cosmicpretzel | won't make fire out of clay | Katniss/Peeta

Neither of them expects it when it happens.

Their courses are parallel, perfectly parallel, within sight but without intersection. They share a lifetime’s worth of horrors, the same chronic insomnia, the same patchwork skin made of scars. But he’s been left to pick up the pieces of his mind, and she’s been left to pick up the pieces of her soul, and a focus beyond any of these herculean tasks is next to impossible.

Yet somehow, in a chance moment, they meet somewhere in the middle.

When their lips touch, it’s breath into her lungs, relief from the musty air of a house she’s spent too much time shutting herself inside. Her entire body alights with senses, and after so long in the shadow of death, she feels alive, so alive. Something vaguely familiar, yet not simultaneously, begins to stir in her chest.

This isn’t hunger; it’s a flame. The most dangerous kind. Warm, inviting, friendly enough to provide protection against a cold existence as a lonely, fractured shell, but if left unchecked could become her undoing.

She recoils instinctively. She’s had enough of fire.

He makes no move to stop her.

One last whisper reaches her ears before the distance resumes.

“I’m sorry.”