THG Pg. 336: Cato just laughs. "Shoot me and he goes down with me."

Why does she answer the phone? For months, its chiming rings have been as much a part of the ambience as Haymitch's geese or Peeta's unsteady footsteps. She never takes any notice of it, choosing to allow it (and the world it represents) to fade from her awareness. But for some reason (like Snow laughing from beyond the grave), this time, one day of all days, Katniss answers it.

(It rained the night before, heavy pattering that kept her awake with memories of a cave and a feverish boy pressed against her; with worry about Peeta's state of mind during such a thick downpour; If, when the phone rings, she was thinking of Peeta, and imagining that he tripped in the mud and hurt himself, or wondering if his fragile mind had eroded under the relentless raindrops, or thinking that this world is never safe, not for the people she loves, well…is that reason enough for how quickly she grabs the phone that day? Or is it only an excuse?)

She answers.

"Hey, Catnip," Gale says. "You answered."

Her voice congeals in her chest, a stowaway taking up valuable room, constricting her heart, suffocating her lungs, straining against her ribcage.

"Katniss," he says (he sounds just like him; as if, should she look up, she'd see the tall, lanky boy who taught her how to make snares). "Please don't hang up."

Katniss squeezes her eyes tightly shut.

"I know you don't want to talk to me. I know that I can only bring up terrible memories for you. But…please, Katniss, I'm begging you, just…just tell me. Do you think you'll ever be able to forgive me?"

He's drunk. She's not sure why she didn't realize it sooner. His words are slurred, his tone too raw. Gale disdains open weakness more than Katniss does. In his right mind, he wouldn't be saying all this (thinking it, sure, but he'd never expose his vulnerable sides to someone who might choose to gut him).

It should make her angrier at him. Instead, it makes her sorry for him.

The Games hurt everyone, even those whose names weren't drawn (who weren't manipulated into volunteering).

His breaths sound harsh through the phone, rasping in her ear. How old is he? Only nineteen? Twenty? He's almost as much of a boy as Peeta.

(But that's not fair. No one should be expected to hold up to the same measure as Peeta. Katniss isn't the only one who could live whole lifetimes and not deserve him.)

"Katniss," Gale whispers when the sun has changed position on the strip of wall behind her, another wedge of the clock passed with them both still alive, still breathing, still fighting for a reason to live. "I'm sorry. I'll never stop being sorry."

"You remember my prep team?" she asks suddenly. Her mouth is dry, her lips chapped, her throat hoarse. Gale stops breathing to hear her better. "The ones that District 13 locked up and chained to the wall. The ones you said deserved it because they were all part of the process. That if they didn't oppose it, they were just as complicit. Just as guilty."

"I remember," he rasps.

"Can you forgive them?"

In the pause that stretches, wide and yawning, set to devour her day, Katniss remembers the too-thin, too-grave boy weighted down by the albatross of his family. Katniss never saw Prim as a burden, but she knows Gale did see his family, sometimes, as something holding him back. And they did, of course they did (they kept him from running off for some distant rebellion and getting himself killed), so maybe when he found a safe place to lay that burden down, he ran too far, too fast, too headlong—and played right into Coin's hands.

(The boy with the snares, snared himself, and perhaps that's where all his fiery, reckless anger really came from.)

Finally, he stirs, comes to a resolution. She hears it in the change in his breathing. In the crisp inflection of his next words. "I can try," he says. "I will try."

Katniss's hand is numb over the phone. It's too hot against her ear. She wishes she never answered the phone. She wonders if she'll be able to work on the memory book at all tonight or if the ghosts will be too present, nearly tangible, breathing in her ear exactly like Gale is now.

"Katniss," Gale whispers. Desperate. Still pleading. (Broken in a way that Peeta has never allowed her to be.)

"One day, Gale," she says (while she's still strong enough to). "I promise."

And she hangs up.

Too late. Too late—she should have known, the sun has gone down, her wall is more gray than creamy white, and by now, she should be sitting in Peeta's kitchen or he should be…here.

It's the smell of bread that alerts her to his presence (always, always, hearing the wrong thing, following the wrong cues). It's the sound of the door slamming shut that tells her exactly what the tracker-jacker venom and Snow's persistent lies (and her) have made him think he's heard. It's the sight of his locked door, the darkness within his house, that rouses a desperate terror within Katniss's breast (it rained last night, reminder of when he was happy, before it all came crashing down on him; and now, as if on cue, everything's crashing in on him).

It smells of rain.

Why did she answer the phone?

Slowly, a little bit at a time, Katniss becomes aware of the fact that she's shaking. That she's standing in mud, smelling rain long gone, staring at a locked door, about to shatter into a thousand distinct pieces.

Peeta's in there. He's in there, and he's hurting, and his mind is breaking, and his heart is quaking, and he's wrong. Whatever he's thinking, whatever he's seeing, whatever fate he's dreading, it's not real.

She needs to tell him. She has to (it's the one thing she promised to do for him).

"Haymitch! Haymitch, help me! Haymitch!"

If Katniss weren't so busy making a book of people who didn't deserve their fates, she could fill up reams of pages on everything she blames Haymitch for. But today, for once, he comes through—he's there so quickly, almost sober (it's been a while since the last supply train), ready to fight for her, knife in hand.

"Open the door," she blurts. Her own fingernails tear against the sides of Peeta's door, her strength useless in prying open this barricade between herself and her District partner. "Open the door, we have to get inside, we have to help him!"

"Uh, sweetheart?"

"Help me!" she screams in his face, and nearly sobs when he shoves her out of the way.

"All right, all right, don't scare all my geese away. I'll get the door open. Just tell me what's going on."

Haymitch is so stupid. How can he not know what's wrong?

(Her. It always comes back to her.)

(But Peeta wants her anyway.)

"Peeta's having an episode. I have to help him."

Haymitch, mid-motion through jimmying the lock open with his blade, pauses and twists to stare at her. "You mind repeating that? Because I know you didn't just say what it sounded like you said."

"He needs me," she says, plaintively. "We always just leave him, Haymitch. He has to put himself back together all alone. I promised that I'd help him."

"But, sweetheart, if he goes for you—"

"He won't." Katniss shakes her head frantically. "He won't, Haymitch. Peeta's violence is always turned on himself, not on anyone else. Not on me. Not since…"

"Yeah." A pause that stretches as long as their first Games (her neck prickles, her throat tightening, but it's not Peeta, just a memory, a nightmare that was never real even when it was happening), and then, finally, Haymitch finishes squeezing the lock out of place. He turns the knob and opens it for her. "Just be careful. You need me to go in there with you?"

Katniss doesn't bother answering. She's already past him, past the living room with their memory book supplies spread out over the low table. Beyond the kitchen with dishes cleaned and left to dry, loaves cooling in the window, the oven on low for some reason a baker could explain. Into his painting room—but he's not there.

Despite herself, Katniss takes a second look at the desolate ruins of the studio. Canvases are ripped, sketchbook pages slashed through with black lines, paints splattered over the carpet, charcoal shattered at the foot of stained walls. It's shocking, but it doesn't look new. The paints are dry, the papers already sagged, the charcoal ground under pacing feet.

"Oh, Peeta," she murmurs.

On hunter-light feet, she drifts upstairs. Down a darkened hallway. To the bedroom at the end of the hall (if she's wandered at night through cold yards, and peered up at a square of gold breaking up the monotony of the darkness to escape the screams clogging her own room, well, Peeta's coping mechanisms have always been better than hers and she isn't sorry now to have adopted them), where the door is just barely ajar.

"Peeta?" she says softly.

A grunt issues from within. Katniss slides into the bedroom before he can pull himself together enough to slam the door closed. It's dark inside, lit only minimally by the silver-tinged dusk through his open windows, but Katniss's eyes pierce through the gloom to the boy pressing himself into the corner of his bedroom.

Once, Katniss watched a boy's heart stop, over and over again, while she threw herself against invisible walls trying to reach him. Once, she watched a boy's mind, razed and scarred, batter against its wounds while she stood outside a pane of unbreakable glass. Once, she sat in a chair, quietly dying, and watched through a window as a boy tried to piece his life back together, one breath, one move, one kindness at a time.

There's nothing between her and that boy now, though. Just her, in his bedroom, hurting for him. And him, afraid of himself, terrified of the lies in his mind, haunted by the delusions hidden away in his heart, crouched in a corner like a wild beast.

"Peeta," Katniss croons, gentle as Prim with her ugly cat (she never taught kind Primrose to hunt, but Prim taught Katniss some of her own lessons). "Peeta, not real, not real, not real."

One bare foot slides forward over plush carpet.

He whimpers.

Another step, soundless and meticulous.

"Katniss," he chokes out. "Get out. Run!"

"Peeta, Peeta, Peeta. It's not real, it's not real, it's not real."

"Leave me alone!" he shouts, feral and dangerous—and hurting.

"Shh, it's okay, Peeta, it's not real."

She rounds the bed, and he throws himself face-first against the wall, his arms embracing the wall as if he thinks he can convince its corporeality to shift and allow him a permanent hiding place (her heart breaks to think of her boy with the bread longing for another cell).

"It's not real, it's not real." Somehow, between the third and tenth step, it's become a song, a melody Katniss keens for him.

Somehow, between her entrance to his final refuge and now, when her hand falls like dandelion puff to his spine, he's stilled, gone rigid, motionless, his face hidden at the right angles of the wall. The cool air from the window ghosts over them both, and Peeta shudders—not at the breeze, but at her touch.

She thinks of that chariot, of their hands entwined, the strength of their grips so tight they'd both had to massage feeling back into their hands afterward.

Katniss steps closer, winds her arms around his waist, and holds on (squeezes until she has to think to breathe and his quakes ease). Breathing in cinnamon, tasting dill, Katniss imagines herself a weight, an anchor, a mold (whole enough to help him keep his own shape, his form, his place).

"Not real, not real, not real," she sings (the little girl in the red dress, the monster in girl's clothing, the ghost learning to be real with his hand in hers).

"Katniss," he breathes out. He breathes in. "Katniss," on the exhale, a counterbeat to her simple, haunting melody.

Katniss: echoes hissed in underground tunnels. Pale mutts with jagged fangs and clawed talons, reaching for her, snarling, her name torn from the depths of their programmed minds. And Peeta…he hissed her name too, until he didn't. Until he was up and reaching for her to propel her to safety, always placing himself between her and whatever danger he sees. Refusing to be a piece in Snow's (but not Katniss's) games.

"Katniss," he breathes, but it's not a hiss (it's a prayer), because he's not a mutt (he's a miracle).

She sings. He breathes.

He still holds himself in the corner. She doesn't loosen her grip.

She thinks of a cornucopia, of a night so cold they zipped themselves into the same jacket and shivered in tandem. Of a boy's screams their background harmony, and Peeta's leg the only warm thing in the night, pumping out his heart's blood. She thinks of Cato, spitting red, threatening to take Peeta down with him.

He knew, even then, just like so many others. He knew that if Peeta fell, Katniss would fall too.

But Peeta doesn't fall. She holds him in place, and he picks up all his shattered pieces, and they piece them back together.

Together, they remake themselves, the girl on fire and the boy with the bread (with the broken mind).

Together (cinnamon on her tongue and mint on his, the nightlock finally scrubbed from their mouths), they come back to themselves.

Together, they are—not radiant—but still, against all the odds, alive.

And Katniss knows: she will never again leave him to fight alone.

THG Pg. 342: "If you think about it, it's not that surprising," he says.

Eventually, he stops shaking. Her arms cramp and she loosens her hold. He steps free of her touch. The darkness of the room hides the fact that, at first, he doesn't want to look at her (she might grow insecure if she didn't know too well what shame looks like on him by now).

"Peeta," she says, and slides her hand into his.

He squeezes back, once, and the moment lingers. Katniss feels it stretch around them until it seems the rising moon is a spotlight, highlighting exactly how close they are (how close she'd rather be). Blushing, she steps away (their hands part) and the moment snaps.

"Thank you," he says, awkwardly. Shyly.

"Anytime," she says.

(Always.)

Then he leads her downstairs, and though she wants to stay, Katniss can see just how drained he is after this flashback. It's not until she's let him say good night and send her on her way, not until she's passing Haymitch's house with a salute to his watching shadow in the doorway, that she realizes she never explained the phone-call he overheard.

She'll tell him tomorrow.

Except, tomorrow, he arrives late and barely has time to swallow half a slice of toast before he's headed away with excuses about late bread deliveries (as if anything in District 12 runs on a schedule; this isn't 13). And then, on their walk, he talks and talks and talks: about the people he saw, the families moving back, the people from 8 and 11 newly arrived on that morning's train, the little children who laugh as they run through graveyards.

How long has it been, since she's heard him speak so freely? Katniss lets his voice wash over her, picks up one or two of his sentences to examine closely, like colored stones in a river, before setting them gently back down. They wander through open swathes of woods (no snares, no wild dogs, no bows or tracks to follow; just berries and flowers and views that make Peeta's eyes widen as he tries to memorize them well enough to recreate on page) and then back into Victor's Village, where Peeta remembers that he promised Haymitch to help him carry his boxes up from the train and he disappears.

And she remembers that she meant to talk to him about Gale.

(But he's still recovering, still recollecting himself after that terrible episode, so better, perhaps, to give him some time.)

Like usual (neither one of them are comfortable messing up their routine), Peeta shows up for dinner. This time, he's bubbling over with stories about Haymitch and the fact that he'd thought one of his crates of white liquor had broken but no, it was the crate full of food for the geese, and the conflicted look on Haymitch's face apparently was enough to make Peeta laugh (if Katniss didn't know that he never laughs directly after his episodes, drained of all emotional resources; she can't see the charm shining outward from him to hide the lies).

He's so wordy. So verbose. It reminds her of the way he was when the peacekeepers sat in her living room and she lied with a bag of peppermints and sprained ankle.

(It reminds her of his skill in diverting attention to where he wants it, hiding his vulnerable parts beneath charm and camouflage.)

"Peeta," she says, when they're sitting at the low table in her living room, blank pages before them and neither one prepared to tackle the life of someone gone too young.

His shoulders tense, then sag. His voice evaporates.

He's managed to put it off all day, but now, the time has come.

Katniss wonders at his guardedness. His careful impassiveness. His empty hands and empty eyes and empty hopes.

But then, why should she wonder?

He's never expected good things, not really. Wait. No. Yes, once, he did. Even after his name was reaped and his life was plucked from its home (from any future he might have wanted), he let himself hope. Not for much, not for everything (he still expected to die), but he let himself reach for just a hint of beauty (let himself imagine one wish, and craft what he thought were his last days around it).

It was only when Katniss took the flowers he offered her beside a train and let her hand fall away from his (I don't want to forget, he said, but she did, and now neither of them can), that he really stopped hoping for anything (for himself).

And maybe that's why they're stuck here, now, with him unable to speak and her unwilling to speak. Maybe that's why he looks at her as if braced for a blow, and she feels as if no matter what she says, it will land like one.

Because he can't hope for anything anymore and is resigned to this being their lot.

Because she can't let free the long-denied truth from inside her and let it touch him like a death sentence.

And yet, even broken and resigned, still Peeta finds ways to be content (his baking and his deliveries and the penances he assigns himself with this memory book; his avoidances and his simple kindnesses and his patience she can never reward), which is just one of the reasons he's so much better than her. One of the reasons Katniss doesn't deserve him.

"Gale killed my sister," she says.

The baldness of the statement rips through whatever Peeta's built this moment up to in his mind.

He stares. Silent. (Not empty.)

"Not on purpose. He never thought of it like that, with real people. Names and siblings and actual costs and surviving relatives. But he came up with the idea, that trap with the medics and the fake safety. He imagined it, and Coin implemented it. And that's why…that's why Prim…"

His hand nudges up against hers, not quite taking it, just sitting there so that she can feel it beside hers (an option; her choice).

"I hate him," she says very seriously. "And he knows it. And maybe one day I'll be able to think of him without thinking of that day in the Capitol, but…not for a long time."

"You don't hate him," Peeta says, very softly.

And it takes him saying it for her to realize the truth of it.

"I should," she whispers.

"That's not who you are." Peeta meets her eyes with his own (she's the girl on fire, but his eyes reflect the firelight and are the blue of the flame at the heart of all blazes). "You care about people, Katniss, that's why you protect them."

"I can't protect Gale," she says (she's not even sure that she wants to).

"Really?" Peeta looks around them, at their painful haven, their stack of memories (half here, half at Peeta's place). "Isn't that why you haven't talked to him before? You don't want to say anything that will break him."

The fire crackles (it occurs to Katniss, then, whose burns prickle under that sound, who can see the scar licking along the sides of Peeta's brow, just how she made it out of that Capitol square, when given the choice, she would have laid there and gone up in ashes to mingle with Prim's).

"I don't understand you," she finally says, but she puts her hand over Peeta's at the same time. "I'm not…I'm not what you see when you look at me."

"And I'm not who you want me to be."

"That's not true!" she spits. Her hand balls up into a fist atop his (she darts a look up, wary of dilating pupils).

Peeta smiles at the fire (not his usual smile; a cynical, jaded thing). "We both know that what District 13 pulled out of the Capitol is not at all what you were hoping to get back."

"Peeta…"

"He died, I think." His hand is warm under hers, his pulse steady beneath her fingertip, and she has to remind herself of those things when all she can see is the dull, plastic cast to his face. "Sometimes, I'm his ghost. But other times I'm just a mimic. Like a jabberjay recorded with things to say, some of them right, some implanted lies. Like nightlock picked and left on plastic to be confused with blueberries."

"Peeta," she says again (it's nearly a song, like the one the mockingjays turned it into on that riverbank in their first Games, when she searched for him and prayed she wouldn't find him too late. Come to think of it, not much has changed, really). "That's…that's not true. You're not a jabberjay."

(She's the poison, and only hasn't choked on her own venom because he let her teeth close over his skin rather than her own heart.)

He tilts his head and studies her, orange and red gleams flickering over his face. "That's all I've ever been. Even before the Capitol, I've only ever been regurgitated dreams and copied hopes. My dad's the one who loved and lost your mom, and so I looked and I saw you and I hoped. My mom's the one who wanted me to be more, to be better, to be worth something, and so I tried to find something greater to hold onto through the Games. All those interviews, the speeches, the parts I had to play—none of them were me."

Katniss can't breathe. Smoke taints her nostrils.

"Snow recognized me for what I am. He's the only one who ever actually used me for what I am: a mutt. One that should have died off a long time ago."

Abandoning his hand alone on the table, Katniss lifts both hers to frame Peeta's face. Turns him toward her. Makes him meet her gaze.

And that's when she sees it: the black pupils that swallow up the blue.

(Her heart cracks inside her chest.)

Her touch is gentle even as she ensures he cannot pull away from her. His hands rise, and he closes his fingers around her wrists. Katniss refuses to tense.

"Everyone always talks about the mockingjay," she says. "The rebellion made it their symbol. Cinna turned me into one. Anyone brave enough to fight back or to run carried an image of it around with them, baked into a small cracker. But you can't have a mockingjay without a jabberjay."

"Katniss?" (Is it a hiss or a breath? A question or an accusation? It doesn't matter. It's Peeta she's talking to and Peeta listening, no matter what color his eyes.)

"The jabberjays were sent out by the Capitol to spy on the rebellion. They were supposed to report back everything they heard, spies and traitors in bird form." Katniss lets herself draw closer to Peeta, shifting to her knees so she can lean her brow against his. "But the rebellion turned their own tool against them, and the jabberjays ended up doing more harm to the Capitol—to Snow—than the rebellion. And so he left them to die. Abandoned them in the wilderness. Threw them away."

"Katniss." (This is a new sound, a new way of saying her name, like a tiny utterance in the dead of night, when nightmares are slow to fade and adrenaline quick to haze reality and no one lies to the side to remind what a living heart sounds like.)

"But the jabberjays didn't die. They didn't do what they were supposed to. They didn't just fade away into nothing. Instead…" Katniss tilts her face, rubs her cheek against Peeta's, feels the stubble that was never there during their Games. "Instead, the jabberjays survived. And they flourished. They made their nests beside the ordinary mockingbirds, and sang their own songs back to them, until they didn't need two nests anymore, just one. Until the mockingbird and the jabberjay both became something more. Something different. Even…radiant."

His breath stutters across her ear, perhaps shaped by her name, perhaps just a sob.

"The mockingjay," Katniss whispers. "It only lives, only exists at all, because the jabberjay decided not to die and chose instead to live for love. For a future it was denied but that it won for itself anyway. Because it refused to be just a piece in the games of monsters."

His hands soften around her wrists, his thumbs caressing tiny patterns over her skin so that Katniss shivers and presses even closer into his side.

"If you're a jabberjay, Peeta, and I'm a mockingjay, then the only reason I'm here at all is because of you."

"Katniss," he says, and it's him, blue-eyed and wondering and awestruck as he draws back far enough to look at her.

There's too much open emotion in his face (too many truths she's not sure she's ready for when half her days still slip her by in unseen blurs), so she closes her eyes and rests her head on his shoulder, her nose nuzzled up against his throat.

"Peeta," she whispers.

"I'm here," he says. "It's me."

And it is. Of course it is. Who else could he ever be, but her boy with the bread?

Her dandelion.

(Her jabberjay.)

THG pg. 355: "I thought Peeta would like this better," he says carefully.

Summer ripens. Heat cascades down on them like cloaking blankets they can't escape. The day of the Reaping looms large, and Katniss's nightmares multiply.

"They'll want the pictures by the anniversary," Haymitch warned them, and now every time Katniss steps outside, she sees cameras hidden everywhere—in windows and flowerbeds and tree-knobs and pebbles on the riverbank. Peeta reaches for her hand (For the cameras), and she flinches away (Real), and then he stops reaching and she stops flinching. And then stops talking. And then stops getting out of bed entirely.

The sun rises and falls along her bedroom wall like a slow, ceaseless wave. How many times has humanity nearly wiped itself out? How many wars have scoured the countryside of innocents? How long has the world burned and rebirthed whole civilizations? And all the while, the sun rises and sets, heedless, cruel, so far removed that nothing touches it.

Katniss wishes she were the sun. She stares at its colors painted like transient masterpieces over the blanket she can't bother to throw off her, and she thinks that if she truly were the girl on fire, she would blaze with her own supernova and never hurt again.

(Or maybe she's one already. Is this why Peeta can't escape her, caught in her gravity well, constantly in orbit around her, a decaying ellipsis doomed to crash and burn after millennia of fruitless struggle? Is this what ensures the world will never forget her, because her flame scorches and sears, nurturing one world while all the others boil or freeze?)

"Katniss," someone says her name, not for the first time. It's a rise and fall, too, ebbing and surging like the tide in the ocean Effie let them wade through in District 4, when Katniss still thought nightmares and forced happiness were the worst things that could happen to her. Sometimes, the voice whispers. Others, it calls. Always, it's worried, and if she could summon the energy necessary, she might laugh, to think of the ocean fussing over the sun.

It doesn't occur to her that this is anything more than her usual weakness (the flaw that beset her mother passed down on the daughter to turn her into a hypocrite) until she shivers in the heat and cools in her sweat and imagines ice crystallizing and then thawing like broiling ice floes in her gut.

"Katniss," the water murmurs, and then there's a bucket under her head, and vileness pouring out of her in hacking streams, and something wet and cool on her brow.

"Katniss," she hears someone say, and there's a touch to her throat, her forehead, her wrists. "You're burning up."

She laughs (and then is sick, because if there's anything this world likes to do, it's punish any moment of non-misery).

(She should have burned. She was supposed to—it was in the name, after all. But something went wrong, fate slipped, and it's Prim who burned instead.)

The fever rises and rises and rises some more, and Katniss begins to worry that there will be no setting for this sun. She burns. She writhes. She vomits (poison, poison, finally her poison afflicts herself). She screams, and then, exhausted, stares at the wall some more.

And eventually, despite her best efforts, she sleeps.

The nightmares attack like a pack of mutts with tribute eyes. They fall on her, and nip, and tear off bite-sized chunks until she can't imagine there is anything left of her. She screams, but not really, because she is too weak to do so, and so she faces the nightmares alone, crying in the dark.

"Shh, Katniss. I'm here. Shh."

Katniss lunges for the voice, for the comfort, for the tiny hint of familiar—she's done this before. She remembers. Nights on a train, sleep syrup an anvil on her mind, trapping her beneath terror…and then Peeta.

Peeta.

"I'm here," he says, and he is. She feels him, pressed tight against her, his strong arms gathering her close, his angles and edges a bed more comfortable than any mattress could ever be.

The nightmares don't release her entirely, but with Peeta's hand in her hair and his heartbeat under her cheek, they dull. Turn hazy. Offer sleep-blurred memories of what almost was. What could have been. (What might yet one day be.)

Two children on a Reaping stage, taking hands for the first time, a shake he offers, she accepts.

Two children on a train, forging uneasy alliances even as they pick their differing courses.

Two children in an arena, so familiar, her woods but as she's never seen them before.

Two children, but now they're a girl, running for safety into the woods, and a boy, rushing headlong into danger for her. In her dreams, he doesn't make it. He falls, bloody and still, to the grass, blank eyes staring up to the sky, hand outstretched toward a bow.

A girl in a tree, and a boy on the ground, and a tracker-jacker nest falls, explodes, a swarm of mutts latching onto Peeta until he dies, screaming his delusions to the sky.

A girl unconscious, safe with a bow and a quiver of arrows by her side, while yards back, a boy makes of himself a human shield and bleeds out from a gash in his thigh, whispering the name of the girl too lost in her own terror to hear him.

A boy, delirious and cold and so alone, staring at the sky and wondering why no parachutes fall, his last breath a question.

Two children, reunited at last, side by side in a cave, in a sleeping bag, and the girl warms herself against the boy's feverish heat while his mind bakes and his heart works itself to death pumping poisoned blood through his veins.

A girl dead by the cornucopia, and a boy waking from drugged sleep alone, dragging himself into the open, pecked apart by birds, laughed to scorn by victorious Careers.

A girl racing, racing, racing at the sound of a cannon, and finding the boy, purple-tongued and dead-eyed, lying beside a piece of cheese and fallen berries.

A boy bleeding out atop a cornucopia, or falling into the maw of mutts, or stabbed in the heart by a boy raised to be a murderer, or staring wide-eyed at the arrow in his chest, or choking on nightlock he didn't spit out in time, or left alone on a table where doctors shake their heads and congratulate themselves on the remaining victor.

A boy, hanged in his own kitchen, drowned in his own bathtub, poisoned at his own hand, walked into the woods and laid down to die like an offering.

Shot in the head by Snow, caught in the crossfire in District 11, vanished in the Capitol, whipped to death in the stockades, tortured to death by Peacekeepers demanding to know where the Mockingjay ran to.

Electrocuted by a forcefield, thirsted to death with his arms around a tree fat with water, drowned in an arena colored pink, dead in every wedge of that hellish clock, eaten by monkeys or choked by blood or washed away in a tsunami or feasted on by bloodthirsty insects. Murdered by Brutus, by Enobaria, by Finnick or Johanna, by Katniss herself, by Coin's rebellion.

Left behind to die, abandoned to torment and pain, killed a thousand different ways in a hundred different days of his time in the Capitol, trapped beneath the Tribute Center, hidden away in a District 13 padded cell, delivered to the firing line for being human and hurt and young, sent to his execution-by-proxy for being in love with the wrong girl and for trying to be better and for not falling in line.

Killed in the Capitol streets, the tunnels, Tigris's shop, torn apart by a mob who picked the right boy out as Peeta this time, or shot by Peacekeepers, or stampeded by riots. On fire and screaming, scooping up the girl on fire and running and falling and refusing to just let go.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

There are a hundred lifetimes Katniss could live and not deserve Peeta, but there are a hundred-thousand in which he dies and she cannot save him.

It would have been so easy (it's still so easy) for him to die. In fact, it's something of a miracle that he's alive at all, that they're both here, in District 12. That he still offers his hand like he did on that Reaping stage, and she still takes it, and they are still children trying to learn how to be adults in a world where the only games are those that kill.

Katniss dreams his death, over and over again, and wakes, over and over again, to his soothing murmur and the caress of his hand over her hair and the knowledge that she cannot lose this again.

And finally, cool for the first time in ages, clear-headed and aching, she wakes to find him asleep next to her.

Asleep—but alive.

Hers (for real) if she wants him.

And Katniss wants.

THG pg. 373: "Well, let me know when you work it out," he says, and the pain in his voice is palpable.

…

"One more time? For the audience?" he says. His voice isn't angry. It's hollow, which is worse.

Peeta knows terror. In fact, he knows it so well that it is a trusted companion (second, perhaps, only to Doomed Hope), there with him nearly every step of his life.

As a child, he feared the unpredictable (the snapped temper, the cracked hand, the slammed oven door).

As a tribute, he feared the unthinkable (cruelty, murder, death, not just to him but by him, and all played out before an audience of tens of thousands, his every crime, every weakness, laid bare to critique).

As a Victor, he feared the known, the threats, the punishments (all so amply laid out before them along the Victory Tour, in his paintings, behind his eyes whenever he closed them).

As a prisoner of war, he feared his own mind (his own flaws, his own insecurities, his own weaknesses, all the broken, scarred pieces of himself brought out into the open to be dissected and examined by Snow's torturers).

As a mutt, he feared everything.

But it's only now, in the close confines of a bedroom with the smell of sick and the feel of fever, that Peeta feels undone by his terror.

Against sickness, against whatever this is ravaging Katniss's body (against her own lack of will to get better), he has no weapons. No allies to make, no audiences to charm, no sponsors to win, nothing to do but sit at her bedside and watch the water he pours into her mouth dribble down her chin while he counts each labored breath.

He isn't equal to this. He feels it within him (knows his own weaknesses too well, has seen them on lab tables and television screens too often). The watery feeling inside his gut. The panic hazing his mind. The tracker-jacker venom, triggered by fear, wreaks havoc on his sense of self, so that he spends equal amounts of time wiping sweat from Katniss's brow and shaking in the corner as he struggles to hold the ripped edges of his psyche together.

"Not real not real not real," he chants to himself (but he can't sing, and the words fail to soothe). Not real—the glossy image of Katniss hanging over his feverish body, spooning poison into his mouth. Not real—the shiny memory of Katniss luring him close, kissing him, nightlock juices dripping from her tongue to his. Not real—the shimmery sight of Katniss digging him out of a riverbank only to torture him by digging her claws into his wounded thigh.

But so many parts of this are real.

The way her eyes roll behind the lids, delusional, frantic. The screams torn from her hoarse throat as she writhes in the fever's heat. The progression of her lips from dry to chapped so that he is reduced to begging her to drink.

Worst of all, though, is when the screams stop, when the frantic motions ease—because that's when the crying begins.

Low, quiet sobbing, like a keening as tears pour from her cheeks, and Peeta is mad with helplessness, wild with fright, crazed with his own pathetic uselessness.

Finally, he gives in to the demands of his leg, the aches of his hunched back (to the demands of his selfish, gibbering heart), and slides into the bed. Gathers her small, slight form into his arms. Settles her weight over his (counts each breath). Runs his hand down through her tangled hair over and over again.

He wishes he were a mockingjay. Then he could sing, he could pull forth from all the melodies she's gifted him, and he could spill them back out to her, call her back to him (no, no, not to him, not real, but to life, at least), draw out that strength still shining inside her, buried deep like a coal at the heart of a banked stove, until she chooses to fight this. To hold on. To not die.

"Let go of me!" she commanded him, in that square he can still hardly bear to think of, with her bow in her hand and two presidents dead at her feet. "Let go of me!"

"I can't," he whispers, and he rocks her body atop his, kisses her brow, twines the fingers of his hand with one of hers. "I can't."

He cannot be left alone. He cannot do this by himself. He is only half a victor, and the crown is too heavy for him to bear on his own, and the world is too cruel a place without her silent tread and her fierce devotion and her enigmatic smile to brighten it with reflected beauty.

"I can't," he whispers, as her tears finally dry up (dehydration, the training he learned in the Tribute Center names it) and her sobs still and the sweat on her brow diminishes. "I can't."

It's a truth he's told her a thousand times in a hundred different ways (don't let go of me on a chariot; thanks for finding me on a riverbank; nobody needs me on a beach; with hands wrapped around her throat when he raged at the fact that he was still alive, not yet granted the reprieve of death; I can't with a bite taken out of his hand and her screaming Gale's name as she looked past him).

And he doesn't. He holds onto her. And he keeps holding on, even when she murmurs his name and stirs in his arms and sleeps without any sign of nightmares. He holds on (discovers a new facet of his old friend, Terror) when his mind shakes and his hands clench over air and he cannot give into the sheen of not-real while Katniss lays quiescent and defenseless in his arms.

He holds on, until he wakes and finds that she has slipped away in his sleep. His arms are empty, his mind blank, and all he can think is that this is why he lost the Games, why he needed her, because he cannot even stay awake on watch for a night. In his panic, he falls to the floor on his hands and knees, tangled up in stale bedding, his eyes darting from the basin she threw up in to the dried-out washcloths he sponged her with to the half-empty pitcher of water he tried to get down her throat.

(Real, then, he didn't imagine it. She was sick, and she was here, and now she is not, but she is still real.)

Leg cramped and back aching, Peeta limps his way downstairs, hugging the wall. Katniss's hunting jacket is missing. The only sound breaking up the silence of the house is Buttercup, winding between Peeta's ankles and meowing for food. Peeta sets out a container of leftover stew for the cat before stepping outside into bright afternoon light.

Only Haymitch's geese disturb the stillness of Victor's Village.

"She went hunting," he mutters. (But that makes no sense, really, because she hasn't been hunting in weeks, months, since she invited him out for daily walks through the woods that used to frighten him and maybe still do if he weren't so intent on trusting Katniss.)

Peeta's halfway to his house when he finally sees her. She steps out of the door to Haymitch's house, and seems to freeze when she notices him, standing in the street, watching her. His every muscle has locked up tight at the sight of her—awake. Alive. Well.

In the time he's been sleeping, she's clearly showered and changed (he hopes she's eaten; hopes she's drank something), and there's something new in her eyes that he doesn't recognize. As if, for the first time since her sister died, since Coin fell at her arrow, Katniss has finally resolved on something.

"Peeta," she says. "You're up."

"So are you," he replies. Suddenly, he feels uncomfortable. Nervous. She's clean and fresh and decisive while he is rumpled and dirty and lost. He doesn't like her seeing him like this. Doesn't like to think what decision she's made (where it will leave him) while he slept the day away (is it an excuse, if he tells her that it's been so long since he's been able to sleep at all, that despite his mental weariness, this is the most rested his body's felt in longer than he can remember?).

"I should go get—"

"The camera crews are here."

They both spoke at the same time. Now, they both stare at each other.

"Oh," he says.

"Go where?" she asks.

Again, they stop. Again, each waits for the other. (Peeta remembers dancing lessons on a train, Effie counting out beats for them, both of them stumbling and clumsy with the stiff Capitol dances. He was better, then, than he is now, with the words that he's known for implementing so well.)

"Haymitch says he'll meet the cameras at the train station," Katniss finally says, when Peeta can't find his voice. "He says that unless we want them taking pictures of us here, we should go to meet them too."

Here. Here where they live. Where they claw out some meager form of life in the wake of the devastation caused by the last time they were on camera together. Peeta feels the noose around his throat tightening, the puppet strings clinching at his joints, the leash pulling him up to heel.

Perform. Love on cue. Read the script. Pry apart the slats of your ribcage to reveal your heart, in all its foolish, doomed glory, to us. Don't mess up or we'll come for everything you love, everyone left to you, and make you live without them.

"I thought…" Katniss studies him through narrow eyes. "I thought we could go together."

Ally. Co-victor. Fiancé—no, no, more than that, married (his lies are tangling up all around him, the story he spun for the world, the private hopes he turned into public currency all being cashed in). Still just parts to play. His limbs are carved of wood, his eyes jeweled insets, his whole being nothing more than a piece in a game he can never win.

Katniss watches him, waiting for his answer, and Peeta doesn't know why he's surprised. Terror steps aside to make room for Doomed Hope, taking his arm to walk side-by-side yet again.

Mutt. Survivor. Neighbor. All those, but underneath it all, at the core of him, he's nothing more than a prop, good only for the spotlight and for deflecting attention (and this, then, must be her fresh resolve: she's decided that the peace privacy can give is worth playing this part again). Camouflage, he thinks. It's his specialty, and why should he be angry that she knows that and uses it?

(Why should his feeble, broken heart quiver in indignation? At least she still needs him. At least this is still something she wants from him.

At least she has not discarded him completely.)

"Peeta?"

We protect each other, she told him, one of the real building blocks he used to form the foundation of his self.

So he smiles, and he nods, and he says, "Let me just get cleaned up and then I'll walk with you."

"Okay."

He turns away from her scrutiny (her new resolve) and heads toward his house. But then, he cannot help himself: he stops and looks back. "Katniss," he says. "You're okay?"

The corners of her mouth ease (her smiles are rarely wide, her happiness hidden in subtleties, and Peeta has made the study of them his focus for too long to miss it). "Yeah," she says. "I'm okay. Thank you. For taking care of me."

Not until he's inside his house with the door closed between them does Peeta cover his face with his hands and shake with the force of his relief—and the magnitude of his despair.