We have not touched the stars

We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero's shoulders and a gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.
-Richard Siken, Snow and Dirty Rain

++

There's splatters of blood on my cellar floor and Peeta Mellark is shackled to a pipe in the corner, breathing hard and half out of his mind.

Peeta licks his split lips and bows his head, shuddering all over and trying to catch his breath.

I think I'm going to have to hit him again. When I step forward, he breathes harder, faster, and I can see his body tense, in the lines of his broad shoulders and in the way his bound hands clench. When I backhand him across the cheek, the only sound he makes is a rushed exhalation, but his head snaps to the side and stays there, eyes closed. It takes a few more hits to get him backed up against the wall-he's so strong again, now that he's had some time to heal-but eventually he's pressed against the corner, arms at an uncomfortable angle, shackles cutting into his wrists.

Eyes downcast, blood across his lips, trembling, he tries to find his voice. It takes him a long time, panting as hard as he is, shaking like he's about to burst, straining against his bonds.

"I asked for this," Peeta asks, voice low, "Real or not real?"

"Real," I say.

++

It's hard to believe, but all this started innocently enough on a clear spring day otherwise like another other:

"Sometimes I miss the shackles," Peeta says, and I freeze. It's a simple sentence but a complex thought, and I have no idea what it means. Peeta's looking out the kitchen window when he says it, lost in the vast blueness there, and he lets his eyes glance away from the sky only when I've been quiet for a full minute.

"Katniss?" he asks.

I'm already headed towards the door.

++

We've been living together for some months now. There seemed to be no reason not to.

++

We do this sometimes, or I do. I guess Peeta never walks out on me if I remind him, but sometimes his eyes cloud over with secret shiny memories and the confusion makes him mute. I'll lose him for a few seconds or a few minutes, so is that any different from when I walk out of the house and climb up a tree for a few hours?

Maybe it wouldn't be if I didn't leave for a half day at a time-or a few days at a time-a week, once or twice.

He's always waiting for me to return.

++

Usually, there are cheese buns.

I can measure how worried about me he's been by how stale the ones in the back row are, tellingly from the first batch of however many.

Sometimes there will be a cake, and the more upset Peeta is, the more he concentrates, the harder he resists being pulled into nightmares, the more delicate the work is.

There will be cookies, most frosted green, and at least three different kinds of bread, and I can't even guess what else there will be from his forays into cooking full meals instead of just baking.

If it hurts them that I hardly eat the food he makes while I'm away, he doesn't show it-but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. He gives the food away to others, eventually. We do not waste.

++

I'm not gone too long this time but when I get back I don't speak. One moment I'm gone and the next I'm a shadow behind the door that he doesn't see, and the next I'm shoving him backwards, into his stupid kitchen, pining him against his stupid, stupid oven.