A/N: Sorry for the long wait - the holidays definitely got away from me! I hope you're all enjoying the new year, and feel free to let me know what you think of the chapter!

PART 2: THE MOCKINGBIRD

Chapter 6

CF pg. 23: "Peeta. How is the love of your life?" he asks.

They walk from Victor's Village with a foot of space between them. Katniss darts glances sideways at Peeta and hopes he does the same to her though she never quite catches the hint of his hummingbird eyes, flicking to her then away. It's hot, muggy, the air so still that it feels like pressure bearing down on them. When she looks down at her feet, Katniss sees the boots she almost couldn't tie with her weak fingers, the double-knot she placed there as if a good luck charm (as if she believes in anything like good luck or charms after her mockingjay pin did nothing but mark her out as a target day after day after day), the dust that rises up under her soft steps.

"Peeta," she tries to say, but she must not get the word out because he doesn't turn to her. Doesn't reach for her hand. Doesn't look at her.

Rest is like a foreign contaminant in her system. How long since she's enjoyed a full night's sleep? Months, it must be, but he came to her bed, he laid down beside her (risked his life and his lungs and his mind, never caring what sickness she might pass to him), and she slept. When she woke up, she wasn't tired. She wasn't dull or slow or anything she's come to think of as normal.

It seems like a good sign (like the tracks of a deer in the woods, leading her to a fully stocked larder and a winter she and her family won't starve).

They just have to get through today. Just one more time, for the cameras, and then…

Then.

When Katniss woke, when she felt Peeta's arm solid around her waist, his breaths feathering against her brow, she didn't get up right away (she couldn't have, not for all the feasts and cornucopias in the world). Instead, she laid there for minutes (for hours) and stared at Peeta's profile. She traced his hand on her stomach with her fingertips, and she played her eyes over his features, and she let herself feel the want settling deep inside her (or rather, unearthed it from the deep, dark hiding places she had buried it in, motivated by fear and by terror and by necessity).

She just has to get through today. Give Panem another chunk of their lives (another piece of their flesh carved out of them, scars left gaping and raw), a final price to pay for the privacy they need (she wants).

"Peeta," Katniss says when the town comes into view, and she reaches for his hand.

He gives it to her. Easily. Smoothly. His fingers curve along the side of her palm, warm and patterned with burn scars. Katniss thinks that the feeling of his hand in hers might be the most familiar feeling she knows. If she were hijacked, if all her memories of this boy were ripped from her and twisted and tangled beyond repair, she thinks that all he would have to do is take her hand and she would know him. She would remember that he's not her enemy (he's her ally, her friend, her everything now).

"I'm glad you're with me," she tells him. It's a truth that feels too real, too exposed, vulnerable and wriggling like a soft underbelly in the light of day. But (for him) she offers it anyway.

He smiles at her.

It's not a real smile.

It's as fake as the one he turns to the center of town, to the train, where a camera crew unloads onto 12's blood-stained paths. The whole District (what little there is left) must have known they were coming. There are decorations hung along the main road, from the buildings they've managed to erect (the bodies are all hidden, the cost of this happy façade shrouded behind big smiles on this big, big, big day).

Katniss recognizes Cressida and Pollux and tries to be happy it's them (she can trust them, she thinks, at least more so than Plutarch or any strangers from the Capitol; but the reminder of them hurts, bringing back flashes of the last arena she and Peeta fought through, once more as much enemies to each other as they are allies). She tries, but she can't concentrate. Can't do anything but hang onto Peeta's hand for all she's worth and smile as if she's had more than one good night of sleep in the past three years.

His smile is fake.

Peeta's hand holds onto hers, and he greets Cressida and Pollux by name, and he is kind and he is bright and he is smiling, but all of it is not real.

And it's just like it used to be. Katniss is moved like a doll, in front of this shop, outside that Justice Building, half-constructed. She holds the basket they give her, full of the supplies shipped into 12 to keep them fed and working to erase the crimes of the last government. She sits where they tell her, walks down the road once, twice, a third time (because she's a terrible actress, she needs reshoots, there's nothing here to make her real).

And all along, Peeta never lets go of her hand. He is charming and polite, never once leaves her out to dry by herself when the questions start, but he is quieter than he used to be, doesn't answer every question they pose them, is stiffer and makes odd pauses in his conversation. Is it the part he's playing (the recovered prisoner of war, the traumatized survivor) or is it something more? Something deeper? (Something worse?)

(Katniss has barely let herself want. Has had only hours to think that she might risk letting herself think of something besides her next breath, her next meal, her next day. And already it slips through her fingers. Already, she is losing him.)

For hours, they parade like a couple in front of the town. As if they're out here every day, rebuilding. Thom (the real architect of 12's rebirth, if Peeta can be believed) lets them take the credit. The people in the market, in the little shops, pretend that this isn't the first time they've seen Katniss and Peeta. Katniss pretends she isn't falling apart.

It's all a game of pretense, and maybe she was wrong: maybe the Capitol isn't the last arena for them. Maybe this is all just a bigger, more elaborate Games, and they are still fighting (and maybe that's why Peeta's not real, because they are still striving for opposite end goals).

"And how are you two?" Cressida asks when they come to an endpoint, a standstill, of their District tour.

Katniss tightens her hold on Peeta's hand (she will back him whatever he says).

He says nothing.

There's no answer. No charming words. No shiny façade. Instead, when Katniss turns her head, she sees a small, scared boy (the prisoner she imagined, endlessly, while trapped in District 13, running a pearl between her fingers, unable to escape the nightmare of her reality without Peeta).

"We're surviving," Katniss says. She presses close to Peeta's side and brings her free hand up to curl around his elbow. "We'll never forget everything we lost during the war. But every day, we survive. We do our best to imagine that there's something better coming. We look out for each other."

She knows it's not as good as whatever Peeta would have said, but it's something, and Cressida seems to realize that's all she's going to get, which means it's enough.

The cameras lose their little red lights. The people begin to disperse, shooed away by Thom. Cressida offers Katniss and Peeta a tight smile, Pollux steps forward to hug Katniss and shake Peeta's hand (Katniss tightens her grip on Peeta's other hand, refuses to let go; if she does, she thinks he will slip away from her, forever outside her reach).

Then they pack everything up and the train doors close (without them inside, with them still here, still together, off the ride that will never end), the train pulls away, and Katniss and Peeta are left standing alone in the evening air.

"I'm sorry," Peeta says. "I don't know why I froze. I thought…I thought I could handle it. I will handle it. You don't have to worry about me."

"What are you talking about?" she asks.

"The questions." He avoids her eyes. "I know you don't like to talk. I said I'd do all the talking. Didn't I? Real or not real?"

"Real," she says, "but that was a long time ago. We can both help each other now."

"Yeah." His smile is pale and tight and not real. "We protect each other."

"It's what we do," she finishes in a small smile.

He nods (an agreement, a confirmation), so why does his hand slip from hers? Why, when they walk back to their houses, does he make sure there's a foot of distance between them? Why is she so sure, when he goes into his house and closes the door behind them, that he won't come find her (like he used to)?

Why is she losing him all over again?

CF pg. 44: "And every year they'll revisit the romance and broadcast the details of your private life, and you'll never, ever be able to do anything but live happily ever after with that boy."

Katniss doesn't go inside her house. She sits on her porch, slanted and kitty-corner so she can keep Peeta's house in view, and tries to believe that she would know if he were having a fit in there.

He's always done everything alone (always been left alone). How can she let him know that she's here for him now (how can she promise that when there are still whole days that slip her by without her noticing?)?

"Cameras all gone?" Haymitch asks when he finally drags himself awake and out of his house.

"Yeah," Katniss says shortly. "Thanks for the help."

He rolls his eyes. "What would I have been able to do? Peeta's always been more than enough help to you in front of cameras."

"Yeah, well, not everything's the same anymore, is it?" she retorts. "He's hurting too, you know. Maybe he shouldn't always have to hold the whole story together for us."

Birdsong in the distance highlights the silence that falls. Katniss can feel the weight of Haymitch's scrutiny even though she refuses to look away from the blur that Peeta's house has become.

"What's going on with you both?" he finally asks.

"Things are different now," she says.

"Big news there," Haymitch snarks. "Trouble in paradise, I guess, huh?"

"Do you even know that I've been sick for days? That Peeta's run himself ragged trying to take care of me? That something happened, it must have happened, to make him—"

"Make him what?"

Katniss scoffs and turns so she can't see him past the jut of her own shoulder. "Forget it. We're alive, right? What's left to worry about?"

But Haymitch never lets her get the last word. "If you're so worried about the boy," he says with a smirk, "then why are you out here instead of in there with him?" And he stomps away, back to the safer, more obliterating care of his bottle.

Though she tries to ignore him, her mentor's always been able to say things in a way that sticks with her. And he's right. Why is she out here? If she doesn't want to lose Peeta (and she doesn't, she can't), then she's going to have to make an effort (she can't depend on Peeta following her anymore, not without some actual encouragement; there's no President with a gun to their loved ones' heads to keep them together anymore…no loved ones at all for that matter).

Slowly, Katniss rises to her feet, brushes dust from her trousers, and slips to Peeta's door. She doesn't knock (they're past that, at least), just slides inside and pads back to the kitchen.

He's not there. The ovens are cold. There's no dough rising under a plethora of dish towels. The bread in the basket he keeps on the table aren't stale, per se, but they're closer to it than she's seen them get since they returned to 12.

"Peeta?" she asks. Her voice emerges small, childlike (alone).

Soundlessly, Katniss ghosts toward the room she knows he uses as his painting studio. The door is cracked open, and Katniss shifts to peer through before even setting fingers to the dented wood.

He's inside. She can see him, sitting on the floor, cross-legged, hunched over, his head in his hands. At first, she thinks he's having a fit (lost in altered memories, a nightmare he can't escape), but then she notices that his hands aren't white-knuckled over his hair. His shoulders aren't shaking. His muscles aren't tense with the effort of fighting off illusions made real in his brain.

Instead, he just sits there. Not baking. Not painting. Just…breaking.

"Peeta," she says softly, and watches the line of his shoulders go rigid. They sag after a moment, and she pushes through the door. After a moment's hesitation, she sits across from him, cross-legged, her knees bumping up against his. He doesn't say anything, so she doesn't either (their conversations have always been guided by him; without his words, she's lost in a wilderness she's not familiar with), and they just sit there, together, silently.

But gradually, a bit at a time, he uncurls. His hands drop from his head, his posture eases, and eventually, when Katniss feels tingly from sitting so still, she reaches over and puts her hand over his.

"Come on," she says. "I'll make us some dinner."

He comes. He sits at her table. They eat side by side. They sit in front of her low table in the living room and stare at blank pages, but Peeta makes no move to pick up a pencil or paintbrush, and without his impetus, Katniss can't grasp hold of any thought, any subject, herself. Eventually, he stands, and Katniss does her best not to grab hold of him (not to beg him to stay with her, to sleep beside her, to hold her in his shaking-but-still-steady arms).

"Good night, Katniss," he says, and she watches him leave her.

She doesn't even try to sleep that night. Instead, she sits on her couch and shakes with tremors (with terror) she can't stop (imagines a life devoid of Peeta's words, Peeta's hand, Peeta's bread and his hidden painting). Her eyes burn so much that when he comes through her back door into the kitchen the next morning with fresh cheese buns, she nearly does something stupid like break down and cry.

Instead, she just gets up, joins him at the table, and silently eats breakfast with him.

They go on their usual walk, a longer one than normal (because while he's walking with her, he's still with her, still hers), and Katniss waits only a few moments at her house, just long enough to wash her face and neck of sweat and change her clothes, before she heads back over to his. A sigh of relief so large it nearly knocks her down escapes her lungs when she finds Peeta kneading dough, fresh bread loaves cooling on the counter behind him, a cake in the fridge ready to be frosted.

(He's still fighting. Still standing up after he's been knocked down yet again. Still refusing to give in and let the Capitol, the Games, the world take him from her.)

"I'm glad you're baking," she says.

He gives her a puzzled look, but when she doesn't elaborate, he simply sets some vegetables and a knife in front of her and goes back to kneading. Katniss peels and slices and helps him make stew, and they eat it with rolls rich with butter and jam, and then they sit, shoulder to shoulder, in his living room, staring at blank paper.

They don't make any more progress that night.

The next afternoon, Haymitch comes over and tells them that if they want to know what their segment on the news is going to look like, it's being aired that evening.

Katniss can think of little she wants less (but oh so much she wants more). Why are they all still interested in her and Peeta? Didn't everyone fight and sacrifice something for their new supposed freedom? Aren't they all the same now? Why can't the world just let them be? What is it about the star-crossed lovers (about Peeta's moving words and Katniss's bow; his enduring tenacity and her stubborn inability to die) that will not let them fade into obscurity? If Katniss were anyone else, she doesn't think she'd spend one moment of thought on two kids forced into terror and trauma and violence until they were involuntarily shaped into symbols.

Peeta stares down at the mixing bowl and flour he'd just gotten out.

"Let's go somewhere," Katniss blurts out.

"What?"

"Let's get out of these houses and just…go somewhere they'll never think to look for us."

"Okay," he says after a long moment. "But where?"

This stumps her for a moment. Town is out of the question (too many people with eyes too sure to fix on them just ahead of a broadcast; too many reminders of what he's lost). They've already been to the woods. The meadow is a grave just barely covered up.

"The roof," she says. "Let's go on the roof. Like before. Remember?"

"Okay," he says again. "Do you know how to get to the roof?"

"Yes," she claims, and while he rummages up a blanket and some snacks, Katniss prowls through the upstairs rooms until she finds an entrance to the attic. From there, she jimmies open the window she's spotted under the eaves from outside and finds a way that should be safe (for her and for Peeta, who doesn't like to sleep in trees and prefers to remain more earthbound) to climb out onto the eaves of the house. When Peeta pokes his head up into the attic, lit by the afternoon sunlight shining through the slight window, Katniss has to catch her breath to see his hair lit up, the brightest thing by far in the dark, close confines.

"Katniss?" he calls, uncertainly, and she moves forward out of the shadow so he can see her. Something sparks in his eyes then (some emotion she's seen countless times before but has never quite managed to interpret; the same expression he'd worn when she came into the house with a bruised tailbone, a pouch of peppermints, and a cobbled together story), but when she offers her hand, he just sets the packed basket into her grip. He climbs up into the attic himself, and only when he tries to stand and can't does she realize how cramped it really is.

"It's just through this window," she says. "I'll take up the basket, then come back to talk you through it."

It's hard to tell in the fractured light, but Katniss would swear Peeta rolls his eyes. "I think I can manage hoisting myself from a window to a roof two feet up," he says.

"Just…be careful," she says, and slips upward. He follows after (Katniss nearly drops the basket in her rush to observe him, desperate that she not lose him from something so mundane, but thankfully she catches it before it topples over the edge), and soon they're settled on the blanket over hot roof tiles.

"We might have wanted to come out in the evening instead," Peeta realizes, but there's a smile just curling up the ends of his mouth, so Katniss is content.

It's nothing like the rooftop over the Tribute Center, something for which Katniss is both relieved and disappointed. It's too hot, for one thing, the sun bearing down on them oppressively, and there are no windchimes, no wind high in the sky, but also no crowds far below celebrating their impending deaths.

"What are you thinking?" Peeta asks after they've eaten a leisurely meal pulled from his basket. He's not looking at her (at least, not when she looks back, too slow to catch his hummingbird eyes). Instead, he plays with the corner of the blanket under his knee. His cheeks are red, and Katniss thinks she'll pretend to need to go to the bathroom here soon so she can grab some aloe cream to spread over his neck and face, his hands and forearms.

Laying a slightly cooler hand to her suddenly flushed cheeks, Katniss shrugs halfheartedly. "I'm thinking…"

Peeta looks away when she can't find anything (innocent) to tell him. The spark she'd seen before is gone again, snuffed out like flame in an airless room.

"I'm thinking that I wish I could freeze this moment," she says suddenly (defiantly).

"This moment?" he asks, skeptical.

Katniss averts her eyes, wonders if her cheeks are as red as his. "Yes," she murmurs. "We're both alive. We're together. And we're on a rooftop."

"And no one's trying to kill us," he adds, his tone almost thoughtful.

"Always a plus."

They both laugh, and he's right, the previous moment isn't the one she'd freeze. But this one (Peeta laughing, their eyes locking together, neither one flinching away), this she would freeze in a heartbeat and live for an eternity.

"Every time we were on that roof," she makes herself say, "those were my favorite moments."

His breath audibly catches. The sun hurtles for the horizon, dying in a broad splash of red and purple. Katniss almost imagines she can see the stars being birthed by the day's death throes.

"I…kind of thought you were mad at me for a lot of them," he finally says, his voice barely above a whisper.

"You think very differently from me," she says. "It took a while to adjust."

"Oh."

"You remember when you said you didn't want them to turn you into just a piece in their games?" She holds her breath as she waits for his answer (as she waits to see just how much of him really is left).

"I remember," he says. "President Snow thought it was funny."

Despite the glaring sun, the warm evening, Katniss flashes cold. "What?"

"He said I was always just a piece. That I'd never be anything else. That the real players in the Games didn't care about me at all."

She doesn't need to see the way he avoids her eyes to know just who Snow (and Peeta) thought the 'real players' are.

"That's not true," she says quietly. "You're the only reason I survived the Games. And the real reason that I became the Mockingjay."

Peeta scoffs and looks away.

"You told me you wanted to be yourself. That you wanted to find a way to play the Games in a way you chose. And you did that, Peeta. They didn't take that away from you. And when…when Rue died…that's why I covered her in flowers. Because I didn't want her to be a piece either. I only saluted her because I remembered what you said."

Katniss pretends that she doesn't notice the little sniffle that Peeta makes, especially because when he looks at her, he's smiling. "But you were mad at me when I first said it. Real or not real?"

"I was," she admits. "But just because that's when I knew."

"Knew what?"

"That you're better than me."

He stares.

Katniss wants to reach out. She wants to brush her fingers down his face (maybe curl her palm along the line of his cheek so he can press a kiss to her hand the way he did in their cave). She wants to hug him, to feel him hug her, and ask him to stay with her tonight.

She never gets the chance.

"Hey, lovebirds!" Haymitch calls down from the ground. "Get down here! They're just about to show your star moments."

Peeta's eyes go dead. Katniss's voice dries up.

They gather up their half-eaten snacks, their dusty blanket, their sunburned selves, and go downstairs where Haymitch waits in the living room with the tv already on. Katniss hovers by the open window, her eyes stubbornly fixed outside the house, trying to think only of her growling stomach, her tight skin (anything but what's on that screen). Peeta sits, back absurdly straight, hands clasped before him, expression blank. Haymitch watches both of them more than he does the special that Plutarch airs.

There's footage of Johanna, of Annie with a hugely swollen stomach and a dazed expression, of Beetee hard at work in a laboratory, still in a wheelchair, and Enobaria for just a moment, tamely working in some field of crops. There are interviews with 'experts,' with Doctor Aurelius (who earns just a smidgen of Katniss's grudging approval when he declines to comment on anything specific about any of his patients), with the few survivors of the Star Squad who share recollections of their time invading the Capitol (Katniss drifts closer to Peeta, sits beside him and lets the back of her hand brush his, when a picture of Mitchell flashes next to pictures of the other fallen members).

And then it's the footage from 12. Katniss doesn't watch it. She zones it out, stares out the window, hums inside her mind.

Peeta watches it unblinkingly (as if punishing himself). Not a single one of his muscles twitch which makes her think he's holding himself unnaturally taut. He's completely silent—except once. Reluctantly, Katniss looks at the screen to see what made that strangled grunt emerge from his gritted jaw.

She sees both of them. Katniss without makeup or Cinna's dresses, just her regular clothes, her father's jacket, her double-knotted boots, her stubby braid with its charred ends. Peeta with his khaki pants and the light blue shirt that belatedly makes her think of their reaping (his reaping) day, his combed hair and the scars he can't hide, licking over his face, down his neck and into the collar of his shirt, up his hands and along the forearms where he'd rolled up his sleeves.

It's them. The star-crossed lovers as they really are.

Still fake.

Still playing a part.

And standing in front of the bakery's remains.

Katniss is smiling (the too-bright, too-brainless smile her face automatically twists into whenever the cameras are on her). The recorded Katniss is also looking at the camera, at Pollux, at Cressida, at everything besides the boy she holds onto with all her strength.

Peeta isn't smiling. He's wide-eyed. Ashen-faced.

Haunted by the ghost building (the charred bodies) behind him.

(And Katniss never even noticed.

But the cameras did.)

The stupid montage ends with Katniss's answer to Cressida's final question (We do our best to imagine that there's something better coming, but there's not, there can't be, not when she's somehow left Peeta behind in his nightmares again), and with Plutarch saying something about the two star-crossed lovers retiring to enjoy a belated honeymoon, to grieve a baby dead too soon, to heal from the wounds war left behind.

It's Peeta's house, but he doesn't wait for Haymitch and Katniss to leave. As soon as the screen goes dark, he stands, heads upstairs, and from above, Katniss hears the decided click of his bedroom door closing them (her) out.

(He won't invite her in. Won't ward off her nightmares. Won't help her sleep. Why would he, why should he, when she never even notices him trapped in his own?)

"It could have been worse," Haymitch says.

"How?" Katniss asks.

"You could have refused to show up together at all," he snaps back. "That'd get everyone talking and speculating. This way, you'll fade into the past while they all focus on building some kind of future."

"How are we supposed to move on?"

Haymitch has no answer to that except to leave.

Katniss stares at the tv screen (hating it) until she stands, picks up the lamp that matches the one in her own mirror image living room, and throws it into the tv. The screen fractures into ten thousand pieces, and Katniss walks over the glass to get out of the house echoing with pain she hasn't been invited into.

This, she thinks, is not the happy ending they were supposed to play out.

CF pg. 53: "I hate them," I say. I can almost smell the blood, the dirt, the unnatural breath of the mutt. "All I do is go around trying to forget the arena and you've brought it back to life. How do you remember these things so exactly?"

All Peeta can think to do is paint. It's what he's always done. When he was a child, he did it in his mind. When he was a teenager, he painted with frosting. When he was rich and more alone than he'd ever felt, he discovered actual paints, and he's never looked back since. So he paints.

Painting heals him (or at least that's what he tries to convince himself). Painting haunts him (there aren't enough canvases in the world to bring the dead back to life). On paper, on canvas, on the wall when his impulses get away from him, his reality is transposed. Everything good about himself (the people who loved him despite all the pain he causes, the trouble he brings, the failures he accumulates) is separate from him, and everything bad about himself stains his hands (dripping like poisoned berries from a girl's mouth, gushing like blood from the throat he tore open with his bare hands, painting the walls and his soul like the body parts that littered his cell in the Capitol).

He's painted death and beauty and both together. He's conjured up images of perfect recall and captured tiny moments of the nightmares he (most of the time) thinks are real. But now, when what bothers him is nothing he can see, nothing he can pin down, just there, hidden, invisible, in between the open wounds, he finds himself painting absence.

A white canvas with the lens of a camera a circle of silver right in the center. A black background with the suggestion of a pillow's edge limned in moonlight, the hint of a braid doused in sweat. An open door, the crack within revealing just a sliver of the white cell that he's never really escaped (he wonders if anyone else can tell what that colorless void is or if it is unique to him).

And all along, he knows that these paintings are useless. Not one of them can encapsulate the helplessness he feels. He is a void, an absence, the antithesis of what is real. In every scene he's ever tried to recreate, every portrait he's ever completed, there is only one common denominator to them all.

Him.

(And yet, for all that, Peeta can't fool himself into thinking he means anything. He knows what his worth is. An entire rebellion, a war, a propaganda machine, his own mother, all of that is more than sufficient to impress that lesson into him.)

He's not sure how many days have passed, how many walks he's missed, when he gradually, scent by flicker by some sixth sense, realizes that Katniss is here with him. She sits right beside the open door, her back against the wall, her knees up in front of her, and she stares—not at the paintings (so many of the older ones bearing her face), but at him.

Inexplicably, he feels ashamed. Raw. As if she has peered inside him to the deepest, most hidden part of himself…and yet finds nothing worthy of her attention.

Except him.

His heart leaps in his chest, an odd, sharp feeling that makes him spasm. Only then, when he drops his paintbrush, does he realize that his hands are cramping, his back is aching, his eyes are dry and burning.

How long has he been here?

"Katniss," he tries to say, but all that emerges is a croak (it sounds like a hiss, like a mutt, like a bleached-pale monster in the sewers).

Katniss doesn't flinch. Instead, she meets his gaze.

"How do you do it?" she asks.

There's a part of him that wonders if she thinks she speaks clearly. If she believes herself to be anything but a confusing enigma. (The rest of him, though, is filled with fondness at his huntress of so few words.)

"Do what?" he says after clearing his throat. Carefully, he sets down his palette with its color scheme of whites and grays and nothing in between (the void between the letters of his family name, the one that used to be spelled out over a bakery that now exists only in half-forgotten memory).

"Paint what you feel," she says. "I could never do that. I don't even know what I'm feeling most of the time."

That, he thinks, explains a lot.

"I don't know," is all he says. "It's just…so strong inside me that I have to get it out somehow."

Peeta washes his brushes clean. Sets the canvas aside. Only, he'd forgotten that underneath this painting (the one he'd decided to paint on impulse, could only get down because he hadn't allowed himself a second to reconsider) is the canvas he'd been working on.

Pure white with a camera lens as the focal point.

Now, Katniss does flinch, and turn her face, as if to hide from even this simulacrum of a camera.

I'm sorry, he wants to say but can't because it will never be enough.

"I also do it because it means I can do this afterward," Peeta says suddenly (he doesn't give himself time to second-guess this either, and this is so dangerous, he can't be allowed to follow his instincts when so many of them are a mutt's). He grabs a bottle of green paint and squeezes it out in a long arc over the camera lens.

There's a gasp behind him, and Peeta feels suddenly, savagely gleeful.

"Try it," he says. "Whatever it is on the paintings that we don't like, we can cover it up."

"We can destroy it," she says. Slowly. Wonderingly.

Bit by bit, a limb at a time, Katniss rises to her feet and moves to his side. She picks up his bottle of blue paint and holds it over the top edge of the canvas. When she looks to him (for permission? for inspiration?), he nods. She squeezes the bottle violently and blue paint oozes down, aided by gravity in covering up the cameras that have dogged their steps, like the sky melting down to cover them in a safe haven.

"More," Peeta says.

And together, hand in painted hand, they cover dozens of canvases with swirls and streaks and drippings of paint (a world of color and randomness and unexpected glee).

Peeta's never felt so much like a Victor.