disclaimer - all characters belong to Suzanne Collins.

I wouldn't have made it out alive. Not without Peeta.

At first, it was need that drove me to him, pure survival instinct. I'm a survivor after all, and Gale said I would choose the one I couldn't survive without. He was right. But I didn't take into account the fact that Peeta, for all his seflessness, all his steadiness, he needed me too.

The wounded animal sameness we bear under the shiny pink of our outsides, it makes us alien to the others, hides something raw, gnashing, scarred underneath. And that scares them. They extend what they think is kindness but I recognize as pity, even smile and give cordial greetings as we pass them in the streets, but we're not one of them. Even though none of us escaped the horrors of the war, something about Peeta and I, we emerged from the crucible of suffering only somewhat human. Out of loneliness, out of desperation, the sticky bloody tatters of what we were cleaved to what we are. Together, like one monstrous piece of flesh, and there is no choice but to live in total dependence on the other now.

I didn't like it at first. Not being able to exist on my own anymore. I'd always been able to take care of myself, my family, get by on what I knew and what I'd learned from my father about subsistence. But the nightmares swarmed and teemed like locusts. I couldn't sleep without seeing them no sooner did I let go and allow myself slip under. Sleep syrup didn't help, only made my escape from the horror of my dreams slow and sticky, like trudging through a muddy slough. Morphling, though sweeter in the way it led you into the crushing depths of its gauzy wasteland, was expensive and hard to come by. One look at Haymitch's ragged appearance told me alcohol, though a more accessible anesthetic and path to numbness, did not give the desired effect. Peeta was my last resort.

And so, after a time, after I resolved that I would never be the same again, came to grips with it, he came into my life and never left. Sunshine reflecting off the metallic Seam gray of my existence. Warm sun optimism beating on the cold metal of despair. Always looking on the bright side, always knowing the right thing to say, even though he was in as much pain as I was.

The day we were engulfed in the fire that took my sister...it never left us. The fire won't go out, we've accepted it now. We've learned to live with the sensation of always burning. I relive those bombs and the agony of watching her die over and over. The memory is scorched into me, leaving me with scars that I carry inside and out, until one day we both became accustomed to the torture of living inside the searing flames of grief. It burns like a brand into the fabric of our souls, becomes a part of us, until our identity cannot be separated from all we lost.

Not until we draw our last breaths will we be released from the suffering that followed us home from the Capitol... and even then I'm not convinced that the pain won't follow us into eternity. I see the ghosts of it flitting in and out of the summer blue sky of Peeta's eyes. It hides behind the ashes in mine.

Slowly, as we emerge weak and trembling into the sunlight of the days after the War, we try to accustom ourselves to being normal again. Peeta bakes, gardens, paints. I learn to hunt on my own again, trying not to notice the gaping hole in my life where Gale used to be. I work on my memory book to try to heal the open wounds left behind by all the losses and some of them have started to close, have begun to itch as the first signs of healing set in. I relieve the itch by writing everything I knew about them, let myself pour it all out in words that describe their bravery, their smile, the way their eyes disappeared into a wrinkle when they laughed. Peeta's healing involves painting faces that haunt him with extraordinary resemblance to the people they belonged to. He knows better than to paint her face, as he's noticed it's the only open wound that won't close.

"You have to write about her, Katniss," he tells me, urges me.

I try. He's figured out that when I write about them, I stop flinching every time he mentions them.

But the pen won't move when she comes to mind, so I always put it down, slam the book shut, and run away from her as she surfaces from the inky shadows of memory.

Months melt into years, and one day, as I walk through shafts of summer sunbeam cutting through the house, I realize the comfortable familiarity has shifted again. There is no his house and my house, but our home. There's two plush armchairs facing the fireplace and his sketchbook sits precariously on the corner of the mantle next to a picture of my father. The smell of his fresh bread has become part of the air. His sourdough starter stands next to the spice rack on the kitchen counter. Even Buttercup has accepted that he belongs here, favoring his feet at the end of the bed to curl around.

Somehow, without me realizing it, I more than just invited him into my life to stay out of desperation. I did it...because of what I felt for him.

It took even longer for me to give it a name. Dared speak it aloud, what I chose. And even when one night, when I whispered it, hiding behind the anonymity of darkness, my lips trembled around the shape of the words as they escaped. My tongue tripped over it, stumbled over the grave finality of what it meant to say the thing aloud. I love you.

His blue eyes shone like midday, a sudden ferocity burgeoning in them, and I realized the intensity belonged to tears. They found me in the darkness and chased it away. Arms folded around me, safe and warm and sure, and for a long time after that, I carried the terrible burden of knowing what would happen if I lost him, if he were to ever leave, and came to the conclusion that I couldn't bear it. If I lost Peeta, I'd be lost too.

Life goes on. He bakes bread, paints the faces that haunt his dreams. I write, hunt in the comfortable solitude of my woods. People pass by with tight smiles and guarded eyes as we walk, scarred hands locked together, through town. The days and weeks and months and years pass by and somehow, though the nightmares remind us that we could never leave our past, we begin to weave some sort of life together from the frayed ends the war left behind. Sometimes, Haymitch invades the life we've built, as desperate for others like him as we were for each other. He's as caustic and unbearable as ever, but I've come to realize I love him too, for all his careless throwing around of "sweetheart' and insults and the way we rub each other wrong until we're both raw and screaming at each other. It's just his way of dealing with it all.

We all have our coping mechanisms.

.

.

.

One buttery afternoon on the cusp of summer, we're sitting next to each other in the meadow, watching butterflies balance on the fragile heads of wildflowers. After years of keeping the woods to myself, it occurred to me that filling the empty space Gale left behind with Peeta was the only logical thing left to do. I asked him to come with me, though my request was met with a furrowed brow, though no words spoken. The woods was mine, one thing we didn't share, but here I was bringing him into the fold.

He decided we could make a picnic of it, wrapping bread he'd baked that morning and placing it beside broken hunks of cheese and fruit in a threadbare picnic basket. I carried it on my free arm, the other held captive by the hand that enveloped mine. Paint stains the puffy scars that look like pink clouds on his forearms, made visible by his rolled up shirtsleeves. I follow him as he leads us through pathways and streets, down the grassy slope that leads to the inviting line of trees that look like arms extending in a warm embrace of welcome. The thought occurs to me with a stab of fear that I'd follow him anywhere.

He sits with his legs extended out in front of him, one foot flopped to the side. One hand flattens against warm supple earth and props him up, the other holds an apple that he's already taken bites out of and reveals tart white flesh beneath the mottled skin.

"I love our life," he says offhandedly, staring out at the clearing from beneath the shelter of trees.

It takes a long time for me to say it, but there's no putting off the inevitable. It's true – "I do too."

"I'd love it even more if you'd let me marry you," he counters, like an offer.

The suddenness of the proposition takes me aback, almost knocks the wind out of me. I always expected that one day he'd ask, but never like this, so plain, so straightforward, so...frugal with his words. I stare at him, my mouth slack, open, and he smirks when he sees the effect his proposal has had on me.

"Expected something different?" He says, taking another bite of his apple.

"I guess...more fanfare? More begging?" I shoot back, smiling.

But he's serious. "I mean it, Katniss," he says softly, and those blue eyes that never seemed to belong in District 12 find mine, holding me captive in their crystalline snare. "I want to marry you. I want to have a family with you. After all we've been through...we deserve to be happy."

"We are happy," I argue, but even I question the firmness of the foundation I've built my argument on. He finds the weakness in it and rips open my hypothesis, disproving it.

"Are we happy, Katniss?" He sighs, turning the apple over and over in his hands. "We wake up screaming from nightmares every night. We're busy, we have hobbies, but...it's just to outrun all the ghosts that catch up with us as soon as there's nothing else to do."

As usual, the way he says things, it injects clarity into the unformed ideas roaming around in my head, searching for names, descriptions, in order to make them real. We're chasing normalcy, but it's still out of reach, just beyond our grasp. We live, but it's a half life, a stolen life, and as soon as we slow down it becomes apparent that it's all a lie. Peeta and I are true, but everything else about us...we're just going through the motions of pretending to be normal.

"Getting married won't fix all that Peeta-"

"I know," he says. "But, won't it be a step in the right direction? Trying to just...leave our old lives behind? Besides," he pauses, throws up his hands, losing the apple that he was holding but he's too wrapped up in his own impassioned pleas to care. "We live together. We're as good as married, aren't we?"

I pause, thinking, afraid that his argument is too good. I have nothing to refute it.

"What are you afraid of Katniss?"

What am I afraid of?

I shake my head, staring out at the green grass, the expanse of blue above it that seems to shimmer in the warmth of the day. It all feels...like a dream. Like I don't belong to it. As if I've conformed to the image of violence and vengeance, of the tip of a knife or the string of a bow, and the only garment left in the world that fits is the bloody uniform of war.

"I'm not," I finally admit, meeting his searching eyes again. "I just know it's all a lie and I'm tired of living them."

"Marrying me is a lie?"

"A contract, a government slapping a label on us…" I reply. "Peeta, aren't we as good as married? We share a life. We are...as happy as the life we've lived will allow. Isn't that enough?"

He shakes his head, tearing at the grass under his bent knees. The blond waves shudder across his forehead with each rip of those fragile little blades coming up from the dirt. "Not for me."

For a long time, I sit there, contemplating his plea...it's the only thing he's ever asked of me. For as long as I've known him, he's given himself selflessly to the cause of my survival. The burnt bread, confessing his love before a live audience in order to make them like me, always looking for the solution to the problem of keeping me alive when all I wanted to do is succumb to death. It occurs to me that for the first time in my life, I can repay the insurmountable crushing debt I owe Peeta Mellark.

And all I have to do is become his wife.

All I have to do...is make him happy.

.

.

.

I thought I loved him before.

But I realize now, in the aftermath of her birth, that whatever I felt pales in comparison to the unbearable ache that blooms in my heart as I watch him now.

He's holding her in his arms, cupping her tiny cheek with his hand so that it eclipses her, swallows her whole. Tears brim over and spill onto his cheeks as he gazes at the fragile miracle wrapped in swaddling clothes. The look in his eyes tells me he's never seen anything more beautiful...not even the sunset that gifted him with his favorite color in the world could compare.

"Oh Katniss..."he whispers, his voice barely making it out of his throat as he swallows hard against the lump forming there. He searches for me through the blur of tears now spilling down his cheeks, leaving hot red salt trails behind. "How did we do this? How did we make something so beautiful?"

I'm tired and beads of sweat are dripping down every curve of my body, following the tremors that roll through me like waves. My limbs feel as heavy as anchors, threatening to pull me under the surface of sleep, and for the first time in a long time I yearn for it. But the moment unfurling before me, of father meeting daughter for the first time, is too beautiful and painful to look at.

Beautiful because I have never loved Peeta more, the way his face is awash in the glow of complete devotion to the little creature in his arms.

Painful because the face hiding behind the folds of swaddling cloth holds an uncanny resemblance to the same face that I've tried to drown from my memory for the last fifteen years.

Primrose.

"Katniss?"

Peeta has realized I've not asked to hold her. Not spoken a single word since he loosed her from the safe cocoon of my body and held the length of her – bloody and squalling – in the crook of his palms.

I can't look at her, but every fiber of my being aches to hold her, to feel her skin against mine. Peeta appears at my side. After years of learning me, of studying every shift and nuance of mood, he is a master of reading my thoughts.

"Katniss," he says softly, offering the now quiet sleeping bundle to me. "I saw it too."

A tear betrays me, slips out from behind its cover, falls to its death and shatters as it hits the sterile white sheets of our bed. The remains of it pool in the fabric. "I can't look at her Peeta," I whisper.

"Give her a chance, won't you?" He urges me with gentleness. "The second you hold her, meet her...you won't be able to help but love her."

Without giving me another chance to refuse, Peeta places the swaddling clothes in my arms and the fabric is pulled back to reveal the quiet face beneath. There's no mistaking the resemblance now, blaming it on a trick of the light or the bone marrow deep exhaustion of birth. It's Primrose's face, shrouded in the tiny folds of a newborn face as soft and smooth as rose petals, but it's her.

After years of trying to surrender to the reality of Prim's death, I had come to some sort of resolve to forget her. To erase her from memory. Even in dreams I run from the images of her body igniting in the consuming fire that took her life so many years ago. Even in dreams, when I hear her voice, I silence it, drown it in the depths of my subconscious.

And yet, here she is, surfacing again.

A gaping wound that will never heal.

"Hold her close, Katniss, skin to skin."

Peeta coaches me through the process. Removes the swaddling clothes, presses the warm little body into mine so that it is flush against my chest. I feel the push and pull of tiny lungs working the heady air through them. The delicate fingers flickering with movement even in sleep.

But it's her heartbeat that reaches me.

The anger, the hurt, the desperate need to run, run far away that materialized like a banshee from the yawning depths of me. Years and years of repressed memory breaking through, rising from their prison, shrieking as it brought with it a madness that threatened to consume me.

But all at once, it's quiet, it's still. The calm is fragile, waiting for a reason to be broken, but no sooner do I feel that heartbeat humming gently over the rhythm of my own do I feel the tremulous calm recede and peace replaces it. Love has taken root in its stead.

Peeta recognizes the victory of the moment and asks, "What do you want to call her?"

She shifts, lifts the heavy head to look up at me, those wide set eyes so familiar that the pangs of grief resonate through me like shock waves. And yet, so new, the adoration I watched wash over Peeta now rushing like a tidal wave over me, and love embeds itself deep within me, a part of me now, just like Peeta.

Perhaps...there is hope for me.

I look up at him, finally, and give him the only name that fits.

"Primrose."