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When Peeta knocks on her front door, Katniss is curled up in the hallway closet, nestled in a pile of clothes she hasn’t bothered to take for washing. She’s sure it’s Peeta. Haymitch doesn’t knock.
It’s a habit from her underground days she hasn’t yet managed to shake, this hiding thing. On days she can’t imagine managing to leave the house for the woods, she feels safest in small spaces. No one can see her here. It’s both comforting and slightly suffocating.
“Door’s unlocked,” she calls out, voice stretched thin and raw from little use. When did she last speak?
The creak of the door, the familiar heavy, lopsided footsteps. He finds her quickly. She squints her eyes against the daylight streaming through the windows.
“Fancy meeting you here.” He tries for a joke and she does her best to reward him with a smile. “I wanted to know if you’d eaten today.”
He’s here to play babysitter. Katniss wishes she could lie to him, but unfortunately he has grown a sixth sense for her lies since they were sixteen. Or she’s lost her skill, if she ever had it.
“No. I don’t really want to leave here, though.” The corner is comfortable. Her house is both too large and empty, and simultaneously too full with him in it.
Peeta sighs. Not annoyed. More sad than anything. “Katniss, you have to eat. And go outside, and bathe, and sleep not on the floor.”
“I do all of those things. I do. Just not today,” she replies, slightly indignant. He should know. She silently brought him a few hunting finds just last week. It was more food than she could ever need for just her.
“And today?”
“Today I’m tired, Peeta.”
“Don’t make me get Haymitch.” It almost makes Katniss laugh. He sounds like a child threatening to snitch to the teacher. But she doesn’t give up the fight.
“Go ahead,” she almost dares, pressing her cheek into the warmth of the clothing pile. Her joints are starting to ache. “He gets it. He gets me.”
Peeta scoffs. “Don’t kid yourself. He’s as worried about you as I am.”
“No he’s not,” she challenges. “Go over right now, he’ll be blackout drunk. He won’t care.”
Peeta’s hands clench and unclench. She doesn’t know why she keeps speaking, provoking him, the words spill out of her mouth unbidden. She wishes he would comfort her already with those hands. She can’t ever bear to reach out first these days.
“You two need to— to cut it out with the hermit thing. I can’t be the only one looking out for the both of you. I swear he didn’t even eat until I came back, and I know you wouldn’t have if it weren’t for Greasy Sae. If you won’t take care of each other at least help me out here and let me take care of you.” He either can’t or doesn’t stop the pleading tone that creeps into his voice.
“I’m sorry,” Katniss says. She is. It’s springtime outside and it’s springtime inside, standing right in front of her, all fresh air and sunshine and warm food and all she ever does is reject it.
Finally, he speaks again. “Will you let me make you supper?” Quiet, gentle. “I can force Haymitch over here too. Only if you want.”
“Yeah.” It’s the growling of her stomach that answers, that gives up the fight, before she does, the sudden realization of how hungry she is. The temptation of dinner is too much. “Yeah, you can get Haymitch. Dodge better this time.”
He laughs at that. Just a few days before, he had brought breakfast to Haymitch, and upon trying to wake him, recieved a nick from the knife on the back of his perfect hand.
“He feels really bad,” Peeta had told her, smiling despite the blood, when he showed up for bandages out of her mother’s dusty cabinet. “He never has aim that good. Think I really scared him.” She will never understand the ease and quickness with which he forgives.
“That’s why I throw water on him,” Katniss had murmured, rolling her eyes, wrapping up his hand. Feeling his heartbeat through his fingers, her own still pounding from the sight of him at her door dripping red.
She feels the bandage now as he takes her arms in his hands and gently, effortlessly hauls her upright. Her head spins a bit from the suddenness, and she leans on him and lets him lead her to her own kitchen.
This is how they end up around the table, their little triangle, spoons clinking in warm stew. Haymitch groans at noises through his hangover headache but dutifully sips his broth. Peeta passes Katniss more bread before she can ask.
She soaks up the last of the broth in her bowl with the bread, its warmth spreading through her. She feels fuller than she has in days.
“I was thinking,” Peeta says, pushing back his chair to collect dishes, “we might work on the book tomorrow.”
Katniss recognizes this for what it is; an attempt to give them a goal, something to do, anything to focus on. The book is a stupidly depressing task, really. But she’ll take it. “Okay.”
“Not helping you with it.” Haymitch winces at the sound of his bowl clattering into Peeta’s, pinching the bridge of his nose. Lately he has begun to offer his own details and tidbits for them to record. The sort of thing they have to wait for him to offer and never press. Like letting a dog sniff your hand.
“Fair enough,” Peeta agrees. He drops the leftover meat into Buttercup’s bowl, who comes running as fast as an arthritic cat can.
“You spoil him,” Katniss accuses, but she can’t fight the smile creeping onto her face as Peeta bends to scratch the scraggly cat.
“Why not? I think we all deserve to be spoiled these days.”
When he winds up in her bed, she’s grateful. He unbraids her knotting hair. Their legs tangle together. The metal of his false one makes her giggle and shiver when her bare feet hit it before warming under the blanket. Through the window she opened for him, a night breeze flutters the curtains.
When Katniss wakes again, it’s not to her own nightmare, but to his. His skin has gone flushed and sweaty in her hands, shaking, and when his eyes snap open, she prepares to roll away in case that stubborn corner of his brain should respond negatively to seeing her.
But when his eyes focus and find hers, after a brief flicker of fear, all they show is relief.
“Hey.” When he doesn’t flinch away, she takes it as an okay to lean back in, stroke his hair, brushing his curls back from his damp forehead.
Trembling still, his eyes dart around her face as if confirming she’s there, grip tightening on her arm. “Dreamed about… I… doesn’t really matter. You’re here.”
“Real.” Katniss swipes a thumb over his temple. His eyebrows are beginning to grow back in. “And we’re home.”
Peeta nods and wriggles deeper into her arms, burying his face in her shoulder. Whatever optimistic resolve he keeps up in the daytime has melted away, and now he lies silently against her, shivering.
“Sorry,” he chokes out eventually, barely more than a whisper, voice thick with something. Emotion, maybe, or fatigue.
“Don’t apologize,” Katniss replies, bewildered. Of course Peeta, who spends his days tending to Katniss’s breakdowns, would somehow find a way to feel bad about the slightest show of his own damage.
“Peeta,” Katniss asks, suddenly worried. “Do you have nightmares every night still?”
He shifts around in what might be a shrug. Or just anxious fidgeting. “Most.”
The thought of Peeta alone in his empty house makes her deeply upset. “You know you can come find me, right? You always do the same for me.” It’s not very often now that she can bring herself to seek him out for comfort, but he’s never once rejected her.
He traces a finger along her shoulder blade. “You used to sleep in my room on the train. Real?”
“Real.”
“I don’t really…” He pauses. “I don’t want to scare you. Or hurt you. I’m usually okay in the daytime. But when I’ve just woken up, I— I get confused, and—“
“Shh, it’s okay.” She pulls him into a tighter hug. The pressure seems to still his agitation. “You don’t scare me. And I’ve missed you.”
And she does. When she’s hiding in the closets, when she leaves before the sun for a hunt so early not even a baker’s son would think of being awake. When she wakes from their twin nightmares and he’s three houses away.
“I miss you too. I thought… it probably wouldn’t be helping you any to be around me like this. And—“ Though she can’t see his face, she can hear the slight waver of hesitation in his voice. “I don’t want to… I don’t know, hold you back somehow. From healing.”
Katniss pulls back and actually laughs in a strange sort of strangled way. “Hold me back? Peeta, you— you feed me and check on me every day and nag me about the closet thing, and—“
She can’t possibly express in words that he is more than half the reason she’s alive. She needs him to know just how important that is.
“I know we don’t really talk about it. But I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. No way. Don’t discredit yourself for that.” He swallows hard and nods. But she’s not done. “What you said earlier. About me and Haymitch. Isolating ourselves and all that… You don’t go starting that either, and I’ll try to stop. Okay? I want to be here for you.”
“Okay.” He nods again, processing. “Okay. Guess we both have a lot to work on, huh?” he laughs breathlessly. Katniss smiles. Maybe they always will.
It doesn’t take long for him to doze back off. Katniss, not so much, but holding him and watching the moonlight reflect around her room is far from the worst way to pass time. After a while, Peeta shifts again.
“I love you,” he murmurs into her neck, half-asleep. There’s no expectation behind it. He doesn’t ask if she loves him. The guilt doesn’t fill her throat as in the past.
When he’s snoring softly again, she whispers back, “I love you too.”
On a summer morning when her mind stays cloudy and her blanket feels a hundred pounds, trapping her to her bed, it’s the sound of the geese outside that motivates her to stand.
Obnoxiously loud, the overlapping honking means they’re getting fed early, which means, for once, Haymitch has left his house himself. Katniss knows this because Peeta hasn’t left her kitchen all morning.
The creak of the stairs under her bare feet alerts him, and he turns from the stove to grin at her. “Good morning. Almost done with pancakes.”
The aroma of vanilla and fresh baked dough fills her nose, and while he would have brought it to her anyway, she’s glad to have gotten out of bed now, however long it took her. “Oh, I can’t wait. I’m going to see Haymitch.” She pulls on her boots, squinting against the sudden light as she opens the door.
“Bring him back for breakfast!” Peeta calls as she steps out into the warm morning air. It’s a quick walk to Haymitch’s backyard, the geese’s honking growing louder as she approaches.
Sitting on the bench facing the patch of green behind their houses, bag of feed clutched in his hand, he turns at the sound of her rustling through the bushes.
“Good morning,” she offers, swinging her legs over the back of the bench and sliding down beside him. He says nothing. His hair is mussed, circles under his eyes still dark. He seems sober. “You sleep any?”
He shrugs, turning his gaze back to the geese, scooping out another handful from the bag. “Not much. The delivery train comes tomorrow, I think.” The feed scatters over the grass, geese honking and stepping over each other for their turn.
“Sorry.” After her experience with morphling, Katniss has much more sympathy for his addiction than she’d used to.
He shrugs again and passes her the bag. “Well, I’m glad for the distraction.”
He means the geese. Katniss had felt so inexplicably helpless faced with everything he had told them as they worked on their book. It started with her father’s page, and then it all just came out. Like he’d been holding back a dam and it finally broke. That week when she’d found herself in the woods and noticed a goose egg nest, a determination she hadn’t felt in months overtook her. She spent the next few hours collecting eggs from different nests, finally stumbling back home at dusk with a full basket.
The look on Haymitch’s face and the silent, tight hug he had given her made it worth it.
She tosses out another handful of feed now. They sit in comfortable silence for a while, occasionally passing the bag between them. The sun rises a bit higher, peeking over the trees. A thought occurs to Katniss.
“It’s next week. Reaping Day.”
“Oh, I know,” he sighs.
A goose steps on her boot, beak darting for the bag. “Hey, back. Greedy.” She throws another handful which he promptly chases after. Turning back to Haymitch, she tries to read his profile. “Do you want us to talk about it? Next week? We can ignore it.”
He grunts noncommittally. “No. I don’t know. Effie’s probably gonna fuckin’ call.”
“Well, maybe it’d do you good to pick up your phone and talk to someone besides me and Peeta for a change.”
“Maybe you can celebrate by not being an asshole for a change.”
“A whole day might be a lot to ask.” She hands the bag back to him. He takes it, cracking a smile. “But really, we can just, I don’t know, have dinner. Something nice. It doesn’t have to be… a thing. I’m not eager to think about the reaping either.”
“That would be preferable,” Haymitch sighs. “It’s just another day. No different from every other day we’ve survived here.”
She ponders that. Nearly everything is an anniversary of something, really. All of July unbearable for Haymitch, surely. In six months it will be winter again and Prim will have not aged a year. Finnick, too, will have been gone a year. In a few weeks, Rue gone for two. Gale’s birthday will pass. Katniss’s already did.
Yes, no day is worse than any other when she thinks of it like that. Every fall afternoon is one Prim should be walking home from school. Every sunny day is one Madge should be spending eating Katniss’s freshly harvested strawberries.
“Hey.” Haymitch is snapping his fingers in her face. “Anyone home?”
She blinks and pushes his hand away. He places the seed bag back in her lap.
“What’s bugging you? Thought we were here talking about my shit. It’s not your turn.”
She smiles despite her drop in mood. Squeezing the seeds, running her fingers along the burlap, she’s glad to have something else to hold and look at. She takes a breath.
“I… how do you…” She stares at her hands, struggling to get it out in a way he won’t laugh at her for. No guarantee either way, really. “How do you even… manage? To face the day?”
“Do I look like I’m thriving?” he deadpans.
“No. But it’s just, I could hardly get out of bed today… and you, you wrote so much for the book, so many people.” She watches a goose pecking at its friend a few yards away. “If I struggle this bad, how do you…?”
It’s a long, long moment before he speaks. “If you’re suggesting I should have killed myself by now, I wish. Heaven knows I would’ve loved to live to see the Games end and then end myself right after. That was pretty much my only goal.”
Well, he’s never been particularly comforting or optimistic.
“Why did you get out of bed this morning?”
“Huh?” Katniss finally turns to face him. “I… Peeta is making me breakfast. And I heard you outside.”
“Well, there you go. Unfortunately, I have two very annoying neighbors I care about who insist on being in my house all the time and cooking me shit.”
This touches Katniss more than she’d expect it to. Despite him calling them only neighbors, clearly preserving the last shreds of his indifferent facade. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Guess you got the same motivation, then.”
She always has. Even back to the reaping, even before. “Family’s always been my reason.”
This word choice, apparently, is too much for him, though she can tell he’s pleased. “That’s enough feelings talk. What’s the boy making?”
“Pancakes. He said to bring you back.”
He stands and stretches, groaning, and pulls her up. “Well, let’s not leave him waiting. The geese are more than fed.”
She leaves the seeds and they make their way through the tall grass. The sun is fully in the sky now, warming their faces, Haymitch lets her not drop his arm, and by the time they reach the porch, the scent of pancakes wafts out the windows.
Today will be an okay day.
It’s Peeta — who else? — who finds Katniss with the scissors in her hands the day she decides to cut off her braid.
Hunched in front of the bathroom mirror, several inches of hair clutched in her other hand, choppy remains of the braid unraveling, she admittedly didn’t think through the actual strategy of haircutting. She bites her cheek in frustration.
“Is this… something you’ve been thinking about for a while?” he asks from the doorway. He means, of course, is this a breakdown of some sort?
She nods. Sets down the fistful of dark hair and assesses the situation in the mirror.
Her skin grafts are healing well, nearly blending into her old skin now. Soon she might not look a fire mutt at all. The puckered scar from Johanna tearing the tracker from her arm has gone faded and pale, and she’s gained back the weight and sleep she lost those years.
But the braid. It feels just as much a symbol of who she used to be as the mockingjay pin, which is now wrapped up in a drawer.
And worse, everytime she does her hair she can’t help but think of doing Prim’s. How she took over brushing and braiding her beautiful blonde hair each morning before school when their mother stopped. The way Prim had worn just one braid over her shoulder in 13, just like Katniss. It consumed her thoughts and sent her spiraling every time she ran her fingers along her own braid.
So it had to go. She thinks maybe she’ll want it back one day, and let it grow again. But today is not that day.
She’d been planning on asking for help, considering she can’t see the back of her head, but on this particular morning its presence on her shoulders was driving her mad, and the first pair of any random scissors she could find had wound up in her hands. She’s pretty sure they’re sewing scissors, actually. Another talent she was meant to practice for the camera that Prim had mastered instead.
She gives them up to Peeta now. “You’ve got the… artistic eye or whatever.”
He laughs and takes them, stepping inside and hesitating above her uneven cut. “You trust me with this? How do you want it?”
Despite his worst days, she’d trust him with just about anything, to hold her real actual beating heart, but she doesn’t say as much. “Yes. Anything. Just don’t make me look too terrible.”
“That’d be pretty hard to do.” He blows the hair trimmings off her shoulders and sets to work. For whatever reason, Katniss closes her eyes. She focuses on the snipping sounds of the blades at her ears, fidgeting in place.
Finally, she feels him brush the hair from her shirt, hears the clink of the scissors on the counter.
“How’s this?”
She opens her eyes. Peeta has somehow transformed the messy, uneven cut she had given herself into a short style just brushing her shoulders, still long enough to tuck behind her ears.
“Woah.”
“Do you like it?”
“I do.” It’s the shortest her hair has ever been, and, turning her head side to side, she feels tons lighter. “It’s great. Thank you.”
He kisses the top of her head. “I’ll get the broom.”
Katniss looks down at the piles of shed hair encircling her feet like ashes, like the fallen autumn leaves beginning to cover the grass outside. She steps out and follows him, head feeling free and light.
Fall comes and goes in shades of Peeta’s-favorite orange. Winter arrives, and they survive the snow. Soon, another year has passed and springtime has come back around. Dandelions and primroses bloom by their front steps.
They hunt, bake, drink. Same as it ever was, but something comforting about letting their little routines collide, a three-way Venn diagram.
Katniss braids loaves of bread instead of her hair. Haymitch raises another brood of geese. They teach Peeta to swim.
They get visitors, sometimes. Greasy Sae. Delly. Calls from Annie, Johanna, Effie, even Katniss’s mother. The remaining people of District 12 form a monthly sort of tradition, in which anyone willing to brings a dish and shares a meal in the rebuilt town square. It’s nice, Katniss thinks.
At some point Peeta stops going back to his own house. His shoes and cane sit by her door, his clothes are folded into her drawers. Her room becomes their room. No one comments on it. It’s as natural as the winter air turning to spring.
Some days they walk to the Meadow, a trail of geese behind them. They pack a picnic, where they’ll lie eating cheese buns, Peeta sketching, while Haymitch tends to wander around with the geese. Katniss, tiny flowers woven into her hair whenever Peeta’s hands aren’t busy with a pencil, can’t help but think of their rooftop date. How they get to live in that moment every day now, when they choose.
It’s on one of these walks back from the Meadow, sun setting, sky casting a golden glow over the grass, the trees, their bodies, that Katniss begins to sing.
It’s an old song of her father’s she thinks of, watching the geese dart around their heels, pecking at the picnic basket in Haymitch’s hands. She catches Peeta smiling.
“What?”
“I just like seeing you happy.”