THG Pg. 74: "…'Well, if you put enough pressure on coal it turns to pearls!'"

At breakfast, Peeta's there like it's their new normal (like there can be a normal in a world without Prim). He compliments Sae on the eggs in such a way that she laughs, and Peeta smiles at the sound, and if Katniss were to tilt her head and squint, she might think they were back on the train, headed for doom and terror and dread while Peeta makes the attendants laugh and Effie relax and Haymitch set down his drink for a few extra moments.

But then his gaze flicks to her and away, and Katniss remembers. He did the same thing in some room in the Capitol while Coin sat at the head of the table and watched them with calculating eyes. After who knows how long, with both their skin shiny with burn scars, Peeta had looked at Katniss and then away as if he still didn't know what to do with her. And yet, when it came time to vote, his no rang out the loudest, the steadiest, the most eloquent.

He called her pure once (and she'd hated it, not knowing just how much she would give, later, to hear him call her anything besides mutt), but aside from her sister, Katniss is pretty sure Peeta's the purest soul in all Panem.

Eventually, Katniss blinks away the scarred memories and finds herself alone with Peeta. Her plate is empty, the motions of her hand mechanical as she brings the fork up to her mouth for the last bite, but Peeta's is still half-full.

"Something wrong?" she croaks, and then wishes she could take it back.

(What isn't wrong anymore?)

"I…" His eyes lift, catch, fall away. "You had a pearl. Real or not real?"

Her breath snags like a hook in her throat. As easily as that, she can feel the cool smoothness against her lips, the tiny weight of it against her fingertips as she hid in dark places and imagined all the terrible fates that might have befallen the boy with the bread. Iridescent and beautiful even in the dark, and shaped by both patience and terrible outside forces.

"Real," she stutters. And this time, when Peeta looks up, she doesn't let him glance away. Instead, she stares at his eyes—shining iridescent in the sunlight, blue and pure, a pearl made from the coal dust of District 12 and shaped by his own innate patience and outside forces of painful trauma. "The pearl. You…" She clears her throat. "You gave it to me. In the Quarter Quell."

Hope and purpose and resolve, all crystallized in that one sweet, impulsive gesture of Peeta's, so camera-worthy and so artlessly sincere all at once.

But this Peeta frowns, as if remembering something completely different. "Right," he says slowly. "I wanted… You had the pictures of everyone else, right? I think…when I found the pearl, I thought you deserved something pretty. But I also thought…maybe it'd be nice if it could remind you of me. After." His frown disappears, replaced by something that looks an awful lot like resignation (an expression far too close to the hollowness in his eyes just before he took her hand and began acting for the audiences). "You didn't want anything to remember me by."

Not for the first time, Katniss realizes just how different they are. They're the only ones who understand each other's nightmares, who can instantly recognize two arenas in each other. And yet sometimes, it's as if they were each in different Games entirely.

Maybe it was a mistake to think she could ever help him clear up the truths from the lies.

"It did remind me of you," she offers spontaneously. "When they told me the Capitol had you…sometimes all I could do was hold onto that pearl. Like it would help keep you safe." Her face burns as she looks away. "Stupid, I know."

"It's not stupid," he murmurs, but when she looks over at him, he looks down at the food he's barely touched.

"I lost it in the Capitol," she whispers (no more lies). "At the end."

When she got him back (the real him; the Peeta of blue eyes and pure soul).

"That's okay." Peeta's smile is wan and strained and not entirely whole. It's still one of the most beautiful things Katniss has ever seen. The side of his hand nudges, ever so gently, against the side of hers. "Besides, everyone knows that if you put enough pressure on coal, it turns into pearls."

"You're right." Her own lips twitch up (her first smile since she lost everything she fought for). "We should be swimming in them in no time."

Katniss nudges Peeta's hand with her own, and doesn't miss the pearl she lost.

(She still has the only one that matters).

THG Pg. 89: "I can't do anything," says Peeta. "Unless you count baking bread."

Of course, her pearl is being slowly smothered in coal dust. He's choking in it, treading water with his endless amounts of bread and the painting she's sure he does because he shows up to breakfast with hands stained in colors she tries not to put names to (tries not to imagine red spattered over white, purple and green mottled together, black devouring blue). He smiles when Sae looks at him. He visits Haymitch every afternoon. He bakes from his home without pause, his kitchen a constant presence of warmth and light and spices (tempting her to slough off her self-made grave of guilt and loss, if only such were possible). He gives out the fruits of his labor as easily as ever (as easily as a young boy faced down the specter of starvation, dared the all-too-real monster of abuse, to gift a starving girl with survival), as if he's learned nothing from the Capitol and war.

But the circles under his eyes grow deeper, darker. His hands are never not shaking. Some mornings, he can't even pretend to look over at her as his shoulders round inward, making him look small (small as a boy wracked with chills while she tended him in a cozy cave and begged him not to die, not to leave her all alone). He came back to 12 thin and hollowed out but recovering. Now, he wastes away, growing thinner, gaunter, more haunted.

And why is she surprised? They live in the midst of his ghosts, surrounded on all sides by the bones of everyone he once loved. (Prim's bones aren't here, scorched and charred and left in a memorial outside the Capitol with her name one of thousands etched into its stone surface; here, her memorial lives in the form of a tattered cat.)

The bakery's gone, so where is Peeta supposed to go for comfort?

She told him he could come to her. Didn't she? She's sure she told him. She remembers his kitchen, the tenseness of his shoulders, the way he accepted that they were allies.

But…how long ago was that? Did she come down to breakfast every day? Or did some of them slip by her, liquid and elusive?

Maybe he needs to get away (she needs to get away). Away from the sight of rubble and the smell of smoke and the taste of defeat.

But where?

Days slip by like fog, but Katniss knows that whenever she manages to gather up strength enough to slip into the woods, Peeta watches her go with something very like trepidation.

"It's the forest," Haymitch says in one of his lucid moments. "Too much like his first arena, don't you think?"

No. She doesn't think that. But Peeta is from town where they told stories of how dangerous it is outside the fence, of wild animals and treacherous territories. He flinched away from fields of grain in the arena; and shied away from climbing trees; and felt safest curled up with Katniss in the closest thing to domesticity a Hunger Games ever saw; and lost his leg to the bite of a wild dog.

(He watched from afar, invisible and hurting, while Katniss slipped into the woods over and over again, sometimes with Gale at her side, sometimes with packs of goods, so that when she was late and dosed with sleep syrup, he whispered his fear that she'd left him behind forever, as if that was a valid concern.

As if she could ever do that.)

(As if she ever did anything else.)

The woods are not a refuge for Peeta like they are for her, and everything else in District 12 lies in ruins.

Katniss stares out her window (like she does so often) and fixates on the primrose bushes he planted for her. I found them in the woods, she hears him say, and trembles at the gift he brought to her doorstep (a gift every bit as powerful, as damaging to him, as burned bread and a dandelion).

One morning (the next day? a week later?), Katniss watches Peeta's careful movements, the way he hides his hands under the table and lets his breakfast go cold, and she cannot do it anymore.

(No more passive audience. No more watching from afar and letting him flounder alone.)

"Nightmares?" she asks. Her voice is tiny, hoarse, barely enough to scratch the yawning silence. But it sounds like thunder between them (they both flinch from the memory of lightning).

Blue eyes flit to her, flit away. Everything that's happened (three arenas, a revolution, the unmaking of their world in almost every way) and still they are here. Afraid to look. Afraid to be seen. Most afraid of knowing, once and for all, how the other sees them.

"They're not real," he says, and for all the rawness of his own voice, she can hear the doubt.

Katniss scowls. "Some of them are."

"The trick is telling the difference," he says, and slides his piece of toast onto her plate (Katniss's heart drops into her stomach). "It takes effort and sometimes…"

I'm so tired, Katniss. She hears it in his voice. Sees it in his eyes and in the tremors of his hands.

"How do you make it through the nights?" she asks.

She wants to tell him he can seek her out. Roam the yards like he once roamed a train and come into her bedroom and slip into her bed and maybe they can make something real amid the ghosts. She wants, but she doesn't say (because as wary as he is of the woods, he is surely just as much so of her).

"I paint."

"But after? Does baking help?"

He shrugs, all his attention seemingly required to pinch up every crumb from the table. "I like it. It takes a lot of focus. To remember the recipes. To not get distracted."

"Not very restful," Katniss mutters.

"I like it," he says again, firmly (she wonders which of them he's trying to convince).

It's not enough. He can't bake all the time.

"I want to take you to the woods," she blurts, and then, softer, "You don't have to be afraid anymore."

The silence is louder than thunder. The distance between them seems vast as a chasm. And then, with a single word, Peeta bridges it, calms the thunder (settles her rattling heartbeat).

"Okay."

They leave the dishes on the table. Katniss doesn't let herself think (so much of her best interactions with Peeta come intuitively; she's tired of overthinking everything between them) before reaching out and lacing her fingers through his.

He stiffens. His pupils dilate.

Katniss's heart stops.

With a stuttered breath, Peeta's fingers close gently over hers, a squeeze of his hand. Blue eyes, wide and bruised and beautiful, meet her gaze. It's Peeta looking back at her. Ally. Co-victor. Friend. Enemy. Almost-lover. Fellow survivor. Dandelion.

They walk hand in hand out of the Victor's Village. Past the graveyard peopled by those looking to carve a home out of devastation. Beyond the meadow where once dandelions flourished. Under the shadow of heavily green trees (spring has come and passed into the beginnings of summer without her noticing until now). And still they keep their hands clasped and Katniss wonders if maybe not everything is lost after all.

Together, they begin to learn, again, how to love part of the world (how to claim it without expecting it to be ripped from them as soon as they let themselves care).

Together, they learn how to keep living (survivors to the very end).

THG Pg. 100: "Don't. Don't let's pretend when there's no one around." "All right, Katniss," he says tiredly. After that, we only talk in front of people.

The woods aren't scary. Not really. Peeta forces himself to look around. To note the play of dappled sunlight between shadows cast by trees with their quivering leaves. The difference in color between the leaves growing on the trees and those from the year before (back when he was locked up in a room deep beneath the Tribute Center, terrified of another visit from Snow) that blanket the forest floor and dampen the sound of his steps.

"I'm too loud," he says (pretends they both don't notice his own flinch at the sound of his voice rattling between the stalwart trunks and tilting branches). "Real or not real?"

"If we were hunting, you would be." Katniss offers him a close-mouthed smile. Her hand is gentle around his. "But we don't have to hunt anymore."

A shudder rips through him and it (he) tears his hand away from hers.

Her bow. Arrows gleaming with nightlock poison at the tips. Targets—humans; children—running, crashing through undergrowth, while she coolly sights them and lets the arrow fly.

Shoot straight.

His own voice. Did he say that to her? Why? Why would he wish her luck when she was so intent on hunting down children and—and—

There's a girl, in the woods, half buried beneath flowers and leaves stained with blood. A girl with her eyes closed and her hands folded and Katniss above her. Peeta tenses (not sure if he should throw himself between the little girl and her or fold Katniss protectively into his arms), but Katniss isn't triumphant. She's bowed and crumpled in on herself, and tears stain her face like scars, and a name that isn't the name of the little girl she adorned in blossoms falls from her lips in a sob.

"Not real. Not real. Not real."

Of course not. Never. Katniss would never kill a child. She's protective, so nurturing, caring in a way she's never recognized within herself. She's a mother without a child because should she ever have one, the world would burn beneath her ferocity were any harm to ever befall that child (not like him, not like the household where one parent inflicted pain and the other looked away and no one asked questions, no one cared, and maybe, he fears, he'd do the same to keep whatever crumbs, whatever peace, he could claim for his own).

"Not real, not real, not real."

Gradually, the words (the truth) filters into his awareness. It sounds like a song, rhythmic and chanted, melodic in the hands of Katniss.

Because it's her saying it.

How many times has he come back to himself and had to catalog the various points of humiliation his wrecked mind has inflicted? He can't count them, but this one, in front of her, counts most of all, he thinks.

Slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on his own shaking hands, Peeta uncurls and picks himself up off the forest floor. He can't look up and see whatever expression Katniss will be trying (ineffectively) to hide.

(She looks at him, sometimes, and sees a boy so selfless and purposeless that he was willing to die for her. That's not him, not anymore.)

(She looks at him, sometimes, and sees a monster twisted beyond all recognition by a man who never even thought him worth attention. That's not him, he won't let it be.)

"I'm sorry," he mutters as he brushes moldering leaves from his pants.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Katniss's hand reaching for him. Her fingers curl into her palm and she drops it back to her side as if the motion never happened.

But it did. It did, and it didn't shine at all (a hand outraised to help and not to hurt; to support and not to kill: the wonder of it nearly staggers Peeta).

"It's not your fault," Katniss says, and then, as if nothing happened, she continues walking.

This time, instead of watching the woods around him (instead of searching for traps and snares and weapons he'll never see coming, poison disguised in disarming camouflage), Peeta locks his eyes on Katniss. He tries to step where she does; his leg makes it hard, but he manages, if with much less grace.

"Why did you find me?" he asks. This time, he doesn't startle at his own voice. (He's asked this question so many times, in his own head, in the silence of a cell he never thought he'd leave alive, in the quiet of his empty house, that he's not even sure it's not just in his mind.) "You could have won and gone home to Prim and never had to worry about the star-crossed lovers. It would have been easier."

She doesn't say anything, just keeps walking. Her silence pricks and goads until his skin nearly crawls with the necessity of provoking something out of her.

"Was it because of the District? You didn't think they'd forgive you for letting your district partner die even if he was just a merchant? Had to keep the merchants' favor, too, in order to keep trading meat."

Her shoulders are tense and raised almost to her shoulders, the short, fraying braid that's left of her hair swaying between her jutting shoulder blades. Peeta's fingers itch to touch (to soothe), but he clenches them into fists.

These aren't real-not-real questions (which is all she promised to help him with), but he wants to know. He needs to know (the next time the nightmares come for him in the dark when the paints all look the same and the flour won't settle and his mind crackles with lightning he can't escape).

He needs to trust her. He has to be able to believe the answers she gives him—and how can he ever distinguish a truth from a lie in the one-to-two word answers she gives him?

(How can he ever narrow down the list of what they are to each other if he doesn't know the reason for the very core of their story?)

"Please," he whispers, a single word surely drowned out by his footfalls.

Katniss rounds on him so quickly that Peeta staggers back and would have fallen if a helpful tree didn't catch him up against its rough trunk. "I don't know!" she cries. "Is that what you want to hear, Peeta? I don't know. I probably shouldn't have looked for you. Maybe I'd have been safer on my own. Or maybe I would have died sooner when the hovercraft came for Rue's body and I went mad. Maybe…" Her lip curls in an expression of disgust so exasperated, so familiar, that Peeta's surprised by how much he likes the sight of it. "Maybe, maybe, maybe. Who cares about maybes, Peeta. I did come for you. I did find you. I did save you. Why does it matter why?"

The wind stirs the trees until branches creak against each other, a sound that's haunted his nightmares. But Katniss is alive, and safe, and staring at him with frustration (but not murderous intent), and Peeta isn't afraid.

"I trust you," he says.

That's the difference, he thinks, between now and before. In that first arena, there was no trust between them at all, her thinking she would kill him and him knowing he couldn't depend on her to help him save her. Then, when she found him, it was all they had, there in the midst of danger, her trusting him so much that she could sleep wrapped in the same sleeping bag as him, him trusting her so much that even starved, he didn't eat a single berry without her as he collected that purple poison. Even when she broke that trust on the side of those tracks, in that abandoned room in District 11, in Haymitch's house with a bottle of white liquor shared between her and their mentor, still they built that trust back up and up and up so that in the Quarter Quell, there was nothing they didn't know or believe of and in each other.

But so many lies in between (for the audience). So much misdirection (to save his heart). They were wholly dependent on each other, in the bedroom during terror-ridden nights and in their arenas. They were utterly separate too, each protecting themselves behind walls and distance and unspoken words, in her woods with Gale and his kitchen with his own thoughts locked up behind a face all too skilled at concealment.

So many chinks in their clumsy alliance for Snow to use against them, to erect higher walls between them until he built a grave over Peeta and stamped it with Katniss's lies (to herself, he's beginning to realize, rather than to him).

"I don't want Snow to win," he says, and Katniss, whose sneer was erased when he said he trusted her, sucks in an audible breath. "I don't want to be afraid of you anymore. But it didn't take Snow for me to wonder…to think that maybe…what I thought…"

Words fail him.

Katniss doesn't.

Her hand curls around his, so gently, as light as dandelion seeds, and Peeta blinks back the sting of salt in his eyes.

"I wanted to die," she says, her voice so soft that he can hardly hear her. "Without Rue, I…I couldn't fight anymore. And then they made that announcement, and I thought of you, and I…I just wanted to save someone. I wanted to do for you what you did for me, in the rain, with two loaves of bread. I wanted to be your dandelion."

Snow made her into a monster. Peeta fought and raged and snarled and treasured every salvaged memory, but bit by bit, piece by piece, Snow had taken the Katniss in his heart and turned her into a mutt.

But she's just a girl. One girl, with too many burdens placed on her slender shoulders and too much loss carving her hollow. One girl, who dares to reach out to the mutt designed to destroy her (through love first, then through hatred, then through abandonment).

And now, here, in the woods that reflect in the silver of her eyes and play lights against the dark of her hair and ease the tautness of her corded muscles, they find their way back to that trust, her believing that he won't snap and strangle her, him believing whatever truth she offers.

"I'm glad you came for me," he says, his own truth (mangled nearly beyond recognition, but true nonetheless). They're alone, no audience anywhere to be found, and only here can they peel away the falsehoods to find the truth beneath. "I hope you know that, Katniss. No matter what happened later, that cave…those stolen hours…I'll never regret them."

She turns away to lead him to a river where rocks too small to contain caves dot the shores and bushes trail fragile tendrils through rippling rapids and the sun bounces from liquid to cast rainbows in the air. So much beauty, but he's fixated on something else.

Her smile. It transforms her (turns her beautiful), and Peeta isn't afraid anymore.