A/N: In which Peeta is an Avox slave, unknown to Katniss, joining the rebel army.

He finds her singing with the dawn, before the vanguard of the army, in a field of flowers.

The songs that Peeta know are heavy with drums and the loud voices of his masters. The sound of grating metal, grain on earth, whip on flesh. They are tunes that compliment the thunder of an anxious heart or the shameful scuttle of a condemned man.

He pauses in the shadow of the trees, listening to the music falling from the lips of the woman before him like a wash of rain against cold window panes.

Katniss does not sing in camp. She speaks, yes; she speaks of fire and damnation and revenge. The Capital skyscrapers thrown down and their prettily painted streets melted as vengeance for the Hunger Games. Peeta has heard her shouts in battle, the righteous fury of her propos, her whispered regret at dawn and murmurs of strength and courage to the rebels in the grief-filled nights; but, he has never heard her sing.

It is a simple tune, spare, the music of a coal miner's daughter from a District far to the north of his original home. There is nothing angry in this song: no clash of bullets, no fire. It reminds him of the songs that have never truly been his since the day of his arrest. Sounds that he could not even murmur under his breath after what the Capital took from him. When he became their slave, words, music, and beauty had simply laid at rest, gone to sleep, passing from no lips and into the grave, useless and unreachable to him.

And yet, her song isn't happy.

It is not a song of a home returning, or a people rising and liberating themselves.

It is a song of a long lost love.

He watches her in that field of yellow flowers, spinning slowly like the girl she used to be. He watches her pluck one of the flowers and press it to her cheek. It is a dandelion, pale and innocent as she is not. The early-dawn light catches on the scars across her fingers and arms, uncovered by armor, and accentuate the hard lines of her shoulders and legs trained by months on the march. The dark uncombed mass of hair fans behind her and he knows that if she turns he will see her face that a Capital master of his once called more like a rapid wolf than a girl, but that does not matter. She is his commander, his Mockingjay, and perhaps, most importantly, his liberator. Or his equal, now, if Peeta would allow himself to believe that, or if that word would ever sit comfortably on his non-existent tongue as he looks up at this strange woman.

He understands, for the hundredth time, why people follow her.

For the hundredth time, he understands that he would die for her.

He holds his breath as Katniss finishes her song, and when she leaves to wake the army – retrieve her gun, don her armor with a Mockingjay on the face – he slips into the clearing and finds the flower that she has dropped. The dandelion is perfectly yellow and already wilting on the stem.

Hope, he thinks, recalling a memory. He used to work alongside Capital attendants. Every once in awhile, they would speak to Avoxes. One had been carrying a vase of these same blooms. We call this flower one of 'hope', you know, they had said, and with words so recently stirred back to use in his life, he took to this memory, recalling the meaning of the word: hope.

Peeta smiles. Katniss has little grace, as the Capital would say; she is all sharp lines and the weight of a bow, the snarl of a barbarian face shouting for justice and salvation. She is too tall, too scarred, too loud, not breakable or beguiling enough, and all her grace lies on her tongue; in speech and song. But she is hope, despite her fire. She brings hope, as she has, and they love her, they do – the rebels, all of them, and Gale, who knows her body, and her sister, who knows her dreams.

And him.

He cuts the stem of hope short with a jagged nail and places it in his pocket.

It is there through the coming battle, as the sky grew dark with a coming storm, people of all districts in formation side by side. It is there all through that battle and the next, and the next, as they light the land on fire and strike off chains, and he stands at her right hand as she breaks the lines of his old Capitalite masters and brings one block of the city after block crashing down. As their army swells, he begins, finally, to hope – of a home, again, of being free, and of a world where slavery does not exist, nor the Hunger Games.

It is there in his pocket as their army stretches across the trapped, prettily stoned streets, miles upon miles of marching rebels, foraging ahead and behind and bringing down a force stronger than any he had ever known.

It is there when they stay up late into the night, Katniss and her generals; Boggs, Haymitch, Plutarch. They spread out maps on their council table and try their best to treat him as an equal, as the elected representative for the Avoxes. He sits at the table with them, at Katniss' side, and he does not have to look up to meet their eyes, does not have to fumble over sounds that are meant to be words, and does not have to burn with shame.

It is there, still, as her husband, Gale, arrives and takes her to their tent and Peeta remembers that she is mortal like the rest of them, belongs to more than her cause, to the rebels, to the war, and to him. He remembers the girl in the field of flowers before dawn, instead of the armored Mockingjay.

He touches the flower against his heart, her little dandelion song pressed against the martial drum of his, and he thinks of that girl as that same night grows long and hard. He looks north and imagines the lights of the president's mansion in the distance, steadily growing closer: the lights of victory and finality.

He has not heard her sing since that morning in the field, but the flower is his memory, hidden, dried and pressed thin as a whisper. While thin and brown and brittle, it represents how fragile his dream of home once was, but it is there.

There, his hope.

It is there, even, with the next dawn.

The sun breaks red and bloody over the horizon and Peeta is one of the first awake. He is the first to see the Peacekeepers in the camp, and he yells incoherently, unable to scream words of warning, and springs to his feet. There is a gun in his hand and a bullet in the barrel, almost en route before he is ambushed.

He feels that all too familiar rub of metal on his wrist, as they push him against the side of the nearest wall. The blow leaves a cloud in his head and sand in his veins, and he can no longer even attempt to shout words.

He watches one of the Peacekeepers smile at him, watches the tent open and his commander, his Mockingjay, his hope walk out unarmored. She is calm despite the bindings on her hands, not looking at her husband bound behind her, or the Peacekeeper who holds the tethers to her cuffs like she is a songbird on a leash.

"I will go peacefully," she says. She sounds like nothing Peeta knows. He has heard her shout and scream in battle, heard her rage, heard her plan in the small hours of the night, heard her voice in fury and exultation and despair. Now it is none of these things. "I will go with you, if that's what it takes."

She does not look at her husband. She looks at him.

One of the Peacekeepers laughs, spits. It lands on her face but Katniss does not even flinch. She lifts her chin and steps forward. But Peeta knows these men. When a master is displeased and is incapable of real discipline it is to the Peacekeepers Avoxes are sent. He knows what they want and what they like to see, and he cries out as the man curses. Words like barbarian bitch are on his lips as he raises a hand against Katniss, hits her hard, sends her on her knees onto the lavender paving stones as the rest of the Peacekeepers laugh.

The chains holding him create a clamor as he fights them, but they are Peacekeepers of the Capital and he is a single man who used to be a slave, barely even worth their effort and their fun. He hears her calling "Peeta!" as he burns with the knife in his back. He hears her calling "no!" as they kick and curse him, and he falls to his knees with the knife in his back and another between his ribs; a knife scoring the hope against his skin.

He has woken the camp at least, finally, with his animalistic screaming, and by the shouts Katniss is issuing; they must have woken the camp. He hears commotion, shouts of outrage, and the Peacekeepers yelling that they need to leave. Someone – Haymitch? – shouts an order. Gale calls out to Katniss. The rebels stir from their nearby tents (moving aside the murdered guards who had been meant to keep a lookout) and the crack of gunfire follows the Peacekeepers as they begin to shoot their way out.

His hands are braced against the ground and the stone is wet with his own blood, but he can raise his head, at least, and see her. Katniss, manacled, blood and bruise across her face, is being led away by a Peacekeeper dressed in finery and white. The rebels are afraid to shoot her in the crossfire, and while the Peacekeeper is the one with the ends of her chains in his hands, she is the one doing the leading, her head held high.

He can see her. He can see the scars on her dirt-streaked skin, can see the fight in her eyes, and see the harshness of her face that no one would ever call as beautiful as him; because you do not look into a face and see only hope and grace, and not think that.

She is not the commander and his Mockingjay, then.

He can see, for the first time since that morning, the coal miner's daughter in her eyes.

Peeta watches her away until his eyes can see no more, until it is just the sound of her, over the clank of a slave's chains and the fading sounds of battle beginning all around him.

She is singing.