one who breathed her name in the night when he would wake from stiff paralysis, and set his trembling hand, so very tenderly, on her head).

And Katniss still has just a little bit of strength left to her. Just enough to meet his shadowed eyes and say, "I want to help you, Peeta."

"You want to help me," he repeats. He sounds as if he is trying out the flavor of each word, as if deciding how to parcel them up and divide them for different recipes. Spread the mere crumbs she doles out to him to reach every part of his life.

"Real or not real." She nods stiffly, a puppet cut of her strings and trying to learn independent motion for the first time. "I'm sure you still have questions and I...I can help."

Peeta looks away. He suddenly seems so small. So shaken. So young. "I don't... I can't... That's not why I came back here, Katniss."

"I know," she says (though she's lying; she has no idea why he came back, why he always comes back). "But we were allies once, right, Peeta? And you listened to me in...in the Capitol. You believed me. I..." She swallows, glad he's not looking at her. "I promise I won't lie. I'll tell you the truth."

Now he does look at her, stare so intent, so open, that Katniss's breath catches in her throat.

Why should he trust her? Why would he listen to her at all? Half of him has been tortured and rewired into thinking she is the enemy, a mutt created simply to destroy, a born liar and bred killer. The other half must remember that walk by the train on the way back to District 12, the awkward silences on a train bound for another arena, the secrets between Haymitch and Katniss...the way she got out of that hot and humid arena and he didn't. The way she left him there in a cell and let his flesh and his soul bear the punishment for her choices. The way she turned her back on him and left him behind for dead in District 13.

Why would he ever listen to her?

"I know," he says, and she flinches, forgetting once again that he cannot read her thoughts. "I never thought you'd lie, Katniss. I mean…" His eyes flit away, so familiar a sight that Katniss almost reaches out to touch his face, just to make sure she's not dreaming this up in a haze of sleep syrup. "I haven't for a while."

"Then let me help," she whispers. "We're still here, aren't we?"

He shakes his head. "But not the same. I can't be that person you want me to be anymore. They killed him in the Capitol and I don't know how to be him—"

"Stop!" Katniss is on her feet, her hands clenched into fists (she wants to reach out, wants to deliver caresses learned in their first arena and perfected on a Victory Tour and made real simply because of who he is—but that would only scare him and confuse them both). "You're not dead, Peeta!" she says fiercely. "You're still here! Still alive!"

"But I can't—"

"You think that just because the war changed you, you're different?" Katniss hisses. "Maybe you are, but that doesn't matter, Peeta! Okay? You're hurt, we're both hurt, but that doesn't mean they won. It means we fought and it means we got away with it and it means that we're both still here and...and we don't...we don't have to be alone."

Just like before, in a cave, the truth bleeds from her before she even knew it herself and startles them both. (She's not alone.) Peeta stares at her, stunned, something wet shining in his eyes. (He's still here, her Peeta, trying to get back to her but losing faith.) Abruptly embarrassed (terrified), Katniss is at the door, tearing at the knob, desperate for escape, when Peeta speaks behind her.

"Okay," he says softly. "Okay, Katniss. We'll help each other. Neighbors. Allies. Victors again." There's something very like bitterness in his voice (or maybe he's right and he's too different and she can't understand him at all, but that makes no sense because she understood him so much better when he was hijacked than when he was whole and pure and inexplicably in love with her).

Almost against her will, Katniss turns back to look at him, still sitting there in the same place, his shoulders rounded, his eyes bruised, his body touched with exhaustion and hurt. But here. Alive (not a torch or a sacrifice or a victim left to haunt her every moment).

He's so young, still just a boy, still growing into his battered body. He's so broken, pried apart into composite pieces and put back together wrong. He's still so very beautiful, everything she never knew she wanted.

"Friend," she adds so quietly she's not even sure if he hears it.

She flees before she can figure it out (before he can say anything to refute that desperate hope).

But now, even with a door between them, she can still feel the ghost of his hand in hers.

THG Pg. 71: "No, don't let go of me," he says. The firelight flickers off his blue eyes. "Please. I might fall out of this thing."

Grief, Peeta feels, is a fickle and terrible thing. It waits, unseen, a hidden threat stalking its prey silently. Patiently. It lurks behind any door (but not every door), under any item (particularly the most mundane), ever and always poised to pounce—but sometimes choosing instead to bide its time.

Until he lowers his guard. Until he dares to think that the sun is shining bright behind a few interesting clouds and the ash looks like mere snowflakes and maybe this day will not be so bad.

Then, in the blink of an eye, that's when the grief lunges for his throat. And Peeta, poor stupid lovesick boy that he is (heavy and loud and burdensome), is too slow to avoid it. Too dull to do anything but stand there with his hands buried in a bowl. Too starved for any feeling at all (for anything but shiny numbness and cloying hollowness and hovering deadness) to close his eyes and back away from the terrible sight of his own hands buried in wet dough.

That, he thinks curiously, is exactly what his father's hands looked like, once upon a time (before boys who lived when they should have died and bombs fell to create such a scene of desolation that Peeta, when he first beheld it, had finally been able to put image to the wasteland his own mind had become). He remembers, suddenly, very vividly, the sight of his father's burn-scarred hands. Can see the past written in the bones of the present.

His father's hands, probably his brothers' too (he can't remember, can't quite recall any similarities, any differences, between him and the brothers whose names he sometimes has to strain for), and now his. Hands, broad and tapering to the wrist, pale skin made paler by flour, shaping and kneading and buried in the fine dust. A line of Mellarks all leading to (and ending with) him, a survivor who was never meant to be.

"Peeta?"

Katniss's voice is quiet and melodic, hoarse and beautiful. It kickstarts his heart into a patter so arrhythmic that his chest hurts. It stiffens his muscles (fight or flight: fight for or against; run away or run to) and puts a lump in his throat and a dazzle to his eyes (real or shiny; disappointing or glossy). He hates her. He loves her. He's scared of her. He's scared of being without her.

(He wishes he could believe that this schism in his soul is solely because of the venom in his bloodstream.

But he remembers this too: she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not. Real or fake. A show for the cameras in glittering light but warm sniffles against his throat and a hand wrapped in the shirt over his heart at the dead of night.)

"Katniss," he says when he's cajoled his heart back into a steadier beat and blinked the dazzle from his eyes. His hands shake when he pulls them from the dough (the past is dead and buried, or maybe not buried, not yet, maybe it's still open bones in the ruins of a bakery, identical sets of hands all melted together and left to rot) and turns to face her.

As usual, she looks caught in her own personal battle. Like a mockingjay, she stands ready to flee (to fly far, far away from his charred remains). Like a Victor, she stands ready to attack and defend and protect (Because that's what you and I do. Protect each other).

"Hi," he offers.

"Hi," she replies.

Once, there was a boy who might have smiled, might have teased, could definitely have turned that small exchange into something more. Something better. Now, there's only him, exhausted from so few, unimportant words.

"Did…" Katniss takes a deep breath that shifts her shoulders under the too-big jacket. Allows sunlight through glass to refract against shiny scars over her hands (that's what his hands look like too, a similarity she'll never notice while counting all their differences, all the things he'll never understand—and maybe his hands aren't those of a baker's but those of a killer's). "Did you have questions for me?"

And there it is.

Poor Peeta, small and fragile and useless, desperately in need of help, head too weak and broken to bear anything more than the weight of half a Victor's crown. The spare. The burden. The unwanted. An obligation (a debt she'll never count paid).

He remembers (he thinks he remembers) a chariot. He remembers a hand clasped in his, and terror so great it blinded him to an audience of thousands. He remembers his feet rocking beneath him and his world slowly shattering around him and the grip on his hand all that felt real (but, simultaneously, so surreal, the culmination of a decade's worth of farfetched dreams and idle fancies, all granted at the low price of his death sentence).

"I needed you to help keep my balance on our first chariot ride," he says (because he's tired of not knowing, even when the truth hurts—and it always does). "Real or not real?"

The question seems to stump her. Her eyes flutter and her face goes expressionless, her hands tucked away at her sides as she stands in the middle of his kitchen. She doesn't belong there, even he can tell that, fractured memories and shattered personality or not. Katniss is the sort of person made for woods and trees, for freedom and wildness. Not like him, more suited to white rooms with locked doors.

"Real," she finally says. "I guess."

"You guess?" There's something lurking inside him, deep and hidden, camouflaged under other things, but it stirs, digging itself out into the open.

Anger, maybe.

She promised she'd answer his questions. She said she wouldn't lie.

(But then, she also said she loved him.

She claimed she could shoot him like the mutt he is.

And neither one of those sounded like anything but the absolute truth at the time.)

"I don't know," Katniss mumbles. "When I tried to take my hand away, you said you were afraid you'd fall out without me. But…"

"But?" His breath is caught in his throat. Like a beggar hungry for crumbs, he is caught waiting for whatever truth she might dole out to him. (This is the way it's always been, isn't it, the legacy of the Mellark men, to wait breathless and hoping for the woman they love to hand them crumbs.)

"But later, I…" Katniss turns her face away from him, cheeks flushed, so pink Peeta's fingers itch for a paintbrush. "I think maybe you were just saying it because you wanted to hold my hand. I don't know. That's stupid, I guess."

"No," chokes out Peeta (or whatever's left of him). "No, that seems about right."

After all, he thinks (and this is the truth, painful and destructive and illuminating), he's always needed her so much more than she's ever needed (or wanted) him.

Even now, he's the ghost who's moved in three doors down, there to frighten her and to remind her of things she wants only to forget and compel her to help him pick up the fragile pieces of himself.

This time, he doesn't hesitate before plunging his hands into the dough. He welcomes any memories of his father (who's dead, maybe, but at least his silence and his too-little-too-late kindness were simpler than this). He'd rather any outpouring of grief than to face the tired story of star-crossed lovers (or rather, lover, singular) still being dragged along in his wake.

Only, nothing comes. No memories of his family—only the thought of cheese buns and laughter, and sitting on Katniss's bed with a book of plants open on his lap while her eyes scorched his heart with warmth. (Fantasy, lie, reality, it's so hard to tell the difference; this memory isn't shiny, but it seems to glow with a fondness he can't trust.)

From behind him, near the door, Katniss whispers, "I was glad. That you held on. I…I didn't want to let go either."

Then she's gone, soundless, leaving behind just a trace of pine and smoke in her wake.

And a smile, tracing itself over Peeta's lips (like a truth that doesn't hurt).