Prompt: Belief/Katniss Everdeen & Peeta Mellark
Requested by: pacman
Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

request one here



It's been a long time since I've come to visit Peeta. Maybe too long. Seeing him brings up too much history between us that hasn't been resolved, too many feelings of pain and guilt, of promises broken or still waiting to be fulfilled. Seeing him hurts.

I don't know what brings me to his porch this spring morning. Maybe it's the fact that the primroses in my windowsill have started blooming. Maybe it's the fact that the mockingjays were singing outside my window, or I woke up and for the first time for got completely about how angry I still am at Gale.

Maybe it's because it's the eve of what would have been the 76th Hunger Games.

Whatever it is, it's drawing me to him, like a moth to a flame. I almost didn't come--almost talked myself out of it, probably twenty or thirty times. But here I am, in the end, standing at his door. I wonder if he's still the same Peeta he was a few months ago. I wonder if he was the same Peeta he was a few years ago. Probably not. I'm not the same Katniss I was a few months, or a few years ago.

I change my mind again three times before knocking on his door. What if he doesn't want anything to do with me anymore?

When the door swings open, I ready myself for the anger, the bitterness of being left alone after coming back from something as horrific as what he went through. But it's Peeta, so of course I get nothing. Nothing except a small smile, and a hoarse voice. "Katniss," he says, and it sounds like he hasn't spoken in days.

When I walk into his house, the first thing I notice is the smell of bread. The same way it used to smell walking by his father's shop every morning. Then I see how the walls are covered with paint. They're like a mural of his life, but not the Hunger Games parts of it. At least, not the parts I know still haunt his dreams the way they still haunt mine. No, these are different memories. Finnick and Annie, at their wedding. Beetee and Wiress laughing on the beach. Splitting a loaf of bread amongst an odd number of people, eating clams on by the sea. A girl, cheeks hollow, crouching and grasping a warm loaf of fresh bread. The same girl, but younger, pigtails and plaid dress, standing up and opening her mouth in song. Rue, the way she'd looked during the interviews--I'm very hard to catch, and if they can't catch me, they can't kill me. So don't count me out.

The tears prick behind my eyes, and I blink them away. These memories are beautiful but painful, so sharp and vivid in the colors Peeta's mixed for them. I turn away, and face a door, his room, I think, painted the colors of the setting sun. I'm reminded of a moment--Isn’t it strange that I know you’d risk your life to save mine...but I don’t know what your favorite color is?--and I have to struggle to hold back tears again.

Peeta is in front of me now, with those understanding eyes of his. "Real or not real," he says softly, holding an arm out to gesture at his walls, lit with the colors of our past. "It happened."

I choke back a sob. Me, volunteering, with a frightened Prim in the background. His mother and father, and his brothers, sitting around the dining table. Johanna, stripping naked before walking into the elevator. Cinna, smile alight on his face, fingers steepled under his chin. My face when Peeta had announced to the whole world he was in love with me. His hand, nightlock held between nimble fingers. Finnick again--Want a sugar cube?

"Yes." The word is so soft even I can barely hear it. "Real. Real." And the words aren't just for him, anymore. They're for me. Convincing myself that the good times had existed as well, that the past two years of my life have been more than just pain and anguish and death. That Prim and Finnick's deaths, Rue's death, Thresh's death, were not in vain.

I find myself leaning in towards him, and I cling onto his shirt like a baby clinging to its mother as he holds me. "Real or not real," I ask, the first time I've asked it and not him. "We still have each other."

It takes him a moment to respond, but I know from the way his arms tighten around me that it's not because he's doubting what he's about to say. "Real." he says, voice choked with emotion. "Because that's what you and I do. Protect each other." And it's enough. Even among all the ghosts and memories haunting us in the hallways of his home, the belief that I'll always have him is enough.