Prologue

The first time she met him, they were five years old. Her dress was red—faded with age so that it was nearly orange, the fabric wrinkled and stonewashed—and he wore denim pants that had food dye stains on the left shin. It was their first day of kindergarten. When the teacher had them all gather into a hopelessly lopsided circle, she prompted her students with a question.

"Does anybody know the Valley Song?"

The song itself was just as worn and faded as the little girl's red dress, as it had been passed down from generation to generation in this tiny town that was wedged in a gorge of the Appalachians. Only the people of Panem, Pennsylvania—all eight thousand of them—were familiar with the melody, and it was a figment of their culture that would probably never die out, or so the elders of the town readily bragged. It was their anthem, which could always be heard resonating from the crypts of the mines on the northside of Panem as the workers chipped away at the coal, day after day.

Yet, at the ripe young age of five, sixteen of the seventeen students in the small class looked at each other with widened eyes, jaws slack in narcosis. The Valley Song?

But one hand, belonging to the seventeenth student, shot straight in the air.

The little boy in the stained denim jeans, who sported a mop of curly, golden hair, looked to the owner of the hand. Instead of noticing the pallor of her red dress, or the coal dust under her nails, or the dark circles below her lower lids, he saw the brightness of her silver eyes that looked to be moons of their own, the elegance of her thin frame, the lush chestnut shade of her two braids, her exotic olive complexion that suggested she was from a miner's family.

She's pretty, he thought to himself.

And then she opened her mouth.

The teacher had urged her to sing the Valley Song for them, and the girl with the braids and the lunar eyes complied. The sound that streamed from her mouth was certainly not human—could it be?—as it was too pure, too lyrical to belong to a person. Her timbre was high, unwavering in its confidence. She sounded like a bird. Like a phoenix, rising from the ashes and coal dust of Panem, new and colorful and beautiful.

He was a goner.

He waited to talk to her all day, but she made friends easily because she was pretty and could sing. (And five-year-old students build friendships on traits as superficial as that.) Not that he didn't make friends, though; he had eyes that were shards of the sky, rosy cheeks, and sunshine for hair, and he had brought cookies to school that morning, so the kids were fond of him, too. But the girl with the moon-irises and the red dress paid little attention to the porcelain boy that thought she was divine, chiseled from a little sector of heaven itself. In fact, she paid little attention to any of her immediate "friends." She was fierce and independent and displayed very early that companionship was not vital to her well-being.

But by the time the final bell chimed through the halls, and she began her journey back to her neighborhood, the boy with the golden curls toddled up to her and offered her the last of the cookies he'd brought to school. She shook her head and told him, "I can't repay you."

He thought, What a silly thing to say.

He told her she didn't have to repay him, and that he just wanted to be nice to her. Her voice grew thin and her molten eyes flattened into iron as she asked him—more like barked at him—"Why?"

The little boy with the cosmic blue eyes told her the truth; it was the first time he realized he couldn't lie to her—that he didn't want to lie to her—and would certainly not be the last.

"Because I think you're pretty, and you sound like a bird when you sing, and I like birds."

It was as simple as that. The girl with the steel eyes and the olive skin offered him a rare smile that hardly anyone else in the world would be able to claim from her, and she held out her hand in which he placed the last cookie.

"I'm Peeta," he offered.

With a full mouth, she mumbled back something that sounded like "catfish."

His eyes widened as he gaped at her in bewilderment, unsure of exactly what he was supposed to gain from that comment, and she could see that she confused him. She decided that he looked cute when he was confused, because his eyes were so big and his chubby cheeks were the color of strawberries, and she easily concluded that she wanted to spend the rest of her life confusing him.

She conceded a sharp laugh that reminded him of birds again, which made him like her even more. "Katniss," she clarified once she swallowed the first bite of her cookie. "I'm Katniss."

And so the sunshine boy and the lunar girl became friends.

Their friendship was easy at first, as most childhood friendships are, resilient to their mammoth differences in upbringing and personality. Those elements may have even aided their camaraderie, as they were bold compliments, each bringing something new to the table. He let her use his sixty-four pack of crayons when their teacher instructed the class to draw, and she taught him how to climb the trees lining the schoolyard so they could hide from the other kids during recess. He would give her half of his lunch if she promised to double-knot his shoelaces for him. (She didn't have much food, and he didn't know how to tie laces.) He got her to smile when no one else could, and she confused him a lot. To him, Katniss was a mystery he was dying to solve. To her, Peeta was a constant in her otherwise unstable life. They were good for each other, filling in the holes of the other's patchwork world.

But when the sunshine boy and the lunar girl were eleven years old, an explosion ripped through the mine on the northside of Panem. Peeta's family—the Mellark kinfolk—was alright, as they owned a bakery in the heart of town and were either there or at school when the coalmine collapsed. But Katniss's father, Mr. Everdeen, was a miner.

He never came home.

The catastrophe transformed both Peeta and Katniss in different fashions, straining their relationship in every possible mode. Katniss grew more withdrawn, both unwilling to share her feelings and so constantly concerned with survival that things as trivial as friendship were immediately put on the backburners; Peeta grew even more compassionate, if that was possible, pleading for Katniss to unfold her guard so he could fix her. She pulled away, he pushed. She became even more of a mystery, and Peeta became even more confused.

He watched as she sought comfort from a new friend, an older boy by the name of Gale Hawthorne, who lived in the same neighborhood as her—a lower-class quarter popularly known as the Seam. His father had been killed in the mines like Katniss's, and the two of them were so abnormally alike that Katniss eagerly turned to him for guidance, for direction, for a sliver of hope she prayed he could offer but knew, deep down, he really couldn't. They both dealt with grief through bottling up their distress, shrouding themselves in the woods with their shotguns so that they could put food on their tables in place of their fathers. Gale was Katniss's male replica, while Peeta was her complement. And Katniss did not need a complement when she so desperately sought independence in the absence of her father.

But one afternoon, when the sky was gloomy and hostile, her skin cold as rain-soaked clothes clung to every sharp angle of her starved body, she found herself outside the Mellark bakery, curled up under a tree. Her stomach was threatening to eat itself from having gone without food for so long, and she was seeing tiny black dots swirling in her line of vision, when Mrs. Mellark—a wicked woman with platinum-dyed hair and cold eyes that, thankfully, her sunshine-son had not inherited—flung open the back door, screaming and motioning for the girl with the lunar eyes to leave, doing everything in her power—save actually going out into the rain, because how dare she let her white pumps get muddy—to shoo Katniss from the yard. In response, she brought herself to her feet, hobbling slightly as Mrs. Mellark mumbled something incomprehensible and disappeared inside. The eldest Everdeen daughter was about to turn away when the door opened again, this time revealing the boy that had once been her closest ally, bringing the sun to their world with both his golden curls and his bright features, his blue eyes wide not with confusion this time, but concern.

He held two burnt loaves of bread in his hand.

For a moment, he questioned if he should throw them to her or swallow his pride and personally hand the bread to the girl that used to be his best friend. He decided on the latter of the two, and looking back, it was one of the best decisions he'd ever made.

She met him halfway in the yard, his shirt growing damper as he cut through the rain, his hair matting to the sides of his face in all sorts of directions that she would've found adorable if she wasn't starving to death. He thrust the two loaves into her trembling hands, and unlike with the cookies six years ago, she didn't even make a weak attempt to rebuff. Then he opened his arms, and before she could turn away again, he had snaked her into his grasp, his shoulders slightly broadened and so accommodating in adolescence, the warm scent of pastries lingering on his baby blue polo.

Even though she'd only reserved hugs for her baby sister, Prim—her father had been the single other recipient, but he was gone now—there was something about this embrace that felt so right, so oddly comforting. Katniss had never liked being touched, and that would predominantly hold true for everyone else, but she didn't mind it with Peeta. In fact, now, she welcomed it. And for the first time since her father died, she let herself shatter, sobs ripping through her chest as Peeta's grip only tightened, his strong baker's hands sweeping over her back in gentle brush strokes. She was his empty canvas to fill, to color, to bring to life.

"I missed you," he told her, finding that, as always, the truth was much easier with Katniss.

She was thankful it was raining so that he couldn't obviously distinguish that it was her tears soaking through the collar of his polo. She didn't tell him that she felt the same way, that she had inwardly craved a companion to open up to but denied herself that privilege out of both pride and natural instinct. But both her and Peeta, in that moment, knew she had missed him just as greatly as he'd missed her, even though she didn't say it. Katniss would never be talented when it came to expressing her feelings, but that was alright. It just made her even more mysterious, more intriguing, to the boy who brought her a ray of sunlight even on the rainiest of days. To her boy with the bread.

And so things reverted to how they once were, how they were meant to be, or so they both liked to believe. Of course, their relationship grew even more complex with age, as most relationships do—Katniss's perpetual moodiness could not be solved by Peeta letting her borrow a crayon, as it once had—but in the end, she always came back to him, even if they were merely just friends. When they were fourteen, and Gale asked Katniss to the homecoming dance, which resulted in her being crowned his girlfriend, Katniss would end up crawling through Peeta's creaky window at least twice a week, simply to lay with Peeta and tell him about her and the eldest Hawthorne's latest dispute. She put her climbing skills to good use, as there was a knotty oak tree leading up past the second-story window of the bakery which piloted her directly to Peeta's room. The two of them would splay their restless bodies atop his pale orange comforter as she relayed the details of the fight, and he would talk on and on (he was the expert talker, she was the expert listener) about trivial matters that provided exactly what she needed—a distraction—and eventually they would reduce to piles of giggles. By the time she had to leave for the night, she would almost forget that it had been anger that'd brought her there in the first place.

But things changed when they were fifteen. It had been obvious that Mrs. Mellark was incompatible with her family for years, as Mr. Mellark and the second-eldest brother, Hans, were almost as inherently compassionate and gentle as Peeta (only the oldest brother, Soren Mellark, bore any dispositional resemblance to the mother), so it was hardly a surprise when she decided the life she'd been building for over two decades did not suit her. Katniss crawled into Peeta's window that night to complain about Gale's most recent pigheaded contention to find her boy with the bread curled up on his ginger bedspread, his eyes shimmering from crying, curls disheveled into wayward tendrils. He told her he'd come home from school to find his father locked away in his study, waiting until dinnertime to tell Peeta and Hans (Soren was off at the University of Pennsylvania) that their mother had left without so much as a goodbye. Peeta may not have gotten along with the woman, but she was still his mother, and his spirit was too gentle and too kind to brush off her departure with no anguish. Peeta was everything Katniss wasn't: he loved too readily, too wholly, while she was guarded and hesitant.

That same year, Peeta's left knee began giving him trouble, which could've been easily ignored if it weren't for his exalted position on Panem High's wrestling team. He fought through the pain for most of the season, but near the end, the injury became so severe that he was forced to hobble around on crutches for three weeks. This bound him primarily to the house where he spent more time painting than usual, and because he'd always been there for her when she needed it, Katniss ditched many of her typical forest-filled afternoons with Gale to accompany her best friend. Peeta's father had grown distant much like Mrs. Everdeen had after her husband's death, and Hans was perpetually engaged elsewhere, so Katniss's company was never unwelcome. It did strain her already choppy relationship with Gale, however, and by the time spring was in full bloom, the meadow just to the north of the district sprinkled with dandelions, he and Katniss mutually agreed to end what they had. Soon after, he began dating one of Katniss's few friends, Madge Undersee, which was more of a relief to Katniss than a source of jealousy or frustration. It left her feeling less guilty about her consecutive afternoons with Peeta. Even if they were just friends, outside of Madge and Gale and, of course, her beloved little sister, Katniss devoted nearly all of her free time to her slice of sunshine, to her boy with the bread, who painted beautiful portraits of her and baked her cheese buns whenever he thought her cheeks were looking a little too sunken-in. He was the only person she'd accept "charity" from, if they could even call it that. He always told her, "Just lend me one of those pretty little smiles of yours." He considered that payment enough.

She gave them to him willingly.

They spent most of that summer before their junior year indoors, Katniss lending a helping hand at the bakery, since Hans was preparing for college and Soren refused to come back home without Mrs. Mellark present. She couldn't frost even a cupcake to save her life—Peeta was the master when it came to decorations, while Katniss specialized in extremely complex tasks, such as sweeping the floor and eating all the leftover or half-burnt pastries after close—but the extra help was always welcome. After all, Mr. Mellark grew more reclusive than he'd been before his wife had left, and while Peeta was off his crutches, his bad knee still limited his mobility. Besides, Katniss needed the money, and it put more food on the table for her ascetic mother and her precious sister than they'd had in years.

Junior year began as anticlimactically as any year before, but by the time fall dusted over the valley in which Panem was lodged, their worlds were flipped upside down. Peeta had missed a day of classes in early October to visit a doctor about his knee, which at that point, had grown so swollen and sore that he couldn't put any weight on it. Katniss had texted him after school to see if she was allowed to come over, and when he didn't respond, she shrugged it off at first, but something in the corner of her mind had begun to poke at her conscience, the noise in her head growing louder and louder with every passing hour. But once Panem was submerged in nightfall, her phone still remained silent. After Prim was fed and settled in front of their meager excuse of a television set, Katniss darted to the heart of the small town where the Mellarks' bakery and home was settled.

The lights were off. The premises were silent. Without even a moment of deliberation—which is how nearly every decision of Katniss's was made—she found herself scaling the side of the oak tree, settling on the branch that webbed out just underneath Peeta's window so that her nimble fingers could shove up the wood-trimmed pane. She tumbled inside effortlessly.

Peeta was propped up on the edge of the bed, his comforter stretched across the mattress without a single crease, as if no one had touched it in years. His hands were folded on his lap neatly, his body angled toward the window, his eyes void of all surprise.

It was clear that he was expecting her.

For the first time in her life, Katniss found herself genuinely startled by Peeta. That was her job, to do the surprising. Katniss may have been relatively easy to read (she wasn't a great actress) but in no way was she predictable, but here Peeta was, forecasting her every motion.

"Peeta?"

His celestial eyes were flat. He didn't even attempt to ease her into his confession, knowing she coped with blunt news better than evasive circumvention. He was the one that fell for the flowery language, not Katniss.

"They think I have a tumor."

His six words floored Katniss. They flattened her every organ until she couldn't breathe, until her heart couldn't pump blood through her body, until she couldn't feel a single nerve in her system except for the violent pain that fired down her spine.

She choked.

"What?"

His finger barely brushed his knee as he motioned to the joint. "They have a name for it. It's like… Telekinesis Osteoporosis or something like that. In my femur. Somewhere. Above my knee. I don't—I don't really know, Katniss—"

His timbre was flat, low, and grated as if it was full of gravel, but she could sense the slight wavering in his tone; she knew this voice of his better than anyone else would, as it was the tone he pushed whenever he was trying to feign composure but was rapidly beginning to lose it. Even in the dark, she could see the tip of his nose is growing red—a telltale sign of eminent tears—and without thinking, she flung herself to the bed at his side, her arms draping over his shoulders as she pressed her forehead against his neck.

She didn't know what to tell him. She'd never been good with words.

"It's… it's going to be alright, isn't it?" she managed to stutter after a moment of silence. His arm snaked around her side, dragging her closer to him, and she began to wonder if he needed to feel her beside him just as much as she needed to feel his heart beating.

It has to be alright, she repeated in her head, over and over, until her body refused to entertain any other possibility, because Peeta was her best friend, and there was no way that fate would rip both her father and her closest companion from her in a five-year span. She couldn't even begin to comprehend a world without her boy with the bread. It wasn't just that she didn't want to, it's that she simply couldn't. Her earliest memories were all comprised of Peeta's golden curls and his confused, trusting blue eyes and the dimples in his cheeks and his sixty-four pack of crayons and his cheese buns. She had grown around Peeta like a vine against a wall; with him here, she was defined, supported, able to blossom.

Without him, she would crumple into a network of starved stems on the ground, thirsting for the sunlight she couldn't reach.

After what felt like years, he finally told her, "They don't know if it's a tumor for sure, or even if it's malignant. The x-rays didn't look good, but… I'm getting a biopsy done next week, so they'll know for certain if it's this Telekinesis Osteoporosis thing."

If the situation had not been so severe, his inability to name the disease—Telangiectatic Osteosarcoma—might have actually made her laugh. But just the possibility of her best friend having cancer, his life lodged in limbo… it wrecked her, flooding her brain with a harsh tangle of thoughts that was so tightly coiled she couldn't possibly make sense of any of it.

"And… what will happen if it is?" she prodded back, locking her jaw as she braced herself for the answer she knew was coming but was afraid to hear.

But he surprised her for the second time that night, his finger crooked under her chin, lifting her face so that he could look at her fully. A tendril of golden hair swept over his forehead, and for a split second she ached to sweep it from his face, but his eyes captured hers without any guarantee of letting her gaze free, and she found she couldn't look away.

Even in this moment of uncertainty, his stare was implausibly sturdy, resolute in its assurance.

"We'll get through it," he told her, his lips sealing it off as a promise, and she cashed it as such. It was her contract for him to sign, and he'd donated her his signature.

They'd get through it.

Her hand flattened against his chest, fingers splaying over the fabric of his shirt. "Just tell me what I can do, Peeta. I'll do anything."

She saw a flash behind his eyes, as if a thought had just occurred to him, but he didn't gift her with any confession as to what it was. Instead, he told her delicately, "Just lend me one of those pretty little smiles of yours." As if that would be enough—and maybe it would, because up until that point, it always had.

And, although it was certainly far more difficult than usual, she complied. The grin didn't touch many of her features, but at least she tried, and she knew he would at least appreciate the effort. Besides, could he possibly expect her to offer him a genuine smile after he just told her that the one constant in her life may lose its consistency? To Katniss, Peeta was stability. She needed him to remain as such.

Neither of them were very tired, both wired awake from the onslaught of jumbled thoughts, so she pawed her way back on the bed, dragging him with her. The two of them laid themselves on top of his comforter as they had so many nights before, but instead of distracting themselves from trivial afflictions with their typical banter, they found themselves smothered by a choking silence. She felt him lace in his fingers with hers, the gesture surely out of a platonic need for comfort rather than anything romantic, but it still electrified her, and she wanted to kick herself for every moment in which she'd rejected his touch. Even with those days—especially with those days—from so many years ago, back when she'd tried to replace Peeta's compassion with Gale's temporary diversion, she prayed she could go back and relive them a million times over until she got it right. How many experiences with him had she passed up?

She rolled on her side, inching closer to Peeta, her face finding the crook of his neck again. His skin was heated, barring the cold that threatened them from outside his window, the fragrance of cinnamon and dill circling from his clothes. It was an odd combination but so characteristically Peeta that it comforted her, even if only for a few moments at a time.

They didn't speak at all, just focusing on synchronizing their breathing, on committing the pace of the other's heartbeat to memory. Katniss was sure that Peeta wanted to say something, because there was hardly ever a time in which Peeta didn't have something to say, but she hypothesized that his mind was too crowded, the words tangled and indiscernible on his tongue. And, of course, Katniss flourished in her own reticence, so she was never expected to be the one to speak first.

Surprisingly enough, however, after nearly an hour of silence, she was the first to shatter the quiet by saying what both of them had been too terrified to admit.

"You can't die, Peeta."

Underneath her flattened palm, she felt his heartbeat spike for a moment. He turned his head slowly to her, and if she didn't know better, she'd almost say he pressed a kiss to her forehead. But they were just friends, so she wrote it off as her imagination, forcing herself to ignore the dull ache between her legs that she didn't really understand.

He tried to make light of the situation in typical Peeta fashion.

"I can't?" She heard a hint of a smile in his voice, and even though it was not as warm and genuine as usual, she was glad that he was at least trying to bring a little sunlight into the dark room thickened with silence.

"You literally can't. You don't deserve to."

"I'm afraid that's not how it works," he whispered back almost immediately, and she could feel her heart plummet, but thankfully, he recovered before she could dwell on his admittance for too long. "But if you say so, I guess I'll keep kicking. That's only because you're the expert on this kind of thing."

She was half-thankful that he decided to inject some jollity into the otherwise gloomy conversation, but still, it didn't seem to ease her terror.

"Peeta, I…" And, once again, Katniss was rendered speechless. I… what? I can't let you leave me? I want you in my life? I need you there?

She felt him sigh. "It's so early, Katniss. Things will probably be alright. Even if it is that Telekinesis Osteoporosis—" God dammit with that name again—"the doctors said they can perform surgery on my leg. They… they said I can pull through. I'm going to be okay, Katniss." His voice lowered as his nose brushed over her pulsing temple. "I'm just… I'm scared."

She wanted to tell him, I'm scared, too, but she decided in that moment that she needed to be strong for Peeta. When she lost her father, and when things were rough with Gale, Peeta had always been steadfast at her side. It was her turn to repay the favor.

She'd always owed him, anyway.

"Don't let yourself be afraid, Peeta. You're strong. Give yourself reasons to be alive."

He smiled down at her, the dimples creasing in his cheeks, flaunting that at least this grin was partially genuine.

"I have one right here," he told her, tapping the pad of his index finger against her nose playfully, and she tried to ignore the pull in her chest that his comment had triggered.

They decided not to delve into the subject any further, settling into a silence that may have still suffocated them but was certainly more manageable than the last. After a while, Katniss heard Peeta yawn, so she concluded her welcome was expended. She bid him goodnight, ignoring the tension straining in her belly to hold him closer to her for just a moment longer and give him a good-night kiss, now fully aware of just how precious every gesture had become.

She would not realize until a year later that, after she had left, he'd slipped from the bed and flicked on his light, seating himself at the mahogany-tainted desk beside the window, pulling out a fresh leaf of lined paper and doodling a list in his neat, stereotypically-Peeta scrawl. It was what had flashed through his mind when she'd whispered, Just tell me what I can do, Peeta. I'll do anything. And then, again, when she'd directed, Give yourself reasons to be alive.

He would do just that.

In his list, he recorded a set of ten things that he promised himself he would have to finish before he allowed himself to give up, the end of the list presenting deeds far more difficult than the beginning, the last few most likely unattainable, but he didn't care.

These were his reasons to be alive. To stay alive.

And that is why, in the middle of an early October night, a sixteen-year-old Peeta Mellark sat hunched at his desk, writing a record of ten activities he would end up spending his entire life working toward.

A bucket list.

There you have it! Any feedback, by way of reviews, PMs, or tumblr asks, are always welcome.

Oh, and here's a little fun-fact: I was looking up names for Peeta's brothers—I thought it'd be cool to make the Mellark family of Scandinavian descent—when I ran across Peeta's name! Apparently, it's Scandinavian, too, and it means "Rock" which I think is pretty fascinating and true to Peeta's character (in the sense that he's sturdy and resilient). A homophone for a type of bread, yes, but at least it can be taken a little deeper than that. ;)

Have a wonderful weekend!