Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s like she and Peeta are living two parallel sets of lives, one in the daytime and one at night. After breakfast, he comes over. He plants more primrose bushes in the garden, bakes bread in the kitchen, paints every room in the house. Katniss doesn’t know where he comes up with all the paint colors, but he does something funny in each room—one pastel green wall opposite three off-white ones in the living room, a portrait of Prim in Katniss’s bedroom. It’s beautiful, and she hates it, taking to sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms ever since.

And then, every night after Greasy Sae comes over to cook dinner, Peeta ducks out, citing something about not wanting to impose or to expect them to prepare food for him, and doesn’t come back until morning. It’s funny: for all the time that Katniss wanted to be allowed to avoid him but couldn’t, now that there’s nothing obligating her to talk to him, she doesn’t want to be without him. She tells herself that she just doesn’t want to be alone, not with herself and certainly not with the nightmares, and that it’s got nothing to do with Peeta being Peeta—his kind eyes, his unassuming smile. It’s probably a lie, but who’s going to be there to say?

She still wakes up screaming at least once every night, and in a move whose motives she refuses to admit to herself, she takes to sleeping with the windows open, knowing that Peeta is doing the same across the way. The first morning after, he keeps sneaking glances at her when he thinks she’s not looking, but otherwise, nothing changes. She even knocks on his door once, around ten o’clock at night after she’s changed into her nightgown, and still—no answer.

They’re in the woods one evening before dinner—picking berries and checking snares, because Peeta’s still too heavy of a walker to be able to take hunting—when Katniss asks, “When we get back to the house, will you stay?”

Peeta doesn’t answer. She looks at him, and his expression is cracked-open, his eyes wrinkled and jaw wobbling. “You don’t have to stay for dinner, if you don’t want to ask Greasy Sae to cook for you. You can come back after. But I—I want you to stay, tonight.”

He looks like he’s about to cry, still, but he closes his mouth and swallows thickly. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

He drops her off at her doorstep and says he’ll come back after dinner, but by the time he does, it’s almost eleven o’clock and Katniss thinks he’s reneged on his promise. She answers the door in her nightgown, but he’s still fully dressed in cargo pants and a Henley, and a flush of embarrassment creeps up the back of her neck. “Hey,” says Katniss.

“Hey.” They stand there sizing each other up for an awkward moment, and then she smiles nervously and steps off to the side so that he can come in. “I thought I would just leave when you—after you fall asleep.”

“Oh. Yeah, of course.”

At the top of the stairs, he makes a left and she makes a right. “I thought your room was…?” Peeta starts to ask.

“It was. I mean, it is. That picture of Prim you painted—I can’t sleep with her looking at me.”

“Oh.”

“But it’s beautiful. It is.”

Katniss tries to smile at him and leads him quietly into the room she’s chosen as a second bedroom, one of the smaller ones that’s right next to a bathroom. Climbing into bed, she scoots to the far edge of it and holds herself stiffly as Peeta gets situated behind her. He doesn’t try to wrap her in an embrace, but he does let the fingers of one hand trace designs across her shoulder and upper arm.

Before she knows it, she’s crying—ugly crying—holding her elbows and shaking. She doesn’t even know why, exactly, but Peeta sighs, “Katniss,” behind her, like she’s done something wrong, and it just makes her cry harder.

She pulls herself together so that tears are still spilling down her cheeks but the sobbing, at least, has stopped, and then scoots down and slides off the foot of the bed. She crosses to the window and closes it. “Do you have to go?” she says, and she’s horrified to hear it come out sounding almost like a whine.

“Katniss…”

Getting back into bed, she faces away from Peeta again and resolutely tries to stop crying. It works, eventually. “You can go now,” she says, and it sounds harsh.

Peeta heaves this big sigh and pulls a resistant Katniss into his arms. “Not yet,” he says.

The next thing she knows, she’s woken up screaming, the memory of Prim’s bloody little body fresh in her mind. Peeta is gone, but inexplicably, the window is open again.

He acts normal all day and comes back the next night, still wearing plainclothes. Katniss refuses to allow herself to make eye contact as she lets him in and leads him up the stairs to her new room, but once they clamber into bed, he settles his arms around her again and maneuvers her head onto his shoulder. “Just sleep,” says Peeta. “You’re okay.”

Katniss doesn’t know if she’ll be okay ever again.

Weeks pass before Katniss wakes from a nightmare to find Peeta still in her bed. She checks her watch and finds that it’s a quarter after two. Peeta is shushing her and—crying, maybe—and pulling her bodily on top of him. “It’s over,” he says. “It’s over.”

“You’re still here,” she says wondrously, once she’s calmed down.

“I couldn’t listen to you screaming one more night,” says Peeta, and Katniss feels abruptly guilty for leaving the window open every night. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay awake, though.”

“You don’t have to stay awake for me,” Katniss hedges. “You can just…”

He shakes his head vigorously from side to side. “What if I wake up in the night and I—and I hurt you?”

“You won’t,” says Katniss, a little stunned.

“You don’t know me,” he insists darkly.

“I do know you.”

“No—you don’t. Not this version of me, anyway. Ever since they—since the Capitol hijacked me…” His voice trips over the word hijacked, and Katniss feels a surge of sympathy bubble up in her chest. “Sometimes, even when I’m wide awake, I look at you and I see a Capitol mutt. I know how to recognize it—how shiny it is—but what if I wake up in the night and I think you’re a—?”

She feels sick, thinking about it, and maybe it’s to distract herself from the unsettled feeling in her stomach that she winds her hands into his hair and kisses him. It’s just a clumsy bump of her mouth against his, but Peeta still goes stiff as a rod and shoves her away.

“Peeta?”

“It’s—it’s okay,” says Peeta now, but this time it’s Katniss who disagrees. “You just surprised me, is all. Why would you—? I mean, the Capitol is gone. We’re not in the arena anymore. Snow is dead. I thought…”

“I don’t know,” Katniss mumbles. “Why do I have to have all the answers?”

“You always expect me to have all the answers,” Peeta mutters, and Katniss hides her face in his chest and sighs. “Why can’t it be your turn, for once?”

He leaves before she falls back asleep, this time.

The next morning, Katniss dresses mechanically, eats the grits Greasy Sae prepares for her, and takes off for the woods before she has to decide what to do about Peeta. She just—needs a few hours to herself, she tells herself. To clear her head.

She supposes it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Peeta wouldn’t want to kiss her anymore. Now that he doesn’t have to. Now that he doesn’t want to. Now that he’s been hijacked to think the worst of her. Still, she’s not used to Peeta rejecting her, and if she’s being honest with herself, she’s been disoriented ever since he returned to District 12—no, ever since he was hijacked—by the sudden vanishment of his apparently conditional love. It’s not that doesn’t care for her at all: if he didn’t, he wouldn’t spend all his waking hours with her, and he certainly wouldn’t have started sticking around to soothe her while she cried and be lying beside her when her nightmares hit. But he doesn’t love her the same way that he used to—not enough to do anything she asks—and it’s making Katniss realize that she’s been taking Peeta’s love for granted, and that she shouldn’t have, and that she wishes she still could.

When she returns home with a sack full of game and her nerves steeled for the worst, she’s expecting to find anything other than Peeta pacing outside her house with his hair flying in all directions and a distraught look on his face. “Katniss, I thought—Greasy Sae and Haymitch both didn’t know where you went, and I thought you left, I thought you—where were you?”

“Hunting,” says Katniss, a little shellshocked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think—I’ll warn you next time.”

He laughs a little hysterically and then shocks her even further by kissing her—one long press of lips on lips, nothing more, but still. “Warn me next time,” he echoes, glancing rapidly from eye to eye at her.

That night, he comes over wearing a T-shirt and briefs, nervously shifting his weight from foot to foot. “I can stay. I mean—I want to try to stay,” Peeta says, and Katniss knows it’s because of the stunt she pulled without meaning to that morning, and her stomach tightens as she nods.

Now that he’s given himself permission to, Peeta falls asleep before Katniss does. She lies awake for a long time carding her hand through his hair.

They play the next fortnight by Peeta’s rules. He holds her when he wants to, comes over when he wants to, and when they lie awake together waiting for sleep, it’s Peeta who presses his lips to Katniss’s for short moments that drag on in her memories. She’s tried it the other way around: anytime she casually puts a hand on his waist or leans in close to his face, Peeta goes ramrod stiff, his breath shorting out. So she stops trying, after a day or two.

She’s not used to having to wait for Peeta’s affection, used to receiving it freely whenever she seeks it out. It requires her to be secure in herself in a way that she never has been. No, that’s not right: it requires her to be secure in her relationship with him, to “have all the answers,” as Peeta says, and that’s not something she thinks she’ll ever know how to do.

And then—

They’re lying in Katniss’s bed together, his head on her breast, her hands in his hair, when she’s startled awake by the abrupt feel of not being able to breathe. She tries to shout out but can’t, and that’s when her eyes open and she sees Peeta’s hardened face and arms reaching up toward her—both his hands are locked around her throat. “Peeta,” she tries to say, but nothing comes out. “Peeta.”

Katniss is close to drifting into unconsciousness by the time Peeta’s eyes widen a little. He looks down at her hands, then back up at her eyes. “Katniss?”

She can’t answer him, but she sees him warring with himself in her last seconds before her eyes drift shut again.

It feels like not much time has passed before Peeta is slapping her awake, shouting her name over and over. His head is back on her chest, this time not to rest but to listen for a heartbeat, she thinks. “Hi, Peeta,” Katniss says quietly.

“Oh my god. Oh my god, Katniss, I thought…”

“It’s okay,” she says hoarsely. She feels around her throat: the skin feels tender there.

“This is exactly why I didn’t want to do this,” says Peeta, but he can’t stop the relief from creeping into his voice. “I could have…”

“But you didn’t.”

“But I could have.”

“But you stopped yourself,” says Katniss. Her voice sounds like her normal self now, almost. “I trust you.”

“You shouldn’t.”

She doesn’t tell him what she’s thinking—that it was worth it, if it means that she can have Peeta back in her life in an intimate way. He paws at her face like he’s desperate for something she can give him, like that’s possible, and kisses her hard.

She thinks it’s going to be a short thing, but then Peeta starts to move brusquely against her mouth, and Katniss has to pull away—she has to. “I’m sorry,” he croaks, and she shushes him. “I can—I can just go. I should go.”

“No,” she says, but he doesn’t stop until he’s halfway out her bedroom door. “I don’t want you to go.”

She can’t even justify to herself, exactly, why she wants him to stay, when by all accounts she should be terrified of him right now, of what he could do to her. “I need you and me to be okay,” she whispers, once she’s sure he’s standing still and listening. “I don’t know, Peeta, it’s like… if I can count on one thing, I need to be able to count on us.”

“But you can’t. Not when I’m like this. I’m…”

“I don’t need you to be perfect. I don’t even need you to be safe. I just…” Peeta stands there waiting as Katniss gropes for words, sure it’s coming out all wrong. “I just need you not to let me be alone.”

He stays where he is in the doorway, looking worn-out and old. “There’s a conversation somewhere in there about boundaries that we should probably have.”

She smiles thinly. “Come back. Please.”

They look into getting a pair of handcuffs for Peeta the next day, and he waits until they arrive to start sleeping in Katniss’s bed again. He brings over a duffel full of clothes and his painting things, setting up shop in one of the spare bedrooms. She thinks of it as his room even though he always sleeps with her in her spare.

Katniss has started to accept that she’s probably never going to fully understand the way she feels about Peeta, but she finds it comforting, the knowledge that she chooses him and wants him to be here. It’s a fair sight more than what she knew a year ago, that’s for sure.

Single kisses turn into doubles and triples, but it never gets heated; Peeta’s face stays solemn as ever when he pulls away and she grips his handcuffed hands in her own. “I must have really, really loved you. Real or not real?” says Peeta one night while they’re lying there in silence, and Katniss feels like she’s about to cry.

“Real,” she says, and she rolls off of him and sticks to her side of the bed.

Chapter Text

Peeta seems to sense that she’s said the wrong thing, because he touches her shoulder clumsily with both hands below where his wrists are handcuffed together and then says abruptly, “Would you like me to paint you?”

“I thought you already had,” Katniss says, frowning.

“I know. I have. I meant—would you like me to do one where you pose for me?”

That gives Katniss pause. “Oh. Uh—sure, I guess.”

She’s confused, at first, when she feels Peeta’s hands leave her shoulder and hears the creak of her mattress as he gets out of bed. When she rolls over to face him, he’s struggling with his prosthetic. “Come on,” he invites her with a coy smile.

“You mean—now?”

“Yeah, now. We’re not sleeping anyway, right? I think you’re going to need to unlock these before we can go anywhere, though.”

Katniss reaches over for the key and unlocks the handcuffs soundly. Peeta thought, at first, that it defeated the purpose to keep the key right next to them—what if he unlocked them himself so that he could get at Katniss?—until she pointed out that, for him to have the presence of mind to successfully work his way out of the cuffs, he’d have to be cognizant enough to realize that he didn’t want to hurt her, not really.

She follows him into his bedroom/studio, Peeta walking stiffly on his false leg, and takes a seat rigidly in the chair he indicates to her. Glancing down at herself, Katniss feels a rush of self-consciousness as her eyes dart across her threadbare nightie—the point of her nipples underneath the cloth, the way one of the sleeves keeps slipping off her shoulder. “I should change into something more…” she says, and then falters.

“No,” says Peeta quietly, looking her over. “No, you look perfect just like this.” Still, Katniss resolutely tugs her sleeve back up where it belongs, then hunches her shoulders forward a little so that the fabric hangs forward and the two points on the bodice disappear.

She doesn’t know what she’s expecting—for Peeta to be chattier, certainly—but after he lights the lamps and gets started, they sit there in silence broken only by the strokes of paintbrush against canvas. His palette is coated mostly in shades of blue and brown, in spite of Katniss’s white nightgown and olive skin. Her sleeve keeps slipping off her shoulder, and she keeps tugging it up, until Peeta finally tells her, “You can leave it where it is.”

It feels like forever before Peeta clears his throat and says awkwardly, “Well, I think that’s as good as it’s going to get. I can only add so many details before I have to show you, right?”

It occurs to Katniss for the first time that Peeta might be nervous about what she’ll think of the painting, and with that in mind, she stands from her perch on the chair and crosses the room to look at the canvas on Peeta’s easel. When she does, she gasps.

Her white nightgown he’s painted in shades of blue, ranging from a very pale periwinkle down to a deep indigo, but it doesn’t give the appearance that the dress is blue, exactly. Rather, it looks like white fabric in dark lighting, with a realistic dappling of light caused by the lamp behind her. The art style Peeta has chosen looks almost cartoonish with the color palette he’s chosen and the exaggerated round shapes throughout the painting; every brushstroke is thin but visible, almost like Peeta is drawing attention to the brushstrokes themselves more than the shapes they’ve combined to create, but Katniss is still, somehow, utterly recognizable, from the point of her chin to the curves of her nose and forehead.

And her eyes—they have a haunted quality to them, somehow, as they look down toward the corner of the canvas, and Katniss wonders whether her resting face really looks that sad. Despite all her efforts to hike her dress up, Peeta has drawn the sleeve dangling off her arm the way it kept falling. He kept the hunch of her shoulders, the way she holds herself looking—not vulnerable, exactly, but guarded.

“Do I really look like that?” Katniss muses.

Peeta trips over his next words. “No, I mean, it’s in a style called Impressionism that they have books on in the Capitol, so I know it looks—off. It’s just an experiment. If you hate it, I can—”

“I don’t hate it,” she says quickly, and then adds, “and that’s not what I meant. I just mean—do I really look that…?”

“Sad?” asks Peeta, and she nods, even though the emotion Peeta has captured on the canvas is a lot more complicated than just sad. “Sometimes,” he admits now. “You do tonight.”

Katniss looks away. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says, “but I really don’t want to look at it.”

“I’ll hide it in my house,” says Peeta agreeably, and Katniss smiles faintly.

If Katniss could paint, she would—try to find a way to cram multiple sides of Peeta onto the same canvas, probably. One side frothing at the mouth, hands outstretched and deadly. Another side beaten-down and hunched over and crying. Another—not violent, but still tough. Resilient.

When she tells him this, back in bed, he laughs. “Remind me sometime to show you the prints I have by someone named Picasso. I have a feeling you would like him.”

He takes the painting away the next morning and draws another one in its place. Here, Katniss stands tall. Fierce. There are orange highlights in her hair where the light spills across it. This painting is allowed to stay in the spare bedroom they sleep in—their bedroom, she thinks of it as, for the first time.

“It’s not that I don’t still love you,” Peeta tells her when they’re in bed together, handcuffs locked. “I remember what it felt like to hate you—” Katniss bites her lip “—and this isn’t that, not at all. It’s just—I think I used to be a disaster about you. The more I remember how I used to feel, the more scared I am of ever feeling that way again about anyone. How I feel now is more… there are moments when it’s more cynical, and then there are moments when I look at you and I want…”

“What?” asks Katniss, breaking the spell, when it becomes clear that Peeta isn’t going to finish his sentence without prompting.

“And I remember everything we did to keep each other alive, even when I was trying to kill you, and I want to give you—everything. I don’t know how the two things balance out. I don’t know if that means I love you less now, or if it just means I love you differently. Whether the moments I don’t adore you are me seeing you more how you really are, or whether they’re the hijacking muddying up my feelings again.”

“I don’t…” Katniss clears her through. “I used to think the one thing that would never change was how much you loved me.”

“Katniss—”

“No, I’m sorry, that wasn’t fair. Snow’s people did this to you; it’s not your fault.”

“Katniss.” She looks at him, then, and he looks devastated. “I love you as best as I know how.”

“I know. I’m just being selfish.” She smiles weakly. Even with how complicated things were before, Peeta has always loved her, and Katniss has always been greedy for as much as she knows how to take.

She tries to start repaying him some of the affection he gives her, learning how to kiss and hold him without startling him or setting him off. The trick, it seems, is to give him plenty of notice, so that she doesn’t catch him off guard and he knows he has time to decide for himself if he wants it. Morning kisses in bed. Gently holding his hand under the table at breakfast (he’s finally staying for meals, now that he’s all but moved into her house). Tucking an arm around his shoulders while they’re sitting side by side on the lake.

They’re on the lake, in fact, when one day, she kisses Peeta and—doesn’t stop. He moves against her slowly, like she’s something fragile and precious and soft, and she slips her hands carefully, so carefully, under the hemline of his shirt, dragging her fingertips against the soft skin. When she traces over his nipples, he shudders violently and pulls away.

“Too much?” asks Katniss, voice wobbling, pursing her lips.

“I—I don’t know. I don’t want to stop; I just—need a minute.”

She wonders what she’s doing, chasing after a guy who doesn’t love her like he used to, who wants her dead when he wakes up, disoriented, in the middle of the night. But—this isn’t just some guy. This is Peeta. Whatever he feels for her now, she owes him the patience to figure it out, after everything she put him through while she was sorting out her own feelings.

“Okay,” Peeta says finally. “I’m okay.” And he kisses her again.

They end up wound together in the grass along the lake, their shirts off and thrown in the mud, Peeta’s hands hopelessly tangled in her braid. The bare skin of her stomach presses against Peeta’s abdomen, and Katniss shudders. “You okay?” Peeta asks carefully.

“Yeah. Yes. It’s just—a lot.”

He runs a hand along one bare arm, her shoulder, the slight curve of the side of her breast over her bra, and Katniss shudders again. “Maybe we should just lie here for a while,” she says.

Peeta smiles.

She thinks she’s figured out her problem. Katniss has never been good at identifying her own emotions, and now that she’s finally figured out how she feels about Peeta—that she wants to be with him—she’s afraid that she’s missed her chance: that Peeta will never love her like she loves him, let alone like he used to. “Peeta?” she asks after she has this revelation, sitting up in the grass. The wind is chilly on the bare skin of her arms and stomach.

“Yeah, Katniss?”

“What are we? I mean, what do I mean to you?”

Peeta raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t think labels mattered much to you.”

“Humor me.”

He sighs. “You’re Katniss. We belong to each other. Calling you my ‘girlfriend’ feels like—feels like an understatement.”

Katniss breaks eye contact and lies back down next to him, spreading an arm over his bare chest. “I want us to always be us,” she admits.

Peeta lets out a long breath. “I would like that very much.”

When he goes to paint her that evening, she sits in the chair she always sits in, pauses, and delicately strips off her top. Peeta glances over from his brushstrokes and stops still. “Katniss?”

She doesn’t look at him, because she can’t do this if she’s looking at him, and reaches behind herself to unhook her bra. Sliding it off her shoulders, she flings it to join her shirt on the floor and sits in a huddle with her elbows in her hands and her loose braid falling over her shoulder.

“Katniss. Hey.”

She looks up from her lap, now, to find Peeta looking—starstruck, awed. “Let me… let me see you?”

She straightens in her seat, letting her crossed arms fall and her hands drop, neatly folded, into her lap. She twists her lips around, bites them till they bleed.

When the painting is finished, she looks like—like somebody who is loved. He’s used the same style as usual, and warm orange light from the lamps dapples across her naked skin, making it look like she’s glowing. He’s added flowers—primroses—to her braid, and she thinks it’s that detail more than anything that makes her swing down to sit in his lap and kiss him soundly.

It seems to go on forever, and when Peeta pulls away, it’s to ask, “You love me. Real or not real?”

“Real,” she whispers, and kisses him again.

He smiles, when she pulls back. “And I love you.”

To her mixed disappointment and relief, they don’t have sex that night. She’s braced herself to push through the pain, but Peeta insists that there’s got to be a way of doing it that doesn’t involve hurting her, and until one of them gets enough sex education to figure out how that works, he refuses to go much further than they already have. They take off their clothes, and she puts on his handcuffs, and when he wakes her up screaming mutt and traitor and enemy, Katniss grips him in the firmest embrace of her life and waits for his confusion and, then, his guilt to set in.

“I love you, Peeta. I love you. I love you.” It feels freeing, being able to say it, after all this time.

She kisses him until he stops whimpering.

Chapter Text

In Peeta’s nightmare, he is back in the arena of the 74th Annual Hunger Games. He’s standing on top of the Cornucopia, and the ground is teeming with mutant wolves, and standing at the other end of the Cornucopia is Cato, his arm locked in a death grip around Peeta’s father’s neck. “I can still do this,” says Cato, and he smirks and jumps backward, pulling Papa headlong into the mass of mutts, all of whom have the same long brown fur, the same familiar snarl, the same grey eyes—

“Papa!” Peeta screams into waking, and when his eyes fly open, they settle on the exact same features, more humanoid than animal but nonetheless recognizable, and the frowning girl beside him is a mutt, she’s a Capitol mutt, she killed his Papa and she’ll kill him, too, if he doesn’t stop her—

He raises his hands, but they’re bound together in tight metal loops. He tries to wrench his way free, but it’s no good; the handcuffs are too tight. Handcuffs—

He engages a distant memory of picking these out himself and ordering them from District 2. Why would he do that? Why would he put himself at such a disadvantage in the arena?

“Shh, Peeta, it’s okay. You’re okay. You’re safe with me.”

“Get away from me, mutt! You’re not—you’re not—”

He rises up onto his knees and balances precariously on the bed, thrashing his arms forward, but more things don’t add up. There should be no beds in the arena, for one thing, and the painting he sees hanging on the wall as he frantically looks around the room looks like one of his own, but how could it be?—why would Peeta ever draw Katniss to look so radiant, so human, so beloved? When she’s—

“Katniss?”

Other memories rush in to replace the dream: ones with Katniss slitting his Papa’s and brothers’ throats, but others, too, with Katniss clutching a handful of berries to her mouth—pressing her lips against his—carding her hands through his hair.

“Katniss?”

“Welcome back,” says Katniss, and she’s smiling, but there’s fear in her eyes.

He stops thrashing around, closing his eyes to concentrate. The trouble is that his dreams aren’t shiny-edged like his mutt memories are, so it’s harder to tell the difference between dreams and reality when he first wakes up feeling convinced that Katniss is dangerous. Peeta looks again at the portrait, at the orange streaks in her hair and the proud lift of her chin. His Katniss.

“Sorry,” he mutters. He checks the clock: it’s almost half past four in the morning.

“Don’t be.” Katniss tentatively reaches out with both hands, settles them on his shoulders, and starts kneading the places where they join with his neck. It feels good, and he leans forward into her touch.

“Here, uncuff me real quick,” he says, and she obeys quickly and quietly. When his wrists are free, he rubs at them for a few moments before taking her face in his hands and giving her a kiss. She’s wearing nothing but a baggy T-shirt of Peeta’s and her underthings, and when he slips one hand underneath the shirt and thumbs over her stomach, she shivers.

His love for her is tinged with doubt and disgust, but it’s still there, and he clings to it like water in the arena. But the problem with water is that it slips through your fingers. “You kissed me when you didn’t really mean it to save yourself in the Games. Real or not real?”

Katniss seizes the hand that’s fingering the hem of her bra and folds her fingers together with his, back out from underneath her T-shirt. “It’s not that simple,” she says forlornly. “I did it to save both of us. And I meant some of them. Not many… but some.”

“Tell me about one of the ones that was real, then.”

She launches into a story about kissing Peeta in the hopes of getting sponsors to buy the medicine he needed for his leg, but ending up actually liking it. How confused she felt. How much she wanted to be alone with him to figure it out without all the strings attached. By the time she’s getting to that part of the story, he’s starting to fall back asleep, and he hears more than feels the click of the handcuffs back onto his wrists. He hopes she’ll lie down on his shoulder the way she does most of the time. She may be a mutt, he thinks blearily, but she feels so safe when she’s close to him.

The next morning, the blind rage has been replaced by a sort of vague sense of distrust. He chose her, Peeta reminds himself. This is who he chooses. But he can’t shake the feeling that Katniss is going to turn around and stab him in the back the second he lets his guard down.

It’s a little better when she touches him, because those moments feel real in a way that none of the shiny-edged memories do, but only if he sees it coming in advance. If he doesn’t, it always startles him in a way that makes his hackles rise and the corners of his eyes see red. She seems to have picked up that she needs to be careful about affection, though, because Katniss always makes sure to broadcast her signals so that Peeta can see them from miles away.

If he were feeling better, he realizes that he’d be living the life, right here: baking and painting and making out with the love of his life all the hours of the day. He’s a little ashamed that he has enough money never to need to work in the economy District 12 is slowly rebuilding: usefulness has always been a trait highly valued here, and he can’t help but feel, well, useless.

“So then start a bakery,” Katniss tells him when he happens to mention this to her one afternoon on the lake. “Or start taking commissions for your art. You can do anything you want to do, Peeta, if you want to start working again. You have the capital to fund it.”

So he starts taking orders for baked goods and paintings, but he delivers everything he creates free of charge, figuring that if he doesn’t need the money, he may as well do some pro bono good in the world. Katniss takes to hunting in the woods during the times when Peeta is working, getting bored with sitting around the kitchen or his studio upstairs with nothing but a book to entertain herself. Peeta doesn’t mind. It gives him a welcome chance to take a break from obsessing over his feelings about her, whether he loves her enough now that he loves her differently.

With not a small amount of mortification, he asks Haymitch for—he doesn’t want to say sex help, but that’s basically what it boils down to. Haymitch has a roaring laugh at Peeta’s expense, but deigns to lend him a few Capitol-written books from his library. Peeta reads them in the evenings, when he keeps the habit of retiring to his own house for a few hours before bedtime.

So they fall into their routines, Peeta and Katniss. They’re spending more time apart, now, but still come together for a few hours every afternoon to kiss and talk about their days and for Peeta to show Katniss what he’s been making. The monotony is good—keeps Peeta’s mind away from shinier thoughts about her. She sneaks pastries and compliments his paintings and listens to him ramble on about Capitol movements like Cubism and Art Deco that she can’t possibly know anything about, and he thinks he could spend his life just like this—if it weren’t for the nightmares, anyway.

He so badly wants to shove down the hijacking, to never have a Katniss-shaped nightmare again, but Peeta knows that’s not realistic. “The handcuffs are never coming off, are they?” he asks her one night while they’re trying to fall asleep, Peeta’s head on Katniss’s shoulder.

“Never is a long time to be making assumptions about,” she replies, but she takes his wrists into hand and thumbs the red-rubbed skin underneath the cuffs.

“People make assumptions about forever all the time. When they get married, for instance.”

“Mm.” Katniss looks at him like she’s not sure where he’s going with this, and neither is he, to be honest. It’s not like they’re ready to get married. Not when he has to sleep handcuffed so that he doesn’t murder her when he wakes up from his night terrors.

“Or when they have children.”

“Oh, please don’t ask me what I think you’re going to ask me. I’ve never considered having children. Not once.”

“Oh?” Peeta asks, trying to keep his tone neutral, not sure what he wants or wanted to hear from her.

“No. I never wanted to bring up children in the world we used to live in, and now—I don’t know if I’ll ever be stable enough to be a parent.”

“See, now you’re doing it, too. Making assumptions,” Peeta points out with a faint smile.

Katniss twists her head so that she can kiss Peeta’s forehead. “I think that’s enough of them for one night,” she says, and he understands the topic to be dismissed.

But it stays on his mind after that—marriage, kids. Two years ago, he’d have given anything to know that he’d one day be married to Katniss Everdeen, but now, it’s like—he loves her enough to want it to be perfect, but not enough for it to really be perfect. No, that’s not right. It’s not that he doesn’t love her enough… or is it? Peeta doesn’t know. He just keeps comparing the way he feels now to the way he felt before, doubting what’s real, doubting what he remembers, and wants it to be as simple as it was back when he adored Katniss unconditionally. When it was uncomplicated. Not like now.

And now that he’s thinking about it, he feels like everyone he and Katniss are still in contact with is expecting them to end up married, and what if they’re never in that place? What happens if Peeta strings Katniss along for years, even decades, without ever being ready to take off the handcuffs, let alone say vows?

He needs to—stop comparing. He and Katniss aren’t everyone else. They’re Victors. The things they’ve seen and done have cracked their minds, and they’re never going to be able to measure themselves by the same metrics used by ordinary people, and Peeta better find a way to become okay with that before it consumes him.

Katniss starts telling him little stories to help keep him grounded. How Peeta fell in love with her in kindergarten. Their last nights up on the rooftop before both Games. The cave. How hard Katniss fought to get him back from the Capitol, even though it ended with his hands locked around her throat, her neck in a brace.

As always, he marvels at how much he used to love her. He reaches inside himself and still feels that same feeling, sometimes, but it’s—scarred, now.

But there are times when he looks at her, at how the sunshine warms her cheeks or how the moonlight falls across her breasts, and just wants to save her from himself. Katniss isn’t perfect. He used to think she was, before, but he doesn’t anymore. She doesn’t trust people’s intentions even when she should, and she expects other people to have it all together so that she can use them as a safety net when she falls apart. She isn’t perfect, but she is still good—fiercely loyal to her chosen friends and, when she’s not being selfish, selfless—and good people deserve people who love them all of the time, and certainly who are physically safe to be around. Peeta is neither of those things, and if he can’t fix himself, he wishes he could—point her somewhere better, somewhere happier.

He tells her this, and she answers, “Peeta, that right there—where you have actual reasons for loving me, now, instead of just blindly adoring the girl with the braids who could sing—that’s where there’s hope. That’s why I’m staying.”

“Maybe I had to…” Peeta pauses, swallows. It takes a lot out of him to think like this. “Maybe I had to be hijacked and fall out of love with you, so that I could fall back in love with you for proper reasons. Maybe I needed to see you as a mutt, and break out of all of my assumptions about you—not just that, but the old ones, too—before I could see you as you are.”

“It’s okay if—if you’re never ready. For more than what we have. I like my life—our life. This can be enough.”

Peeta scoffs. “Seeing me wake up screaming that you’re a mutt and trying to put you down?”

“It’s not what I had in mind, either, but you make up for it when you’re you,” Katniss says softly.

He kisses her, then, meaning for it to be a plain thing, but she rolls him on top of her and kisses back with soul. Katniss has been pushing for more physical intimacy lately, and Peeta’s not sure how he feels about it. On the one hand, okay, yes, he’s eager for it—he’s a teenage boy, not even twenty years old yet—but on the other, what if they’re not ready? What if Peeta never gets past the hijacking, or Katniss just plain gets bored of him, and their relationship falls apart, and Katniss is hurt worse because they went too far physically?

Peeta thinks about before he started sleeping over, when Katniss started sleeping with the window open so that he could hear her crying out in the night. How he started making sure her window was open when he left the house after she fell asleep, to punish himself with her screams for leaving. He hates to admit it to himself—and that’s how he can tell it’s a fair opinion—but if they ever break up, Katniss will be sure that Peeta suffers at least as much as she does.

Of course, “breaking up” feels like a foreign and bizarre concept to Peeta. It’s not like Katniss is even his girlfriend, exactly—at least, they don’t use those words for each other. It’s just that Katniss is the person he loves, and kissing is a natural extension of how they show that.

Days blur into weeks. For a community as small as District 12 has become, Peeta keeps remarkably busy with his free bakery and art commissions. “Say hi to Katniss!” becomes a common refrain he hears from clients throughout his workday, and although he keeps her abreast of the community gossip he hears on his delivery runs, Katniss makes no sign of being interested in seeing anyone outside of himself, Haymitch, and Greasy Sae.

Greasy Sae she only keeps in touch with because Plutarch is paying Sae off to keep cooking for Katniss, Peeta is sure, and even Haymitch Katniss rarely sees. Peeta makes sure to visit Haymitch a few times a week for at least an hour at a time, but Katniss doesn’t bother to do the same, Haymitch says, and he only comes round Katniss’s house, uninvited, for dinner maybe once or twice every month. Peeta’s pretty sure that he himself is Katniss’s only regular source of social support, and it concerns him. Besides all the obvious reasons, it worries Peeta that if something ever happens between the two of them, Katniss will have no one—that seeing no one but him, even, will cause something to happen between them. Peeta can’t be her everything, not even close, no matter how much she may treat him like he is.

“I don’t want new friends,” Katniss insists when Peeta tries to bring it up. “I had friends. Gale. Prim. Madge. And look what happened.”

“Then at least talk to Haymitch more,” Peeta pleads.

“Haymitch never liked me. Haymitch always liked you.”

“Yeah, well, he could use the company, too. Don’t let him scare you away.”

“I’m not scared of Haymitch,” Katniss mutters sullenly. Peeta smiles.

Prim they talk about sometimes, when Katniss is feeling sentimental, but Gale they never talk about. Sometimes he comes on the television with whatever big job in District 2 he has—Katniss never leaves the channel he’s on running long enough to find out—because she clicks the channel-up button on the remote hard and then hurls the remote at the screen and lets Peeta hold her to the tune of whatever sitcom or cartoon or music video is playing the next station up. There’s no reality TV in Panem anymore, of course. Not since the 76th Games concluded.

Peeta is reasonably certain that Katniss hasn’t tried to send any letters off to Gale, but he does accidentally see one come in the mail from Gale for her once. When he leaves after dinner, Peeta makes sure to stay at his house for a good few hours, to give her some privacy to read the letter and react however she needs to. When he puts on pajamas and comes back over, her face is scrubbed red and her eyes are bloodshot, but she doesn’t say anything about it, so he doesn’t ask.

Peeta finishes reading all of Haymitch’s books, but he’s still not sure that he wants to act on them just yet, so he reads them all for a second time, then a third. When the time does come, he wants to be prepared, even if that time isn’t anytime soon.

It’s been a good, oh, four or five months since Peeta’s last night terror, so after he wakes up one night pulling his wrists taut and pushing down so that the chain of the handcuffs digs into Katniss’s neck, he’s—“devastated” doesn’t feel like a strong enough word to describe it. “I thought I was past this,” he whispers as Katniss brushes tears out from underneath his eyes. “I really thought I was past this. I thought we were almost ready to take the cuffs off.”

“Maybe you’ll get past it, or maybe you won’t,” says Katniss, sounding reasonable as anything. “I’m still going to be here. I promise.”

She unlocks the cuffs and carefully pulls his shirt over his head, pulling him into a long kiss. Then another. And another. When she reaches for his boxers, though, Peeta freezes.

“I never wanted us to be like this,” he says, feeling so tired. “I don’t want to have sad sex. If we’re going to do it, it should be because we both want it. It should be romantic, not this—bizarre hurt/comfort thing.”

“There’s nothing wrong with comfort.”

“No, but there’s something wrong with feeling hurt when you should be feeling—you know.”

“What?”

“You know.”

“Use your words, Peeta,” says Katniss with a glimmer of a smile on her lips.

“Aroused,” he chokes out.

If he can’t even say the word for it, clearly he shouldn’t be doing anything about it, right? But Katniss just laughs kindly and says, “You almost got me with that stunt with the chain. Let’s try locking them around one of the bedposts this time, okay?”

It’s not long after that Peeta realizes—they’ve been living together in District 12 for almost two full years now. It’s this more than anything that makes him think that maybe, maybe, his relationship with Katniss is meant to last. He never would have thought, after the hijacking, that he could make it work with her for this long, and every time his brain gets in the way of their communication, they find a way to pull through it until he’s himself again.

When her birthday comes up, he gives her a ring. Not just any ring: it’s a silver band with a pearl inset. “Is this—?” Katniss starts to ask, one hand covering her mouth.

“The pearl I gave you in the Games? Yeah. Yeah, I sent away for this to be made months ago.”

“I thought I lost it,” says Katniss, looking distant, lost.

“Is it okay that I—that I took it for this?”

“Yes! Yes, it’s okay. It’s more than okay.” She blinks back a tear and smiles weakly.  “But does this mean…?”

“I’m not proposing,” says Peeta, almost choking on the words. “I thought you could wear it on your right hand for now, and then switch it to your left when we…”

“When we get engaged,” she whispers. She gives him her hand; it shakes violently in his grasp as he carefully, so carefully, slides the ring onto her fourth finger.

“Yeah. When we get engaged,” Peeta echoes, and the words feel right on his tongue.

She smiles at him, more steadily this time, and Peeta realizes that—they’re happy. Sure, it’s complicated. She still features in his night terrors every once in a while, and he still has moments when he sees a shiny memory coming up and thinks, oh, one of those again, and has to bury it under recent memories of being together, happily, with Katniss. She still doesn’t see enough of other people, and he still paints horrific Surrealistic images of the Games in between commissions. But—he likes this live he’s carved out with Katniss, and what they’re not ready for today, they maybe will be someday.

Maybe it doesn’t need to be perfect. Maybe it can just be.