Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sleep darling sleep
That soft and silent silent sleep
You lie where you lie 
Behind two hazel eyes 

It was Tam Amber who found her. 

He’d seen Snow come back from the woods, alone, midmorning. He’d not seen Lucy Gray though. No flit of color through the trees, no sparkle of melody on the air. 

Tam Amber hadn’t said a word to the rest of the Covey before he set out for the forest. 

He’d taught them all, since they’d been small and he’d been grown, how to hide in the woods. The other adults who should have taught them how each family hid were gone. Billy Taupe and Barb Azure more or less knew how Claydes and Bairds hid, but not well enough to teach the three youngest of the Covey. So it’d fallen to Tam Amber. 

There were slip holes between the pine trees that could be twisted down into nearly between breaths. It was dangerous, but dangerous things had kept the Covey safe for as long as anyone could remember. There were ways to survive and hide in other districts but here in Twelve a pine slip was the best option most of the time. 

He found her half-crawled out of one of the warrens. She’d been shot. 

Chapter Text

The news that spread today 
One man had slipped away
When the morning brought the light
One cell was still and quiet

She was pale, bloody from landing badly in the slip, bloody from brambles that’d torn at her arms and face, bloody from a gunshot wound that had wrecked her shoulder. 

“Oh Lucy Gray, sweet child,” he’d said, bending and helping to gently pull her the rest of the way out of the slip. She was delirious from spending half a day cooking in her little hiding spot as she bled and bled and bled. He hefted her up into his arms, ignoring the blood that seeped out of her shoulder down along his arm. 

“Will you take my song? Make—make sure he hears it, don’t…don’t let him get away from it. I love him still, unlucky me.” 

Tam Amber could only nod as he sat down at the lakeside. Sky and land and water and Covey close by—there were worse deaths, for people like them. They’d watched the Hunger Games that she’d survived and they had seen there was poison and hunting and screaming. 

This was peaceful. Quiet. 

She sang that hanging song she’d been working on. Her voice grew weaker and weaker as she repeated it, her gaze falling from his to stare at the clouds in the sky as she did. Her eyes welled up with tears, falling like crystal down the sides of her face. 

They sang it together once, twice, and then on the third round only his voice swooped on the last lines. Lucy Gray was still, her troubles over. Tam Amber bit his lips and with a trembling hand gently shut her eyes, pulling her close to lay a soft kiss to her forehead before hefting himself up to stand. His overalls were drenched in her blood and it seeped into his socks as he soldiered on back to the Seam with Lucy Gray’s body.

There the rest of the Covey cried, Maude Ivory especially inconsolable, before they arranged their Lucy Gray for her grave. Barb Azure washed her body, Maude Ivory buffed her nails to a bright shine and CC combed her hair. They dressed her in a simple white nightgown, laid a crushed rosehip on her tongue, tucked a posey of daisies and bachelor buttons between her hands, and finally laid a kerchief over her face. Tam Amber got a few of the more friendly Peacekeepers to help them dig a grave—they’d always been good to the Covey, even before Lucy Gray’s capitol boy had come, and were sorry to see the girl dead. 

They told them that Lucy Gray had bled out on account of a family hope—a miscarriage or an abortion or a gunshot, it didn’t much matter to the men, and it kept them from pressing too closely with their questions. 

“Ought we say something?” one of the men said watching a silent CC and Maude Ivory toss handfuls of pine needles into the grave to cover up Lucy Gray before they filled in the grave. Tam Amber hesitated to answer but then gave them the benefit of the doubt. Life was going to get a whole lot harder soon, why not do what was fit and proper? 

“Covey don’t say anything, but we sing a song. The last song the dead one wrote, happy or sad.” 

The last song anyone had heard Lucy Gray perform had been that sweet love-song she’d written for her Capitol boy—the idea of that song made the two Peacekeepers angry for some reason, not wanting to hear a love song written by a dead girl for a boy who’d run out on her. Tam Amber wasn’t sure they’d end up thanking him for the alternative, but he sang Lucy Gray’s actual last song anyway, three times through as she’d said it ought to be. By the end the tune had embedded itself in the song of the mockingjays all around them and it would be a very, very long time before it would fade. 

The two Peacekeepers truly hadn’t been happy with the song but they were of sterner stuff than Lucy Gray’s Capitol boy and had sung it all the way through once they’d picked up the words. It had a hypnotic tune, one meant to burrow into hearts and souls. 

For the rest of his life, Tam Amber sang the song about once a month out in the woods where he’d found Lucy Gray. It kept the mockingjays happy and it helped him remember what he had to fight for as he quietly cultivated the tiny resistance in Twelve. By the time he was in his sixties, Lucy Gray was a ghost story to everyone in Twelve. 

But the thing about Covey was that as long as their last song was sung they were never really dead. You could find their ghosts in the trees, you could see their footsteps on the ground, might even see a flick of their hair, but you would never catch them again the same way you could never catch a crow twice. 

Tam Amber knew, gently hammering out a mockingjay pin with fingers that ached, that he wouldn’t live to see Snow and his ilk fall but he did know that Lucy Gray’s song would outlive them both. 

Chapter Text

Before fabric was torn
The knob on the door 
Was stained red with fingers one night
Buried inside, slips through your dreams 
Only to linger

Lucy Gray’s wound was not as bad as he’d thought it was, though she still needed a doctor sooner than later. She was just conscious enough to help put pressure on the wound as Tam Amber tried to make double time through the woods back to town. Her face was dirty save for the tracks her tears carved through the grime. 

“He’ll kill me,” she whispered as Tam Amber passed the house in the Seam and forged on towards the better parts of town. 

“He won’t, he’s the sort to regret it, he might even mean it,” Tam Amber tried to comfort her, tried to be the adult that her mother had charged him to be right before the Peacekeepers had stoved Mrs. Baird’s head in, “and what would he kill you for here that he can explain away?”

“He’s smart. He’ll figure a way,” Lucy Gray said, hissing in pain as Tam Amber almost tripped on a loose stone, jarring her whole body, “you can’t trust a man what lies. Even when you love him, unlucky me.” 

Tam Amber didn’t have a chance to respond before one of the Peacekeepers, the one they called Smiley, saw them in the road and did a double-take at the blood. He elbowed his fellow and they intercepted them before Tam Amber could make it across the square to the apothecary. 

“Hey that’s Gent’s girl—what happened, little lady?” 

“Somebody took a shot at her out in the woods, we were out checking the katniss,” Tam Amber said, trying to sound afraid of the past and not the present, “didn’t see who.” 

“Probably that creep the mayor,” the other Peacekeeper said softly, getting a nod in return from the first one, “been keeping us up night and day with rants about you Covey folks. Commander Hoff is about done with him, though, if he’s not careful. Come on, we’ll get you fixed up at the base, can’t mess around with body wounds like that.” 

Lucy Gray went white under the grime but didn’t say anything—the apothecary could be expensive and wasn’t really any more of a doctor than Tam Amber or Barb Azure were, though his antiseptics were better. Everyone knew that the doctor on the base was free if a Peacekeeper brought you in, and they hadn’t even had to ask. Besides it wasn’t like they were going to run into her man, it had been hours and even if he’d been banged up the medics would have seen to him by now. 

Except it had been hot all day and a whole squad of Peacekeepers had needed treatment for heat exhaustion. 

It had been hot all day and because of the squad with heat exhaustion, Snow had only just finished being bandaged up for a wound on his arm when Tam Amber carried Lucy Gray through the doors of the medic’s ward. He shot to his feet, his face contorted half in rage and half in hope as he saw Lucy Gray—as he saw that Lucy Gray was alive.

“Gent, somebody shot your girl up,” the one named Smiley said, a certain anger in his tone now that he wasn’t out in front of the people in the square, “out in the woods.” 

“Lucy Gray?” Snow’s voice shook, his lashes lined with tears as he reached and took her from Tam Amber’s arms—Tam Amber who didn’t dare resist or show how he distrusted the other man. Not when there were so many locking doors and gates between him and freedom. 

“Coriolanus,” she whispered, shrinking from his gaze, the blood loss leaving her too weak to try and push him away. It made her look meek and deferential to everyone but Tam Amber who saw her fear and anxiety.

“Doctor—!” Snow shouted, and in that moment, Tam Amber heard the authoritative tone that always made the most frightening Peacekeepers. The ones who were actually effective. The ones who were always the worst.  

“I heard, I heard. Gunshot wound, girlie? Damned rebels’ll even shoot the District kids, these days.” 

The medics and nurses swarmed Snow and Lucy Gray and within moments they’d taken her away to the rudimentary operating room they had here on the base. It was far and away the best medical care in Twelve but Tam Amber still clenched his hands in worry at seeing the doors swing shut behind the gurney they’d put Lucy Gray on. 

Coriolanus Snow stood alone with his arm bandaged, his sleeve rolled all the way up past his elbow, and his uniform smeared with blood. 

“I—I—I—” he stuttered out, his eyes wild, his hands clutching at nothing. 

“Let’s get you cleaned up Gent, you and your girl’s…brother here. Don’t want Hoff to catch you looking a mess like this. You know he hates blood.” 

It was by far the worst bathing experience that Tam Amber could remember in all his twenty six years of life and that included when the Peacekeepers had used water from a fire hydrant to hose all of the Covey off after dragging them back to the town here in Twelve. Snow’s friends produced some towels, some underwear, and a blue cotton jumpsuit for Tam Amber to wear while they rushed to get both his clothes and Snow’s uniform washed before Lucy Gray’s blood could stain everything. The showers were communal and the soap stank of a slight cologne that was no doubt meant to help mask the smell of sweat and musk on hard-driven Peacekeepers day in and day out. There was also the naked young man next to him who had shot Lucy Gray. 

He’d shot her. The fairies knew where he’d gotten a gun from but he’d shot her and come back here like it was nothing. 

They didn’t speak for the whole ten minutes it took to wash up, nor the five minutes it took them to get dressed, nor the ten minute walk back to the medic ward. Snow’s friends drifted away, no longer interested after offering a few platitudes that things would work out and that Lucy Gray was in good hands. 

They made it an hour before Snow stood up and started pacing. 

Tam Amber watched him, wary, alert for the faintest change in the man’s mood. Mostly he focused on Snow’s eyes, eyes that he was sure could be filled with just as much hate as they could with love. Right now he saw that they were filled with worry for Lucy Gray and not for himself. 

“You have to get her out of here,” Tam Amber finally said after wrestling with the increasingly urgent question of what next?, though his words were startling to the blonde man, “she isn’t safe. People shooting up the woods, who knows if they’re still out there or not. But whoever shot her didn’t mean to kill her quick.” 

“I don’t know what you think I can do about it,” Snow said bitterly, rubbing at the bandage on his arm, “I’m off to Two in the morning.” 

“Take her with you. Or send her back to the Capitol, set her up with your people. She isn’t safe here and you know that.”

“You don’t get it, I lied to her and that’s the end,” Snow said softly, as close to a confession of his actual crime as he was likely to offer.

Tam Amber barely avoided rolling his eyes, keeping his grimace inside. Snow was hardly eighteen and while Tam Amber only had eight years on the guy it was so painfully obvious how much more maturing Snow had to do. Everything was black and white with people his age, Lucy Gray’s age too. 

“It’s the end of the frail part, sure, but a starlight love like you’ve got isn’t like a flower love. Flowers wilt, they rot or they dry out, they crumble to dust eventually. The stars are forever, they can wheel and change with the seasons but they never go away.” 

That brought Snow up short, his eyes flicking to the doors of the operating room. He came to some decision with lightning quickness. His thoughts could have kept time in a rattle band, that was for sure.

“…don’t let her leave, when she’s out of surgery, I have to talk to Commander Hoff first. Please?”

Tam Amber sucked in a breath, blowing it out all at once and then nodding his agreement. Lucy Gray wouldn’t like it, but it was for the best at the moment. She was dead if she ran to the woods, she was dead if she stayed here—going with Snow at least afforded a chance, however small, of living.