Snow sleeps long and late in his drugged stupor, his breathing now as familiar to Katniss as her own. She chews bear meat and watches him drowse. With nothing to do in the tent and the cold discouraging her from venturing outside, Katniss has only the map and Snow to entertain herself. She reads the map and she reads the scars on his chest. What two strange, interesting landscapes.

When noon comes and Snow is still sleeping off the drugs, Katniss carefully changes his bandages. The wounds look good: uninfected, fresh-smelling, the stitches taut and gleaming. He did a gorgeous job sewing them up. Her mother would have approved.

Her mother. Katniss has thought so little of her. Far away in District 4, avoiding the memories of her home town and her disappointing, peculiar wreck of a daughter. Does she think Katniss is still safe in 12, sleeping alongside Peeta? What would she think if she saw her daughter's new bedfellow?

Changing the bandages is easy now. Snip the fabric, unwind the coil that binds his midsection. Peel off the dressings. Smell the blood and serum. Press a new, clean dressing to the wound and smooth it against his skin. It is warm and soft beneath her palms, like good healthy meat, smoother where he is scarred. Sometimes she finds one of the white hairs of his chest caught under her fingernail or on the callouses of her palm after doing this, but she does not mind.

Katniss is in the middle of applying the second dressing when Snow's soft, sky-blue eyes open to watch her. They do not speak for a while. She tends his wounds with attentive hands and he watches her, his breathing strong beneath her fingers. She can just feel his heart beating, steady and sure.

'You're improving,' he observes.

'You're giving me lots of practice.' She runs her thumbs along the rounded rectangle of the dressing, feeling the papery dressing meet warm skin like sand meeting shore. Her breathing is deep and even to match his. She pulls off another dressing and feels his skin jolt ever-so-slightly with pain. She has taken a couple of hairs along with it. 'Sorry,' she says. 'You have a lot of chest hair.'

Snow regards his own chest with amusement. 'I don't believe it's an unusual amount.'

'Peeta has hardly any,' she remarks idly.

'Mr Mellark is a boy,' he says. 'I'm an adult man.'

Katniss frowns at this and ignores it, busying herself with removing the bandage from the medical kit. 'Sit up so I can get this around your waist.' He obliges, wincing as he sits, and Katniss smiles at the mess of his white mane. As though reading her mind, Snow smooths it back into a tidier shape. He lifts his arms to let her wind the bandage around him and her body fills with the loamy scent of his underarm hair.

'It was impolite to drug me,' murmurs Snow and his voice vibrates through her hands.

Her face is extremely close to his. 'Sorry. I don't like unnecessary suffering, that's all.'

'Neither do I,' he says pleasantly. His breath is stale from sleep, but she does not mind. 'It is only the degree of necessary suffering about which you and I disagree.'

Katniss shakes her head. 'Yeah, well, I just don't like seeing people in pain.'

Snow's voice is bright and weird: 'I do.' Katniss shoots a glance at him. She continues taping the bandage as Snow continues. 'I enjoyed seeing you in pain during the Games and the war. Or more specifically, I enjoyed watching you overcome that pain.'

She pulls a face of disgust, even as her hands rest against his abdomen. 'Why?'

'Pain is a facet of the human condition, Miss Everdeen.' His smile is mild, his eyes are soft blue flowers. 'It helps us grow. It makes us stronger. You were a frightened girl the first time I met you, when I coronated you. And when you drew your bow at my execution, you were a fantastic young woman.' He shines with peculiar pride. 'Pain made you that way.' That smile grows softer and stranger. 'Did you never want to see me in pain?'

She leans back from him, hands on her thighs, staring into the weft of the bandage. She pauses for a long time. 'When we were at war, I wanted you dead. I didn't care much for your suffering. I just wanted you gone. Wiped out. Erased. One horrible death and then nothing. Like that would somehow make everything better.'

'I see,' says Snow, and then there is silence broken only by the rustle of dressings as Katniss tidies away the medical kit. Snow's voice is a low vibration. 'Interesting. I assumed you would have found my pain enjoyable. But it was just killing me you so desired. Like a true predator.' He tilts his head this way and that, doing his little arithmetic, calculating her or counting her primes. 'Perhaps we should try to put the pain out of our relationship. Our companionship,' he clarifies.

'I don't know how that could be possible,' she zips up the medical kit. 'You are the cause of almost every terrible thing that has ever happened to me.'

Snow regards her in silence for a very long time. And then he says something strange: 'But you like my cooking.'

She blinks. 'Yeah, I guess. Why?'

He shakes his head, a tiny jerk. 'I am only thinking. I have caused you great pain. But you like my cooking. These two facts are both true.'

She does not understand what he is driving at. 'I suppose. You manage to do a lot with leaves and bark.'

Snow nods slowly. 'Well, I am certainly a better cook than you,' he says reasonably. 'My culinary experience is not extensive, but I learned to put together meals from very little when travelling with the Peacekeepers. I could teach you, if you like.'

She frowns at this. 'Some other time.'

'But I like your cooking nonetheless,' he says, oddly cheerful. 'There is a Spartan quality to it. A determined hardness to everything you make, a sort of playful ruefulness. Your meals taste as though you resented making them, but that the resentment was tinged with… not affection exactly, but… a kind of lukewarm resignation.'

Katniss stares at him, her mouth open. 'I just cook meat as much as I can without it burning to kill any parasites and bacteria.'

'Yes,' says Snow brightly, as though she has said something that agreed with his insanity.

She releases a long sigh. 'Okay,' comes her pale, surrendering voice. 'Please let us talk about something else.' Her eyes cast about the tent: the orange walls, the miserable pile of their dirty clothes (she has stopped caring when his socks wriggle up against hers), the blood-stained bedroll, Snow, his legs, his bare arms, his heavy hands, his chest, the white hair, the nipples that are smaller than her own, the scars. She points almost randomly at a round, white, bullet-shaped scar. 'Tell me how you got that one.'

And so he does. Snow is an excellent story-teller: his rich, walnut voice shaping each word with careful, particular grace; his command of pace and detail; the way he plucks images from the air. The actual substance of the story is unexceptional and nothing more striking than what Katniss herself has experienced at war: an attack, a defense, hiding and exchanging bullets, giving and receiving wounds. But Snow makes it captivating, and once he is finished she stares at the soft white mark of the bullet scar and thinks about how she can now read a whole story into it, how it is like a little plaque to something important that happened to him.

Then she points at another scar, the burn, and makes him tell her how he got that one.

Sometimes he is evasive. Some of the scars remain a mystery and he offers only a quiet shake of the head, a private smile, a demurring. She considers their possible origins. He admitted during their drinking game to a violent father, so that's a possibility. Fights at school? She can certainly picture an adolescent Snow taking a knife to an older rival and finding himself on the losing end. Assassination attempts? She doesn't think he'd keep those a secret. A violent lover? She wonders if he ever beat his wife. He rejected her moniker of rapist, but that doesn't preclude other abuses. Or maybe his wife hurt him. Bizarrely, although Snow is capable of all manner of violences (and much of them against herself), the image of him striking a woman in chauvinist domination strikes an offkey note. But a woman striking him? She thinks, again, of his expression bound to that pillar, her bow raised, the arrow ready to penetrate his soft and open neck…

'Snow?' she says suddenly. 'What would you do if I told you the location of the rebel base?'

Snow considers her question with mild confusion. '"Do", Miss Everdeen? I would do nothing. I hardly mean to go there without you.'

'Do you promise?'

He understands now her question. His eyes latch onto hers with gentle sureness. 'I would do nothing. I am your prisoner by consent, and that is not something I can or wish to revoke.' His smile is almost that of a normal man. 'I trust you with my life — by which I do not mean I trust you not to kill me, I simply trust you to do with me as you see fit. And you can trust me.'

She takes a deep breath. It is insane that she trusts him, and yet she does. She doesn't really know how to stop herself trusting him now. Katniss goes to her pack, pulls out the map, and hands it over.

'So show me where the nearest Peacekeeper cabin is.'

Snow does not even unfold it to look for the location of the rebel base. Within a few seconds of his eyes scanning the contoured lines that Katniss still struggles to interpret, he points his finger to the page. His fingernails are black with blood from his wounds. He caresses a circle around some unmarked point on a hill.

'There.'

Katniss stares at the anonymous mess of green squiggles. 'Are you sure?'

'I am indeed. I remember the latitude and longitude of every Peacekeeper cabin in the Districts through which we travelled.' He gives her a bright smile. 'I have an excellent memory.'

'Yeah, you do remember lots of weird things,' she says casually, folding up the map once again.

Snow glitters like diamonds. 'I certainly remember everything about you, Miss Everdeen.

The evening is cold, the night colder still. The snow falls with gentle persistence, making pretty white death of their forest clearing. When Katniss unwraps the bear meat from their makeshift refrigerator, a foul odor hits her. Rancid. Bugs, too, have found their way inside the waterproof wrap. She tosses it aside in disgust. That's the end of their fresh food.

Katniss fetches water from the creek, which has grown gross with brown, gelid ice. Her hands are numb by the time she returns to the fire, where she cooks two dehydrated meals for dinner and tries to warm herself. She tries too to calculate how many days it will take them to reach that cabin. What if there is no food there when they arrive? Snow needs food to heal. She huddles by the fire and buries her face into her collar, and all the while the snow falls coats the treetops and the forest floor, her hair and the firewood, the tent and their little shelter.

Katniss watches the snowflakes settle on her boot. She glances back at the tent, which is still zipped closed. Slowly, carefully, she pulls off her right boot. Her toes throb. Hesitantly, quietly terrified, she peels back Snow's socks that she hasn't removed since the river incident.

A huge plume of breath leaves her lips as she sees her toes. It's exactly as she expected. Two are black, undeniably necrotic. She wriggles them and feels a disconcerting mixture of pain and nothing at all.

Get over it, she tells herself sharply. Peeta lost a whole leg, including five toes. You can afford to lose a couple. It's not like it can make you any uglier.

She sniffs and pulls the sock back on, ignoring the anxiety in her chest, ignoring the urge to cry. Nothing to do about it right now; amputation will only slow them down more. Ignore it. Pretend it's okay. Once they reach the cabin, there will be warmth and food and lots of medical supplies, and there she and Snow can recover together.

And maybe a chocolate cake and your dead sister will be there, too, says a nasty voice in her head, and she tramples that back down. She isn't thinking straight. It's so cold.

A low, hollow wind slides indifferently through the clearing, trembling the treetops, disturbing the fire, and Katniss shudders. Thirteen meals remaining, minus the two they're about to eat. Even if they skip breakfasts, that's still four packets a day they need. Three days of food. How long to the cabin? How many with Snow's injuries? Will he be able to walk soon? What if he can't? What if he gets worse?

Katniss also shoves those thoughts deep inside her. She takes the food off the fire and portions it out, then returns to the tent. Snow, his eyes closed, wakes immediately when she enters. He looks at the food with a question.

'No more bear meat?'

'It's gone bad,' she says shortly.

'Ah.'

Snow does not say more, he doesn't need to. He knows the situation as well as she does, if not better. Food is finite. The cold of the Appalachian winter might as well be endless.

After they've eaten, it's too cold for anything other than sleep. The indifferent wind snatches the fabric of the tent and more and more snow piles up on the canvas, no matter how often Katniss smacks it to dislodge it.

Katniss shivers. Snow shivers more. With difficulty, she helps him into the shirt that didn't get torn to pieces by the bear, then very gently works a sweater on around his injured body. She undoes her braid and she can smell the grease and filth of her hair as she shakes it out. It has been weeks now without a proper bath.

They lie down beneath the sleeping bag, two cold bodies, and Katniss tries to stop her teeth from chattering. Sleep will not come. There is hunger and cold inside her, but little else. She shifts and rolls around, she buries herself under the sleeping bag, she presses herself into the bedroll and against Snow's body and she thinks what dying will be like. Better to freeze to death than get eaten by mutts. Torn to pieces. What a phrase. To be torn, like fabric of paper, for the threads of your being to rip apart…

'Miss Everdeen?'

She does not lift her face from the valley between the bedroll and Snow's arm. 'Mm?'

'Are you cold?'

'Very.'

There is a hesitant pause. Hesitancy, that rare flavor in Snow, has become something to which she pays careful attention. 'We would be warmer if we used the sleeping bag for its intended purpose, rather than as a blanket. It would allow us to more effectively conserve body heat.'

Katniss frowns in the almost-dark of late twilight. 'We won't fit. It's meant for one person, and you're big.' She sticks her numb fingers into her mouth and sucks on them. The feeling returns a little bit as she runs her tongue over the digits.

'It would be tight.' His voice is a flat, immaculate plane. 'But I think it would accommodate us.'

Katniss shivers. 'We'd be like sardines.'

'Warm sardines,' Snow modifies.

Her chest trembles with cold. Her toes are numb. She can somehow smell how cold Snow is, and she thinks she can smell his open wounds. Has she brought him out here to die?

'Okay,' she says at last.

It takes some negotiating. They lay out the sleeping bag and first Snow then Katniss lie on it, their feet both shoved in the end. He reclines first, his arm spread to accommodate her, and Katniss arranges her body in its crook in a fetal position, facing away from him.

'Miss Everdeen, I do not think I can reach the zip. My injuries make it difficult to bend.'

Katniss nods and reaches down for the zip and, slowly, awkwardly, works it up the length of the sleeping bag. With insanity and with warmth, she feels the length of Snow's body curl against her as the bag presses them together. His chest against her back, his legs against hers, his mouth and nose inches from her neck.

'Is this alright, Miss Everdeen?' His breath is an immediate warm rush over her ear.

She takes a deep breath. She's done this with Peeta. She's done it with Prim. It's not all that strange.

This is the most insane thing I have ever done in my life, she thinks.

'It's alright,' she says.

'Please tell me if you want to separate,' he says, and Katniss shivers with the warmth of his words over her skin.

It is quiet and dark. She feels his heartbeat, she feels his breath. She feels life vibrate against her. She feels warm. And though it pains her to admit it, though it's insane, though she still dreams of him trying to kill her, she feels safe. Snow holds her, and she feels safe.

'Snow?'

'Yes?'

She takes a thin breath, cooled by one snow and warmed by another. 'You promise you're not going to hurt me?'

His own breath gusts over her ear. 'I promise, Miss Everdeen. You are safe. I have never lied to you. I promise you are safe.'

The imprint of his arm around her abdomen almost burns her. His breath might as well be her own. His thighs and hers are flush and hot together.

Somehow, among all this, Katniss falls asleep.

Katniss' arm hurts.

This fact wakes her and she immediately shifts and tries to sit up, but the sleeping bag holds her firmly cocooned. She struggles like a bound insect, panicking in her half-asleep state, but then she wriggles free of the mouth of the bag and the feeling returns to her pinned-and-needled arm that she's been sleeping on all night.

'Are you alright, Miss Everdeen?'

She looks behind her. There he is. Snow. He is still ensconced within the sleeping bag. Their legs are together, her feet against his, the sharp point of his kneecap against her calf. His hair is all over the place. She notices that a long strand of her own dark brown hair has become entangled in his silver-white. She wants to pluck it off but resists.

'My arm went to sleep,' she says. 'It's fine now.' She scratches her head and rubs her face and yawns. 'Did you sleep okay?'

Snow is silent for a moment as he considers this. 'I slept eventually,' he says at last.

'Did I keep you up?'

Again, he is silent. 'My thoughts kept me awake.'

Katniss smiles at him, touched by something in his strangeness and softness. Snow smiles back. The first time he touched her, brushing her hair aside at her coronation, she was flushed with terror like she had been drugged. How exhausting it is to feel terror. How did she manage to feel so afraid of him for so long? How did her body not simply fall apart with the weight of it?

'Do you think you might be ready for travel today?' she asks.

'If we are slow and gentle, yes, I am.'

She smiles. She can be slow and gentle with him, if she has to be. What choice does she have?

From the moment they leave the tent Katniss knows the journey will be hard. Snow does not help her take down the tent or pack up the cooking supplies because this would involve bending and he isn't yet capable of that. Katniss stuffs his pack inside hers, as both are nearly empty now their supplies are almost exhausted. She can carry all the weight herself if she needs to. Snow has to focus on staying upright.

Their travel is through snow and hills and endless, dark, unfriendly trees. Snow never complains; he walks slowly but surely, his steps heavy, his breathing carefully even, but Katniss has long learned how to read his expressions of pain. She insists they make regular stops and she knows from the way Snow always nods and acquiesces and immediately sits that his wounds are making this a gradual agony.

They walk and they rest, they rest and they walk. Her feet grow numb, then her nose and her ears, then her hands. They only cover seven miles before the forest starts to dim with dusk and Katniss tries to hide her panic. Not even a third of the way there.

The evening rhythm is familiar. Tent. Fire. Food. Snow at her side. Too exhausted to speak. Sliding now together into the sleeping bag, zipping it high. Snow's big, broad chest against her back, his heartbeat a little fast at first. Does it make him anxious to sleep against her like this? Is there something about her small cold body that frightens him? Which of them wants to eat the other?

She accustoms to the weight of Snow's arm around her waist, his wrist against her stomach, his fingers trying not to touch her. Breath on her neck. Blood-smell. The occasional soft scratch of his beard, the soft fur of it, like a fox. She nestles into the warmth and inside her there is fear, but not of him. Only of the cold beyond, of the black trees, of endless white snow and skies. Where is Spring? Will they die in the ice and the dark?

'Miss Everdeen?' His voice rumbles through her bones.

'Snow?'

'Everything is going to be alright.'

She shudders against him from something inexplicable and feels him jolt, then they both settle down in their soft burrow. Sweat-scent. Slow motion of a breathing chest against her back. Her legs curled around his. His thighs and hers, folded together. Warmth. Safety. This man, she thinks, has killed thousands. If they freeze and they die and their skeletons are found in some future century, what will people think they were?

They travel for two more days before they run out of food. They gather nettles in damp clumps from the slush-wet forest floor and make soup, and this is all they have to eat beside the chocolate. Katniss regards the stinging nettles and their nasty little biting hairs. How strange that life and sustenance can be found in something that can also bring such pain.

Her thoughts get confused. Hunger wears her down, rubbing at her feet and her spirit and her mind, but Snow persists. He is tired, yes, and in pain, yes, but he does not stop without her suggestion. He greets her each hungry morning with a smile and he wishes her goodnight as he rests his arm around her. Katniss thinks of Prim. She used to hold her sister against her like she was a precious, trembling thing. How easily the warm cherished things in life slip through your fingers…

In the middle of the night, waking from a nightmare of hunger, Katniss pants and trembles in Snow's arms and tries to remember where she is. For a long time she thinks she is in the Games. Is it Peeta beside her? Rue? Her sister?

'I don't want to die,' she says, voice slurred, thoughts a panicked jumble.

'You won't die,' says the low, sleepy voice beside her, and she remembers that it is Snow. 'I will not allow it.'

And she sleeps again.

When she wakes, her stomach churns and shouts at her for food, but she has nothing to give to it. She lies in the slow, grey dawn in Snow's arms and she knows he is awake, that he must be feeling the bite of hunger worse than she. Her arm, she realizes, is resting atop his. It does not bother her. His quiet breathing tells her he is awake.

'We can get to the cabin today,' she says, staring into the vast orange nothing of the side of the tent. 'If we try really hard, we can get there.'

Behind her, she hears Snow swallow and she hears the soft sandy friction of his face and beard moving against her. 'Yes. We can do it.'

'I'm so hungry.'

Snow's voice is so low that it feels like it comes from her own heart. 'I wish I had something for you to eat.'

She lets out a long sigh. 'Could kill and eat you.'

Snow's laugh vibrates through her. 'Indeed you could. I would not stop you.'

They rise and take down the camp. Snow helps a little. He is healing, but slowly. No energy. No food. Not enough rest. Too many inches of deep white cold to trudge through. As they push through the gorgeous, deadly blanket of snow, a new and terrible thought occurs to Katniss.

If I die out here, Haymitch will think Snow killed me.

How unfair that would be, when Snow wants so much to keep her alive.

Through numbness and ice and hunger, through hills and through endless heavy pines, Katniss' thoughts pursue strange avenues. She looks for game and finds nothing, seeing instead faces in bark, movements that aren't real. Memories jostle in her mind with the nausea of hunger. She thinks about Snow. She wishes they were in his warm, rosy greenhouse together. She could make a pillow of rose petals. Perhaps Prim would be there too, playing in the flowerbeds. Snow could tell them stories.

Katniss is jerked from her reverie when Snow suddenly, with total unexpected volume and triumph, exclaims, 'There!'

She looks. Yes, there. Ahead, between the trees in a small and barren clearing, is a cabin. She has never seen a more solitary, forsaken place. The ghost of a building. Broken branches cushion the roof. One window has been smashed. It looks dead. It does not look like shelter. It does not look like salvation.

Katniss becomes sure that they are going to die. Snow will die too and it will all be her fault. He will die first and then she will have to cut him up and eat him to try to keep herself alive. Acid and bile soak her tongue.

But when she looks at Snow, he has a smile for her of silver and gold.

'Don't look so despondent,' he says. 'It only needs a fresh coat of paint. Come along.'

Katniss follows in his quickened footsteps. If nothing else, perhaps it will be a soothing place to die. Dying with Snow once seemed a terrible insult, but now she doesn't mind the idea so much. He could sing her to sleep as she drifted away, like her father used to do.

Up close, the cabin looks in slightly better shape. The roof is still in one piece, the door is still on its hinges. Katniss tries not to let herself hope for anything. Snow pushes open the door and the scent of must hits them both, and they step inside.

It is a bare, unhomely place, and small; fifteen feet by ten, perhaps. The short wall to the right holds two metal cot beds with a stove between them. At the other end of the room is a basic kitchen. In the middle, a table with two chairs bears a radio that Katniss doubts will ever work again. She cannot see any food.

Snow appraises their surroundings. 'The good news is, no one has been here in decades. Coin might not know about it.' He toes the skeleton of some unfortunate animal that chose this as its final resting place. Then he goes to the kitchen and opens the cabinets.

Food. Katniss breathes a huge, ecstatic sigh of relief. Cans and cans of food: soups and vegetables and meats, and salt and spices. Each label is featureless and white, bearing only the name of the contents and a very old version of the Capitol symbol, harder and spikier, one that was used during the Dark Days. The cans say things like 'MIXED VEGETABLES' and 'PORK MEAT' in dull capitals. She runs to join Snow and pulls out two cans at random, examining them in delight.

'Food!' she says unnecessarily.

Snow looks perfectly content. 'Yes, Miss Everdeen. Long expired, but edible. The Capitol designs its military food to last.'

Katniss can't shake her smile from her face. 'Snow, we're not going to die.'

He looks at her, into her, into her eyes and her thoughts and into her mouth and along her hands, which clutch those cans with white knuckles and filthy fingernails.

'We will not die,' he says. 'You will be safe. Just as I promised.' For a moment he simply smiles at her, his smile not quite fixed, and then Katniss notices he is swaying slightly. He releases a huge breath. 'Miss Everdeen, if you don't mind, I'm going to take some morphling and rest for a moment.' He pauses briefly. 'I am in a huge amount of pain.'

She blinks at him. 'Of course.' There is a brief moment in which nothing happens, and then Snow collapses. Katniss lurches, grabbing him, somehow taking his weight through sheer determination alone, and then she walks him over to a dusty, bare cot bed. Snow says nothing as she moves him, nor as she unpacks the morphling, nor as she carries it to him. He remains silent and unmoving even when she has it held out. His eyes, the only alive parts of him, seek hers. He parts his lips.

Understanding, Katniss loads up the pipette and places two drops on his tongue.

'Thanks,' he says, and that is all he says.

He falls instantly asleep.

Carefully, Katniss checks his bandages but everything seems to be in place, and nothing has bled through. She hopes his exhaustion is just cold and starvation. They have almost nothing to fight sepsis.

Just cold and starvation is plenty to kill an old man, she reminds herself.

Katniss lays the sleeping bag over his cold, pallid body, and then she investigates the cabin, looking for fuel or anything of use. She peers behind a narrow door in the opposite wall and it reveals a disused washroom. A metal bathtub hags from the ceiling and a cracked commode provides the best toilet she's seen in a month. There is even some kind of flushing system.

Katniss gathers wood. Everything is wet and slimy with ice. Coaxing a fire into life takes almost an hour, but once she has shut the old glass door of the stove she feels something relax inside her. It feels like they're in a real place. Somewhere that isn't made of endless trees. Still the wilds, but friendlier. Perhaps they will not die.

She sits on the other cot bed, the stove in between them, and she breathes and lets herself rest for a few moments. Snow's sleep is deep. He looks tired and pale but she thinks — she hopes — that all he needs is rest.

From the piles of old canned goods, Katniss assembles a mess of a meal: pork, mixed vegetables, and some kind of pasta all stirred together in the saucepan. Her stomach gnaws on her insides as she cooks but she forces herself to wait until she has spooned it all out into two bowls she finds in the cupboards, added spoons, then filled two dusty glasses with clean water. A proper meal. Real, domestic cooking.

Playing housewife for the man who killed almost everyone you know, comes that nasty voice again, and Katniss hopes that food will make it go away.

She sets the meal on the stovetop and gently shakes Snow's shoulder. 'Snow? It's dinner. Can you wake up?'

Snow's sleep-ridden face crumples in displeasure and he mutters something about tigers.

Katniss bites back a smile. 'Is it lions or tigers today?'

Snow's eyes, drowsy blue and unfocused, struggle to find hers. 'Katniss?' He blinks and the eyes focus. 'Miss Everdeen?'

She tweaks her eyebrows at him, then inclines her head to the steaming bowl beside him. 'It's dinner time.'

With several slow, deliberate blinks, Snow is awake again. He pushes himself up and takes the bowl, and together he and Katniss settle in for a silent, voracious meal. The hot fire insinuates itself into her and she feels her bones warm up, aching back into life, and her head throbs with a migraine as her body allows itself to feel pain once again. For a long time, neither speaks. They eat slowly but ravenously, each pacing themselves, each aware they could make themselves sick from eating so much after such deprivation. But, oh, it feels good to eat, and to be warm, and to feel protected and safe in this broken down cabin.

'This is excellent,' says Snow, scraping the bowl. There is a slightly off-kilter rhythm to his words, a roving cheer that Katniss suspects has been induced more by the morphling than the food. 'Government ration pork. I used to love this when I was a boy.'

'I can't imagine you as a child.'

Snow chews and swallows. 'I was a lot like I am now. Only smaller.'

Katniss cracks a smile. Maybe she could get used to morphling-Snow. 'Are you feeling better?'

'Immensely. The painkillers help. Though I do despise them.'

'I might take some too,' she says and then, after some hesitation, she pulls off her boots. Snow's eyes fix idly on her feet as she peels off those filthy, sweat-browned socks and bares her frostbitten toes.

'Oh, Miss Everdeen,' says Snow, and he sounds truly crestfallen. He casts the bowl aside without a thought and drops to his knees in front of her. 'You should have told me,' Snow murmurs, and without asking he reaches for her foot. She yanks it up onto the bed, out of his reach, and he looks at her in bemusement. 'Miss Everdeen, let me examine it.'

'Why?' she says, defensive and accusatory. 'It's not like you have medical training.'

'Yes, I do,' Snow protests. 'I took classes at university, and I studied basic field medicine with the Peacekeepers. Why do you think I'm so good at stitching?' He points at her foot as though it has committed some great transgression. 'That is frostbite. It needs to be treated, else it might progress to gangrene. Have you ever seen what gangrene does to a person?'

'More than once.' Miners got it sometimes. Standing around in stagnant water made the skin go bad. Made it rot. Those who ignored it could lose their feet. She's watched her mother perform amputations before. They were not pleasant.

'I saw gangrene in the Peacekeepers,' says Snow, and there is a morphling-mad flicker in his eyes. 'I had to cut a man's foot off with a hacksaw.' He chops the side of his hand down on his own knee and makes a sawing motion and Katniss watches the mime with quiet terror. 'I don't want to have to do that to your toes, Miss Everdeen.' An expression of great crisis grips his face. 'They're very important.'

Katniss chews her lip. 'Well, what do we do?'

Snow pushes himself upright again and raises an instructional finger. 'It shall need debriding.'

'What?'

'Cutting away the dead flesh. But that can wait until tomorrow, after it has been rewarmed. And I am not in a fit state to perform a delicate medical procedure right now.' He runs a hand through his hair and blinks with slow intent. 'I do so despise morphling.'

He fetches snow in a saucepan, brings this to a boil, then removes it from the stove and adds some of the medical alcohol. He waits for it to cool and then places it on the floor.

'Miss Everdeen, you must place your feet in that.'

Slowly, reluctantly, Katniss angles her feet and sinks them into the hot water. At first, she feels nothing. Then she feels pain. She hisses and clenches her teeth as her numbed extremities begin to warm, and she tries to think about anything else.

'This will take about half an hour,' he says. His voice is sounding a little more steady as the morphling wears off. 'Try to remain still.'

'I'm doing the best I can,' she says through her teeth.

The pain reaches a highpoint and crests, and then as her feet warm it evens out, and after ten minutes or so it's only a low hum, like angry bees in her toes. The frostbitten toes, strangely, hurt far less. She can't feel anything at all in them.

That's because they're dead, says a voice in her head. You were stubborn and stupid and ignored the problem, and now your toes have died.

'Are your feet okay?' asks Katniss.

Snow shrugs. 'A fair question. They're not numb, so I imagine so. I will check in a moment.'

After Snow deems her feet sufficiently warm, he instructs her to lie down and makes a pile from their packs to prop up her ankles.

'Do you know how much you'll need to cut off?'

'There is some cyanosis on the left foot,' says Snow, his face close to her feet. 'The right looks like it should recover. For now, we just have to wait twenty-four hours and then reassess. Some of the dying flesh might heal now it's been warmed up. Whatever remains black tomorrow, we will cut away. You need to stay put.'

'What, just lie here?'

Snow crosses to the other bed and sits, then starts undoing his boots. 'Yes, Miss Everdeen. You cannot put pressure on the affected digits. Or, indeed, expose them to contaminants.'

'How am I supposed to go to the toilet?' she says, still accusatory.

Snow smiles and rolls his eyes, pulling off his boot. 'Walk on your heels.'

Katniss sighs, exasperated, then falls back on the bed. 'I am already bored.'

'Try to rest and heal.' He glances around the cabin. 'There should be blankets for these beds.'

After a short search, he locates a couple in the cabinets and brings them to the cot beds. Katniss helps him spread one over the bed (hers first, of course), a little wobbly as she balances on her heels. Snow tucks it carefully around each edge. Amused, she stands out of the way to let him complete this utterly unnecessary exercise. She helps with the blanket on the other bed, too, and makes a token attempt to tuck one of the corners. It looks so lopsided.

Lying down on the bed makes it very difficult to want to do anything else, and soon she isn't interested in or capable of much more than watching Snow turn to treat his own wounds. He removes his sweater and hangs this by the fire, then unbuttons his bloody shirt and examines the dressings. They have bled through a little, perhaps with walking, or perhaps with crouching down before her. His skin is softest at the waist, sagged and rolled with age, and she notices the dimpled ripples in his chest where the skin is no longer taut.

Snow's fingers move precisely in unpeeling the dressings. Then he takes the alcohol and unscrews it, his thumb and forefinger big around the little cap, and then he douses some cotton and rubs delicately at his oozing wounds. His movements are slow. The travel, the starvation, and the pain have physically wrecked him, but he is so persistent. She cannot help but be impressed by his ability to overrule his physical needs. There is a soldier buried in there somewhere, as well as the President who killed so many people she knew.

'Miss Everdeen,' he says, his voice tactful. 'Would you mind if I remained shirtless? One of my shirts is covered in blood and half torn to pieces, and the other is filthy. I'm concerned about infection.'

She shakes her head. 'I don't mind. My mother was a healer. I've seen plenty of injured men with their shirts off.'

But none like you, she doesn't say.

When it is dark and the cabin is lit only by the low light of the stove, Snow heaves himself from the bed and locates some old, dusty biscuits he calls 'tack' and they take a light supper, making conversation about the cabin and its supplies, and whether or not he can fix the radio.

'I saw a tin bath in the water closet,' says Katniss. 'I haven't had a proper bath in weeks.'

'A bath would be wonderful,' he muses. 'Although this cabin offers little privacy.'

Katniss regards the space between the cots before the fire, where the bath would naturally go so you could keep warm by the stove. Maybe if one of them sat at the table with their back turned, the other could have some privacy. Hardly ideal, but she doesn't really care. The idea of a hot bath tomorrow makes her skin glitter with delight.

'We'll figure something out,' she says.

Exhausted and aching for sleep, Katniss glances around the cabin and wonders how she is supposed to change. The only privacy is the dimness of the firelight. She considers making Snow face the other way, but what's the point? So little of their bodies now remain a mystery to one another. Snow's injuries have stripped him of his privacy and she has bared her scars willingly.

Hesitantly, Katniss removes her outer shirt and hangs it over the stove, then unhooks her bra and tucks it inside that. Now, in just her loose t-shirt and pants, and sockless for the first time in weeks, she feels a bit more comfortable.

'I can't believe we're still alive,' she says, staring at the rotting ceiling. 'I can't believe I'm relying on you to keep me alive.'

'No more than I rely on you, Miss Everdeen.'

'Must be strange,' she murmurs, sleepy and food-full. 'Me of all people saving your life.'

'You saved my life many times, Miss Everdeen. Before all of this, even when we were at war, you were saving my life.'

She turns her head to him, confused in her sleepiness. 'What?'

What a sparkling smile he offers her, this shirtless old man she has dragged across the country. 'I had no purpose in my life before I met you. I did my job, yes, but I had long grown disillusioned with it. The country seemed a… failed experiment.' His expression glows. 'And then I met you, and I was challenged again. Stimulated. I would not have lived as long as I have if it wasn't for the joy of our battle.' His smile grows soft and small. 'And after, once you had defeated me, all I had to live for was the chance of seeing you again. But here you are. I can see you every day.' His eyes flick elsewhere and he nods to himself, decisive and sure. 'You saved my life.'

Katniss stares. 'Oh,' she says. 'Snow…' she tries, and she trails off. What can she possibly ask? What is wrong with you? Why do you like me? More importantly, why is she no longer able to hate him? 'Well,' she says at last. 'Goodnight.'

Snow inclines his head in her direction, and there is a soft smile there. 'Goodnight, Miss Everdeen.'

Lying on the bare cot, warm by the fire, she glances at her sleeping companion. It's strange not to have his body pressed against her, like some big part of her own body has been severed. But he is not far, not so very far away at all. She could reach out and touch him, if she needed to. They are safe. They are warm. They are alive. She and her cargo, shepherd and lamb.

No, he's no lamb, she thinks sleepily. Wolf. I am a wolfherd.

She looks at Snow's profile in repose, content and on the edge of sleep — content because he has food and the fire, yes. But more than anything, content because he has her.

My wolf.