log: everlark WHO: Peeta Mellark and Katniss Everdeen(-Mellark) WHEN: Backdated to the day of the snowstorm WHERE: Their room! WHAT: Peeta wakes up and suffers flashbacks and confusion to his time being hijacked. Katniss manages to talk him out of it, but she's afraid for what this means for him. WARNINGS: PTSD/flashbacks, etc.
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Normally, Katniss was awake even before the crack of dawn. Down in the mountain her internal clock was still relatively on the same schedule, although it had taken some adjustment at first. She usually lingered in bed next to Peeta for at least a little while, unless there was some urgent reason to get out of bed. Generally, a hunting day was better if she left before sunrise, and the sun didn’t tend to poke its head over these mountains very early - but a few minutes didn’t make that much of a difference, and as much as she enjoyed almost every minute of being out in the woods, she treasured the quiet moments when she was awake but Peeta was asleep even more. They were warm, quiet, peaceful, and filled her heart with a lightness that she carried with her the rest of the day.
On this particular morning, she woke before him and lingered there, not particularly interested in leaving their warm bed for the cold, and then she remembered - snow. There was a blizzard, and she wasn’t going to go hunting until it was over. She didn’t have to get up at all.
Smiling to herself, she tucked herself closer against Peeta and closed her eyes.
--
Mornings that weren't busy were rare. Katniss liked to get up and hunt before sunrise, and Peeta needed to be up before dawn in order to bake the morning's bread. They were generally up before anyone else, getting ready together in the mornings before parting ways when Peeta left for the kitchens.
Today, though, was a morning off. Peeta got Saturday mornings off. It was something he'd insisted on, something that he'd never gotten when working for the family bakery. He wanted one morning that was his, even if it felt like an indulgence. They probably would have given him more if he asked for it, but Peeta tended to keep himself busy and avoided being idle.
He was sleeping soundly for once, stirring a little when Katniss curled in against him. He shifted, arching up a bit off the mattress before resettling with a heavy sigh. "Mm?" As if she'd been trying to get his attention.
--
Katniss hadn’t intended to wake him, but the sleepy little sound was so endearing that it was difficult to feel bad about it. She stayed still while he shifted, and then wrapped her arm a little more closely around him. She wasn’t sure if he was entirely awake, and didn’t want to ruin a rare moment of good sleep for him - though they did better together than on their own, sleep was still a difficult thing for both of them - so she stayed quiet, looking up at him from her vantage point with the side of her face resting against his chest.
--
Peeta shifted again, pulling his arm out from an awkward spot underneath her and resting his hand against her hair.
He ran his fingers through it once, twice, and then his hand stilled as he opened his eyes. The peaceful moments just before waking were slowly descending into a tense silence, one in which Peeta wasn't simply still because he was comfortable, but still because he was watching Katniss and trying not to move.
Katniss had her head on his chest, able to hear his breaths go shallow, able to hear his heart starting to race.
--
After everything she’d been through, Katniss’ instincts were still on high alert, even in warm, comfortable moments like this. She felt the change before she noticed it in his face or in the sound of his breathing, felt her skin prickle and her muscles start to tense, ready to flee. Not to fight, which would have been her response in most cases - had been her instinctive response when she’d thought he was going to kill her in the arena, the first time around. Now, her instincts were heavily weighted in the other direction. Not in a general sense: only with him.
But she stayed where she was, forced herself to keep her breathing steady, even as her mind started to race. Her chances of getting away before he got a grip on her weren’t very good. She reminded herself, for the first time in a long time, that he was better. That she had been able to get through to him before even when he was losing control. She shouldn’t be calculating how to get to safety, she should be concentrating on him.
She kept her eyes on his, because she didn’t dare look away, even if staring at him might seem threatening. Softly, trying to inject as much warmth into her voice as she could - which was difficult when she was terrified - she said, “Peeta?”
--
He was better. Peeta had been largely fine for months, he hadn't checked out of reality for a long time — at least, not where she could see it. He'd been holding her through her own problems, while quietly not mentioning his own: the days when he forgot where he was, the moments where he couldn't sort out if the strange thing he was seeing was real or not, the sudden flashbacks whenever he felt confined or restrained or when he heard certain sounds or saw someone smile in a certain way.
But he'd been quiet about it. Katniss knew about his nightmares, but his nightmares weren't as common as hers. It was what happened during the day that hit him the hardest, the sudden thoughts that blacked out his conscious thought, the memories that came to the forefront and made him tune out everything else.
As terrified as Katniss looked, Peeta looked just as scared. Not angry, but afraid, like an animal caught underneath a predator and too scared to move.
He almost didn't seem to recognize her — and if he did, he had wildly, intensely different feelings right now than he did when he went to bed.
Hijacking was fear conditioning. Hijacking was learning to fear before it was anything else.
--
Slowly, Katniss managed to relax. She was aware that the tension in her body wasn’t helping anything. Except she didn’t quite know what would help. The last time she’d seen him like this, here - before he’d disappeared and returned, better, farther into the future - she’d kissed him, and she would have done the same now, but that required her to move in a way that might set him off.
Well, if she wanted to kiss his mouth, at least. Gathering her courage, she broke his gaze and turned her head slightly to press a kiss to his chest, over his heart. Then she let her head rest there, closing her eyes, praying that it was enough.
--
Peeta had memories in his mind that weren't real. He had memories that were planted there, that were pushed into his head through torture, and sometimes they came unbidden to the forefront of his brain. He knew they weren't real. He knew that these false memories seemed glossy and artificial, that they felt like memories of memories.
But that didn't stop him from his immediate thoughts. This is the woman who killed your family. This is the woman responsible for destroying District Twelve. She wants to destroy you.
The kiss made him flinch, almost imperceptibly. He was frozen where he was, but he was wildly contemplating the exits. The door out of the room, how to get to get there when his artificial leg was next to the bed rather than on him. He could attack her, he could attack her for his own sake, save himself, escape all of the panic in his head.
Katniss was gentle, she was soft, and all Peeta was able to see was a predator toying with his prey, taunting him.
"Katniss…?" It was a quiet whisper, a question even if he didn't know what, precisely, he was asking. He knew it was her, he was relatively sure in that moment that his panic was unfounded.
--
Katniss was in tune enough with him to feel him flinch away from the kiss, and her heart started to break. There weren’t words for how much it hurt, and it was made worse by the fact that she’d felt somewhere close to whole and unbroken lately, because of him. The horrible feeling settled deeply into her bones, took hold of her heart: he was still afraid of her. It wasn’t his fault and she couldn’t hold it against him, couldn’t even find it in herself to be angry at Snow for it. Not right now.
Her throat closed over, and behind her closed lids, her eyes filled up. It hurt enough that she almost wished his hands would wrap around her neck and choke the life out of her. Almost, but not quite. His voice reached her, and she could hear at least something of the real Peeta in it. Enough to give her the courage to speak, although it was a moment before she could open her mouth and feel relatively certain that she wasn’t going to burst into tears.
All the same, her voice came out choked and strained, wholly unlike the happy, carefree way she’d said the same words multiple times before. “Mrs. Mellark.”
--
He squinted slightly at her words, which seemed unfamiliar until they cut through the haze. Mrs. Mellark. It wasn't sentiment that brought him back to reality, but rather a deliberate sorting out of what, precisely, was being said.
Mrs. Mellark.
The Toasting. The knot around his wrist. They were married. Katniss was his wife. The fear that he felt wasn't real. What was real was Katniss, pressed against him and watching him with concern. He felt like a light was turned on, like smoke was fading away, like whatever dreams he had that made him lose touch with reality were being erased.
He blinked slowly, bringing Katniss back into focus. "Katniss?" He remained still, but his eyes cast a quick glance around the room. Their room. It was their room, their space. He was safe here, he knew that.
"I'm sorry, I…"
--
The real Peeta was back, Katniss could hear it in his voice; she could also hear it in his slowing heartbeat, as the fear left him. She drew in a deep, ragged breath herself and tried to make her own emotions go away. But she didn’t yet open her eyes or lift her face from where it was partially buried in his chest.
It wasn’t his fault. She knew that. She wanted to tell him that, that he didn’t need to apologize, that it was alright, but those words required a levity she just wasn’t feeling. She kept listening to his breathing, drawing her own breaths in and out, and then finally reached a point where she could speak.
Her voice came out steadily, not betraying the heartbreak she was feeling, though she had no doubt he’d sensed it anyway. “You’re still afraid of me.”
--
"No, I'm not," Peeta insisted. He didn't want it to be a lie, but it was. Partly. There were just some times when confusion got to him, when he woke up and wasn't sure where he was because of a vivid dream, or because he stopped focusing and he lost touch with reality in the middle of a conversation.
He did an alarmingly good job of keeping it private.
"It's you. I know it's you. And it's the real you," he said. He lightly touched her hair, but drew his hand back. There was still something distant in his gaze, like Peeta wasn't completely present, part of him was torn away and somewhere else in the past.
--
“Yes, you are.” Katniss knew what he was saying, that the real him wasn’t afraid of her. But it wasn’t as easy for her to make the distinction as it seemed to be for him, or to accept the technicalities. Which wasn’t to say that she blamed him, or that it made his real feelings for her any less real; if anything, it made them more poignant by comparison. Yet it was impossible to ignore that the hijacking, the fear, was still stealing some of him away from her. It had stolen away this nice warm moment which otherwise would have been spent happily, contentedly curled up with him, whether he was asleep or awake. “Not all the time, and not for real, but it’s still there.”
The worst part was, it felt as if Snow had won. He was dead, but what he had done to Peeta was still haunting her. It was the most effective tool anyone could have ever used to hurt her, because she loved him. Because no matter how much it hurt, she couldn’t let him go, even knowing that it might mean he eventually lost control again and killed her, or that these brief moments of being afraid of her might slowly and more painfully destroy her in an entirely different way.
--
Peeta had good days and bad days. He had good hours and bad hours. Most of it he kept private, in an attempt to handle it all himself. He knew that the damage done was always going to linger, that it wasn't as simple as winning the war and getting away from Panem. Things didn't end with victory. The pain didn't go away.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly. He felt the need to apologize, even if it wasn't his fault. He'd snapped out of it, but Katniss was so clearly hurt by it that he felt like he'd hurt her deliberately. "Sometimes I …" He trailed off, not sure what excuses he could give.
--
Two words, and he didn’t even finish the sentence, but the meaning sank in anyway. He felt it sometimes. It didn’t really matter when, or how many times; it had happened more than once, and she’d been obliviously lost in the warmth of loving him, unaware that he was sometimes silently suffering from her presence. It wasn’t that Katniss had thought he was entirely better; she’d seen his eyes glaze over a few times, but she’d assumed he was lost in some confusing memory, and he always came back to her. She hadn’t known that he still felt afraid.
She felt like running far, far away, where it couldn’t hurt anymore, where she couldn’t hurt him, but she suppressed that instinct and stayed right where she was. That wasn’t what either of them wanted, it wouldn’t make anything better. How could she make it better? She’d thought she was helping him, making more good memories that weren’t and wouldn’t ever be corrupted, and maybe that had done something, but apparently not enough.
After a long moment of silence, she managed to lift her head at last and look at him. She pressed her hand flat against his chest, over his heart, and leaned down to press a kiss to his shoulder. Telling him, without words, that she didn’t hold it against him, still loved him. How much the sentiment helped him, she didn’t know, but she needed it.
“I couldn’t ever hurt you,” she told him, quietly. “But you know that already. And saying it doesn’t really change anything, does it?”
--
"No, it does," Peeta said. He shifted a little so he could look down at her, and he pressed his hand over hers. "I do know that. And I need to be reminded that I know that. The thoughts and memories, they … creep up on me, when I'm not paying attention. When I'm not talking to anyone, or if I'm just waking up. You remind me of what I know to be true, and I don't have to question it anymore."
He was doing his best to explain it. He didn't blame her. He knew the difference between his false memories and his real ones once he could shake it off. It just sometimes got to him, caught him off guard, found him in moments when his mind was susceptible to drifting.
Still …
"It's been happening more," he admitted, his voice quiet. "Not not recognizing you, but the flashbacks. Memories. I think I've just been … I was seeing Dr. Aurelius before and now I'm not, and I don't think I'm done."
--
Katniss had really hoped he was better, now that they were better. Now that there was so much undeniable warmth and love between them, she’d thought surely that would make it easier to identify her as someone who was safe, who cared about him. But clearly that had been a naive assumption, so she didn’t bother to say it aloud.
“You should have told me,” she said, quietly. It really bothered her that he’d been silently suffering from flashbacks and fears and she hadn’t realized it, but she knew why he’d done it. It was the same reason he did anything: to protect her. He knew it would hurt her, because that was the whole reason why this had been done to him: to tear her apart. She couldn’t bring herself to feel angry about it, just impossibly sad. “And maybe… maybe there’s someone here who can help you. There are people who’ve wanted us to talk to them about what we’ve been through.”
--
"The man I was talking to about counseling disappeared months ago," Peeta admitted. "And I sort of … didn't get around to it."
The truth was, as easily as he spoke about the Hunger Games now, he had less of an easy time discussing what happened when he was captured by the Capitol. The Hunger Games seemed simple in comparison — not easy, but simple. Explaining how they worked was important, to ensure it wouldn't happen again. The rest, though … the details of what had been done to him to warp his mind, all of that had stayed private. He didn't tell Katniss. He didn't tell anyone.
"I know I'm not all right," he said. "But I'm working through it. I'm not broken, I'm just in the process of repairs." He sighed, lifting his gaze up toward the ceiling. "You think I should talk to someone."
--
“I think you should talk to me,” Katniss corrected him, making sure he got the real gist behind her point. “But if that doesn’t work, or isn’t enough, I don’t know. There might be someone here who can help you the way Dr. Aurelius did.”
She would never insist upon it; she hated the idea of talking to anyone, even a doctor, about anything so personal. But she needed him to get better. She wanted him to be able to feel comfortable around her, without being surprised by the fear. Fear was probably going to be a constant companion on their lives - it certainly was for her- but he shouldn’t have to be afraid of her, who loved him, who would do anything to keep him safe.
She didn’t entirely trust her voice when it came to expressing any of that, and she wasn’t sure this was the moment for the sentiment anyway. She lowered her head to his shoulder, looking up at him for a moment, and then lowered her gaze to watch her own fingers as she absentmindedly traced patterns on his chest. “I think you should do whatever you need to do to get better, Peeta.”
--
Peeta worried about not getting better, but he knew that "better" was relative. He'd never be the way he was. It was never going to be the same. He'd already made extraordinary progress thanks to Katniss, thanks to the way he felt about Katniss. She was his trigger and his savior at the same time, and always managed to bring him back to reality and remind him what he really felt. She cut through the haze, all of it, and she grounded him again.
He worried that he relied on her. He worried that he was going to use her as a crutch.
"The fact that I'm here now is better," he said quietly. He wasn't dismissing her; he truly felt that the fact that he was even breathing was more than enough. He was able to love her, despite moments of confusion. He could hold her without hurting her. He could look at her with love rather than anger and terror. For a man who'd been turned into a weapon against her, that was extraordinary progress.
"I'll see if there's someone here, Katniss, but it's never going to go back to how it was. I'm always going to be …" He shrugged, pinching the bridge of his nose and exhaling heavily. "The scars are always going to be there. And I don't know if telling you what they did to me is really going to help, or if it'll just make things harder, because you'll look at me … like that, exactly like that."
--
“I know,” Katniss told him, just as quietly. She wasn’t dismissing the progress he’d already made. She had marveled at it more than he even knew, because she’d been so sure at first that her Peeta was gone, lost forever in the world that Snow had created for him, where Katniss was a dangerous mutt and would kill him if she got the opportunity. She knew it was a testament to the strength of his will, his mind, and the depths of his love for her, that he could regain this much. Was it selfish of her to want any more than that from him?
She listened to him, silently, gazing at her fingers but not really seeing them. It was painful to know he’d never be entirely better, but then, she’d never really expected that of him until it had seemed like he was better. This was worse, but it was the reality that they were living with, both of them. Because no matter what, no matter how hard it got, she knew she wasn’t going anywhere. How could she, when every fiber of her being knew what it was like to love him and be loved by him, from every inch of her skin to every little crack in her heart and the marrow of her bones? In moments like this she was even more aware of how much she loved him, how deep it went, because his fear of her made everything hurt, even parts of her being that she hadn’t even known existed.
But for the moment, she was trying to ignore sentiment in favor of practicality. It was obvious that wasn’t helping him, that her pain only made it harder for him to deal with this. “I can’t help the way this makes me feel,” she said. “They did this to you to hurt me, and it works. But the only thing that’s going to make that better is if I can help, try to take the pain and fear away. I don’t want you to keep looking at me like that, either.”
The effort of expressing herself reasonably was taking a toll on her, and she let out a long breath to release the tension before finishing. “I don’t know if talking to me will make it worse or better, but keeping it a secret definitely isn’t working, is it?”
--
"I just don't know how much I'm ready to talk about," said Peeta. He didn't like that he kept things from her. Of course he didn't. He was the sort of person who bottled up things and kept quiet, but he knew the benefit of therapy and talking things out. He just didn't know whether he could.
"Sometimes just thinking about it is enough for me to lose it for a day. I don't know what's going to happen if I actually try and confront it all, Katniss." He shrugged, smoothing Katniss's hair back. "I'm not saying I won't, I'm just saying … I'm afraid to. I'm afraid of opening a box and not being able to put anything back in."
--
Katniss was quiet for a long time, thinking that through. The thought of him completely losing his mind again terrified her, and not because of what it meant for her safety. The real damage of hijacking Peeta was to her heart and mind. She wasn’t even entirely sure that Snow had ever really intended for her to end up dead because of him, though he certainly wouldn’t have minded if it had happened.
“Don’t, then,” she said. “Don’t talk about it, at least not yet. Tell me everything else, first.” Raising her head, she shifted closer to him, half on top of him, resting on one elbow as her other hand moved to touch his cheek. “What you remember. What you like and don’t like. What kind of person you are, and who you want to be.” She gave him a small smile. “All the deep stuff that we never did get around to talking about. Things I can use to remind you who you really are. Then maybe you can try to deal with it, and I’ll be able to put you back together if it doesn’t work.”
--
Peeta smiled faintly. "What, you don't already know that about me?" he asked, a bit of wry humor creeping in. "Katniss, we're married."
He tried to sound scandalized, but his smile gave it away.
--
“I know a lot about you,” Katniss protested, coloring a little, but she was smiling, too. “But I wouldn’t mind hearing it over again, and I don’t know everything. And maybe if you talk about it, you’ll have an easier time remembering it.”
She lowered her head, resting it against his shoulder. “Or maybe it’s a stupid idea. I’m just trying to help you.”
--
Peeta fell quiet, resting his hand against her hair. As much as he joked, Katniss really didn't know much about him. She knew what kind of man he was, she knew the basics, but Peeta rarely sat down and told her about the details of his life before the Hunger Games, rarely told her about the things that he used to do for fun. They'd been little more than strangers until the Games.
"I like bread," he said after a long silence. "I like it when it's fresh, before anyone else gets to it. But I get sick of it. My family never went hungry, not really, not like other people did, but sometimes bread was just … what we had. It's comfort as much as it's tedious. It reminds me of home, and sometimes I wish it didn't. I …"
He stopped himself, realizing that he was going off on a tangent that he hadn't discussed before with Katniss.
"I don't miss them," he said quietly. "Not the way I thought I would."
--
When he started talking, Katniss lifted her head again, resting her chin on her hand and her hand on his chest. She watched him as he spoke, absorbing the information. None of it was new, exactly; she remembered him telling her that sometimes the bread was stale, and she could easily imagine that he’d gotten sick of it, if it was all they had around.
But then the subject changed, and she didn’t immediately follow his train of thought. “Who? Your family?”
--
"Mm." Peeta's gaze drifted toward the ceiling. He didn't talk about his family. They were dead. What Katniss knew was pieced together from snippets that came from observing him over the years and what amounted to town gossip.
He had older brothers. His father was a sweet man, and his mother was notoriously unpleasant. When he'd been reaped, no one had seemed overly broken up about him being sent into the Games. His father had given Katniss cookies. It wasn't that the Mellark family didn't love their youngest. Everyone reacted to shock differently. Still:
"I don't think I was wanted," he admitted. "I was the third child, another mouth to feed. My mother already had one son who was trouble and another who was going to take over the bakery, and I … you know, I don't know where I fit in. I don't think they were glad to be rid of me, but----well, maybe my mother was."
Mrs. Mellark had been known to be unpleasant, and there was little secret that she raised a hand to her children. Peeta might have never gone hungry, but he'd been treated poorly.
He came back around to his point: "I feel like I should miss them more than I do," he admitted, and he felt terrible for it. But he'd seen Katniss's reaction to losing Prim, and he felt nothing like that.
--
Katniss knew a little bit about what his parents were like, and she knew the way they’d reacted to him being reaped. She remembered Peeta, on the beach, telling her that no one needed him. But she also remembered, before that, during the Victory Tour, when he’d wanted to protect them. She wondered if he’d lost them then, maybe he would have missed them more. Before he’d been reaped again, before both of their worlds had narrowed down to simply trying to keep the other alive, and before he’d been in the Capitol - before his memories had been tampered with, before he’d been consumed with fear and rage. She wondered if some of his other emotions from before, even the ones that had nothing to do with her, had been lost. If his parents and brothers had been alive afterward, would they have even tried to help him get them back?
She could understand the difficulty of having another mouth to feed - she’d tried to drown Buttercup to avoid having to feed him, but she would never have done that to a baby. It didn’t justify the way his parents had treated him. Nothing would justify it in her mind, really. He was their child. He had deserved better, and she wasn’t thinking that only because she loved him.
“I don’t really miss my mother, either,” she said, after a moment. “I mean - she’s alive, or at least I think she is, but - she probably won’t be there, not really, not after…” She couldn’t bring herself to say Prim’s name. “I lost her a long time ago, really. After my father died, she just… gave up. Sat there and looked straight through us. I never really forgave her for it.”
She didn’t know what point she was trying to make, except maybe that she understood, a little bit, how he was feeling. “I think, just because they’re your family… doesn’t mean you have to miss them. If they haven’t given you a reason.”
--
Peeta thought about this, quietly gazing at a crack in the ceiling. She was right, wasn't she? He felt obligated to have certain feelings about them, but they hadn't earned anything from him. His father was kind but passive, his mother abusive, his brothers largely oblivious. Peeta had felt unwanted since he was small. His mother had suggested that Katniss was the likely winner of the Hunger Games, rather than expressing worry over her son. He still wanted to protect them, because they were family, but it was the only way he felt like he could be worth anything to them.
He didn't want to tell Katniss that he envied her relationship with Prim, not when Prim was dead. He didn't want to bring up anything about her. Still, he said: "I've felt like a bad person. But I also know that I've barely had time to process it. I never had a chance to think about it. After the war, it … yeah. It hit me then, when we started rebuilding. They're gone, but I'm not alone."
--
“It might feel worse later,” Katniss said, quietly. She was, by now, something of an expert on grief. All different kinds. She was still mourning her father, who had died a long time ago; people she’d known who’d died in the war, in Twelve, in the Games; she had mourned Peeta while he was hijacked, and still mourned Finnick a little even though he was still alive. And then there was, of course, Prim. Her grief for Prim was enough to swallow her whole, if she let it. If Peeta hadn’t been here, she might have. “Sometimes it takes a while to catch up to you. Or it might not. However you feel is… that’s how you feel. Don’t try to force yourself to feel worse about it, if you don’t.”
So far as she was concerned, he had plenty to upset him already, and didn’t need anything more. If he could be spared a little more heartbreak, she wasn’t going to be sorry about it. But she understood that Peeta was probably going to feel guilty for it, all the same, and she was fairly certain that made him a better person than he thought he was. But maybe she was biased.
And was she also reading into that last part, about not being alone? It sounded like he was talking about her. She tried to imagine it, Twelve being rebuilt. Her and Peeta there, trying to survive what they’d lost. It might still be a pretty empty district, until it was rebuilt, and even then, but they wouldn’t be alone.
She threaded her fingers into his hair. “You won’t ever be alone. I’ll be here.”
--
Peeta glanced at her, smiling faintly. "I know," he said. He finally seemed calm, finally seemed back to himself, as if his moments of panic hadn't even happened. Katniss was right: just talking helped, even if it was about something painful. He was addressing memories, he was thinking about things that were real, he was talking his way through his thoughts even if they had nothing to do with what was done to him at the Capitol. It was grounding, comforting, quiet.
"Thank you."
He said it without realizing it, expressing gratitude without immediately knowing why. "For … just being here. For not running. For just sitting and talking with me right now. This is the real you, and I'm not confused."
--
“I’m not going to run,” Katniss told him, quietly. “No matter how bad it gets. I’m not letting you go.”
She only half meant it as a reassurance, a declaration of how much she cared. She knew that if he felt himself slipping enough that he might be a danger to her, he might tell her to go. He’d done it before. She knew full well that she wouldn’t be able to do it. Leaving him to his hijacked madness was the same thing as letting him go, accepting that her Peeta, the real Peeta, wasn’t there anymore. If he was there even enough to be talked down -- or in some urgent cases, kissed -- then she had to be here. And if he was totally gone, then her safety didn’t matter anymore. She might as well be dead. That probably wasn’t what he’d want, but she couldn’t do anything about it.
She shifted above him, one hand still in his hair, cradling the back of his head, and kissed him. Against his lips, she whispered, “I love you.”
--
Peeta relaxed into the kiss, returning it slowly. It was like a drink of water in the desert, fresh air after breathing in smoke. Whatever haze still left over now lifted and cleared away, and he was reminded that this was what was real. This was the real Katniss. The woman he loved. His wife.
Whatever affection she wanted from him when she first woke up came now, in the solid strength of his embrace as he wrapped his arms around her and held her against his body.
"I love you," he murmured against her lips. "And that's real."