I can turn it on, be a good machine.

I can hold the weight of worlds if that's what you need, be your everything.

I can do. I can do it. I'll get through it…

But I'm only human and I bleed when I fall down.

I'm only human and I crash and I break down.

I'm only human… I'm only human… Just a little human.

~Human by Christina Perri

The heat was searing, blinding to the point of distraction, even from his vantage point eighty yards away in the woodland reserve that flanked the structure. Good. That would keep both the newly arriving fire trucks and bevy of emergency personnel sufficiently engaged with taming the inferno at the front of the building to notice the silhouette approach the rear.

Fanfare was not especially warranted when one barreled into a flaming house, protected only by their own sweat drenched jeans and sweater, soul-searing fear and enough adrenaline to kick start an elephant's heart. The first responders would never find her in time. They didn't even know she was there. And he was definitely not going to waist precious seconds she did not have explaining why they had to forego saving a two-story, century old home everyone had every reason to believe to be empty for the sake of finding a single girl who should not be there.

Questions were not his allies in the best of circumstances. No answers he could offer would garner anything beyond further questions. Few could possibly understand even if he explained in length. He didn't have time for that. She didn't have time for that.

God, how could he have let this happen?

He barely registered anything between the coppice and the storm doors, not the effort it took to climb the chain link fence, not the sprint to the home, not the blistering heat. Nothing could register. He would allow nothing to deter. He needed to get to her. He was infinitely grateful the metal pad lock on the heavy wooden doors was still fairly cool to the touch as he yanked it with a strength he was glad there were no spectators to witness he possessed. Yet another thing he did not need to explain.

Moisture flooded his eyes (he wouldn't even delude himself into pretending it was due to the smoke surrounding him) as he gripped the wooden handles on the doors and pulled with far more strength than the task demanded, venting some of the frustrated rage coursing through his veins. The doors tore clean off their hinges and flew several yards to either side, the groan of their impact against the lawn echoing his own guttural moan.

Twenty-one hours. He'd allowed her to go missing an entire day without a word, a text, a call. Yes, she liked to unplug, disconnect. She was a wild child. She was a thing of the woods, of the stream, of the earth. But she never, never went more than a few hours without letting him know where she was. This wasn't the bloody eighteenth century. If one were going off into the wilderness, one let someone know. Katniss always let him know. She was smart, his girl. So smart, so careful.

This time had been no different. He'd gotten her text the previous morning, letting him know she was heading out on a quick hunt before finals to 'clear her head'. Her life for the last six weeks had consisted of nothing beyond full emersion studying and her six-hour a day, five days a week receptionist job at a local insurance agency. The job was a godsend, the only way she'd managed to finally earn enough to transfer out of community college to join him at his university for their last two years and make enough to split the rent on this place within walking distance of school with five other girls.

He wiped the moisture from his eyes with the back of his sweater sleeve, trying to clear his vision in the escalating haze of smoke and inadvertently smeared the soot that had mixed with perspiration there. Freeing the flashlight he kept in the dash of his car for emergencies from his jeans' pocket, he swallowed dryly, leveling the strong beam of light into dark space of smoke-filled storm shelter. He concentrated to the very limits of his abilities, reached out with his senses, willing his psyche to perceive her, anything of her. It was like testing a muscle. It was also a long shot. He knew what he'd seen, but he still tried. He had to try… for her.

Of their own accord, his thoughts wondered back to the events earlier that day that led him to this moment- the moment he might find the woman he loved dead in that burning pit.

~x~x~x~x~x~

"What do you mean you haven't seen her, Jo? You freaking sleep in the same room!" he huffed into his phone, exasperated.

"She's a big girl, Peeta. She left yesterday morning came back reeking of death and said she was going to tan the skins after she cleaned the… things… she murdered. As if we can't afford enough groceries or something." Peeta could hear the contempt in the brunette's voice. "I refuse to eat anything she brings in, you know. She can eat fried squirrel all she wants. I ain't country enough for that mess. Leave me with my Ramen noodles, thank you."

He ran a hand roughly through his hair, bringing the phone down to see the time on the display. Eleven thirty-seven in the morning. It'd been sixteen hours since he'd last heard from Katniss. It felt wrong. Something was wrong. And he still had two more hours of drill practice before he could go over to her place to check anything out.

With a defeated sigh, he relented, "Okay, Jo. I'll be by later, see if she's home. Maybe, she dropped her phone in the lake again…"

"Oh, you won't find anyone here later, bread boy. We're all heading out to the Sigma House pool party. Katniss is supposed to join there. But, knowing her, she'll totally ditch unless you plan on making an appearance."

He fought the urge to swear. "Everyone's going to be there?"

Katniss had only been living in the house two months. Beyond Johanna, he really only knew her cohabiters in passing. He was sure Katniss only considered the other girls acquaintances herself. She'd never been one to fraternize beyond what was absolutely necessary. He wasn't particularly introverted, quite the opposite, but his… ever-developing idiosyncrasies made the prospect of being swallowed in a crowd of emotionally uninhibited idiots beyond unappealing. And he'd have to depend on Jo to point out which of the gaggle of barely coherent co-eds were her roommates so he could hopefully get a handle on where his girlfriend could be. That was going to be wonderful.

He let out a slow breath. "Fine. I'll see you there. Just, call me if you see her first, okay?" He threw the phone into his duffle bag under the bench and strapped his helmet back on, trying to ignore the coach's barrage from the field about how long he'd taken, failing miserably to ignore the sinking feeling in his gut.

o-o-o-o-o

One would think he'd be used to how aggravating full emersion in a sea of his own demographic at their most guileless could get. He'd certainly spent enough hours in crowded auditoriums during lectures carefully constructing mental barriers instead of listening to instructors just for the purpose of keeping his sanity in these scenarios. But lord knew, if one more drunken, clad-in-far-too-little girl, barreled into him and attempted to ram a debased visual of what she idealized he looked like beneath his clothes through his skull… he was going to freaking lose it.

And where was Johanna? He'd been in this nightmare for well over an hour, gone through each of the twenty rooms and six bathrooms on both stories of the building the fraternity claimed as home, searching out the pixie-haired Latina. All the while, his skin tangibly burning from the sensory overload doled out by the dozens of students crammed into every corner- dancing, drinking, gyrating, and generally acting like idiots.

It was testing the limits of his sanity. Well, that, and he couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. No, it wasn't just being watched, exactly. It was as if someone were tagging him, pursuing him. He'd caught himself staring over his shoulder more than once, never to find the same person behind him. Not that there was much chance for that in that ridiculously cramped house. People barely had space to move. But he kept feeling… a presence – no, not a presence, more like a sensation – following him from the moment he set foot in the house. It felt…jumbled, segmented, as if it couldn't settle on a feeling. Sometimes it felt oppressive, suffocating. Sometimes it felt anxious, angry- sometimes it felt exuberant, excited. He couldn't put a finger on what it meant. Whatever it was, whoever it was, he was not getting close enough to get a proper reading on them. They were just radiating far stronger than everyone else there. He'd yet to meet someone strong enough to transcend an entire crowd of emotional and physiological disarray to penetrate his own defenses this way. Were he not there for such a somber, urgent purpose, he'd be fascinated to seek whomever this was out.

"Hey, Blondie. Looking for someone?"

He flinched reflexively when Jo whispered seductively in his ear, wrapping him in a hug from behind. He was just too wound up. He'd apologized later.

"God, Jo," he huffed heatedly, shrugging her off and spinning to pin her with an icy glare. "Where have you been? It's been an hour. Katniss isn't here. Has she called you?"

Momentarily ignoring the last part of his question, the short brunette returned his scowl, crossing her arms. "I have a life of my own, Mellark. I had to pick him," she threw her thumb over her shoulder in gesture toward the foyer, where Peeta saw Gale Hawthorne greeting some people, "at the airport. Excuse me if I'd rather hang out with a hot dude than babysit your girlfriend. And, back up a second, what do you mean, she's not here?"

Peeta ignored her completely barreling past toward Gale. He excused himself as he cut into the conversation the older man was attempting to have with a barely cogent frat guy.

"Gale, has Katniss contacted you? She went hunting yesterday morning, Jo says she came home some time around noon and no one seems to know what happened after that."

Gale's eyes immediately flitted behind him to where he felt Johanna had sidled, an accusatory edge to them as he answered truthfully, "I've been in transit for the last six hours between waiting at the airport and the flight here. Before that, I was either packing or asleep. This trip was supposed to be a surprise for my best and soon to be ex-girlfriend." He shot another withering glare at Jo. Peeta could feel her stiffen beside him as Gale continued, "Do you really believe I'd come to a stupid party if I knew she was missing? Who saw her last?"

With the three of them together, it took all of fifteen minutes to round up Katniss's other roommates. One hadn't seen her since the previous Friday, none had seen her since she'd gone hunting but Jo, and she'd only seen her when she'd stopped by the room for a quick change out of her hunting gear into something more casual to wear around the house. It didn't make any sense.

Peeta was just about ready to thank Johanna and Gale and call it a night, head to the police station and file a formal missing person's report when he saw her.

She was staring dead at him with large, impossibly dark brown eyes that seemed to glance right through him into nothingness, in such stark juxtaposition to her nearly translucent skin. She sat at the window seat at the large bay window in the foyer (had she been there all night?), her knees bent to her chest, her frail pale arms encircling them tightly. Her choppy, chin length her swayed slightly as she did, to some rhythm only she was privy to within the recesses of her mind, her eyes never breaking their lock on his.

As the odd sensations he'd been feeling all night began to coalesce and intensify into auras and preludes to what he was all too familiar with now, he swallowed drily, whispering hoarsely to Johanna beside him as he gestured with his head in the direction of the glaring young woman, "Who's that sitting by the window, Jo?"

Barely sparing the girl a glance, the brunette waved a hand in her direction dismissively with a roll of her eyes. "Oh, that's Nuts. And don't give me any crap for that name, Mr. Goodie-too-shoes. That chick's seriously off her rocks. She's even more of a recluse that Katniss. At least, brainless talks. That freakazoid couldn't string together a comprehendible phrase if her life depended on it. I think she's autistic or something. She's brilliant, though. An idiot savant or somerhing. She's the house genius, one of the country's foremost young minds in biochemical engineering. Pft, give me an iota of social adequacy over the ability to split atoms any day, though. I feel sorry for her."

Peeta barely registered what his friend was saying, didn't consciously realize he'd started moving away from his group in the direction of the strange girl with the entrancing dark eyes.

All he was aware of was her rhythmic swaying and, with each step he took, the further fading of the room to the undulating nothingness of the movement, that surge of overwhelming loss, sorrow, rage and despair. The swaying became a chant. The grief took shape, the form of the girl he'd just been looking at, only he was seeing her from behind, sitting at a desk, humming a song to herself as she worked on something on the table before her. As the vision clarified, he could see what the girl worked on was some sort of timepiece. It looked antique, the patina on the casing a clear indication of its age. However, the gears and diodes spread about her workspace appeared very much modern, out of place for such a device. The scene became jarring when he began to feel the anger, the melancholy roil off her in surges; hear the anguish in her voice as she sang in a hushed whimper, choked with tears:

Hickory dickory dock.

The mouse went up the clock.

The clock struck one.

The mouse went down.

Hickory dickory dock.

The eerie song permeated the depths of his psyche, chilling him, even as the vision warped once more and he was watching the same girl approach the house he'd just learned moments before she shared with his girlfriend from the rear. She came up to the storm shelter with the heavy wooden doors drawn and didn't hesitate to descend the stairs. She stopped at the base of the steps, drawing in a quick, shocked breath when she noted the trio of skinned, gutted hares hanging by a hook from the low ceiling a yard before her, two plucked wild turkeys and a half dozen of what appeared to be skinned rats kept them close, macabre company. The entire twenty by twenty space reeked of copper.

"You kill… so easily. No one… even cares."

Now the vision panned and Peeta could see whom the pale girl was addressing. His heart sunk when Katniss, his Katniss, appeared at a rustic wooden table in the corner of the small room with a rope hung with various skins above it. The casual tone she used to respond to the girl as she placed the final piece she'd been working on the length above her, not bothering to turn, made it clear she'd heard the girl come down. She clearly found the awkward girl entirely innocuous. "I'm sure the animals care, Wiress. My dad's people believe the highest respect a person can pay a living thing that gives its life to support us is to use every part of it. Not let any of it go to was-"

How could Katniss have expected it? Even Peeta was reeling from what he was witnessing, trying to will his pulse to stop drumming in his ears, his blood to stop boiling as the fragile girl with the piercing dark eyes continued pressing the cloth to the face of the woman who was everything to him, even as she fell unconscious to the filthy, blood-stained ground. The deranged girl brought a finger up close to her mouth in a shushing gesture before securing the length of fabric around Katniss's ears and tying it at the back, effectively anesthetizing her. She walked up the stairs completely sanguine, hoisted closed the heavy doors with much effort, wrapped the chain around the handles and latched the cast iron lock.

As the reverie started fading back into an incongruent cacophony of emotional turmoil, Peeta was privy to one final scene of the girl, back in her room, in different clothes, smiling tragically. She wound the hands on the odd clock counterclockwise and hummed her ominous, soul-wrenching hymn before setting the device down on the table. She gave the room a last twitchy glance over as she moved toward the door. Her penetrating, stygian gaze softened as it lighted on a framed portrait of her and a young, dark-haired man in orange scrubs, holding a cane Peeta recognized immediately. Her pose with her arms around his neck made their relationship easily discernable. He could see the tear escape her left eye as she stepped through the threshold and white blinding light consumed all his senses.

Reality swirled back into focus in such a nauseating spiral, it took Peeta a split second to register the ashen, wraith-like girl whose shoulders had somehow found their way to what he likely knew to be his bruising grip and whose face was now so close to his, their noses almost touched. After the second it took for his psyche to ground back into this reality, his demeanor twisted in unrefined threat.

"What does the clock do?" he hissed out, ignoring Johanna's pull on his arm, her frantic pleads to get off the poor mentally unstable girl. He couldn't bother explaining. There was no time even if he could get her to understand.

The unhinged girl in his grip edged her lips upward mirthlessly, flippantly, ignoring the obvious discomfort to her shoulders in order to lean closer to his ear to whisper softly, "I know."

Peeta jerked away from her as if struck, a cross between a scowl and a wince furrowing his brow as the odd girl released what could have passed for either a scoff or a heave and continued, "He thinks… thinks you're special, different… perfect. Invulnerable. I know better. Know what you are. What you do. I said… I said he was wrong. No one. No one… perfect. Me… I can do it. I did it. Tick Tock."

His frustration escalating nearly to its apex, Peeta had to reach to the depths of his equanimity to keep from shaking the girl until her teeth rattled. He breathed out roughly through his nose again, gritting his teeth. "What does the clock do, Wiress?"

A light coming to the her dark eyes as if she was seeing him for the first time, corresponded by a shock of excitement that fired through his skin like touching a live wire, she answered breathily, "Fireworks!"

Comprehension dawning, he pulled his hands off her abruptly, his azure eyes widening in horror. "Jesus Christ! How much time? When does it go off?" he near howled, his hands tangling in his hair and pulling in a failing attempt to rein in his growing indignation and dread.

Wiress shook her head spastically without lifting it from staring at the floor, a maniacal, high-pitched laugh coming from deep in her throat. "No time. Tick Tock. You take. I take."

Suddenly, an ear-piercing boom, loud enough to drown out the raucous music and strong enough to vibrate the walls, resounded through the house, causing several girls sober enough to realize it'd happened to squeal. When he turned discomfited eyes back on Gale and Johanna, they both chorused a "What was that?" sentiment.

Grudgingly, he turned back to the disturbed girl on the window seat. She was eerily still when she raised her head to focus those chilling eyes that were now full of tears on him. Her voice was hoarse as she choked out singsong, "I told him, I could. I could… do it. Tick Tock. You take, I take. I broke… You break."

Without a look back, Peeta was dashing for the exit. The moment he stepped into the porch, he found the steps leading down to the driveway blocked by yet another crowd of people. He was contemplating putting his rather impressive skills as a running back to good use to plow his way to his car when he realized they all faced the same direction - southeast - some pointing, gasping and even exclaiming in shock. Since 'statuesque' was definitely not a superlative anyone was ever going to attribute him, he weaved his way through the amassed coeds to the far edge of the porch, the knot in his stomach foreshadowing what he feared he'd see once he got there.

It was worse than he'd imagined.

Across the small natural woodland preserve that centered almost all the homes in the small college town, about three miles and a half away, sitting on that pristine hillside cul-de-sac, stood the home Katniss and her roommates rented… all the windows on the top floor lighting the twilight sky with blue-white flame.

~x~x~x~x~x~

Obviously, the storm shelter must have connected to the main structure somewhere. That was the only reasonable explanation for the miniature pyroclastic shroud that accosted him once the doors no longer impeded its escape. The noxious milky gray haze blanketed everything, denser across the ceiling, where it ebbed and flowed like the waves of an angry, inverted sea as it spread forth out the exit and edged ever lower, gagging him, making it difficult to see his footing on the steps.

Even so, adamantly ignoring the aching burn in his lungs from the lack of proper oxygenation, he raged forward down the steps, willing his gifted acuity to pick up anything- a heart rate, a faint pulse, a stuttering breath. Anything.

She'd always been good at closing herself off, but only because he'd allow it. He'd never violate her privacy- or anyone else's, for that matter. He didn't want to be privy to random stranger's or even those he considered close's reactions twenty-four seven. Who would? What fresh kind of hell could that possibly be? He'd learned to build inner barriers for a reason. But, at this moment, he'd willingly go the rest of his life feeling every time Rye, Flax and even their dad had to take a dump if he could just register signs of life from the girl at the bottom of the steps.

It only took a moment to reach her. After all, there were only twenty steps and she'd been left just at the landing. He'd seen as much, courtesy of his vision. But, the sweltering heat, sense depriving smoke-mixed with the salt of his own heavily tearing eyes, and the mental anguish of sensing nothing from something he was keenly aware should be emitting some form of biological data, made the journey interminable.

The smoke was so acrid; he couldn't make out anything with definition past the length of his arm once he virtually threw himself over her prone form. Forcing his own breathing to moderate, his speeding pulse to slow, he pulled the perspiration soaked sweater he'd been using as a crude mask from over his face and brought his ear down to press directly beneath her breast. He was eternally grateful she was so low to the ground and for the handkerchief – once drenched in chloroform, he could tell from the chemical odor it reeked of – that now rested stiff and wrinkled over her nose and mouth, when after a few moments that felt light an eternity, he felt a weak, erratic thump, followed by another a second later. Her heartbeat was not steady… but, God, it was there.

Even his addled brain – his reasoning faculties suspect at best under these circumstances – had his synapses firing that any attempt to aide her condition in a miniscule space where flaming death threatened to bury them at any moment and he weakened with every quarter breath he was allotted, was futilely stupid at its best and neglectfully suicidal at its worst. So, he hitched one arm under the bend of her knees, another under her shoulder blades, sucked in as much of the caustic atmosphere as his compromised lungs could manage from as low to the ground possible and got to his unsteady feet. He struggled not to exhale when the small, already smoke-blurred space swirled around him, nausea hitting hard. The knowledge he needed what little oxygen that last breath circulated though his bloodstream to get the girl in his arms up those stairs and into the fresh air outside, kept the overwhelming desire to retch at bay as he climbed. Each step was torturous, his muscles strained agonizingly with the simple task of contracting and distending.

There was nothing he wanted more than to collapse on the half-scorched, half-soaked grass just beyond the storm shelter the moment his sneaker-clad foot registered lawn instead of creaking wood, that moment the night breeze mixed with heated mist touched his soot-covered face. However, instinct screamed at him that he knew better. That hundred-year-old house could collapse at any moment from either having its foundations weakened by the fire or the weight of the water the firefighters were using to put it out. And, what would happened if it decided to topple over right on their side? He couldn't risk it.

His filthy, aching arms held far too precious a commodity for such indulgences.

He found nothing was quite so frustrating as getting his defiant, exhausted body to comply with his panicking mind's command to move more quickly as he staggered forth, away from the burning building, which now groaned and cracked violently as its bowels collapsed. After walking what felt like endlessly (but was only fifteen yards, roughly) to the front of the home, he squinted into the spotlights the response team had set up to work through the night and heard people shouting in alarm at his appearance- nothing he could make out in his shocked, dehydrated state, but it didn't matter. He felt their concern, their anxiety for the girl he held close to his chest (or maybe even for him, he likely looked a mess, too) ripple under his skin even before he heard the shuffling of feet in his direction. It felt familiar, comforting.

No barriers were coming up for the foreseeable future.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

"Hello, stranger."

Katniss reached a hand up to put pressure on her aching eyes, noting the throb reverberated all the way back to the base of her skull. Ugh, how she hated headaches. They were the worst. Grudgingly, she squinted open one only to find that, as she'd predicted, she found the room too bright to keep it open. Perfect. She had a migraine. There went her day.

She had to call Peeta and let him know… Peeta!

She bolted upright immediately, realizing it was his voice that'd stirred her, mercury eyes snapping open to search him out, her frazzled mind still struggling to puzzle her predicament as her uncooperative vision filtered the blurs of light and dark until finally sharpening on his softly frowning face.

He was filthy.

"What happened to you?" she gasped out in a hoarse voice that cause her brows to shoot up. Was she getting a cold, too?

No. Something else was off, the back of her mind was screaming that much at her. With a discomfited knit to her brows, she ventured a look down at herself, an unsolicited gasp escaping her when she saw the IV protruding from her inner left arm. Her eyes followed the translucent length of thin plastic tubing numbly to its base, where it connected to three plastic bags of clear fluids. Slowly, her eyes shifted away from the bag to scrutinize her surroundings, landing first on the heart monitor next to her IV, then the sterile metal table with medical accouterments and a kidney shaped plastic container, finally lifting to the white and blue striped curtains. Her eyes trailed its length, surrounding the obvious hospital bed she occupied, back to land on her boyfriend, whose neck was black with grime to the point the only place one could see his true flesh tone was those pulse lines below his jaw she just happened to know where a particular weakness. His sweater was just as dirty, torn and… scorched?

"Peeta, what happened?" This time, her voice came stronger, courtesy of the escalating anxiety.

Her answer came in the form of his lips assaulting hers, the motion too fast for her still-woozy mind to process and decidedly beyond the scope of her expectations. She was too stunned to respond at first, but at the sheer vehemence, the desperation of his lips' assail on hers, his teeth nipping the dip of her upper lip, she found herself melting into the onslaught, acquiescing to the wordless demands his probing tongue exacted. He tasted of salt and burned wood, of sweat. And, though she probably should care, once he ran that pattern along the roof of her mouth he knew so well, she could not for the life of her remember why it should matter.

When the kiss broke, Peeta'd wound both hands into her hair and used them to hold her close, bracing their foreheads together as he stared into her eyes. She narrowed hers in response to the agony she saw darkening his irises to a near midnight blue and thinning them to near inexistence.

"She knew, sweetheart", he snorted devoid of mirth, wincing as if the words caused physical anguis. "She knew exactly how to do it. She's admitted to everything. She even admitted she hoped I'd find you alive, that she wanted me to find you. She didn't want to hurt you. She didn't even want to hurt me. She just wanted me to know."

Still confused, although she was slowly piecing together the physical evidence around her, the arms that had found their way around his neck tightened as she asked tentatively, afraid she already knew the answer, "She wanted you to know what, Peeta?"

He took a shuddering breath and she watched a tear cleanse a path down the soot on his left cheek. "She wanted me to know I can lose what I love just like everyone else. That it doesn't matter how strong I am, or how fast I am, or what I can perceive about the world… all that makes me extraordinary. When it comes down to it, everyone's the same. We all break, just in different ways. She wanted me to know she could break me. And she did, Katniss. I'm not doing it anymore. I can't. I can't risk you again. I won't."

She pressed her lips firmly to his, letting one hand become lost in the wayward curls at the nape of his neck, circling in soothing circles. When she pulled away, she waited for his eyes to open and pinned him with a defiant, unwavering gleam. "You can stop whenever you believe it's too much, Mellark. But, don't you dare use me as an excuse. There will always be sick people who hurt others just because. This could've happened to me, either way. The only reason I'm probably still here is because I know you. So, don't stop using your gift because of me. And, if someday I'm gone, don't let that become an excuse to stop. You have the power to help people where so many others are helpless. Don't let this change that. This changes nothing. So, you're vulnerable. Welcome to the club."

He desperately wanted to fight the corner of his mouth edging upward. He wasn't sure if it was a nervous twitch or a response to the adoration, pride and vexation quarrelling for dominance within his overtaxed heart. Either way, the gesture seemed sacrilegious to the somber atmosphere and he tried to squelch it as he diverted his eyes to her lips, bringing one hand around to strum the pad of his thumb gingerly over her cheek.

"I need you too much," he heaved, still unwilling to relent, beseeching her understanding with the plead in his tenor.

"I need you, too, Peeta. So has every single person you've helped the last four years, the people whose lives you've changed… those who owe you the time they still have. I know you're scared. I'm scared, too. Don't think I'm not. I'm terrified every night you're not with me, every time you suddenly walk out of a theatre or a restaurant to follow lord-knows-who to lord-knows-where. We both know you're strong, not bullet-proof. It would only take one lucky shot, Peeta." She had to stop, drawing a stabilizing breath before continuing in a softer voice, "We agreed to this together. We're a team, along with your family. We all agreed it would be hard, very hard. But we also agreed we would stick together, help each other through the hard knocks, to be your support in this. We're here Peeta. I'm here. Don't let this take you from what makes you whole."

He clasped her cheek, brushing his lips over hers again feverishly, then pulling back just far enough to whisper, "I don't want to."

"Stay with me," she exhaled, sharing his panted breaths, her heart thrumming in heart chest, narrowly to the point of discomfort.

His response was spontaneous and he no longer fought the content smile that accompanied it, pinning her with the irrefutably sincere cerulean of his eyes.

"Always."