Work Text:
She feels her heart shatter like thin lake ice.
The cracks span the entirety of it, breaking her love and trust in Coriolanus into a million little fractals. She knew it was a slip-up when he said he had killed three people, and she was wiser than to believe his quip about it being himself. He never meant for her to know, and she knows he would have let their whole lives go by with that lie. She could see their whole life ahead — a place to call their own somewhere in The Wilds, maybe across the borders beyond Panem, small versions of them that shared their eyes and their hair, streaks of gray in his blond hair as they watched their children grow up in a soft future denied to them —dissolve into smoke, like fog that dissipates with a single step.
He lied to her.
And she knows somewhere in her heart, that somehow, he killed Sejanus. He did not tie that noose, but he might as well have draped his best friend’s neck with it. Did he even care for Sejanus? For that selfless, loving, fiercely loyal boy?
Did he even care for her?
He does, she knows it. He cares for her in a way that goes beyond healthy and sane, tangled up in his own inadequacies and warring with his fear and want of self-preservation. She knows he loves her in that same poisonous way, a snake’s venom pulsing through his veins where blood should be. A caged wounded animal in place of a heart. He’ll never let her go, if he could control that. Come hell or high water, he would never let her go.
Where that thought was once comforting now makes her blood run cold.
She has to get away. Get away from him and his paranoia, his delusions and machinations, his constant need for control. She has to somehow ditch him, find her way even a few hundred meters away from him, out of his line of sight long enough to make a run for it. He is a Capitol boy who doesn’t have a lick of wilderness training, doesn’t know the forest the way she does. She has the advantage here. She knows the forest, knows the terrain, knows the animals.
She knows how to control this snake.
She tries not to let her fear show as they get to the lake house, swallows her anger and her heartbreak. He’s too perceptive - and paranoid - for her to blame the rain for her tears if she cries. Hell, all she wants to do right now is cry - cry and scream and slap him, maim him the way her heart and soul have been by his selfish actions. She needs to see him bleed, to see the pain reflected in his eyes, but she knows that isn’t a possibility unless they’re locked in a fight to the death. She’s dealt with one arena, and she refuses to make her sanctuary another one. Besides, she wouldn’t win this fight.
He’s bigger than her, and Peacekeeper training has given him the lean strength that would be deadly in a physical fight. Overpowering her would be no big deal for him. Then there’s the question of the guns. He’s fairly skilled as a marksman, and even if he wasn’t, the number of rounds those magazines can hold is more than enough for even an errant shooter to take her out.
No, it will once again have to be her wits.
Nightshade grows nearby, if memory serves her right. A few berries and it would kill him within mere seconds, at maximum a minute or two. Even if she misjudges the amount, he would be incapacitated at the very least, unable to hurt her. No.
Both her head and her heart tell her she can’t do this. While a Peacekeeper, specifically this peacekeeper, found dead in the woods wouldn’t raise much suspicion - he was friends with someone recently hanged for treason - it would still raise questions. They’d brush it off, file it away as a Capitol boy who made a rather terrible call of judgment. But it isn’t moral. She doesn’t want to kill without reason, and she can get away without killing him. Moreover, she loves him.
Loves him still, even after the way he shattered her world in mere seconds.
She can do him one final act of mercy and love and leave him alive, go her own way. She can simply disappear in the forest in the night, leaving a letter somewhere for him to find. Tell him that some strings of fate break, and that she would always love the boy from the train station, even if he is dead now. She will carry his memory with him, and that he can rest easy knowing his secret will die with her in obscurity, in some other land far away from here.
“I’ll go dig up some katniss,” she tells him with a smile before she turns around to leave, squeezing her eyes shut and her lips pursed to not let the tears flow. She tugs that scarf closer, the one bit of him that she plans to take with her, wraps it tighter around her shoulders. Walks quietly through the forest, her feet leading her towards the patch of katniss root that grows by the lake.
She sings to herself, the tune of the Hanging Tree echoed by the mockingjays that surround her. They are the mournful choir to her lonesome dirge.
She is making her way back when she hears faint yelling and despite better judgment, edges closer to it, trying to make out the words. It’s him. Yelling into the sky, asking for her to come back, so they can talk things out. She can recognise that edge in his voice, the paranoia that seeps through every word. “Lucy Gray!” he calls out, and her hand tightens around the knife, her feet poised to run the other way. This is him, her hanging man. Her man, who murdered three. Her man, with whom she was ready to flee. The man who would have worn that necklace of rope with her, and who now would tighten the noose around her windpipe.
She wonders if she can still reason with him. Use her voice and her charms and tug on his heartstrings, manipulate any remaining love or affection for her into calming him down. No, it would be dangerous. Too dangerous for her ensuing plan for freedom. He would keep a tight watch on her if she returned, so she has to make her escape now. She takes off the scarf, moving to fasten it around her for risk of losing it, shutting her eyes as she recalls every shining moment they spent together for one final time. Tucks them away in her memories, gets ready to face the monster that has finally clawed its way out of his ribcage.
And then the forest erupts in gunfire.