Archive of Our Own ^beta

Peeta moves into the house.

That’s what she calls it. It’s not Katniss’s house, it’s not the Everdeen residence—it’s the house.

There’s Haymitch’s house, and there’s Peeta’s house, and there are the empty houses, and there, right smack in the middle of the Village is the house.

The one she lived in with her mother, with her sister. The one she got for winning a game, for starting a war, for spilling so much blood that it still plagues her nightmares more often than not. That’s why Peeta moves in, really. The nightmares.

When he first came home from the ruins of the Capitol, he stayed at his own house. He wanted to give her space; he didn’t want to force her into anything. Friendship, that would come later, he’s almost sure of it. As sure of anything he can be these days, with a brain that still fights him from time to time.

So he’s there, in his too big house, in his too big bed, when he hears her pounding on the front doors.

“Katniss,” he mumbles to himself, jogging down the stairs still half asleep. All the windows are open, and the late spring air is cold through his t-shirt and soft pants.

He unlocks the door. “Katniss, what’s—”

“They’re dead,” she says, gripping onto his arms tight. “They’re all dead.”

The skin on her hands is red from hitting the door, and her cheeks are stained with tears. Her voice cracks when she speaks, probably from screaming, and her bare feet are lined with dirt and gravel from the short run from her front door to his.

Peeta gently pulls her into the house, moving her shivering body in out of the cold. She’s still in her sleep clothes.

“Who’s dead, Katniss?” he asks because he has to. Because they’ve watched too many people die together—and apart—for him not to be sure that this is just a nightmare.

“All of them,” she says, as she leans heavily into him. She chokes on a sob. “Prim.”

Peeta tries not to breathe a sigh of relief at the name, but he can’t help but relax just a little as he folds Katniss in against his chest. This is not new. The war is over. The death toll has stopped.

“It was a nightmare, Katniss,” he tells her, and she nods because she knows. She always knows.

It doesn’t make them any less terrifying.

In the end, this is why Peeta moves into the house. Not just for this night, but for all the nights that came before it, and for all the ones to come after. It’s easier with him right down the hall—because yes, he needs his own room, they’ve not quite there yet—where Katniss can find him in a heartbeat. Where Peeta can do the same.

So he moves into the house and they both breathe a little easier at night because of it. Sometimes he ends up in her bed, but mostly she ends up in his. They sleep better like that, together. They don’t always start that way, but most mornings they wake up like that.

They don’t talk about it, the bedsharing. It’s too… intimate. For what they are. For right now.

But they need it the way they need each other. To survive.

They still call the empty house Peeta’s house because they have no better name for it, and because Peeta doesn’t mind. It will always be Peeta’s house, long after Peeta is no longer there. Someone will build a plaque and screw it into the front door one day it will say Peeta’s House with a blurb about his part in the Second Rebellion and in the games before it. The name will stick longer than any of them will be alive to speak it.

But what the future generations will only know from word of mouth, from lore, from stories passed on from their grandparents who are sometimes confused, is that Peeta didn’t live in Peeta’s house.

He lived with the girl across the way.

The first time Katniss hunts is… not great.

It’s not that she doesn’t hit anything, she does, but it takes her almost the whole day to get there.

She pulls the arrow back on the bow and her heartbeat starts going rapid fire, visions of Snow and Coin blurring behind her eyes. Suddenly she’s back in 2, back in 8, back in the Capitol. Back in the arena. There’s a boy from 1 with an arrow in his chest and blood dripping down his chin, and none of it makes up for the lives she’s lost.

Her hands shake and the arrow flies. It rattles against a tree and falls to the ground, too weak to even stick through the bark.

It’s been so long since she used one of these. Her muscles are weak and her mind weaker. But this has always been her place of solace. She will not let them take this from her too.

So, she tries again.

And again.

And again.

Until she shoots an arrow clean through the eye of a squirrel without the guilt of a nation pressing down on her chest.

The deep exhale she lets out after scares off the rest of the game. It’s fine. The sun is setting anyway.

She drags the lone squirrel back to the house, skins it, cleans it.

She fries it up the way the people of the Seam used to do back when Twelve was still Twelve and not whatever ridiculous name it is now. She can’t remember. It’s not like it will ever be anything but Twelve to her.

Peeta finds her in the kitchen, and she shares her spoils with him. They talk about his dad, and how he always loved fresh squirrel, how he always paid decently for it when Katniss brought one by. It’s nice when they can do this. When they can talk about family without it being too heavy, too much.

Peeta’s better at it than she is, but he’s better at most things.

They sit by the window and eat fried squirrel and fresh bread and if Katniss closes her eyes tight enough, it starts to feel like home.

“How’s that book of yours coming along?” Haymitch asks.

He’s sitting in a rocking chair on the back porch of the house, jacket on and a glass of white liquor on the rocks steady in his hand. He’s more or less the same since their return to Twelve. He still drinks, though not as much as before, but he’s given up on trying to quit. Anytime someone asks, he mutters something about life being too short, then laughs at the sky.

He is still Haymitch, underneath it all, and some things just can’t be explained with reason.

“It’s good,” Katniss answers honestly. “We were working on it today. That’s where Peeta is now.”

The book is what keeps them busy in their new post-war life. It is their love letter to Panem and its people. Peeta sketches and Katniss writes, and together they make sure that all of their loved ones are remembered. That no one is forgotten.

It is their project, and it makes them feel useful. Like they’re leaving something behind that’s bigger than them. Haymitch argues that they’ve already done that, but neither of them wants their legacy to be that of a war.

So they work on the book together, and they slowly remember why they always worked so well as a team.

“You got more pages in that thing, or is it all filled up now?” Haymitch asks, then takes a drink.

Katniss looks at him over her shoulder from where she sits on the back steps, the wood warm under her toes. “We’re always adding more pages,” she tells him. “Why? You wanna write some more entries?”

Haymitch just shrugs. “There’s always more to add, isn’t there?”

Katniss hopes that’s true. She hopes that one day there will be volumes of books, enough to fill an entire bookcase, that detail Panem’s people and its history. Because, of course, there’s always more to tell. She just hopes there will be more people to tell it.

Haymitch rattles the ice in his glass. “He almost done in there, or is this gonna be like the Meadow painting all over again?”

“Shut up, I’m here,” Peeta teases, pushing open the screen door and stepping out onto the porch.

Katniss smiles softly at him. “Took you long enough.”

Peeta groans. “Not you too.”

Katniss almost laughs, and for the first time in forever, she actually wants to. There are parts of her that are mending themselves back together without her even realizing it. Peeta helps with those parts. Haymitch too.

“You’re missing it,” Haymitch mumbles around the lip of his glass.

Peeta quickly crosses over to the steps and sits on the one below Katniss. His eyes are trained on the horizon, on the soft orange color that paints the sky as the sun kisses the ground.

It’s his favorite time of day, the sunset. Haymitch and Katniss say it’s theirs too, but truth be told, neither of them really has a favorite. And they know that Peeta knows this.

But it’s a good excuse to sit together at the end of a long day, so Haymitch will come over, or sometimes they’ll go to his house. A couple times they’ve gone into town, wandering and shopping and enjoying the sun setting behind the new partially constructed shops and buildings.

“Right… there.” Peeta’s mouth twitches at one corner, a smile playing at his lips. “But not at the horizon where it’s really bright. Up between the trees, with the branches breaking it up.”

Orange. His favorite color.

“It’s beautiful,” Katniss says, and she means it.

As Peeta watches the sunset, Katniss watches Peeta.

Haymitch watches them both.

They call them episodes.

They don’t happen a lot, but they do happen. Sometimes it comes out of nowhere, a word or a phrase triggering some part of Peeta’s brain that mostly lies dormant. Sometimes the trigger is much more obvious, like when the cat knocked over a vase in the kitchen.

It’s not always loud noises, and it’s not always the same words, which makes it hard to try and see an episode coming, but they do their best. Dr. Aurelius thinks it’s getting better, slowly. Peeta’s just grateful it’s not getting worse.

When the episodes do happen, sometimes the others don’t even know. Sometimes it’s just hands gripping the countertop too tightly until the wave of horrible fake memories passes. But other times it’s obvious, when Peeta’s eyes are clouded over and gray, and the twitch in his jaw shows just how hard he’s clenching it.

Katniss is not scared of him. She could never be scared of him.

But she does worry when he gets like this. When he looks at her like she’s someone else, like they’re back in the games and there can only be one victor. She wills her Peeta to come back to her. She reminds him of who she is. Who he is.

“You like the bread with the seeds on top,” she tells him from the other side of the room. “It’s your favorite one to make.”

Peeta sits on the couch with his knees to his chest, knuckles white where his hands grip his arms. “You like cheese buns,” he whispers in a barely there voice. “Real or not real?”

“Real,” she tells him with a soft smile. “See? You remember.”

He nods into his knees, but his blinking is still too fast, too erratic.

She sits with him for as long as he needs. They sit there all night, him on the couch and her in a straight-backed chair, and their bodies will hurt in the morning—but they don’t care.

Because just as the dawn breaks on a new day, Peeta’s eyes shine blue as a clear summer sky and Katniss knows that he’s going to be alright. They drag themselves to bed and hold each other through the morning, the curtains drawn, and the covers pulled over their heads.

Peeta will be shaken up for a day or two, but he’ll be alright. He’ll get better. They all will.

They can deal with the episodes in exchange for the life they get to live.

“Geese.”

Katniss rolls her head to the side from where she lays in the grass, the blades tickling her arms and legs as the sun warms the skin on her face. “What?”

“The birds. You know, with the black necks and the—”

“I know what geese are, Haymitch,” she says. “Why are you talking about them?”

“I’m gonna raise them.”

Katniss squints through the sunlight and stares at her old mentor, sitting in a lawn chair a couple feet to her right. He doesn’t look any crazier than usual, and it’s too early in the day for him to be completely wasted already.

“Why?” she asks him.

Haymitch shrugs. “Need something to do out here if we’re gonna keep goin’ on like this.”

“And… geese are your solution to that?”

“They’re a misunderstood creature.”

“Uh huh,” Katniss says, closing her eyes and going back to basking in the sun. “Whatever you say, Haymitch.”

She doesn’t give it much thought after that one conversation, but when he shows up at the house with lumber and tools, she knows he’s serious.

“I need a fence,” he tells her.

Katniss nods and follows him back to his own house to help him build one. Nothing big, nothing electrical, just a pen for these hypothetical geese to wander around in. She does not bring up the fact that the geese could fly right over the fence if they wanted to. It doesn’t seem important.

When Peeta comes home, he doesn’t question it much.

He stops at the edge of Haymitch’s backyard, a canvas bag over his shoulder filled with ingredients he just bought in town. “What are we doing?”

Katniss looks over at him, wipes the sweat off her brow with the back of her wrist. “Haymitch wants to raise geese.”

Peeta looks between the two of them. “And we’re…”

“Building a fence.”

Haymitch doesn’t even look up, just keeps hammering in the post he’s been working on.

“Okay,” is all Peeta says.

He leaves the bag on the porch and grabs a handful of nails.

He helps. They all do.

She couldn’t look in a mirror for a long time.

Katniss knows that she’s not the same girl that went into the first Hunger Games, not mentally, not emotionally, but it’s the physical differences that surprise her the most. The scars that line her body after the Girl on Fire was literally on fire, caught in the crossfire of the bombs that took her sister.

Her skin is different in places, in the spots where new skin has been attached, and in others where the burned skin wasn’t damaged enough to replace. There are parts of her with more pink undertones, and others with more yellow, a few with something she’d have to call peach, though she’d never say it out loud. The scars that outline these areas, they divide into old and new.

They’re everywhere on her: on her arms, her back, her legs, her neck. Her face is the only thing that was spared, but there are days where she wishes the war had taken that too.

She doesn’t look like Prim. They’ve never looked enough alike for people to know they were sisters without being told. But there are moments—when she tilts her head in concentration, when she wrinkles her nose just right—where she sees her sister again in the lines of her own face.

They’re devastating.

It’s better to remember than to forget, though, so when she catches a glimpse of Prim in the mirror on the rare day where the fates align, she savors it. She remembers the girl, just thirteen, who gave her life to a war that never thought to spare her.

But the war did spare one of them, barely, with half her flesh singed on the streets of the Capitol and half her mind left in the ashes of her dead sister, and for that, Katniss knows, she should be grateful. It’s hard to see that, at first, with all the scars and the new skin and the sanity she’s slowly but surely trying to put back together, so she avoids mirrors like the plague for the first few weeks.

Dr. Aurelius says that’s fine. That she can look in her own time.

And she does, one day when it’s too hot to do much of anything but stand there in as few clothes as possible. She strips down in her bathroom and stands in front of her full-length mirror and she looks—really looks at herself—for the first time.

At the scares that spared her life. Not saved it. They didn’t save anything but a body.

It was Peeta that saved her. And Haymitch. Her boys. Her family.

The doctors in the Capitol may have stitched her back up, but it was Katniss who decided to put herself back together, one painstakingly slow moment at a time.

She thanks the scars that spared her the chance to live again and breaks the mirror in the bathroom.

“Easy,” Peeta says, wincing. “You’re not, you know, fighting it.”

Katniss looks at the ball of dough in her hands, then over to the one in Peeta’s. “I’m doing the same thing you are.”

“No, you’re not,” he says with a hint of a smile. “You’re throwing it on the counter like it personally offended you.”

He’s teaching her how to make bread. Nothing fancy, just simple, homemade bread. She woke up this morning in a good mood, and when she found him downstairs in the kitchen, she asked him to show her how he bakes.

She’s better at baking than he ever was at hunting, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.

“Maybe it did personally offend me,” she teases, poking at the dough.

“Careful,” he warns. “You talk down enough to the dough and it’s never gonna rise.”

Katniss laughs at that, trying to push back her loose strands of hair with the back of her wrist. She has flour on her chin and a glint in her eye and Peeta has never seen her more lovely than she is right now with the late morning sun pouring in through the kitchen window.

“What’s next?” she asks.

“Uh, kneading,” he answers, remembering himself. “Yeah. We have to knead the dough.”

He shows her how to do it, how to press her palms into the dough with her weight behind it, using her whole body to knead the dough in her hands. She gets the concept of it quickly, but her execution is lacking in… something. He can’t articulate it.

“Can I just—” He stops himself. Peeta holds out his hands, hovering over hers, and waits for her to tell him it’s okay.

She nods.

He folds his hands over hers and shows her how to do it, where to press her palms and how much pressure to put into it. He doesn’t stand behind her, doesn’t wrap his arms around her waist or tuck his chin over her shoulder. He stands next to her and guides her, holding her hands.

“There,” he says, slowly pulling back. “You got it.”

Katniss nods at his instruction, looking at him briefly out of the corner of her eye.

Their hands are warm, but their cheeks are warmer, tinged pink with the feelings of three lifetimes rattling around in their chests, desperate for a way out. The bread is the warmest of all, though, when it comes out of the oven perfectly golden brown.

“How come yours is perfect and mine is all…” She never finishes her sentence, just tilts her head and stares are her lopsided bread.

“I told you,” Peeta says. “You have to be nice to the bread.”

She whacks him on the shoulder with a dish towel and he laughs loudly as he breaks apart the bread. They share them both, but it all tastes the same. Hot and fresh and made with something special, something they don’t say as much as they probably should. But it’s there all the same.

Tomorrow, he thinks, he’ll show her how to make cheese buns.

And maybe they can be happy, baking bread in the mornings for the rest of their days.

“You’re cheating.”

“I’m not cheating.”

“You have to be cheating.”

“Or maybe you’re just really bad at this.”

Peeta stares at her slack jawed. “I expect that kind of trash talk from him—the cheater—but you too?” He mockingly claps his hand over his heart. “You wound me.”

Katniss shrugs. “If the shoe fits.”

Haymitch lays down his cards soon after that and Peeta collapses in a fit of faux hysteria after yet another devastating loss.

Katniss giggles as he lays on the floor, contemplating the honesty of the rules. They’re playing an old game called Cap, or at least that’s what the people in the Hob called it. Katniss knows the rules from afternoons spent there with Gale and Greasy Sae and anyone else who wandered in. Haymitch knows it better than most, playing high stakes games in the Capitol every year before the games.

They sit around a low table, with Katniss and Peeta sitting cross legged on the floor and Haymitch leaning forward on the couch. The rain hits steadily against the windows as it storms outside, but it doesn’t bother them. They keep the lights low, and the curtains drawn, and Haymitch passes around a bottle of white liquor.

He drinks most of it, but Katniss and Peeta take turns with small sips. She still hates it, but it’s something different. Peeta gets sick if he has a full glass.

Haymitch shuffles the cards and deals them out again.

“Try not to cheat this time,” Peeta mumbles, and Katniss barely contains a smirk.

Haymitch takes them both to the cleaners.

It’s a Tuesday morning when she shows up, and there’s really nothing at all special about the day.

Except that Effie Trinket is standing just inside the gates to the Victor Village in the old District Twelve with two huge suitcases standing beside her, one on either side.

“Effie?” It’s Peeta who notices her first.

Her face lights up when she sees them, her old tributes, victors. Her friends. Her shoulders drop and she waves them over. “Come here, let me look at you.”

It’s Katniss who reaches her first, though, who wraps her arms around Effie and holds her tight. Because she wants to. Because she can. Because she knows how valuable it is to hug her loved ones while she still can.

“I’m alright,” Effie tells her, laughing softly into her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

Katniss pulls back and lets Peeta have a turn. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… What are you doing here?”

Effie tilts her head just slightly. “I—didn’t Haymitch tell you I was coming?”

Katniss and Peeta share a confused look.

Haymitch has never had good timing once in his life, but today, right on schedule, he stumbles out the front door of his house, hair still wet from the shower. He pushes it back out of his face, then catches sight of the three of them standing in the road.

“Oh,” Haymitch says with the undeniable air of someone who forgot to do what he was told. “Shit.”

Effie pins him in place with her pursed lips and her unamused glare. “Honestly, Haymitch, I ask you to do one thing.”

Peeta laughs at that because, well, it’s just so predictable, isn’t it?

It cuts what little tension there was, and then he’s picking up her bags, handing one to Haymitch as they walk her down the road.

Katniss links their arms. “How long are you here for, Effie?”

“Oh, just for a visit,” is how she answers.

Which isn’t really much of an answer at all.

“Presents from the Capitol shops!” Effie says, then quickly corrects herself. “I mean—the Head of State. Yes, that’s right. God, I can’t keep up with all these name changes anymore. You should’ve seen the conductor’s face when I told him I was going to District Twelve.”

Katniss smiles to herself at the thought of a bewildered train conductor letting Effie onboard with her two giant suitcases and her bright pink hair.

Effie flips the latches on one of her suitcases where it’s propped up on the table in the house. “First, for Peeta,” she says, pulling out a long black case. “New paints with the most vibrant colors I’ve ever seen. I saw it in a shop window last weekend, and I just had to get it for you.”

Peeta opens the case and grins at what he sees. “Thanks, Effie, this is great.” He seems genuine enough when he says it. “They don’t make colors like this out here.”

Katniss knows Peeta can use the paints he has to mix virtually any color imaginable, but she bites her tongue. It’s a thoughtful gift, if a useless one, and Peeta seems happy enough with it.

“Next, as requested,” Effie says, pulling out a large glass bottle with amber liquid inside. She hands it to Haymitch.

“Now that’s the good stuff,” he says with stars in his eyes. He uncaps the bottle and breathes in the scent of the liquor. “Yeah. There it is.”

Effie rolls her eyes good naturedly, but her mouth pinches at the corner like she’s trying not to smile.

“And last, but certainly not least…” Effie trails off, digging around in her bag.

Katniss doesn’t know what Effie could possibly think she wants, but she’s amused at the prospects. A sweater that costs more than her old house. New shoes that pinch her toes. A matching pink wig.

But when Effie pulls out a box of something powdered, Katniss tilts her head.

“It’s hot chocolate,” Effie tells her, running her finger along the edge of the box. “You add hot milk to it, or hot water if it’s too rich with the milk.”

Katniss stares at the fine brown powder and thinks of the cups she used to drink in the Capitol. It always used to calm her, soothe her before she had to do something hard.

She didn’t think Effie noticed. But she did.

“Thank you,” Katniss says, no louder than a whisper. There’s a lump that gets wedged in her throat and her eyes sting a little, but she hugs Effie again despite the tears threatening to fall on the shoulder of her pristine jacket.

She didn’t know just how much she missed Effie until now.

Effie moves into Peeta’s house.

It’s strange, seeing the lights on across the way when Peeta hasn’t lived there in weeks. Months, by now. But there’s something nice about it too, as Katniss looks out the living room window at night and sees the front porch light on just across the road.

There was no question about where Effie would stay, other than the brief offer to move into the house with them. When she refused to disrupt their living arrangement, Peeta offered his house, and Effie went without another word.

It’s still Peeta’s house, though. Even Effie still calls it that. She might call it home, but she never calls it her house. It’s always Peeta’s house.

It always will be.

“Do we really not know how long she plans to stay?” Peeta asks, coming up behind Katniss.

She shrugs. “No. But I don’t really mind. Do you?”

“No. She could stay forever, if she wanted to,” Peeta says. “God knows we could use a few more neighbors around here.”

Katniss smiles as she watches Peeta’s house through the big bay window. There’s movement on the first floor, then a face appears in the window. Effie is momentarily surprised to see the pair of them staring back at her, but she gives a small wave, and Peeta waves back.

Effie shuts off her porch light for the night, and Katniss tracks her movement to one of the bedrooms upstairs.

“Come on,” Peeta says, gently taking Katniss by the wrist and pulling her away from the window. “She’ll still be here in the morning.”

It’s the kind of thing they can say now. There are no more bombs dropping from the sky, no wars waged in the districts. There is no risk of starving during the night and not waking up in the morning. Not anymore.

“Yeah,” Katniss says as she turns to go with him. “She will.”

It’s like finding the last piece of a puzzle under the couch cushions.

Having Effie in the old Twelve is like a sigh of relief, the finishing touches on something they’ve been trying to build for a while now. It’s an adjustment for her, definitely, but she seems more at ease too. Calmer than she ever was in the Capitol.

Something settles in all of their chests. Their family is complete, just the four of them.

Life goes on, and so do they.

Katniss wakes up screaming.

Usually Peeta wakes her up before it gets to that point. She kicks and she rolls and she fights back in her dreams long before she ever yells out. But Peeta is dog-tired tonight—he goes down to the town square some days to help with the reconstruction of their town, and all the physical labor wears him out—so he sleeps through the tossing and turning and only wakes up when the screaming starts.

He hates to hear her scream.

“Katniss. Katniss.” He shakes her until her eyes fly open, arms fighting against the grip he has on her wrists. “It’s okay. It’s alright.”

She takes a stuttering breath in, a sob stuck halfway up her throat.

“You’re okay,” he tells her in his softest voice. “It was just a dream.”

She stares up at him for a full minute, eyes wild and her hands still clenched in fists. Then, something shifts, and when she blinks she looks almost like herself again.

“Peeta?” she asks, her voice broken.

“I’m here,” he tells her, and he slowly releases her wrists. He gently rubs at the skin, presses a kiss to the inside of both of them. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Katniss shakes her head quickly.

When it comes to her, no talking can only mean one thing.

“Bad?” Peeta asks.

She nods, but it’s shaky.

“It’s okay,” Peeta whispers in the dark. He readjusts them, cradles her in against his chest. “You’re okay. I got you.”

Her shoulders shake with sobs, but his steady hand on her back keeps her here, keeps her grounded. It’s a bad night. The worst one in a while.

The nightmares come less and less these days, but they still come.

They always will.

It’s a Bad Day.

Following her nightmare the night before, Katniss never fell back to sleep. Sometimes she can, with Peeta’s help, but sometimes it’s impossible to close her eyes again.

And when Katniss doesn’t sleep, Peeta doesn’t sleep.

The dawn breaks, but they stay in bed. Sometimes they lie there just because. They have no real obligations in this life. No one expects much from them anymore. They can have the occasional late morning if they want.

Other days it’s like they’re chained to the bed. They cannot get up. Sometimes it’s one of them, sometimes it’s both. Neither of them gets up, though. They stay in bed together and draw the blankets up to their chins. The curtains block out the sunlight just fine.

Haymitch finds them like this on the Bad Days.

He leaves food and water on the bedside tables, some warm bread and maybe a soup from the freezer heated up on the stove. He’s quiet when he does this. He does not make them explain themselves.

Peeta thanks him with a silent head nod, then wraps his arms around Katniss again.

Haymitch leaves them be.

“They’re still in bed?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Why?”

It’s the first Bad Day since Effie’s arrival in the old Twelve.

“It’s…” Haymitch starts, scratching at the back of his head. “They’re not up for much today.”

Effie tilts her head. “Are they sick?”

“I don’t really know how to answer that.”

Effie blinks at him, waiting for some kind of explanation.

“It’s a Bad Day, Effie,” Haymitch tells her honestly, leaning on his arms on the kitchen counter. “The kind where you can’t get out of bed. The kind where the world seems like too much to take on all at once. The kind where your mind fucks with you more than you ever thought it could, even now. Even after everything.”

He says it all in a rush of words, and it may be the most she’s ever heard him speak about something serious at one time.

Effie is quiet when she asks, “Do you have Bad Days?”

Haymitch almost flinches at the question, unprepared for it. “Yeah,” he says slowly, thinking about it. “Kind of. For me it’s more like… a little bit of the bad spread out in every day. Some are worse than others, but it’s… It’s like—”

“Like it’s always there, in the back of your mind,” she finishes for him.

Haymitch nods. He looks at her like he’s never seen her before.

“Is that why you drink?” she asks.

She’s known him for years—God, she doesn’t even know how many years at this point—and this is the first time it’s occurred to her to ask that question.

Haymitch nods again, smaller this time.

Effie gives him a sad smile. She covers his hand with hers. “I have Bad Days too,” she tells him.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” She presses her lips together. “Mine are like theirs. Sort of… all consuming.”

Haymitch hooks his thumb over hers. “I’m sorry.”

They stand there in the kitchen, holding hands until the tea runs cold.

The Bad Day comes and goes, and they’ll all be more like themselves tomorrow.

Peeta paints.

He painted before, after winning the first games. It was his skill he was learning, but it was also his release. He doesn’t hunt like Katniss, or drink like Haymitch, or shop to soothe his soul like Effie. He knows how to bake bread and decorate cakes and now—he knows how to paint.

It helps. With the concentration thing.

His mind is still not completely his own, and he fears that it may never be again. Ninety-nine days out of a hundred he can be completely fine, but then something—one tiny, little thing—will trigger a tripwire buried deep in his mind and it’s like he’s watching himself from the outside. Like he’s not even in his own body anymore.

Dr. Aurelius tries to help. They have sessions over the phone once a week, but most of the time they’re uneventful. Because most of the time Peeta is fine.

Until he’s not.

Until he’s bunched up on the floor in the fetal position with his hands over his ears, begging the voices in his head to go away. They echo inside his brain: kill her, kill her. He doesn’t have the physical reactions anymore. He doesn’t actively try to harm Katniss.

But the voices are compelling, and some days they are there to convince him that she’s awful. That she’s spiteful, and evil, and nothing but a bloodthirsty mutt from the capitol.

Then she’ll come home with wild turkey, because she knows it’s his favorite, and he’ll remember that the voices are only in his head.

It’s not like a flipped switch, though. He doesn’t go back to normal the second the episode is over. No, for a few days he’ll continue to fight them off, but they’re quieter and less convincing. He tells the others that he’s fine, even though Katniss can see the lie in the bags under his eyes, and he begs them all to move on.

The painting helps in the days after.

It gives him something to focus on, something to think about that isn’t Katniss or the Capitol or the War. He’ll paint the daffodils growing out by the town square, and he’ll spend an hour mixing the right shade of yellow. He focuses on the paint and the brush and the canvas. All things that he can control.

So he paints.

And it helps.

“You have three of them now?”

Haymitch stands beside his fence with his arms folded over his chest, watching his geese roam around the yard. “Yes.”

Katniss stands next to him. “How’d you get the third one?”

“Don’t know. Woke up yesterday and he was just… here.”

Katniss remembers luring the two geese from the woods down to Haymitch’s pen a few weeks ago. It took her nearly the entire day, and Haymitch did almost nothing to help.

“He?” she asks.

“Or she.” Haymitch shrugs. “I have no idea if they’re boys or girls. I’m hopin’ I got at least one of each, so they’ll start reproducing at some point.”

“How many geese are you trying to have?”

“As many as I can.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

Katniss shakes her head. “What do you feed them anyway?”

“Bread, mostly.” Haymitch looks over at her. “Don’t tell Peeta.”

Katniss snorts.

“You think I should name them?” Haymitch asks.

Katniss considers the question. “Yes,” she says finally. “You should.”

Haymitch grunts. “Got any suggestions?”

Katniss shakes her head again and pats him on the back as she leaves.

There is a fence around the old Twelve again.

It’s tall, like it was before, and reinforced at the posts. It’s strong enough to keep predators out, to keep the people of the town feeling safe at night when they’re sleeping.

It is not electric. This is an important distinction in Katniss’s brain.

But the biggest difference to perhaps everyone else is the installation of the gates. One on each side of town. One leads to the woods, the other towards the train station. People are free to come and go as they please. There’s no one to stop them from leaving, from running.

Oddly enough, Katniss doesn’t dream of running away anymore.

She goes through the gate to the woods, bow in hand and a sheath of arrows on her back. The townspeople wish her luck on her hunting journey as she goes, and she thinks it’s all a little surreal.

She’s still as good a shot as she ever was, maybe even better now with unlimited time to practice her craft. Every day she moves a little deeper into the woods, daring to go a little farther from the town, from her home. It’s all ground she’s covered before, technically, but that feels like another lifetime.

The lake still sits just out of reach. She has not gone back there since before the second games. She hasn’t even told anyone about the lake. Not even Peeta knows about it.

She thinks of taking him there someday, of teaching him to swim properly. It’s a nice thought. A day in the water and on the shores, just the two of them. Maybe the four of them. She wonders if Effie knows how to swim.

She has to get back there first, though. She has to see it with her own two eyes.

So every day she goes a little deeper into the woods with the goal of the lake in mind, and as the weeks go by, it gets a little easier to breathe in there. Every rock doesn’t remind her of sitting with Gale, every kill doesn’t remind her of the arena. Bit by bit she comes back to herself in those woods. She finds the girl she left behind years ago.

She roams and she hunts and she holds up all her spoils for the market vendors to see as she walks back through the gate at the end of the day.

They’re sitting by the fireplace when they see it.

“What is…” Katniss squints out the window. “What’s he doing?”

Peeta sits up in his chair, peering over the edge of the window. “Is he drunk?”

“He’s always drunk.”

“More than usual, I mean.”

Katniss squints at Haymitch again. She watches him stumble over his own feet. “Yeah. He is.”

They watch him for another minute, wondering if he’s making his way to the house. For company or conversation or a homecooked meal that he refuses to learn how to make himself.

Haymitch drags himself down the road towards the house, but when he stands by the front walk, he turns left instead of right.

“He’s—” Katniss blinks. “He’s going to see Effie?”

Peeta laughs under his breath, but Katniss just watches, confused yet fascinated.

Haymitch drags himself up the front steps of Peeta’s house and rings the doorbell.

A flustered looking Effie opens the door, but her smile quickly finds her face. It looks… genuine. Effie has never smiled at Haymitch like that.

At least, not in front of Katniss.

She lets him in easily, shutting the door behind him. When the porch light goes off a minute later, Katniss’s jaw drops.

“Did she just—”

“Yup.”

She looks over at Peeta’s smug smile and the pieces start to click into place. “Did you know about this?”

“No, but I can’t say I’m surprised,” Peeta tells her.

“Huh.” Katniss turns back to the window, watching the front door of Peeta’s house and half expecting to see Effie throw Haymitch out of it any second.

When the night drags on late enough that it’s time for bed, and Haymitch still hasn’t resurfaced, Katniss makes peace with it.

Peeta takes her hand and leads her up the stairs.

“Good for Haymitch,” she muses.

Effie wakes up hungover.

Her first thought is ow, but after her hand is pressed firmly to her forehead, her second thought is: how the hell do the people of Twelve not all die of alcohol poisoning.

It’s no wonder Haymitch is always dying to get his hands on some fancy Capitol pedigree alcohol. White liquor hits like a truck and twice as hard.

Haymitch.

Suddenly she registers the slow rise and fall of the chest underneath her cheek and she slowly, ever so slowly picks up her head to see the man himself passed out on her couch. Underneath her.

His head is on a throw pillow and his arm is slung low over her waist. He breathes steadily, if shallow, and there’s lipstick smudged on his chin.

Memories of last night flood into Effie’s mind all at once. Him coming over. Both of them drinking. Ending up on the couch with kisses stolen in the dark. Everything coming to a head in the way they’ve both been waiting for for some time now.

She doesn’t regret it. Any of it.

Haymitch looks so peaceful when he sleeps. He’s ten years younger when he’s not scowling at the kids or yelling at his geese.

Effie smiles at him and kisses the lipstick smudge on his chin so, so gently.

She burrows back into his hold, lays her head down on his chest once again. She wraps the blanket from the back of the couch around them. It’s still early. She might even fall back to sleep.

The arm around her waist tightens, pulling her in closer.

Effie smiles into his shirt and closes her eyes.

There is a graveyard at the end of the Victor’s Village.

In the small plot of land at the end of the road, Peeta starts a graveyard. It’s not a burial site, not a mass grave like they dug up in the Meadow, but a proper graveyard. With stones and everything.

Haymitch calls it the Land of Lost Souls.

Peeta starts with two headstones, nothing more than big chunks of rock that he carves two names into. One for his mother and one for his father. For the family he lost in the fire that decimated Twelve.

His brothers are next, side by side with his parents.

He doesn’t make one for Prim, doesn’t make that assumption that Katniss wants a reminder of her so visible and so close. But when Katniss asks him to help her carve a stone for her sister, a placeholder to sit there in the same valley of his brothers, something settles in his chest.

They plant Primrose in the field all around it and wait patiently for it to bloom.

Finnick gets one too, even though they’re sure Annie has her own memorial for him back in Four. But he was their ally, their friend, and he deserves to be remembered by as many people as possible.

Effie and Haymitch add their own stones to the graveyard. They talk about some of them. Others are added without a word, just a name on a rock and some flowers planted around it.

Haymitch calls it the Land of Lost Souls because there are no bodies in their graveyard, only memories. There were no bodies to bury. Nothing to be returned to the earth.

Only memories and stories to pass on, to pass down, to make sure that people remember the lives that were lost in the war. Before it. Under the cruel hand of the Capitol.

They build a graveyard filled with flowers and it sits pretty at the end of their road.

Sometimes they visit it together, or in pairs. Other days all alone.

But they do remember. They remember the loved ones they lost until their own dying days.

“I’ve named them.”

Peeta looks up at him with flour covered hands. “Named what?”

“My geese,” Haymitch says with an eyeroll.

“Oh.” Peeta bites back a smile. “Okay. Let’s hear them.”

“Well, there’s Zippo,” Haymitch says with a straight face. “She’s real feisty that one.”

“Zippo.” Peeta grins down at the dough he’s kneading “Okay.”

“Then there’s Midge. Kinda like smidge, but, you know… Midge.”

Peeta laughs through his nose. “Sure.”

“And then there’s ol’ Pearl. She’s a beauty that one.”

“Is Pearl your favorite?”

“No, Zippo is. Don’t tell the others I said that though.”

“Katniss and Effie?”

“Midge and Pearl.”

“Right.” Peeta smirks. “My mistake.”

“Anyways,” Haymitch goes on. “Those are their names.”

Peeta nods. “They’re good names.”

“Yeah?”

He asks it with such sincerity that it throws Peeta for a minute, rarely ever seeing Haymitch so… vulnerable.

“Yeah,” Peeta tells him, and he means it. “They’re great.”

When the town square is up and running again and shops are opening on every corner, Effie demands to go shopping.

“One of you has to come with me,” she says, leaving no room for argument.

Peeta and Haymitch are too quick with their excuses, leaving a baffled Katniss just standing there in the hallway with Effie.

“Excellent,” Effie says, and they’re off.

Katniss has never understood the concept of going into stores without having anything in mind to buy. Even when they had no money and all Prim wanted to do was stare at the cakes in the bakery window, Katniss knew exactly what she would buy if she suddenly found herself rich.

Which is what she did after the first games. She bought everything she had hungered for before.

But this is different, with new shops dedicated entirely to fabrics and clothes, and others filled entirely with stationery and pens. She’s never seen so many different things being sold in her old district before. There’s even an entire store just for shoes.

Katniss takes Effie to all her old favorite places, like the sweet shop that just re-opened. They buy bags and bags of candy to bring home for the boys, and Effie tries nearly one of everything.

Effie, in turn, takes Katniss through racks of sweaters and pants, trying to get a sense of what her style is. Neutral tones and athleisure wear come out of her mouth a lot. Katniss doesn’t really know what any of it means, but she walks away with a new sweater she actually likes and a new pair of boots with plenty of time to break them in before the winter.

By the time they’re done for the day, Effie looks like a whole new woman.

“I know today wasn’t really your… cup of tea,” she says to Katniss. “But thank you for coming with me.”

“Oh, Effie—”

Effie holds her hand up and Katniss goes quiet. “I knew things would be different here. I was prepared to make changes to my life to—” She pauses. “To be with all of you.”

Katniss looks down at her feet as they walk the road back to the Village.

“But there are days when I guess I just miss the comforts of home,” Effie continues. “And for me that’s going out and buying a new dress, or trying every sweet in a sweet shop. I don’t expect you to understand it—”

“No, I… I do,” Katniss says. “Kind of. When I was in Thirteen, and I couldn’t hunt, it was… almost unbearable.”

Effie nods, like she’s got it exactly right. “I know that I will never live the same life that I did, that the days of the opulent Capitol lifestyles are over. I’m okay with that, really. I am.” She pauses, her voice getting quiet. “But today was nice. Don’t you think?”

Katniss, for whatever it’s worth, says, “Yes, Effie. I do.”

Effie links her arm through Katniss’s, and they walk the rest of the way home like that.

She doesn’t notice it at first.

“Think I’m going to go over to Haymitch’s,” Katniss says as she flies down the stairs, breezing through the kitchen and into the living room. She checks the chair, the couch—and there it is draped over the arm. Her father’s hunting jacket. She grabs it and throws it on. “I want to check on how his geese are do—”

She freezes, one arm in a sleeve.

Peeta is still standing in the kitchen, by the counter, the same way he was when she first came down the stairs. He stares at the wall, his eyes clouded.

He’s gripping the counter so hard his knuckles are white.

Katniss takes a tentative step towards him. “Peeta?” Her voice isn’t as loud as she wants it to be, but she can’t help it. He scares her when he’s like this.

Not in a physical way. She’s not scared of him, only scared for him. She can only imagine the thoughts going through his mind when this happens.

“Peeta,” she says again, more sure of herself. “Peeta, look at me.”

His head snaps up and his eyes lock on her. A bead of sweat runs down his temple.

“You’re okay,” she says, mimicking the things he says to her when she’s scared out of her mind. “We’re okay.”

“Katniss.” His voice is a whisper.

“It’s okay, Peeta,” she tells him. “Just—hold on, okay? It’ll pass. It always does.”

He grinds his teeth. “I can’t fight it.”

“Yes, you can.” Her heart breaks for him. “You can.”

He can’t look at her anymore. Peeta stares at a place just over her shoulder, his eyes boring holes into the wall. He grips the counter so hard it looks like he could break it at any moment. Sweat drips down his face.

She’s not sure how long they stand like that for. Him on one side of the kitchen island, her on the other. It feels like a while, but she never takes her eyes off him. Not once.

Eventually it passes.

It always does.

When he blinks back into himself she can see the shift, when his jaw relaxes and his pupils shrink and his shoulders drop away from his ears.

For one single second he looks like Peeta again.

Then he falls apart.

But she’s there to catch him when he falls, and she wraps her arms tight around him as he folds himself into her embrace. He buries his face in her shoulder and cries, these shaking, silent sobs that come from pure unfiltered fear.

He doesn’t talk about it.

He almost never talks about it with her.

It’s too hard to talk to the person his terrors are about. Too much to explain it right to her face. He has other people he can talk to, though. There’s Haymitch and Effie and Dr. Aurelius.

And he will. Talk to them. Later.

For now, Katniss holds her love in the kitchen of their house, and she keeps him upright for as long as he needs. She presses her lips to his hair and kisses the sweaty strands, whispering soft, encouraging words against him.

They protect each other. Still.

Even from themselves.

“It really is beautiful.”

Katniss looks over her shoulder at Effie and nods.

Effie sits on the back porch with Haymitch, the two of them sitting in chairs with barely an inch between them. They pass a bottle back and forth—mostly it sits in Haymitch’s hand—and he has one arm draped across the back of her chair, all casual like.

Katniss smiles at them, even though Haymitch pretends not to notice.

She sits on the back porch steps, one below Peeta and leaning back between his legs. He holds them both up as they watch the sun set on a warm summer day.

Katniss looks over their misfit little group, and for the first time in a long time, she feels happy.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “It really is.”

“How’s the hospital?”

That’s always the first question Katniss asks when she calls her mother.

“It’s good, yeah,” her mother answers. “The new wing opens next week.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s a new intensive care unit, which we’ve needed ever since we first opened.”

The hospital is a safe area of conversation for them. It’s painfully neutral, leaning back on Katniss’s view of her mother as a life-long healer. The hospital is a post-war development, one that was in part spearheaded by her mother, so it’s always a source of pride and interest between them.

“How’s Four?” Katniss asks. Another safe topic of conversation.

They live on different coasts now, but that doesn’t stop their phone calls on the first of every month. It broke her mother’s heart when Katniss had to go back to Twelve without her, but her mom… she couldn’t come back here. There was nothing for her here.

Nothing but a seventeen-year-old daughter, broken almost beyond repair.

Katniss tries not to hold it against her.

“It’s good. Different.” Her mother pauses for a long second. “Very different from Twelve.”

Her mother is one of the only other people she knows that still calls the districts by numbers. She only does it on the phone when she’s talking to her daughter—at work, at the hospital, Katniss is sure that she’s always using the correct terminology.

“I know.” Katniss remembers her one, brief visit to Four on the Victory Tour, but it sort of blends in with all the other districts that were so unlike Twelve.

“How’s…” Twelve? Home? “The house?”

“Same as always,” Katniss tells her. “Peeta wants to get new curtains for the bedroom.”

Bedroom, singular. They gave up the idea of separate rooms a long time ago.

“That sounds nice,” her mother says with no real feeling behind it.

They’re curtains. Who the fuck cares?

“Yeah,” Katniss placates. “It is.”

The thing about these monthly phone calls is that the two of them will never be able to talk about things the way they did before. Their relationship before Prim died is wholly different from their relationship now; just like how their relationship was forever changed after her father died.

Except, this time her mother didn’t shut down completely. She just shut down her communication with Katniss alone.

She left a phone number and a letter and that was it.

And here Katniss is, calling her on the first of every month.

They carry on as well as they can. She’s still her mother, even after everything, and there’s a small part of Katniss that can’t let her go completely. She feels so incredibly detached from her mother these days, but there’s a very thin thread that holds them together. It stretches as far as the phone cord on the wall unit goes, and it’s as delicate as ever.

“I miss Twelve,” her mother says. “Maybe next time I get some vacation days I’ll make a trip out there.”

She says this every time, and they both pretend, for a minute, that she has any sort of desire to come back to the place that haunts her.

“Yeah, maybe.” It’s the best response Katniss can muster.

Because they both know that her mother is never coming home. No amount of begging or bribing will bring her back to this town, to this district, to the house that holds the last few good memories of her better daughter before the war took her spirit, her soul. Her life.

They go around and around in this circle of maybes and somedays and hypothetical scenarios of reunions that will never happen. It’s exhausting, frankly, but deep down in her chest, Katniss loves her mother. She loves her to her very core, despite the years of silence, despite the distance now. She loves her, so she calls once a month and pretends like they’re okay.

For both their sakes.

Her mother will never come home, and they both know it.

But she loves Katniss just enough to pretend, just enough to pick up the phone whenever she calls and ask about how her life is. She loves her just enough to not sever the cord completely. She loves her. She does.

Sometimes Katniss has to remind herself of this ten or twelve times.

They talk for about ten minutes total. It’s mostly casual talk about the hospital or about the reconstruction in the town square. It’s all very superficial. Her mother doesn’t ask many personal questions, and neither does Katniss.

It’s the same polite conversation they always have, once a month.

And Katniss never feels quite so lonely as she does the second she hangs up.

Everyone comes and goes from the house.

That’s partly why it has its name. The house. It’s more of a communal space for all of them, a center point, a shared home. It’s not uncommon for one of them to breeze in and breeze out, or walk through the door and sit down and stay awhile.

They come and they go.

Peeta thinks nothing of it when he’s in the kitchen one afternoon, fresh loaves in the oven, and Haymitch wanders in and grabs a soda from the fridge.

“Hey,” he calls out while checking on the bread.

Haymitch gives him a nod, then swipes the drink from the fridge. He turns to leave but hesitates. “Whatcha got in there?” he asks, gesturing towards the oven.

“Oh,” Peeta says, closing the oven door and standing up straight again. “Something new I’m trying.”

Haymitch raises his brows.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get to try it,” Peeta says with a smirk.

Haymitch pretends to cheers him with the soda can. “Excellent.”

He turns to go, but Peeta stops him this time.

“Should I bring it by your house, or…”

Haymitch hesitates, then turns back around. “Yes?”

“Is that a question?”

“Where else would you bring it?”

Peeta shrugs, casually brushing flour off his shirt. “Oh, I don’t know… Effie’s?”

His eyes snap up and they catch one split second of Haymitch at a loss for words.

“Look, I don’t know what you think you know—”

“Oh come on, Haymitch.” Peeta laughs. “One of you is never home. You’re always together, wherever you are—”

“We are not always together.”

“—and every night there’s only one other porch light that goes on in this Village.” Peeta raises a brow at him, smirking.

Haymitch stares him down, unflinching.

“We don’t care, you know,” Peeta says softer. “I mean, we care, we just… don’t mind.”

Haymitch looks him over. “Yeah?”

Peeta shrugs. “If you’re happy, and she’s happy…” He shrugs.

Haymitch thinks this over for a second, tapping his fingers against the soda. “Alright.”

They stare at each other for another minute before the bread timer goes off.

“I gotta—” Haymitch hooks a thumb over his shoulder and turns to leave.

Peeta nods and watches him go.

“Hey, Haymitch,” he calls out to his back. “That soda’s for her, right?”

Haymitch holds the can in the air without looking back.

Peeta grins to himself and takes the bread out of the oven to cool.

“You want to what?”

“I’m just saying,” Haymitch tells her. “It makes more sense this way.”

“But—” Effie hesitates. “You want to live together?”

Haymitch holds his arms out to the side, gesturing around the room. “How is that so different from what we’re doing now?”

Effie looks around. She didn’t notice it before, but there is a shocking amount of his things in her bedroom. T-shirts piled on the dresser, shoes spilling out of the closet. An empty bottle of white liquor poking out from under the bed.

“I…” she trails off. “I don’t know.”

Haymitch sits down next to her on the bed. He takes her hand in his, his thumb running over her knuckles. “Is it me?” he asks in a quieter voice. “Is it—are you not sure about this—”

“No. No.” She lays a soft hand on his cheek. “It’s not you. I… I want you.” She smiles briefly. “That much I’m sure about.”

Haymitch smiles back, a slow tug at one corner of his mouth. “So, what is it?”

Effie lets out a breath. “I don’t know.” She laughs a little bit at herself. “I’ve never lived with a man before.”

Haymitch grins. “Me neither.”

Effie whacks him on the shoulder.

“Come on,” Haymitch says, laughing. He wraps his arm around her, tugging her close into his side. “I think this could be really good for us.”

She looks up at him. “Really?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Definitely.”

Effie looks at him for a long minute, then finally says, “Okay.”

Haymitch kisses her like it’s the first time, like it’s the last time, like he can’t fathom doing anything else ever again.

“So which house are we moving into?”

“Mine.”

“Yours?”

“Yeah.”

“Why yours?”

“Because I got the geese.”

“Can’t you move the geese?”

“I can—”

“Okay, so do it.”

“Are you going to help me move the geese?”

“…”

“Effie?”

“I… will not be moving the geese.”

“Okay, great. So, my house.”

“You can’t move them on your own?”

“You know how hard it is to wrangle three geese into a pen?”

“No.”

“Me neither, but Katniss was real tired after she got the first two in.”

“Haymitch.”

“Effie.”

“…Fine.”

“Okay.”

“But you have to help me move all of my things.”

“Fine.”

“All of them, Haymitch.”

“Sweetheart, I wouldn’t want to do anything else in the world.”

The first thing Effie does when she moves in is hire a maid.

“Do you ever want to get married?”

Katniss’s head whips to the side.

“Not, like, now,” Peeta reassures her. “But do you ever think about it?”

They’re sitting on their little green couch, barely big enough for two, positioned right near the fireplace to always keep them warm. Her legs are tucked under her as she leans heavily into his side.

“I don’t know,” she tells him.

“I think about it. Sometimes.” He traces mindless patterns on her knee. “Not a big ceremony or anything. Not like… Not what they wanted us to do.”

His voice gets softer, and Katniss pushes herself somehow even closer to him. She lays her head down on his shoulder.

“Something small. Just us. Maybe Effie and Haymitch.” Peeta lets out a deep breath. “We’d make a fire, here, just like we do every night.”

“Would I have to wear a dress?”

“Not if you don’t want to. You can wear your hunting jacket for all I care.”

“But you’d wear something nice.”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“And we’d make toast?” Katniss asks, her voice impossibly small.

“From fresh bread,” Peeta says with a nod. “It’d be the best toast you’d ever have in your life.”

Katniss laughs a little at that. At the idea in general. It all seems so… doable.

“I used to think I’d never get married,” she tells him.

“I know.”

She picks her head up enough to look at him. “How would you know that?”

“It just makes sense,” he tells her. “Someone like you… You’d never want to bring children into the world. The old world. You’d never be able to send them into an arena.”

Katniss drops her eyes away from him. “Yeah.”

“Do you still feel that way?” he asks. “About kids?”

“I don’t know.” She lays her head back down on his shoulder. “Ask me again in ten years, when we have a working government again.”

Peeta lays his cheek on her head, his hand covering hers where it lies on his knee. “We could still get married, though.”

“And not have kids?”

“Sure.” He’s quiet for a moment, and then, “I only need you, Katniss. That’s it.”

She turns over the idea in her mind. “Is this your way of proposing?”

“God no,” Peeta says, and she can hear the smile on his face. “Could you imagine? This would be such a lame proposal.”

Katniss grins. “I don’t know. It’s not so bad.”

Peeta kisses the top of her head. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They stare at the fire for a while after that, the two of them lost in thought. She imagines that he’s picturing their wedding, but she’s picturing their marriage. The two of them together for the rest of their lives.

It’s already what she’s planning, isn’t it?

“Would you say yes?” he asks, his voice a whisper. “If I asked… would you say yes?”

“I don’t know,” she says, even though deep down she does. “Ask me again in a few years.”

With the new government comes free elections.

They elected a new president in the wake of Coin’s murder, but now there seem to be even more positions to fill. Representatives, two from each district, are to be elected to be the voice of their people. They will conduct business in the districts and in the old Capitol, giving the people a say in how their new society should be run.

For a minute, there is talk of electing the Girl on Fire.

“I don’t want that.” Katniss’s voice is bordering on panicked. “They can’t—Haymitch, I don’t want that.”

“Relax, sweetheart,” he says, almost bored. “They can’t vote for you even if they wanted to.”

Katniss’s brow furrows involuntarily. “Why?”

Haymitch sighs. “Because you’re seventeen. In the eyes of the law, you’re nothing but a child.”

She blinks. He’s technically correct, though it doesn’t feel like it. Some days she feels a hundred years old, like she’s lived three lives already. In some ways, she has.

Apparently being seventeen means she can’t actually vote in these elections either, which bothers her to no end. Next year, she thinks. Next year she’ll have a voice again.

She makes sure Haymitch drags himself to the voting booth. Effie too.

It rains for a week straight at the end of the summer.

Katniss has never minded the rain. It’s annoying more than anything, but the worst part about it is being trapped inside. There’s plenty to do in the house, it’s not like she gets bored, but being trapped, in a way, inside while the rain continues outside…

It’s unnerving.

“It reminds me of the cave,” Peeta says one afternoon.

Katniss looks over at him from her spot on the couch. “What?”

“The cave,” Peeta repeats himself. He’s standing by the window, watching the rain. “In the first Hunger Games, when we were hiding out in that cave by the stream, and it just kept raining.”

Katniss remembers. She always remembers.

“The roof was leaking, and it was freezing,” Peeta continues. “And we were sitting ducks in there. Just… waiting. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do but sit there and try not to die.”

“I hated that cave,” Katniss tells him.

He breaks his stare through the window and looks over at her.

“I hated that cave, but if I had to be there with anyone, I’m glad I was there with you.”

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Me too.”

Peeta goes back to staring out the window, but Katniss stares at Peeta. The rain doesn’t make her think of the games. It makes her think of lost hunting days, when the rain was too thick to see through, when the splashing puddles everywhere made it impossible to track game. The days where their spoils were small, and their bellies were empty.

For Peeta it’s different. The rain means fear, terror. Trapped in one place, scared out of his mind.

But they’re not trapped. Not anymore.

Katniss pushes herself up off the couch. “Come on.”

Peeta looks over at her. “What?”

“Come on,” she says again, taking his hand and pulling him away from the window.

“Where are we going?”

“Outside.”

She throws open the door and pulls him over the threshold and down the steps. It’s raining, but it’s not hard. Lightning doesn’t strike the ground, and thunder doesn’t shake the sky. It’s a warm summer rain that kisses their faces and soaks their clothes and makes the road run muddle in the Village.

Peeta looks down at himself, holding his arms out funny as he stars at his wet t-shirt.

Katniss laughs—actually laughs—at the absurdity of it all.

“It’s just rain!” she yells through a grin.

When Peeta looks up, he’s smiling.

He shakes his hair like a wet dog, angling it right for her.

Katniss shrieks through a laugh, holding up her hands to block it before she starts to run. She takes off down the road and Peeta chases her, the two of them panting and laughing and slipping in the mud.

They run through the rain together in wide open spaces, surrounded by nothing but the sky.

Eventually Peeta tackles her into a puddle, and they get mud all over their clothes.

They don’t care.

They’re free.

It’s not perfect.

None of them are perfect.

Katniss still has night terrors that plague her regularly. Some nights are worse than others, but they’re getting better. She doesn’t thrash so much anymore. She’s stopped kicking Peeta in her sleep.

Peeta has his episodes, though few and far between. The little ones get him the most. The ones he tries to hide from the others, the ones he never bounces back from as quickly. His mind still doesn’t feel entirely like his own, but it’s mostly there. It’s mostly there.

Haymitch still drinks almost as much as he used to. He’s cut back some, but not enough to make a substantial difference in his health. Though he seems happier these days when he drinks. Not quite happy, but happier.

Effie will never get that spark back, the one she had before the war. The one that made her jump out of bed in the morning and greet every day with a smile on her face. She will never get it back, no matter how hard she stries, but maybe—just maybe—she’ll find something new to replace it.

They’re not perfect. But that’s not the point.

The point is that they’re trying. Day in and day out, sometimes it’s all they can do. Try to live, try to live well, in whatever way that means for them.

They try every day.

And it makes it just a little bit easier knowing that they’re all trying together.

It’s Peeta’s eighteenth birthday.

He spends the morning in the kitchen, baking until his heart’s content. Loaves of bread, cheese rolls, small pastries they eat right off the cooling rack.

It’s what he’s good at. It’s what he loves to do.

They spend his birthday together, the four of them, mostly huddled around the kitchen and telling their favorite Peeta stories. It’s a lot of laughter, a lot of light. The sun shines in through the big bay window and warms them all.

He spends a little time in the graveyard in the afternoon. A moment with his family.

When he gets back to the house, his new family has the place decorated in colored paper and streamers, and there’s a cake on the table that reads Happy BDay Peeta with eighteen small candles on it.

“Where did you get this?” he asks around a laugh.

“I made it,” Katniss tells him, then adds, “with Haymitch’s help,” after he elbows her.

“You made this?”

“Yeah. I know it’s not… Well, it doesn’t look great.” She laughs at the cracked chocolate cake sitting between them. “But I’m sure it tastes fine.”

“Effie did the frosting,” Haymitch adds.

“I tried my best,” Effie says, blushing.

The frosting is a disastrous mix of orange, but it coats the entire cake. The E’s in the writing are a little crooked. One of the candles won’t stay lit, no matter how hard they try.

But it’s perfect.

To him, it is perfect.

They sing happy birthday around the kitchen island, and when they’re done, Peeta blows out all the candles on the cake. He’s eighteen today, no longer a kid, legally, but he smiles as big as he did when he was six and his dad made him a bright orange cupcake for breakfast.

Peeta looks around the room at these people who love him, and he’d be lying if he didn’t get a little teary eyed at the sight of it all.

It’s a new year, a new life.

He wouldn’t want to spend the start of it any other way.

They eat the cake—no plates, just forks in hand and four stools pulled up to the countertop—and it’s good. It’s dinner and dessert and they don’t care if it’s too much sugar.

They sit and they eat and they talk about the most mundane things just because they can. They talk about later, and tomorrow, and how the leaves are starting to change. They talk about how they might all go into town this weekend and visit ont of the new shops that just opened. They talk about how they might just stay in instead, playing cards and drinking hot chocolate and laughing together in a way only truly broken people can.

In a way that means they’re being put back together. In a way that means they’re healing.

They’ll do it all, eventually. Visit the shop, and play cards, and laugh so hard they’re lying on the floor clutching their stomachs.

They eat birthday cake and make plans for tomorrow because they can do that now.

They have nothing but time.

Nothing but time, and each other.