Work Text:
Three cannons.
Three people are dead. From the moment the wire goes slack, I know a cannon isn’t too far off. I’m right—first one then a second a few minutes later, and now, a third one. I had my eyes on Finnick and Beetee up until the last cannon. Nothing could have made me stay put after that last boom. Beetee calls out to me as I run after her. Finnick, I am vaguely aware of Finnick lunging at me, but I’m too fast for him—something I have not accomplished the entire time in the arena. I don’t wish either of them any harm, but their survival is pointless if Katniss is lost.
The way it needs to have happened is Brutus, Enobaria, then Chaff. If only two of those…then Johanna. I don’t want to admit I’m secretly hoping it is Johanna. I know I’m not alone In this school of thought. Finnick is probably out there hoping the same thing in reverse. Johanna and him are a dynamic I’m never going to understand and all too late that may be playing out to Katniss’ detriment.
That isn’t fair to Katniss—she’s fierce—more than that, she’s capable and she’s willing. She’s gotten us out of more than enough trouble. I trust her to get herself out of whatever this is. Especially if she abandoned Johanna like she wanted to, but the guilt gnaws at me. I imagine her suspended on the forest floor growing cold in the boiling jungle. I stop imagining that. For Katniss’s sake I must imagine her alive, and fighting her way back to me.
I hear the calm before the storm hits—like in the previous arena the whole place goes silent—the chittering tree rats, slithering lizards, and buzzing insects, even the rustling canopy of leaves and lapping ocean tides far down on the beach go still and I do too. The hovercraft appears out of thin air and before I process where it’s docked it’s pulling one body, then two, and then three with three simultaneous claws. One of them is distinctly a buff white man—Brutus, but he’s the only one I can confirm for certain. The others are too far away—mere blobs of color. I stare as hard as I can, watching for long tendrils of dark hair but the darkness obscures their details almost entirely. If it is Brutus I’ve seen and not some trick of the moonlight then there’s a higher chance, if only slightly, of one of the other bodies being Enobaria.
The third and distant body is swallowed up by hovercraft doors seconds before Finnick breaks through the clearing. I’d like to say it’s purely instinct that I wield my knife out in defense, but Finnick and I both know the truth we pretend not to. Katniss’ weariness has spread to me. I am no longer trustful of my allies—of the man who brought me back from death, who lost Mags for me, who went out of his way to save Katniss’ life. It disgusts me that I find any reason to mistrust him at all.
“Johanna,” he breathes, hands on his knees. He’s so winded, his usually honey-sweet voice is ragged and parched with dehydration. “Where is she?” There is such tenderness to his worry that I wonder how he plans to break off this alliance with her once they have killed Katniss and I. Before the jabberjays' attack, I had wondered if maybe Finnick and Johanna had a star-crossed lovers story of their own kept under wraps so as not to copy ours, but quickly realized Johanna held no such feelings, period, let alone for Finnick, and Finnick was so helplessly at the mercy of his districts most questionable Victor.
“I don’t know where she or Katniss is,” I say, staring up at the sky where the hovercraft had been moments earlier. “I think one of the bodies was Brutus, but I can’t be sure. I think at least one of the other two was a woman.”
Finnick straightens up, wiping his peeling hands down his calves, “My money’s on Enobaria. Johanna and Katniss are a good team. They made it out. I’m sure of it.”
The longer I think about it, the further my intestines twist themselves into knots. I’m not any good at hiding the upset stamped across my face. I feel it in the way my whole body tenses then see it when Finnick frowns just a little at the corner of his lip.
“ Aren’t you sure?”
I’m not sure at what point I’d started to pace, but when I look down there’s a line of matted plants stamped into the ground. Slowly, the uneasiness of her absence grows into outright panic.
“Katniss would only stay away from me if there was trouble,” I say, mostly to myself. Finnick just happens to overhear. “—So there’s still danger out there… That means Enobaria is still out there and at least one of our team is dead.”
Finnick stops and I watch the pieces slowly click into place. He plants his trident into the dirt and sinks to the ground.
“Hopefully, Johanna,”
It’s my turn to stop, I turn away from the twilight sky and try to find the angle Finnick is playing at, but it’s too dark in most places and too milky in others to tell what face he might be making. There he goes again…throwing off the uncertain dynamic.
“I thought you two were close,” I say, and for a moment the confusion is enough to pull me from my worry.
Finnick laughs first, and then it settles into a morose sigh. “Johanna is dear to me. I won’t be the one to kill her”
Then who? I can’t help but wonder, sinking my suspicions even further.
“I don’t wish her dead,” he corrects after he must see my probably horrified expression, “but she said it herself. There is no one she loves. It’s better she goes than one of us.”
One of us.
“Finnick?” I don’t want to get the words out, and that makes it even harder to grit it out through my teeth.
He doesn’t look up, only traces letters in the dirt. A N N I E . “Yes, Peeta?”
“How do you plan to kill me?”
Annie, Annie, Annie .
He keeps tracing in the dirt. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t even heard the question.
“How do you plan to kill me?” He says just when I think about repeating myself. For having posed the question myself, I feel absolutely undone by it turned around at me.
“I…”
“Exactly. I’m not going to kill you, and you’re not going to kill me. When it gets down to it, we’ll split off and let the jungle kill us before we ever have to lift a weapon against the other.”
I like the strategy very much, but it reminds me all too painfully of the team we don’t have with us to split up from.
“Where is she?” Finnick says before I can. I see now the expression he has been making this whole time—unbridled fear. For Johanna? No, he already said that wouldn’t be the case. It can only be for Katniss. What stake does Finnick have in her life?
Finnick composes himself, pulls himself up with the trident, and stares off into the tree line. Worry bites his bottom lip, but he doesn’t let it quiver like I feel mine doing.
“We need to get back to Beetee and get our bearings. Our electrocution plan is shot anyway, We can worry about getting our team back once the three of us are together.”
I don’t move, or rather I move too much, having picked up the pacing habit once again. Finnick grabs the thick of my arm and pulls me toward the underbrush.
“Walk first, worry later.”
That’s no small command. My mind is burning with looming fear. Katniss is one of two places: hiding, hunted in the jungle, or dead in a wooden box in a cold and clinical capital morgue.
I turn, but just then the sky lights up with the anthem blaring from every angle. My head snaps back to see the capital crest pixelated in the inky darkness.
“What in the…” Finnick murmurs. The anthem is too early. The one full of Mags, Wiress and district one just passed a few hours ago at nightfall. The game makers really are fast-laning this one.
Before I can deliberate its purpose, Brutus’ face is magnified in the sky and my breath catches. From the moment the cannon went off I’d wanted confirmation of her safety but now that it’s fast approaching I find myself clinging to this gray moment: the cat still in the box. Katniss is both alive and dead to me—gone and breathing down my neck. When suddenly faced with one answer or the other—one being a miracle I had only hoped could be possible, the other being statistically expected but devastating to a level I have never known, I prefer to leave the box shut. This way I can at least imagine a world where she is still alive.
I think that maybe this is enough when Chaff is stamped into the sky and my heart bottoms out through a trapdoor in my stomach. Chaff, from District 11. This means there is only one face that can appear in the sky now.
“Peeta,” Finnick breathes as my knees hit the Ground. I can’t speak—I have nothing I can say, it’s all trapped in the burning portion of my lungs as I forget to breathe. “Peeta, I’m so…” he cannot finish his condolence because he realizes how insincere it sounds coming from a man who must kill us all to get out of here alive.
Before I am prepared to see it, there she is. Fluidly spotless in the pixelated sky. Her eyes stare across the jungle and I feel the pressure of them boring down on me. How beautiful she can make pixels.
One explosive crack rips from me and nothing more. By the time I’ve hunched over my knees to scream the anthem is over and so is my cry. My next breath comes out hoarse and the next doesn’t come out at all.
I stare meaninglessly into the inky sky where she was just moments ago. Did I look? Really look and memorize each divet of her features in the seconds she appeared, commit to memory the intricacies of her beauty? I will not allow there to be a hole in my memory of her. I try to put together each piece of the puzzle when dots dance in my vision and Finnick has to lunge to grab me off the jungle floor. He shoves me upright then lowers my head between my knees. It does little to help the burning in my lungs and the spinning in my mind. My lungs won’t move and that’s when Finnick traps me in his arms, locking my heaving chest against his. He’s panting just as much as I am but somehow when synced in grief together it seems minuscule. There is such noise in my head that I don’t stop to wonder again why Finnick is as crushed as he is. There is nothing in my head but the blaring anthem. When I close my eyes, there is nothing but her.
Get out, get out, get out . I need to get out of this Arena. I need to die in this arena. I need to cry. I need to never shed another tear. I need to fight. I need to fold. I need to hug her sister and look her mother in the eyes. I need to never see them again, never sit with that shame, never share with them this despair.
Among all things, I must either breathe or die. I cannot keep her like the cat in the box. I must choose now—live or die.
My trembling hand fights to escape from Finnick’s iron hug. He’s not letting go any time soon but I slid my arm down his abdomen and wrench the knife from my belt.
Finnick’s abs tighten when the cold metal pushes against his blazing flesh but he doesn’t loosen any. I manage the knife up between his arms and its dull side against his collarbone.
He doesn’t understand, and my mouth isn’t working to tell him what he must do. I thrust it against him again, forcing out syllables that don’t make words.
“No,” he says, choking when the other shoe drops. “I can’t—I won’t. You can’t die in this arena.”
The noise between my temples worsens. I can hear nothing besides the scream of panic. It’s only faintly that I hear Finnick willing me to let go of the knife.
“You need to make it home—for her family. You’re what they have now.”
I think of Prim and my chest only splits deeper. Prim, who asks with timid fingers if we can make cookies, who brings me cheese to pair with the morning’s bread and lets me pet her grumpy cat. Prim, who believes full-heartedly there was a mythic love story, a joyous wedding, and probably even believes there was a baby—some happy little family waiting for us at the end of this.
“Gale,” is the first word I manage to get out, “Gale.” It’s the only word I know and it’s enough for Finnick to follow me there.
“No,” he said with unwavering composure. “Not Gale.” He can barely speak either, regardless of how composed he may sound. I can follow him too, and I know with a shattering clarity he’s right.
Gale is not reliable. Through no fault of his, I cannot rely on him to do my job for me. Gale is not safe. Gale is not capable of keeping his head under, I can act—I have acted my way out of this once I’ll do it again. I’ll make it back to twelve and never dream of rebellion again, focus only on keeping them alive. I know that isn’t true either. Katniss and I kept our heads down—we read the damn flashcards, we smiled, we waved, we praised the capital and still, we never felt safe once. No one in all of Twelve is.
All over again, I feel my fingers urging Finnick with the knife but I manage to pull it back on my own and stare, blinking at the trees. No matter what I chose, the way forward is black nothingness.
Finnick means to say something—I think Beetee but there's a snapping crack, a flash of brief light, then strangled groans.
Finnick is running while I’m still grappling with the knife.
Beetee is coiled on the ground like his wires, deathly still but also spazzing down the length of his spine. His clothes smell burnt and he manages nothing but a twitch of a finger on a long, silver arrow. One of hers.
“Kat…” he retches and it turns me inside out. He taps the arrow more frantically and I examine it closer. It’s wrapped with wire from top to fletchling. I take it from Beetee and relief flushes his manic eyes but I’m not there yet, I still don’t know what I’m to do with it.
“Kat…” he says again and that finger twitches up toward the sky. No, toward the dome.
Had this been Katniss’ plan along? Had she and Beetee intended from the start to use the plan as one final hurrah? Why then, had he sent her off with Johanna? Unless he knew what she wanted to do and refused to indulge, but now she’s dead anyways and nothing matters. Not even me.
I understand. I take the arrow and run my fingers over the fine wire. I have not the slightest idea how to shoot it but up is not a hard target.
Gale is not safe, but neither am I and nothing I do will ever keep her family or mine or Gale’s or any of 12 safe from the capital menace.
Why not? Is all I think. Could be fun.
Finnick is still utterly lost, but that’s okay. He’d only try to stop me if he understood. I reach over Beetee and close his eyelids though he still twitches miserably. I can afford him this quiet death if nothing else. Beetee can go in silence. I can go in a blazing arc. Thunder crackles above our heads, but without fear, I restring the arrow with wire and knock it back in the bow, feeling the weight of it in my grip.
“Peeta,” Finnick hisses, bending down to check Beetee’s pulse, a knife clenched in his other hand. I am unsure what he finds—Beetee isn’t still but Finnick’s knife is. “We need to go—we have to get away from this tree—find Johanna.”
I don’t answer him. I only hunt the sky for what I suspect Katniss has kept her eye on this entire time. Yes, there it is—not the minuscule hum she claimed to hear, but the warped, shimmery cloud of an invisible barrier about ten feet up and to the left of the tree. I hold my aim, steadying for the first strike.
Something clicks for Finnick and almost instantly he’s lunging for me, but faster than even him, I swing my aim around, the arrow making a bullseye of his heart. I speak with my eyes. One move, one flinch to interrupt this plan and I’ll plant the arrow in his chest before I ever drive it toward the sky.
Finnick’s knife drops when his hands raise in a thinly veiled surrender. Of all the things I expect him to say, I’m not in the slightest ready when he makes a little cry from the back of his throat, and tears shimmer languidly in his sea-green eyes.
“You know who the real enemy is.”
It isn’t a question, nor is it a reminder. It is a statement. A true one at that, because yes, I do. It isn’t Brutus or Enobaria or even Johanna—whichever one of them cut her up and killed her. It isn’t any of the desperate kids who killed to survive. It’s the men and women in white suits in a white room. It’s the old man above them all, sipping bloody champagne and orchestrating our deaths like chess pieces on his board.
Since my name was reaped there has only been one way to move—forward. Forward and to the left, over and over because if I took even one step back everything would be over, and before that…a hungry kid from 12 who did nothing but bake bread for other, wealthier people. There was only one way out of that for me even then. My entire life has been one elaborate game of chess and now is not the first time I see the wrinkled hand that’s been moving the pieces all along, but it will be the last.
In my final move, I can deliver the best form of checkmate I have at my disposal. It won’t win my game, but maybe it can start another.
I hear it before I see it. It's only because my arms are so instinctively waiting for it that I spin my aim and let that arrow fly.
Before I feel any pain, there’s first the blinding flash that sears any sight line of the arrow into white heat. I know it follows through though because after the pain finally hits I am still allowed my hearing; and the creaking—the groaning, the splitting of metal? I am sure it’s the arena crumbling around me. That too soon fades to white noise, but my pupils have adjusted and the blinding white isn’t the lightning tree—it’s the sky. Not only the sky, but the sun, a great ball of golden white light mirrored with silky ribbons of pink, red, and orange—the soft kind of orange that reminds me so of pale candlelight. Like Katniss’ candle dress from the victory interview.
I am not dead, I suppose with a sinking feeling as I process the horizon of beauty. This is confirmed when the pain reaches its overwhelming peak, starting in my bones and spreading to the ends of each nerve. There is a quiet scream in my bones to get up, to run, hide, get out of the way. The arena crumbles to shambles above me and metal beams the size of the artificial trees that dot capital parks crash slowly, agonizingly, and then violently to the glitching jungle floor. A beam makes contact mere feet to my left, but I cannot move. That’s not true because I am moving—like Beatie my limbs twitch, and my fingers are alive with electrical pulses but I am not in control of any of it. When the sunset and all its warmth disappear entirely behind the hovercraft I am helpless to do anything. Just as helpless as I have always been, there is only one way forward so when the hovercraft grows closer and closer and air tickles through my ripped clothes I allow myself the only way out I know—I fade as the capital takes me far, far away.
***
The tube in my lungs presses on my organs. It makes my throat feel swollen shut and in the most irony possible, unable to breathe. On my back, immobile, I lie gasping for air. I cannot speak, but I must scream. The contraption on my chest weighs me down. As if through water, I cannot see the ceiling that swirls above me. Momentarily, I think of the vulnerable force field that got me here. Here, in the capital. Here, where I need to die before they get their hands on me. My fingers can just barely grasp the chords—my grip is so weak I’m certain I can’t hold on for long. I yank and miraculously the tube becomes dislodged. Not out of my throat entirely, but enough so it doesn’t inflate my lungs on its own. Without the steady stream of air, I find it too hard to catch a breath and in a matter of minutes, I swirl in and out and back to white.
There is crying. I know that there are tears but they’re not my own. They’re not Beetee’s either—Beetee who lies next to me trapped under the metal lung I’d been pinned under the last time I woke. I’m free of the contraption, and despite the heaviness to all my bones and the tightness in my lungs, I am able to draw my own breath. That allows me enough clarity to take stock of the room if in—hovercraft med ward or capital hospital?
My skin crawls in this eerie space—the sleek metal walls lit with dim scones, stapled cabinets loaded with medical supplies, and the rock-hard gurneys that passed as beds. I barely have cause to remember the last time—I was in and out, delirious from the lack of blood, or rather the surplus of it surging from my mangled leg, but very suddenly I remember the room—the cold and clinical feel of the air as they started to saw before the drugs fully pulled me under. One hand seeks the smooth bio-plastic that should make up my limb but I find nothing in its place. My artificial leg has been removed. I never saw my leg without it. They’d attached it surgically while I was still unconscious. There were ways to remove it—if it needed cleaning or repairs but that had yet to come up. It takes me a moment to realize the unfamiliar knob of flesh is what remains of my limb. There’s no time to stare at it—to process the alien appearance of my body, no time to sit in the panic this room takes me back to. Among other things, I know Beetee was taken with me, who knows who else, must be one other at least because those tears are still happening, softer, sporadic, but close by.
Beetee—I don’t think I can help him—can I? He looks like he’s been cooked, which he has—we both have. I have no way of escape. I cannot jump out the window—I’m not sure I could even get out of this bed. While my artificial limb took its own time getting used to, I never had to first learn to hobble on one foot and a crutch. I examine my immediate surroundings—there’s nothing to ensure my peace before some capital henchman comes to take me someplace awful. There’s a syringe and a row of muted brown bottles on a table a few paces away. If I could just get myself upright, I might be able to cling to the bed with one hand and pull the tray close with the other. There’s enough morphling there to stop my heart in minutes. It wasn’t the death I wanted but beggars can’t be choosers.
I’m gripping the handle of the gurney with peachy white fingers when I hear the footsteps that quietly grow louder. There it is again—the crying now surely a few doors down that hallway on the other side.
“She isn’t dead,” a gruff and tired voice says. Almost instinctually, I melt back into the cot. The effect that voice has on me is instant.
“I wish she was.”
I freeze at that second voice.
“God, I wish I were dead!”
Finnick.
The sobs grow louder, but not closer. Who is the woman he cries for? Who does the capital taunt him with? Annie? The victor the world forgot about?
“I know,” as Finnick’s sobs wrack the corridor I place the first voice.
Haymitch. Haymitch and Finnick? Is no one safe? Were all the previous victors taken in too? If so, why are they allowed free reign?
I try to call out to them—to Haymitch at least, but I stop myself at the last second. As much as I want to see him, to get some sense of clarity from him I cannot allow him to stop me. I will not be a chess piece of the capital. I will not be used. Whatever game maker oversees my every move and keeps me alive with painstaking heartbreak without fail can go jump off this aircraft. I’m done playing this game and Haymitch will not be the one to stop me.
“You’ll need to dry your tears before we wake him,” Haymitch says in his usual sigh. “You won’t convince anyone with blubbering like that.”
Finnick inhales a rattling cry as he forces the tears down his throat. I hear the way they stick to his vocal cords anyway.
“I can’t convince him of something I don’t believe myself,” he says darkly, and then his voice breaks again, “at least in his case she really is dead.”
Katniss. They’re talking about Katniss, at least now they are, but what do they mean to convince me of? That this shell of my life is worth living? That she is better off dead? I already know she is. I have quietly resigned myself to the fact that dead is best. Dead is best when the alternative is the capital and the capital on my own. But I’m not alone. There’s Beetee, Finnick, Haymitch and who knows who else.
“There you go again,” Haymitch sighs and I can practically hear the scowl that accompanies it. “That—don’t say that. You’ll set him off.”
Set me off like I’m a ticking bomb with an unstable trigger.
No.
I use every muscle in my body to raise from the gurney. It wobbles a bit on its unbraked wheels and my heart stops for one terrible moment as anxiety rips between my ribs. I have to pry my fingers off the rail and reposition them to drag myself to the edge of the cot the distance seems like a fathomous cavern that if pushed into I will fall and fall and fall, but when I gather the courage to swing my leg over the sheer drop it skirts effortlessly against the floor. I instruct myself to pretend I’m hopping. I’ve stood on one foot before, played all those hopping games as a boy, and danced around the kitchen in pain when massive baking sheets of cast iron were dropped on my toes. This is just like all of that, except this time, I have something to hold to. It’s easier, really, nothing to panic over. Just reach out, grab as many vials as possible, shove them in your arm without thinking about it, and push. Repeat.
Despite the simple path ahead when I try to inch forward my head rushes with the off-kilter balance strong enough to knock me back, but my hand comes loose from the effort of it and for one horrible moment I wobble, directionless. On my way down I reach for the table—lunge for it, really. I hit the ground seconds before the table does—it lands on top of me, and the carefully sealed syringes bounce harmlessly off me. The ground is less forgiving and I’m left gasping with sharp pains in my side. My head spins, I most definitely need blood and water, and food—not necessarily in that order. Except I don’t need any of that—only the drugs now brushing my fingertips. I grab one, rip the protective cap off with trembling fingers and hesitate for just one moment—it’s enough for the footsteps to respond to the crash and for the door to burst open. I ignore it. I shove the needle into the pale side of my arm without care and push down hard on the plunger. This, however, isn’t enough, hands as rough as cracked dirt grab me by any body part available and heave me off the floor. What little morphling made it to my bloodstream has already made me weak, but only in my extremities. As I am pulled back to the gurney, I see my intruders and with no surprise, it’s Haymitch and Finnick. What is surprising is they both look well—not well , Finnick looks like shit, his eyes blood red and his face raw with recent tears, and the cuts and bruises acquired in the arena remain, but he seems clean, well dressed, and by no means shackled. Haymitch is the most functional I’ve ever seen him—hair clean, ironed slacks, and a button-down that is believably from his own closet, most of all, he looks at peace.
My mind is blank white terror all over again, I don’t know what to think; much less what to say, so instead I say nothing and pretend I cannot breathe again. I play it like I remember it happening with Finnick in the arena. When that proves too much to maintain, I opt to emulate my nightmares. I just sit there, try not to blink but look haunted all the same. I’m so wrapped up in not having to prepare an explanation and an excuse I’m entirely off my guard when Haymitch lets me drop against the bed right onto my back and flicks me reverently on my cheek.
“Stop that, don’t cause problems.”
I couldn’t if I wanted to. My meager dose of morphling has knocked me flat on my back. I feel it spreading up from my arm, but for now, I’m stuck at the mercy of whatever Haymitch means to do with me.
“Thanks for giving yourself a little bit of mellow juice,” he says, bending down to retrieve the needle. He pops it into his exposed wrist and grins, “No, really thank you.” He closes his eyes and hums.
I’d like to take back what I said about Haymitch seeming to be his most functional.
I catch the corner of Finnick’s puzzled gawk and I manage my first word.
“The fuck…?”
Haymitch tosses the needle aside and clasps his hands together.
“There you are!” He beams and I consider that perhaps he’s not as sober as he let on.
“So much for easing him in gently,” Finnick murmurs and takes the initiative to tuck me back under the thin, scratchy hospital blankets. One brush of the fabric and I wake in a scratchy hospital bed like this one with Katniss somewhere out of reach, kept away from me for some stupid reaction shot. My chest burns but no tears can escape, they just get clogged in my clammy throat. “Okay, to start with?” Finnick says, pulling the sheets out from the end of the gurney so my foot can breathe. How does he know I sleep with my foot outside the blankets? “You’re safe,” he pats my hand through the blanket. “All of us here are safe.”
Instinctively, I take a headcount of the room's occupancy.
Beetee, Finnick, Haymitch…who is that man at the end of the room, stalking the doorway, his face shadowed by the terrible lighting of the ward? Are Finnick and Haymtich unshackled because they are monitored? Who is it?
“All of us… here ?”
Finnick wets his lips, fingers moving to weave the ribbons of a thread bracelet on his wrist—the bracelet I recall him weaving and unweaving during downtimes in the arena.
“Enobaria and Johanna,” he says with a certain amount of detachment, though his eyes flare ever so slightly at Johanna’s name. He makes no mention of Annie. Was it Johanna he cried for after all? I believed him when he said he wouldn’t cry for her. “The Capital got them before…” he acknowledges the man looming behind us with nothing more than a nod of his head. The man steps into the light. “—Before Heavensbee could rescue us.”
Plutarch Heavensbee. This man is none other than the head Game Maker himself. That only just barely registers. I am too wrapped up in what Finnick has just released. The capital has Johanna…but not us. We’re not in the custody of the capital, despite the presence of Plutarch Heavensbee. So where the hell are we?
“Mr. Mellark,” I jump at the booming reverb to his voice. My name sounds wrong in his voice. I retreat into the blankets as much as they allow. They are not very forgiving. “Let me assuage any worries you may have about our current arrangement.”
“He’s a friend,” Haymitch cuts in, plopping right down on the end of the cot, “—an undercover operative for us in the capital. He was helping us the whole game.”
The whole time? How exactly had he helped us? I supposed he must be the whole reason I’m here and not in the capital.
“Nearly half the tributes were working together,” Plutarch butts back in, stepping closer so I can see each white-blonde hair on his upper lip. My fingers tremble with the effort not to hide beneath the covers. “Our plan was always to get you out.”
The blanket scrunches in my fists.
“Liar,” I say, nonplussed. No one ever saves me. The only person who ever tried couldn’t save herself.
Plutarch sighs, and what little reverence he’s been addressing me with falls right off his face.
“Okay, fine, I lied.”
“You wanted to get her out,” I say from the quietest place in my lungs.
“Don’t know why you’re so sullen,” Haymitch says with a gruffness to his voice sharp enough to mask any grief he has no alcohol to subdue with, “we followed your plan.”
“And you failed,” I spit out, something horrible and Vicious baring its fangs across my face. I know at once I’ve hurt Haymitch. His face scrunches up and he pulls away as if I’ve burnt him. He holds his hand against his chest as if that’s the very spot where I’ve wounded him.
“I know,” even the morphling cannot hide the tearing in his voice.
I can’t look at him—the shame is too hot in my chest and I want to cry, but there is too much anger rolling around in me to produce anything more than a wet scowl.
“What happened?” I ask and somehow, my voice is even smaller, “What happened to her? Do you know? Were you watching?”
Haymitch gets up, walks all the way to the end of the room, and uses the sink to splash water on his face.
“Were you?”
He doesn’t answer so I look to Plutarch. He makes my heart beat right out of my chest but surely he must know, he was glued to the screen the whole time.
“Haymitch,” I repeat, louder, gruffer. Again, it doesn’t sound like my voice, but the feral beast that’s taken over. “You were watching,” I tell him rather than ask. “Was it Brutus or Enobaria that got her?”
There’s a withdrawal on either side of me, both Finnick and Heavensbee recoiling slightly.
“What? Was it Chaff? Your friend ?”
“I was in my room,” comes Haymitch’s nearly silent reply, “—when it happened.”
Slowly, my face melts into a frown, only out of confusion. In his room? What purpose would his room serve?
“Why were you—“
“Because I was drunk.”
And there it is—the bombshell. Haymitch walks on eggshells around me because he’s hiding his betrayal—his failure from me. I suppose some part of me is angry—enraged, offended, but all I can do is shake my head because it’s equal parts predicted—expected even and a fact that must simply be untrue, because if it is then I have put my hopes and dreams into the hands of someone clearly unable to carry them all. I trusted Haymitch to carry my burden with me, to help me bring her home and he was not up to the task. I put my faith in the untrustable, in the wrong person, a person I trusted most out of anyone, and the result was her life.
“Why?” I can’t hide the tremor there, but neither does Haymitch.
“Because all my friends were dead or dying and you’d just resigned yourself to the same fate.” Water drips off his eyelashes as if tears fall down his wet cheeks but if they are tears, they’re crocodiles’.
“There was no way I could watch you get yourself killed when you’d deluded yourself into thinking you’d deserved it.” His whole face shakes but his words sound far away and fuzzy. What I’m hearing is he was too weak for the job. He had the job to sit there, to protect us from behind the screen while we fought for our lives—while I floundered in that arena he floundered in a capital recliner. “I knew that soon the extraction would start and the pounding in my head…” he jams his fingers hard into his temples, eyes scrunched shut. “I couldn’t get you out with that pounding…just a little…that’s all I needed to set my mind right.”
“Except it wasn’t… just a little.”
He doesn’t answer—can’t answer because he has no defense.
“By the time I got my fix, the lounge was silent and she was dead…”
It is, perhaps, not entirely fair to blame Haymitch, not fair to expect sobriety from him when he has never been able to deliver before, but I thought—no I wasn’t really thinking, I had hoped this time he might not fail, but I was wrong. I was foolish and selfish. I trusted him with something precious and he destroyed it.
“You had one job!” I am screaming before I'm fully aware of it. It isn’t even true. Without all the rebel activities he still had many jobs, but only one he promised to me. It takes only one outburst to release the rest of the rage boiling in my gut and then the two of us are swapping, terrible, hideous things I’m sure we have both always and never once thought about the other, our heartbeats in our heads while we direct all the hurt and rage into the other. By the end of it, when my head swims and my voice is hoarse, I think I might hate Haymitch more than Snow.
“All of that,” I hiss, my entire face throbbing from the contortion it takes to stay afloat, “and even you don’t know?” I ask, fixing my glare on Heavensbee. Ever so slightly, he shakes his head from side to side. “I was preparing for the evacuation,” it’s probably not in their best interest when he adds on a tacky little, “and rousing Haymitch for the escape.”
In the end, it’s Finnick who musters up a quiet, “Johanna wasn’t supposed to kill her.”
Johanna. The anger seethes in me again, twisting and turning with the stifling heat of the hottest fires that burned away in the bakery kitchen. Johanna, who never liked Katniss, who teased her, slyly under the table in training and all but threatened to shut her up in a violent way in the arena. Johanna, our supposed ally, who apparently was trying to get her home.
“That was never the plan—that was the opposite of the plan.”
The plan. There was an entire plan, one I was not a part of, though I was fighting for the same outcome.
“We knew from the bread that extraction was coming soon. Beetee was in charge of…of breaking the arena I guess. We figured the lightning tree thing was it. The chips had to go before we could run, though or we’d just be followed right back.” That’s when I notice the bandage on his arm—and mine. There’s no oblong lump in my forearm. Even through the bandages I feel that much.
“The victors had a plan before the games even started. When we were the last bunch remaining it fell to us. Johanna would remove Katniss’ and I would remove yours. Her, Beetee, and I would each remove our own. Then the extraction would happen and…” he stumbles over the invisible rock in his mouth and swallows so hard his Adam's apple bobs. “She never should’ve died from that blow to the head,” he diverts, and for the first time, he attempts to crack a sly smile, the way he would’ve in normal circumstances, “unless that baby made her skull squishy.”
Another wave of fury ripples through me and it's only the morphling that keeps me from knocking him squarely in the jaw with my fist. He does find my glare though and the smile sucks right off his face and it takes any levity he was trying to give off right out of the air. The room is so somber and cold.
“What did you plan to happen?” I say like he hasn't said a single ignorant thing, “after you extracted us? That Snow would just let you carry us back off to our districts? Or what? Hide in the wilderness for the rest of our lives?”
“We always had a destination in mind,” Plutarch answers, and the way he says it—the determination, the relief makes my spine tingle if only a little, “and we planned on capital retaliation—hoped for it.”
Of course, they did. The rioting in the districts, Katniss and I bending ourselves backward in order to quell unrest. It was always going to lead here, one way or another, and when it happened I’d always expected Katniss to be dead, and so would I.
“You wanted her,” I have to rasp through a throat that feels so scratched and raw from tubes and tears and sour drugs that my voice descends into the scratch of the metal cleaning brushes on Mrs. Snipe’s chalkboard. “—Needed her for the revolution…to be your…what would you have called her?”
Plutarch turns his pocket watch over in his hand, then flips open the lid and the holographic image of a Mockingjay flashes in the brief seconds he has it open in just that particular way.
“She was to be our Mockingjay,” he says with enough sobriety to sink the craft right out of the sky.
Of course. Defined only by the pin on her shirt.
“She had the spirit and the fire to unite the districts in revolution.”
I feel bad for wanting to hit Finnick now because it’s all that I can do to stop myself from cracking a morbid, hollow laugh. “Only thing better than a spirited Mockingjay is a dead one.” I cave and let my lips curl up in a sneer. It feels so foreign on my face, yet so instinctual. “Right?” It's salt in a wound. Plutarch stares at me like I’m tinder about to blow out, like a feather in his hand rustling in the wind. Haymitch props himself entirely on the counter now, shoulders shaking but silent; even Finnick has put some distance between me and this hurt rising off of me like steam.
“We don’t need a martyr,” Plutarch says with deft certainty, “we have you.”
It’s a dreadful, sickening, and tortuous thought—taking any role that was meant to be hers, even an unwanted one.
“You always knew what to say,” Haymitch speaks up in a steady voice that does not match his crumbling posterior. “Even before the first games, you knew how to play a crowd, and in that quell? I’ve never seen someone mobilize a crowd of brainwashed capitalists so thoroughly with so few words. You’ve got a gift, kid, and the revolution needs it.”
I have to stare at him because it doesn’t sound like Haymitch on many levels. Too serious, too detached, like he’s reading off a card, like he must separate entirely what he is saying and who he’s saying it to and I’m angry, all of a sudden, not at Plutarch, this strange and useless man who doesn’t know me at all, does not care that she is dead so long as he has a piece in this game to play, but at Haymitch. Haymitch, who expects me to fill her shoes in something she desperately did not want, something she fought tooth and nail to keep me out of, who expects me to want to use this terrible gift of persuasion to insight violence across Panem.
“You don’t have me,” I growl and this ferocious, ugly beast in me I’ve been fighting back with a stick can be restrained no more. I look up from my lap to find Haymitch’s eyes across the room. He has so foolishly turned around. “I can’t be your Mockingjay. I’m not her, I can’t do what she could.”
“Sweetheart could do very little and a whole lot..she didn’t once know what to say or what to do but she guessed and guessed right a hell of a lot of the time. She was a product of chance and circumstance. The people chose her for something she was never prepared for, but you, boy, you have the skills, the smarts for this.”
Like she didn’t? Like she held up those berries, strung up Seneca, played out our romance for the capital, potentially conceived to break the arena by chance?
“FIND ANOTHER ONE!” The screech has finally arrived, taking the empty quality of my voice and bursting it so everything masked inside of it spills in a horrible crack. It’s now that those tears I’m convinced I no longer have burst their dam, but even they only feel hot with rage and not with grief. Am I so selfish that I’d cry only for my own sake? “Leave me alone and let me die!” It's a startling concession I’ve given them and they all fall silent, watching with distant, glassy expressions. “Let me die!” I repeat because, clearly, they have not heard me. “Let me die,” I rise against the scratchy sheets, claws ripping down my ribs as another hot sob lets out. Haymitch is at my side in a terrible blip of my awareness and what follows his presence—the tight hug of his burly arms is a minuscule prick of pain in my elbow. With the blistering spread of the morphling through my bloodstream, the fight instantly leaves me and I find myself melting in the warmest embrace I can remember. “Let me….” Haymitch deposits me amongst the sheets like one would set down a difficult infant, his tense hand pushing down firmly on my mouth. “Let me—”
Die.