A/N: Thank you for the welcome to the fandom! I also want to give a big thank you to my sister, who made sure I read/watched THG and encouraged me to post this story. I hope you all enjoy the conclusion to the story (even if hijacked!Peeta breaks your heart as much as mine!).

It's cold in the cell. He curls into a ball and shivers. Warmth is a distant memory that seems more dreamlike every time he reaches for it.

Johanna screams and her skin smells scorched and Peeta recites recipes to try to drown her out.

Annie rocks and rocks and rocks, her hands over her ears, and there is sweat on her brow.

Darius falls all to pieces between shattered glimpses of flames and arrows and mutts and Peeta can do nothing to help him (useless, useless, forgotten and left behind, so many more don'ts for loved ones, if anyone cared about him at all).

Peeta shakes and blows shuddering breaths over his numb fingers and speaks to the others in the dark and tries to keep himself sane.

They fill his veins with acid. The room spins and glows. Katniss appears and then disappears, submerged beneath images of mutts and nightlock berries and betrayal. Snow talks to him, and Peeta tries so incredibly hard to concentrate, to plan, to be smart and cunning and manipulative (to be docile and compliant and charming, because that is his part to play, it is all he is good for), but it is so cold and he cannot think with ice limning his flesh and frost forming over his oozing scabs.

He is taken from his cell after eternities of horror pass, and Portia is there to dress him (there is grief in her eyes and bruises on her skin and heat in her kiss to his cheek; Be strong, she tells him, but they are both just remembering who they used to be and playing long-outdated parts). He clings to the warmth of her kindness, to the fact that he is still remembered by someone. He talks to Caesar—once, twice, maybe again, he cannot remember, everything is blurry and fuzzy and dim around the edges. Except when he is in his cell, writhing at the liquid acid alive beneath his sallow skin, begging them to stop hurting Johanna, stop hurting Darius, he doesn't know anything, just leave them alone, don't touch Annie, she's innocent, she's harmless, oh, please, stop, just let us die! Then, in those moments (those long, agonizing eternities) everything is too bright, too glossy, too sharp, too painful.

He huddles in a corner of his cell and covers his ears, and he knows but does not care that he looks like Annie (except she has sweat beading on her face, and he's so jealous, so envious, that she gets to be warm and he is locked in this frozen tundra).

He is taken from his cell (he'd almost forgotten there is anything outside his private hell), and Portia is there to dress him again, and she cries when she sees him. Her tears drip, drip, drip on his skin, and he cries, too, because these tiny drops are so warm they burn (and he is so criminally selfish, secretly wanting her to cry and cry and cry until she covers him in her tears and he is warm again). He hugs her, ignoring their bruises and wounds and broken bones (and he's so glad he did, because she probably needed kindness as much as he did, more even since she was shot in the head just days later).

"Thank you," he whispers, and only she could know just exactly how much he is thanking her for.

He cannot stand. They prop him up on a stool (he wants to laugh; he's always been a prop for others to use, and nothing's changed, even now when he cannot even recognize himself in the mirror). Snow stands nearby (too close, too close, too close; cold emanates from him, tinged with the scent of blood and tainted with the absence of color).

There's a script (he remembers talking about the Hunger Games, about his soul, remembers bargaining for Katniss's life, remembers feeling dirty and used; he remembers being afraid of the rebellion that played them all like pawns; remembers a warning; remembers Caesar's sad eyes as they led Peeta back to his frigid cell), and he tries to follow it. (He remembers guards talking and Snow taunting and the remnants of his once quick mind piecing clues together.) He stutters, searching for that eloquence people told him he possessed. (He remembers a girl, warm against his heart, sobbing so that her tears fell like tiny little drops of flames against his shirt, screaming until he soothed her back to sleep.) He follows Snow's cues, and tries not to earn any more pain for Johanna and Annie—and Darius? no, Darius is dead now, gone forever because Peeta isn't smart enough, isn't strong enough, isn't enough. (He remembers a girl on fire, and a girl in the rain, and a girl in a sunbeam, and a girl on a beach, and a girl who painted warmth against his flesh and etched ice into his heart.)

The screen in front of him flickers, and there's the girl there, standing in the ashes of a wasteland.

She's real.

(He remembers.)

Katniss.

Then he speaks, a warning, a cry, a threat, and he is not cold anymore. He is on fire. He is burning. He is consumed and given up in immolation.

The boots striking his flesh spark pain that roars. The hands that form fists against his bones ignite aches that growl. The prods and the clubs and the tasers send lightning arcing across his form so that he can feel the dimensions of his body in agonizing relief. The needles come out, and the acid eats him from the inside out. (And he is still so very cold, the pain only taunting him with the promise of heat and never delivering, and he screams in betrayal.)

(He remembers a girl, and he remembers a boy, watching, watching, watching, until the girl took his hand and held it up before the crowds and laid him down as a sacrifice. He remembers her dress, sparkling with flames as she set the boy on fire atop his alter, and he only laid there and watched her, and a mockingjay flew above them and he died with the smell of burned bread clogging his nostrils.)

He remembers.

And then he doesn't.

His cell fills with a sickly sweet scent. Peeta breathes in and out evenly, letting it lull him, waiting for the beating that will surely come. People in strange uniforms enter his cell and stop when they see him, exchanging glances and muffled words he doesn't care to interpret.

Peeta, they say. Peeta Mellark.

"Please," he says (he is long past caring about the indignity of begging). "Please, I don't want to be cold anymore."

They talk over his head (they always do, no matter who the they is) and then lift him up. He thinks he screams. He notices the sweat sheening the skin of the man carrying him, and then he falls into a frozen lake that closes over his head.

Maybe he only dreamed up the idea of warmth. Maybe there is only cold and hurt and Snow (and a mutt who wants to kill him). Maybe there has never been anything else.

After all, if there's one thing he still knows, it's that he's always dreamed too big.

Peeta's gone. Peeta's gone. Peeta's gone.

They serve her food. She does not eat it. There is no bread.

They pump her full of morphling. She welcomes it. It makes everything they force-feed her tasteless.

Time passes and she has to wake and move and interact with people. She hugs Prim, even hugs her mom because she cannot summon up reasons not to, and then she hides. They tell her where to go, they tattoo it onto her very skin (like Capitolites, etching their differences onto their skin, coloring their flesh with their ideologies), and she lets the purple stain her arm, then ignores it without a second thought.

Peeta is gone.

The revolution is here, they tell her. You're the Mockingjay. (She can always hear the capital letter when they talk to her; they put so much faith in this symbol. Too bad their Mockingjay burned up in the 75th arena and all they got out were her bare, starved bones.) She stares at them blankly and waits until they let her leave, and then she finds a dark corner to hide in and wait to die.

(She thought she was going to starve to death once before, she remembers, and when she had huddled in a small ball in a dark place, next to a bare apple tree, a boy with blue eyes and blonde hair and too much kindness had found her. He'd looked at her, and he'd seen her, and he'd saved her. So she huddles up in dark places and waits to die; she waits for her boy with the bread to find her, and look at her, and save her.

But there is no boy with the bread anymore. He's gone. She left him behind, like she always does, and this time he's not coming back. He's dead, and if he's not, he should be, she wants him to be, it's so much better than the alternative.)

She walks beneath graveyards, walks on top of them (and nearly screams at the injustice when Prim's stupid cat is alive and Peeta's family is gone, he's gone, it's not fair, why should Buttercup survive when her dandelion is burned to a crisp?), but can never find a place to lay her own bones down. She cannot find Peeta either, no gravestone to mark his passing, no coffin to grieve over, nothing but regret and self-loathing and never-ending hunger.

Prim sleeps beside her and her mother murmurs soft things and Gale watches her back and Finnick looks as lost as she feels, and Katniss does not care. Peeta is gone. She's a survivor, but surviving isn't enough on its own (she knew that before, recognized it in the first Games, standing beside a Cornucopia and looking at a boy offer to bleed out for her and bare his own heart for her aim; she knew she couldn't go home without him or she'd be trapped forever trying to find a way out, and now she knows how right she is, because she's trapped—they rescued her, but they left him behind, and she still might as well be in that broken, burned arena).

Then the screen comes alive with Peeta's face, and he is moving, he is speaking, he is breathing, and suddenly Katniss is alive again (still starving, still wasting away, but breathing). He's alive, he's healthy (he's in Snow's clutches, he's a captive, he's in so much danger!), and he does not hate her. She can see his love (his forgiveness; his unconditional acceptance; his sacrifice), when he looks at the camera, when he paints them a picture with her as the innocent star, when he says her name (like he always does; like it's the best word in the entire language; like it's almost more than he should be allowed to say, as if his voice doesn't make it better than it ever could be on its own). He still loves her, and he's still in the Games, and she is not the only one trapped in the arena.

So she becomes their Mockingjay (for Peeta). She fights in their revolution (for Peeta). She pays her debts in costumes and scripts and danger (for Peeta, because nothing has changed, everything is the same as their first Games, when she played a part with Haymitch coaching her and Peeta pretended to side with the Careers to keep her safe from dangers she didn't know enough to be wary of) so that one day, when the war is over, Peeta will be safe (he makes his deals for her safety, and she makes hers for his, and he is a thousand miles away but they are still allies, still partners, still in this together, and she can all but feel his hand threaded through hers).

They dress her as a bird, and they dress him as a Victor, and together, they are puppets, dancing on the strings of tyrants.

"Do you really trust the people you're working with?" he asks her, and she doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't, because Gale is a stranger and Prim is absent and Finnick is crazy and Peeta is hurt (his painter's hands shake, and his bright eyes dart aimlessly, and his merchant skin is bruised beneath makeup, and Katniss hates them all, the Capitol for doing this to someone so good and District 13 for letting them do it and naming him traitor). She doesn't, but it doesn't matter, because this is the only way to save him (and when the people in the District 8 hospital ask about him, she hides her tears of gratitude that someone else cares and she tells them he will be fine and wills them to convince her of it in turn).

She doesn't trust, but she hopes. It's stupid and meaningless and she should know better, but Peeta is alive and there is bread (dull and crunchy and so far inferior to Peeta's that she almost feels guilty calling it bread and not-burned, but it's there nonetheless) and she cannot be the Mockingjay without hope. Hope that they will save Peeta, that his constant, steady strength will help him endure until she can reach him, that he will wrap his arms around her and chase all the nightmares of reality away as easily and softly as he did the others.

Then Snow parades him before them all (alone, without a hand to hold or someone else to offer to tear his flames away before they can burn him, without anyone else at all; he is so alone, just like after the first Games, only worse, so much worse), and he is slow and dull and stammering (and Katniss feels her heart crack, brittle and sharp enough to pierce her every time she breathes in). The makeup cannot cover up the agony, the script cannot explain away the aimless pauses, and Katniss's stupid, inexperienced hope cannot get past the madness in his eyes.

(But his words, so few, so important, so valuable, are as crucial and life-saving and illuminating as they always have been. Still, again, always, he saves her…at the cost of his own blood, his own pain, his own heart.)

His blood is red. His cries of pain are hoarse. His body falls onto a floor so white, as white as the canvases he always covered with so many vibrant colors (and she hates that he is surrounded by white, this boy who was alone for half a year and then chose to ask, as his first question, what her favorite color is, who loves a shade that can only be described through poetry, who comforted a dying woman with verbal color all the shades of a rainbow).

Bombs fall from the sky, lights flash over cats, ropes wear blisters in her skin, and all Katniss can see is red, red, red, on white floor, white skin, white rose.

You love him, Finnick says, and Katniss doesn't know why it matters, because he's still gone. He's still bleeding and crying and hurting and whether she loves him or not will not change that.

He's gone, and it's been so long since he hugged her, so when she flies to Haymitch's arms, she tries to pretend they are Peeta's. But they're not. They're not sturdy enough, not steady enough, not warm enough, not strong enough. Not enough.

But they are all she has, this and the pearl (the locket, the memories, the taste of bread, the void in her heart; her very life). So she clings to him, and she sobs, and she wishes she could switch places with Peeta (she'd do anything to take his place, to have him be the one Coin pulled from the arena and herself in that white cell, trapped with the stench of blood and roses suffocating her). The roses, pink and red (for the Star-Crossed Lovers, only there's only one now, and the other half doesn't need the roses when his blood is serving instead), tossed over the remains of District 13, just like Peeta's blood was scattered across those white floors and that transparent camera lens.

When she wakes up, Haymitch tells her they're going to rescue Peeta (going to get him, as easily as Katniss got Buttercup, scooped up and carelessly deposited in a bag to take back to his owner, as if it is nothing, as if it is merely an afterthought).

"Why didn't we before?" she asks, and Haymitch has no answer (not a real one, not a good one, not one that matters, because this is Peeta and how dare they not do everything to get him back before his blood was used as paint to cover up an empty canvas?).

She waits, and ties knots, and tries to remember the taste of his cheese buns.

She waits, and ties knots, and hopes.

But she should know better (she's done it often enough to Peeta): hope never survives. It's always strangled before it can take a breath in the light of the real world.

And she is still so very, very hungry.

She speaks, and tingles prick in his frozen fingertips. (Peeta, she says, and the new sensation hurts, a new form of torture, but when he closes those prickling hands around her throat, it doesn't stop the pain. It makes something deep inside the aching, hollow space behind his breastbone thrash and protest, but that is nothing new, it's been happening for nearly as long as he can remember, and he has to kill her, has to stop her before she can hurt him and everyone else in this place. Only, his hands can't quite close around her slender throat as tightly as they should, and he doesn't know why, it doesn't make sense, but none of this does, and now he knows he will pay for his weakness with his life.)

They put him in a white room with a door that locks, and people come in and out with needles and medicine and tasteless food (and he wonders if anything has changed at all, if he will ever be free or safe, if there is anything outside these white cells except President Snow and Katniss Everdeen). They tell him he is broken, he is damaged, he is crazy (useless, forgotten, left behind; it all amounts to the same thing, him alone, shivering in the dark, scared, so very utterly scared, and so absolutely alone, even more so here than in his last cell).

They tell him Katniss is the Mockingjay, and she is good, and she is a hero, and they only shake their heads and ignore him (why does no one ever listen to him?) when he tries to warn them she is Snow's move to checkmate them all, he's using her, she's a mutt. They're so wrong, so deluded and deceived, and if this is the vaunted rebellion, Peeta is disappointed.

(Later, when he sits across from Dr. Aurelius in the Capitol gathering the jagged shards of his mind and trying to reassemble them into some kind of cohesive shape, he will realize that he is still disappointed in the rebellion, in this District that watched children die and turned a girl into a warrior and screamed for Capitol blood even after the last shot had been fired and the last bomb ignited. Later still, sitting with Haymitch because Katniss is hiding in a closet again and cannot be coaxed out, he tells their mentor that there was a better way, and the old man laughs, and then smirks at Peeta's frown, and then shakes his head almost fondly. You're an idealist, boy, he says, and Peeta looks away as Brutus and Mitchell and two girls, one from District 8 and the other from District 5, rise from the edges of his mind to haunt him, and finally says only, There are far worse things to be.)

Days pass, maybe weeks, maybe years, he doesn't know, they all drag past him, there in a blink, gone in an eternity, suffused in a constant stream of drugs and restraints and short visits from Delly and Prim and Haymitch (and he remembers Johanna and Annie being tossed into his cell every once in a while, remembers Portia's too-thin arms clamped around his aching ribs; he remembers, and he is so very afraid for his friends, but they will not listen to his warnings). They send in doctors, too; Peeta doesn't talk to them. He doesn't see the point. (He didn't talk to the doctors Snow sent in either, and there was no need, since they hardly talked either, only slipped acid through his blood and taped his eyes open to the videos they played, only calmly informed him just what damage electricity or beatings or starvation would do to his fellow captives.)

Katniss doesn't come for a long time (he thinks; he thinks he would remember if she did), but Peeta isn't surprised. Snow almost never came himself either.

The videos are the worst (they were before, too, but for different reasons that he can't always hold onto). She's in them, all over the place, always with him, always hanging onto his hand, leading him around, controlling him, and Peeta's flesh crawls with terror. He wants to save his younger self, wants to reach into those screens and pull out that innocent boy before she can hurt him and leave him alone and strapped to a bed in a white dungeon. But he is powerless. Helpless. Again. Always.

(Always. The word rings like a song, there and gone, a melody that fades.)

Needles dripping acid in one cell; needles dripping hazy sedation in this one. Friends electrocuted and assaulted and tortured in the Capitol; friends who call him crazy and name him mutt and walk away from him here when his hands are shackled and he is flanked by guards and his mind is split down the middle. His family dead by Katniss's hand; his family dead by Snow's command. Nothing really changes. Everything is still the same, bleak and hollow and terrifying. (And he wishes Portia would visit, would look at him as if she remembered him being something more and scorch his skin with her tears and recite the lines that will let them all play the parts that just maybe were more real than any of them ever knew.)

He is tired, so utterly tired. Of being a piece in their games they never explain. Of being lied to. Of not being able to trust what she says, what they say, what they tell him.

Useless. Crazy. Damaged. Forgotten.

Unneeded.

Unwanted.

He asks for pencils, for paints, for flour and oil and dye. He decorates a cake and paints pictures and tries to keep his hands steady. He recites recipes. He asks Delly and Haymitch questions. He lets them drug him up and show him more videos, because he is done with being a victim. He's done being the scared little boy who cowers and flinches and lies about his bruises, who makes up stories and imagines a world where he is loved, who does not expect to ever be saved or bettered.

There is no one else (not for him; never for him).

He will do it himself. He may be crazy, he may be useless, but he will be himself.

(Katniss comes, once, when he asks for her, and he is restrained and he is drugged, and he is so vulnerable, so helpless, and she is not what they told him. She is not the monster Snow said, nor the hero District 13 claims; she's only a girl, and she shrugs aside his pain and his confusion, and she leaves almost immediately, and his memories were correct, after all—there was a girl in the rain and a boy who laid himself down as offering, and she does not care; she is a mockingjay, aloof and flying far above him, leaving him behind, and he can smell the char that equates to beatings and castigation).

(She comes, and she speaks, and her voice wakes his limbs from their frozen stasis. They sting and prickle and begin to burn, black with frostbite but warming so agonizingly slowly. She comes, and he suddenly knows that he did not just imagine warmth.)

One day, they take him from his restraints and his paints and his white, white cell. They dress him in gray and take him outside (and his heart leaps to his throat in elation, in terror, because he is breathing fresh air, he is so vulnerable, she is there) and place a weapon in his hands.

And Peeta is suddenly, abruptly sure that he is in just as much danger now as he was during the Victory Tour (from Snow, from Katniss, from whoever the real enemy is; but this time from Coin and District 13 and whatever plan they expect him to play a part in). They dress him for the scene and place the props in his hand without the script (but if he is crazy enough to be kept in a white room with a locked door, then why are they putting him within sight of their precious Mockingjay with a gun in her hands, and training him for war?).

He's always sedated, when they want him to sleep (maybe other times, too, how can he know?). It's the only way he sleeps through the night, and apparently, Haymitch doesn't bother to tell them about nightmares, or maybe since he doesn't scream and cry, they don't realize that he is trapped in hell every time his eyes are closed. But those nights, after he sees Katniss from afar, he dreams of warmth. He dreams of something hot and small wrapped along his side, holding a fistful of his shirt, breathing against his neck. He dreams of flames licking his skin, and himself hugging it tightly to his chest.

Days pass in a blur of morphling-induced calm and muscle-aching clarity, trapped between his cell and his training. The tingles that awoke when Katniss spoke to him fade, and he slips back into a sort of cool numbness. (But he thinks on her words, and the differing videos shown him by both sets of doctors, and he remembers that a lie is only effective if planted in the truth, and he tries to sort it all out, but it's a sea of confusion, a jungle of entrapping fears, a forest of bleeding wounds.)

Eventually, he asks after Katniss, because if she is the key to his wounded mind, he needs to confront her and label her and sort her facades into memory or delusion. When they tell him she's gone to the Capitol, he goes into a rage (though he doesn't know why, or why he feels abruptly afraid, or why he flashes instantly, painfully cold again). When they take him from his cell and give him a black uniform (to match a Mockingjay's, so that when they stand on stage before the cameras, they will be paired in the eyes of all who see them) and load him on a hovercraft, he wants to cry. He wants to scream. He wants to fight and wound. Because he has been fighting as hard as he possibly can to find himself, to be himself, and none of it matters at all.

Once more, yet again, he is a puppet. A pawn. A piece, moved to counter someone else's play, these giants who rend the earth with war and never care to count the cost.

And here he is, with Katniss once more, an arrow aimed at his heart, confusion in her eyes, and all Peeta has left to cling to is a name they have turned into a title and a home that doesn't even exist anymore.

They hate him. They guard him, waiting until he is the most defenseless so they can strike (can beat and kick and shock and cut and tear and wound). They help him, answering his questions (taking his questions and his confusion and slowly, carefully, unbending them, shaping them, forming them into some kind of pattern).

"You saved a lot of lives," Jackson tells him, and Peeta is so confused it takes him a couple hours of tying knots in Finnick's rope to sort that one out.

Portia's last hug. The hours it had taken her to make him look halfway alive (he wishes he could make her look alive, too, but he doesn't even need to ask to know she is dead, all because of him; because of Cinna and this rebellion and District 13 who didn't rescue her or his prep team or Effie or his family). Snow, so close Peeta could smell the blood-soaked roses. The screen where Katniss walked atop the bones of his family and told him he could never go home again.

The warning he's thought he dreamed giving.

You saved a lot of lives, Jackson said, and the words do not warm him, but they do…something. They make him sit up just a bit straighter. Make it a bit easier to meet the others' eyes. (Useless, powerless, helpless, forgotten, but maybe he is still needed, even just a little bit.)

So he asks another question, this time to Katniss (because if he is needed, then maybe he can be brave, too).

And her words don't just simmer inside him. They explode. They burn. They start that tingling in his hands and move to his arms, from his feet to his legs; sweat sheens on his brow, makes his hands slip on the rope. It's warmth and it comes too quickly, too furiously, roaring up to engulf him. It consumes him so that he almost doesn't even notice Katniss hiding herself away (he thinks, for some reason, that he's used to her running away from him, and that idea astounds him, too, that he can set the hunter to flee; that she is afraid of him).

(Later, in a house in Victor's Village, holed up while storms rage outside the window, he asks her why she chose those specific things to say. Baking and shoelaces and favorite colors? he asks. Why were they so important? He knows why they matter to him, but why did they matter to her? She traces her fingers over his face, along the curve of his brow and the slope of his cheek and the angle of his jaw. Because, she says in that soft, straightforward way he loves, it's you. Everything about you is important.)

He asks, they answer, he tries to make the real answers fit into the constantly shifting landscape of his broken mind. Confusion and exhaustion and terror replaced by resentment and loss, and over it all, an aching loneliness as he sleeps alone where they can all see him, a lunatic on display. But still he asks, and listens, and sorts, and tries to remember who he is (who she is, what she means to him, if she is the girl in the rain and the sunbeam or the girl with the bow and the fire, or some strange mixture of them both).

Useless. All of it. What does any of it even matter?

It's not enough. (He's not enough.)

He's warm. He's not cold, not frozen, and he's breathing in fresh air and he's surrounded by people he thinks could be (are?) friends and he's trying, and none of it matters in the end. None of it saves him (saves an innocent man who was only trying to help and save and protect).

There's gunfire, and explosions, and people running. There's blood, red on white stones, and body parts falling away, and he's back in the cell. He's back in the Games. He's in danger, so much danger, and Katniss is dragging a body behind her, grotesque and violent, and there's a bow in her hand and arrows on her back, and Peeta only wants to save them, these people that are his team, his allies, who answer his questions and tell him he matters.

And he wakes up, and he's staring at another screen, only this video is worse than all the rest put together.

This is a video of him. Feral and savage, terrified and violent. It is a video of him trying to kill a girl and succeeding in killing a man.

He's a monster.

He's a mutt.

He's a murderer.

Death is the only answer, the only solution. He begged for it, in both cells, dreamed of it, courted it, and now it is the only thing to do. The obvious answer to all their problems (to his, so he will not have to look in the mirror and see a murderer looking back; to the team's, so they can accomplish their mission without worrying about being cut down by the boy at their backs; to hers, so she will not have to look at him with that sad, tortured expression and delve up memories that are obviously unwelcome).

(Sometimes, he thinks that everything that went wrong, all the death and the suffering and the distance, can all be traced back to the first mistake: that there were two Victors lifted from the 74th arena. Sometimes, he thinks that he has just been waiting for death to find him, and watching as death takes its revenge for his elusiveness out on everyone else. Sometimes, gripping a chair and trying to sort truth from lie, he thinks that everything would be so much better if he had only died when he was supposed to; if he hadn't failed in even this most basic of tasks. He feels immortal, unkillable, but still so very breakable, and how is that fair? How is that right? But then Katniss curls into him in the night and her screams ease, she sees him in the light of day and her stern lips turn up in a smile, she takes his hand and tells him Real and then Peeta thinks that his life is not a curse, but a miracle.)

But they are just as much his captors as they are his team (and certainly not allies in the Games, because then they would gladly kill one of their fellow tributes; except…except he offered this before, and Katniss…did not take it? She pulled out berries and said Together. No, she pointed her bow at him and left him behind when running to the Cornucopia. Or…he's not sure. If he weren't waiting to die, he'd ask, but there are more important things to consider). They will not kill him. They will not give him even the freedom of a tiny pill clutched in the palm of his hand.

He hates himself. He will not hurt them. They drag him behind them and watch him suspiciously, but he swears to himself that he will help them. If they are in danger, he will be the sacrificial lamb, the distraction, the scapegoat, the diversion, anything they need so long as he does not blink awake again and find that he has broken.

The cold eats him up from the inside out, his entire body fizzling with remnants of acid and hallucination. "Leave me!" he pleads. But she doesn't. She wraps her hands around his wrists, around his hands (he is ablaze). She presses her mouth to his (he is incandescent). She looks straight into his eyes and does not look away (he is as radiant as the sun).

"Stay with me," she begs. (A monster, on her knees begging. A mockingjay repeating back words that sound so very familiar, trapped on the ground, refusing to fly without him. A girl, just an ordinary girl with a braid and a bow, asking him to stay.)

"Always," he says, and for the first time, it does not feel like he is playing a part. It feels as if he is himself. Just Peeta. A Victor. A charmer. A manipulator. A boy in love. Useful, and remembered, and needed.

She bathes his wrists and wraps them tenderly (and how could he have ever believed her to be a mutt?). She shackles him up at his command, reluctant and worried for him (and how could he have ever believed her dangerous?). She lets him have death, cupped in his hand to be used at his own discretion, and begs him not to use it and hugs him (and how could he have ever thought he did not love her?).

She's the girl on fire, warming him from the inside out, bringing him back to life, waking him (the real him) from his enforced stasis.

She's the mockingjay, flying ahead of him, toppling presidents and turning worlds upside down, inspiring him to try to be more, try to be enough to be what she needs.

But in the end, she's just a girl (and he remembers, a red dress, a ray of sun, two braids, a voice to stop the birds singing, and a little boy watching, open-mouthed; he remembers that he loved her before she was ever anything in the eyes of Panem). In the end, she's flesh and blood, muscle and bone, and all of it so very fragile. So very flammable.

The explosions rock the square and send body parts flying and there is blood on his face and his leg isn't working right, but Katniss is on fire. She's literally on fire, flames licking up her back, along her legs and arms, charring her bow…and she isn't moving.

Peeta runs. He's warm, he's hot, he's scorching, there are tongues of fire biting at his heels, blisters bubbling up on his palms as he grabs her and cradles her to his chest (she's so small, so tiny, so helpless; so precious). He rolls her, his body falling on top of hers, and he's always been too close to her, always caught up in her wake, and he barely notices when the fire caresses his face, devours his Capitol disguise and black uniform. He only knows that Katniss is hurt, she's dying, she's fading, and he's supposed to be protecting her. He's supposed to keep her from going out.

But she's always been the girl on fire. And he? He's always been the boy watching from too far away (too close; not close enough).

So she burns. And he burns with her.

At breakfast, there is toast, sitting there on her plate next to the eggs. Bread browned (but not blackened) and covered with a thin amount of precious butter. Across from her, sitting at the table, is Peeta.

She cannot stop herself from flicking her eyes between the bread and the boy with the bread (if he still is that boy). He doesn't say much. His eyes dart up, then dart away (like a young boy in school; like a Victor at a vote to bring back the Hunger Games). He stays in his seat, his arms held closely to his sides; he makes no sudden movements, and aside from a few pleasantries to Sae, stays mostly silent. Katniss aches to see him like this, so controlled, so wary (so afraid), but he is here, and before he leaves, he gives her a small, tentative smile.

(He planted primrose bushes in her sister's honor, and he brings bread every day, and his smiles grow warmer, his stays longer, and she remembers the hug in Tigris's shop, his arms steadying around her. She remembers someone dragging her from the flames of her sister's pyre. She remembers a boy, damaged and hurt beyond all repair, voting No! immediately, without hesitation, gentleness and goodness flaring in those horrified eyes. She remembers her teeth biting into a calloused hand, and two simple words that make her hope for a miracle.)

It took him eleven years to speak to her the first time. It took Cinna and Haymitch and Hunger Games and burned bread to make her pretend to be friends with him. It took him sacrificing his life over and over and over again (to public scrutiny, to lies, to Careers, to a blade, to infection, to blood loss, to starvation, to hundreds of things he could have avoided if he weren't trying to save her) and berries and a rebellion to get them engaged. It took losing him for her to realize how much she needs him.

So they go slow. Tentative. Simple. Like the days when her ankle was hurt, when he carried her up and down the stairs and sat beside her and sketched, and she could not look away from him and she began waiting for him to come back as soon as he left and dreading when he'd have to go as soon as he arrived.

He brings her bread, and when he remembers how to make them and what they mean to her, he brings her cheese buns. He sits with her at meal times (and it makes her think of that first time she and Gale brought back meat for District 13, how there was something different about the meals when people actually enjoyed them). He smiles when she brings him squirrels back from her cautious hunting forays. He begins to talk to her, a little at a time, sometimes ending with real or not real? and waiting for her to answer.

(But he listens to whatever she says, and he nods. He trusts her. He chooses to trust her, and maybe he is not the boy with the bread, with the kindness and the bruise on his eye, twisting a nation to her side and making deals to spare her, but this trust is important. This means something, and he is Peeta, because nobody else would ever be able to overcome the enormity and the cruelty of hijacking. No one else would ever be able to look at her with the soft, sweet, shy look that makes her blush and smile and shiver all at once.)

Slowly, slowly, carefully, they grow back together. He's learned to walk quieter (to be warier, quicker to expect the worst, slower to step between tenuous allies), and she learns to walk louder (so she doesn't have to see the instinctive fear in his eyes as he flinches away from her sudden appearances). They are both different, both vastly changed from the girl on fire and the boy with the bread, but their hands are clasped more often than not, and so they change together, and meet in the middle.

Her nightmares haunt her, leave her screaming and shaking, afraid to sleep, desperate with exhaustion. Her sister is burned into the back of her eyelids, following her into deep closets, shadowing her at mealtimes, haunting her when the sun sets. When Peeta first arrived, Katniss knows she was feral, hardly living, all instinct and reaction and defensiveness, and he seemed to realize it, bringing with him food to prove his harmlessness, offering her shy smiles to diffuse her instinctive anger, taming her so that she begins to smile back, to eat more, to want to touch him.

It doesn't take her long to realize that Peeta is not entirely tame anymore either. He is still silent when his nightmares attack him, still withdrawn, but somedays he doesn't come to breakfast. Somedays, he retreats to his house, to lock the doors and close the windows and curl in over the savagery Snow planted inside him (to make himself a living shield against that darkness, trapping it in his mind, ensuring it does not rage outward at her). And when he comes back to her, he is quiet, wary, skittish. She learns to be slow, to speak gently, to hum under her breath until his muscles relax and he inches closer, closer, close enough for their hands to clasp. And eventually, she learns to jimmy open a window and walk into his room and pull his hands away from their painful grip on his own hair. She learns to wrap her fingers around his wrists and talk to him, quietly, softly, kindly.

(He has learned to walk like a hunter, to confront her directly, to stand in front of the exits and speak firmly, to lure her in with bread and food. She has learned to walk like a baker, to be subtle and soft, to always give him room to leave, to soothe his fears with her own presence and voice. It's almost ironic, how much they have learned to be like the other, Peeta silent and tentative, Katniss persistent and always talking.)

One day, she realizes she doesn't want to leave his home, with the ovens radiating warmth but hiding the sight of open flames (and Prim burning in their depths, Finnick writhing in their fumes, Boggs gone in an instant) and the smell of bread that has been infused into the walls themselves and the bright colors of paintings everywhere (only good paintings, beautiful and breathtaking; he hides the others away behind a locked door upstairs). She does not want to leave Peeta here, alone and vulnerable to attacks when he forgets what is real and not real. She doesn't want to go back to her house where echoes of Prim resound and shadows of her mom grow and memories of Gale can sometimes arise.

So she doesn't leave. She stays, through dinner, into the evening, long after there is any excuse (other than the truth) for why she lingers. Peeta watches her, out of the corner of his eye while he sketches a picture of Thresh, and in the glow of the lanterns, she sees his lips curve up in a smile. Soon, he sets his pencils down, and stands, and holds his hand out for her.

Easily, smoothly, their fingers twine together. He leads her upstairs to his room, and they curl up in each other's arms, and it is as if he never left her. As if she did not abandon him in the arena and he did not lose his mind and there were no stranglings or drawn arrows.

"You're Peeta," she whispers into the night (because his arms are strong and steady, even though they are thin and scarred; because his breath is warm and close, even though it is shakier and shallower than before; because he is here, he came back to her, and only Peeta has ever come back to her; he is her Peeta).

"You're Katniss," he replies easily (Katniss, not Mockingjay, not Girl on Fire, not Victor, or any of a hundred other titles; just Katniss, and a single tear slides down her cheek to fall on his shirt).

Haymitch smirks, but says nothing (she thinks he is happy for them). Sae smiles and nods and comes only occasionally to make sure they're still doing well. Katniss begins to hunt again in earnest after Peeta mentions the children and families returning to 12. Peeta begins to say things instead of ask them, begins to relax rather than tense when he hears her voice. Effie visits once or twice and talks a lot and says little and hugs them too tightly. Her mom calls and Dr. Aurelius tells her to make lists and Thom comes by to talk to Peeta about the process of rebuilding the town.

And every morning, there is toast with butter. Every afternoon, there is bread for sandwiches. Every evening, there are cheese buns beside the meat dish.

And eventually, in quiet moments and gentle days and dandelion summers, Katniss is happy.

She is happy, and with Peeta holding her hand, she is finally, deliciously full.

Peeta doesn't know much about history before the Dark Days, but he reads more as every year, old books are recovered and restored, and he has always loved old stories, so he thinks that it is always that mankind has been attracted to the beauty and the warmth of flames. He thinks people have congregated around quiet fires throughout all of history, to converse and to eat and to live. He thinks everyone longs to be close to the pretty, variegated tongues of heat, to feel them emanating warmth against skin, to smell the crispness of smoke, to let the light cloak their flaws and limn their strengths.

He is no different. From that first moment, in the halo of a sunbeam, he saw Katniss, and he was attracted to her warmth, her light, her radiance. The pouring rain on a cold day could not put out her flames, and when it tried, he fed her. She swept across a nation and reconfigured the landscape behind her. She lit up a blazing beacon in the sky for all the Districts to aspire toward. She reached farther, faster, encouraged by angry, ruthless puppeteers, and was burnt down to ash and soot, raining down cinders over the grave of her sister and so many others she dared to care for. When Peeta finally found his way back to her, she was nothing more than coals, barely there at all, black on the outside, but still red and orange and beautiful within.

"Besides," he tells Katniss, teasing, "don't you know pearls come from coal?"

She laughs and winds her arms around him (and his breath catches, because he still cannot believe she is his, she is here, she wants to be with him) and says, "I have the only pearl I want."

And he laughs to hear her so free, so open, so happy. And he wraps his own arms around her (loving the way she melts into him; loving the softened expression when she feels his embrace; loving her) and kisses her.

He warms himself at her fire, and he feeds her when she is sputtering weakly, and he builds her up when she's drenched, and he breathes his own oxygen into her at night when the dark terrors try to overtake her, and he loves her in whatever form she takes. (It's been years since he's ever felt cold, since he's felt anything but warm and loved and never forgotten.) And when she is vacant and chilled, when he can see only the black of coals, he holds her close and whispers Always and waits for her to come back to him.

She always does.

That's the thing about fire. It never completely goes away. It's always there, a spark, living in the heart she's placed in his ever-steadying hands. The conflagration is gone, the beacon faded, the sun-like radiance tamped down. In its place, it is a home hearth he tends, brilliant in its own way, beautiful and nurturing, not as dangerous but so much more welcoming. His hands have scars from ovens and pans and sharp teeth (his flesh is marked with the twisting trail of flames), but he doesn't mind. His mind is scarred, too, and sometimes he still is afraid and hurt and confused. But she presses herself close and curls her fingers over his wrists, and the darkness goes away, leaving him once more in the light.

He is happy.

He is warm.

He is loved.

So one day, he asks her, "Stay with me? Forever? Always?"

"Always," she says, and when she kneels before the fireplace and smiles up at him, Peeta knows he will never be cold (alone) again.

Food is a necessity, essential to keep her family breathing and existing, and Katniss has always seen it as that. Essential, but nothing beyond that. But with Peeta, food is more. It's laughing together in the kitchen, and throwing flour at each other, and specks of color on his hands and beauty on cakes. It's life and expression and happiness. It's a surprise breakfast in bed on a stormy day. It's a cupcake decorated like the knot of a tree just because (I have to keep my camouflage skills up to date somehow, he teases). It's art and hope and magic, all wrapped up in him, and it's okay to waste it sometimes in silly food fights because there will be more and because laughing, he says, is just as important as being full until dinnertime. (It's an unexpected can of lamb stew, in a war-torn Capitol, with hijacked memories screaming in his mind.)

He's so strange to her, so different, almost alien, and he still confuses her sometimes (she still studies his focused expression when he paints, the one where worlds are locked away behind open eyes, and loves that she still has so much to discover, and mourns that some of those worlds now are made of pain and agony and confusion). The way he paints his family and cries just as much for his mother as he does for his father and brothers. The insistence he has on making sure her birthday is special for her. The self-loathing and the shame he never quite manages to hide from her after she sings him back from that dark, frightening place in his mind. The way he never fails to light up when he sees her, every day, no matter what she's done to him in the past or what special day she's forgotten or how many years she can't bear to give him the children he wants. The way he loves her, when everything in their lives has proven he should hate her.

"How could I hate you?" he asks her, a crease in his brow as the sun pours liquid gold into his hair and a dusting of flour floats in the air above his hands. "It's like hating light."

But when Gale shows up on the television or sends her a letter or Katniss mentions him, Peeta grows silent and still, as wary as when he first came back to her (as if Gale could ever mean more than Peeta now, when even when Gale was everything she wanted—the forest and the rebellion and her family and her uncomplicated life from before the Games—and Peeta was everything that scared her—hope and happiness and beauty and life and kindness and selflessness and a love that can destroy her—she still chose Peeta).

I need you, she told him, on a day long gone, when he offered her a future and she chose him instead. How can he not understand that? How can he not realize?

Eventually, she realizes why he doesn't. She is a creature of needs, fixated on necessity and survival. But Peeta is a being of beauty, mesmerized by things she once considered luxuries, extravagances. Peeta does not care about what he needs, but he dreams of wants and wishes that make her smile when he paints them in words for her while she lies on his chest by their lake and they watch the clouds dance above them. She told him she needed him, and he knows she does (there are still nightmares, still visions of Prim in agony in fire, still screams that only he can silence and soften and soothe away), and to her, that is enough of a confession. But for Peeta…for Peeta, it is only half of it.

(Gale said she would choose who she couldn't survive without, but he was wrong, and she can't exactly blame him because he doesn't know. He hasn't been alchemized from the inside out by Peeta, hasn't been infused with his spirit of kindness and generosity. He hasn't learned that there is so much more than simply surviving. That Peeta doesn't just survive, curled up in a chair in a cold house; he lives, every day, no matter how much it hurts, because he wants to smile and laugh and love.)

One night, she smooths her hand over his arm and up to his face, brings his lips to hers, and whispers the words she has practiced all day in the woods. "I need you, Peeta. I want you."

I love you, she means to say, but she doesn't get that far. His mouth covers hers, his hands are scorching down her sides, and when the sun is rising, she tells him Real.

So when he asks her to stay with him always, when he bakes her a loaf of bread with nuts and raisins in it, she sits in front of a fire (and does not see Prim), and she helps him burn the bread.

(She thinks they are married already, thinks that Peeta asked for Haymitch's permission when he demanded that she survive the Quell. She thinks she accepted his proposal when she said I'll allow it. She thinks the ceremony was on a beach beside a circular sea and a deadly jungle, when he swore to give her everything and she said I do and took his pearl into her own hand and kissed him as if there would be no tomorrow, when he put his hand on her stomach and spoke of a future and she dreamed of him in it.)

For her, their story began with burned bread. It almost ended a hundred times (a hundred lifetimes, and maybe now she can finally deserve him), and now here they are. A new beginning. The best beginning.

He feeds her the bread, and stares at her with those bright, kind eyes of his (no bruises this time, because she will protect him and she will not fail again). She feeds him the bread (the first time since a can of chicken soup that she gets to feed him), and she knows her eyes are just as bright as his, even if they are not quite as kind.

"Katniss," he says (and that's all, but it is his own declaration and confession and vow all in one).

When he kisses her, she tastes burned bread.

She tastes hope.

She tastes life.

She tastes Peeta.

And because of that, one day, she looks at him and says, "I'm ready, Peeta. I want to have children with you."

His smile, all surprised and awed and happy, is her answer, and Katniss knows that she will never want for (never need) anything ever again.

The End