Work Text:
"Lucy Gray! Where are you?"
She was behind a tree only several feet away, but Coriolanus didn't know that, and he never would if she kept quiet enough.
"Can we please talk, Lucy Gray?"
No, she thought, please leave. She shouldn't have taken so long contemplating by the katniss patch - he caught on too quick. She didn't want to believe it, at first, that he really had killed a third. She would have fully accepted his joke as an answer if it weren't for his eyes. It was something she couldn't fully explain, but his eyes held a coldness that had not been there before that made her falter, and she just knew.
Sejanus.
It may have been a lie, a good one at that, but Lucy Gray always held the belief that most lies ring a bit of truth to them. Coriolanus's old self was dead, most certainly. And she knew that he was no longer someone she could love. She had no more trust in him.
His footsteps got closer, crunching the dead leaves and twigs of the underbrush. She heard him let out a slight gasp before his footsteps quickened, and then she heard the buzzing. He had found her scarf caught in the bramble. She would have picked it up and left no trace of herself if it weren't for the buzzing. It was a dangerous sound. A sound she knew Capitol-raised Coriolanus wouldn't know to be cautious of. He probably thought it was just a bug. She thought about jumping out of her hiding space to scream at him to stop if she didn't know the potential consequences. She had just barely caught sight of him and the gun before she made the decision to hide.
Then she heard the sounds of the bushes rustling before Coriolanus cried out in pain. He had picked up the scarf that got itself entangled in the snake's den.
"Lucy Gray!" he screamed, "are you trying to kill me?"
She balked at how quickly he switched up. Had he always been so delusional? Then a spray of bullets was shot her way and she couldn't help but scream. She felt the tree she was leaning on shake as bullets were imbedded in it on the other side. She didn't really expect him to shoot so impulsively. He really was someone else entirely, now.
He let out a loud, frustrated scream. "Lucy Gray!"
She knew she had to run or else she'd be done for. But how? She saw the shadow of a mockingjay fly overhead and she knew exactly what to do. She had to do what she did best. She sang. She took a deep breath and sang the song she knew would haunt him and tell him exactly why she ran. That she knew exactly what he had done.
Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Where they strung up a man
They say he murdered three
As if on que the mockingjays picked up her tune and carried it around until it was no longer discernible to where the song was coming from, and so loud that it would be impossible to hear her running.
More bullets. She just had to wait until he ran out and she could make a break for it. The trees around her shook and leaves came raining down around them, but the birds never stopped.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight
In the hanging tree
Soon, almost as soon as it started, the trees stopped shaking, but the leaves continued to fall and the sound of gunfire never ceased. Stupidly, Lucy Gray peeked out from behind her tree and watched as Coriolanus shot up into the sky at the mockingjays. Screaming, insane, psychotic. He was too tunnel-visioned with rage to even notice her emerge, and too pumped up on adrenaline that it made him so unsteady on his feet that he'd find it difficult to chase after her. So she ran. Maybe even faster than she had in the arena.
She ran down the path they had taken back to District Twelve and in the distance, eventually, the gunfire stopped.
Even farther in the distance she heard Coriolanus shout one last time, weak, desperate. "Lucy Gray!"
And then a splash, as if something heavy was dropped into the lake.
Silence.
She never looked back.
Back in District Twelve she went straight back to the Covey house. She dove right into her bed and under her covers and sobbed. Heartbroken was too simple a word. It was as if Coriolanus really had shot her, straight in the heart with a bullet with his name carved into it, leaving a gaping hole in its wake. Or better yet, as if he had reached right into her chest and tore her heart out himself.
Soon enough the rest of the Covey found her. They asked her why she was so upset but she couldn't bring herself to say a single, tearful word. Once she composed herself, she decided, she'd runaway again, this time she'd convince the Covey to come with her. They would lay low and wait until Coriolanus came back so they wouldn't encounter him in the woods.
She knew he would be rushing back as soon as possible to tend to his snake bite, maybe only slowing to hastily toss the guns. He had talked about it before Lucy Gray had left. That's why he tossed his rifle into the lake once he ran out of bullets.
He'd be back within the hour. The Covey would leave before sunrise.
But the Peacekeepers had pounded down the door as soon as dawn struck. Lucy Gray and the rest were just finishing up getting ready to leave when they grabbed her and dragged her out the door. Maude Ivory screamed, ready to run to her rescue but Tam Amber swiftly picked her up and took her to the other room before she could condemn herself, too.
They took her to a small, windowless room with only a dim light over head to light it. She was chained to the table the same way she and her fellow tributes were chained during their first interviews with their mentors.
Commander Hoff himself stared her down as if she were a disgusting beast. It seemed that he had already made up his mind that she was the culprit for everything. This was just a mock interrogation, for formality’s sake. "How do you know Spruce?" Hoff asked.
"I don't," she replied coolly.
"Was killing the mayor's daughter worth it?" he asked. No mention of Billy Taupe, he was too inferior to be worth the Peacekeepers' precious time.
"I've never laid a hand on a gun," she replied.
"Next question I want you to answer honestly, this time. There’s no use denying that you two were aquaintanced,” he sneered, forcefully lifting her chin, but she only looked back down when he let go. There was at least some sort of satisfying defiance in not looking him in the eye. “Where is Private Snow?” he asked. That made Lucy Gray jerk her head up, and Hoff gave her a sly grin, as if he had proven her a criminal. The hole in her heart grew. Coriolanus didn't come back? She knew that she shouldn't care, he had betrayed her trust, after all, and that meant he was dead to her, and he was, but even after everything he had done in those woods she still couldn't help the tears that sprung to her eyes. She swallowed the lump in her throat. She knew, deep down, exactly where he was.
"He was bit, sir. By a timber rattler."
Commander Hoff sucked in a sharp breath and walked out of the room without saying another word. After he was gone, two new Peacekeepers came in to unchain her and throw her in a cell unfit for even rats, with only a bucket to do her business. The Capitol zoo was nicer, she thought bitterly.
She was there for two days, with no food, no water, until they came and got her. They cuffed her and marched her out of the jail; she didn't need to ask where they were going, she knew her fate.
They marched her down to the hanging tree and down the aisle of people waiting to see her neck snap. It's not over 'til the mockingjay sings, she thought.
So she decided to sing.
She considered The Old Therebefore, the song she sang in the arena when she thought she was going to die, but that was too simple, too self-pitiful. She wanted to at least send one last message, so she sang her newest composition. The third and last time she’d ever sing it, low and mournful. The Hanging Tree.
She sang as she was led onto the stage. She sang when her eyes met with the Covey, her family, and they were singing, too. She sang when they tightened the noose around her neck. She sang when Commander Hoff announced why she had been condemned.
“Lucy Gray Baird has been charged with the murders of Mayfair Lipp and Billy Taupe Clade, and the rebellious assassination of the Peacekeeper Private Coriolanus Snow! Her sentence is death by hanging!”
She sang when the call was given.
She only stopped singing when the platform dropped out from under her and her very own necklace of rope choked the last note out of her.
But it is said that the mockingjays carried her song for days.