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“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
—Emily Dickinson, “Hope” is the thing with feathers
𐄁𐄁𐄁
She wakes up in the hospital with the same frown she wore in the arena plastered on her face.
Everything is white. The sheets that secure her against a bed, the fluorescent lights, the wallpaper and floors. Dove finds that she detests it.
The “hospital” in Seven wasn’t even a fifth as nice as this place is, and the people inside were actually dying. The reason Dove’s here, on the other hand, is because she won’t be dying anytime soon.
Her mind replays the last thing she remembers before her vision went dark.
She was hunched over the corpse of the boy from Four, her stolen knife still embedded in her flesh. Caesar Flickermann called out from the sky, “It is my honor to present the victor of Forty-Fifth Annual Hunger Games — Dove Briar from District Seven!” and then a helicopter descended.
Before it could reach the ground, Dove grabbed the knife and ran away. She knew that whoever was inside it was from the Capitol, and that meant they were an enemy. She wasn’t going to let them get to her.
She didn’t get very far before she felt something pinch her skin, and then her body falling to the floor.
Right. Dove should probably get out of here. She should run far away until she reaches the train station, and then hop onto the first train she can take back to her broken home in Seven. She can pretend the last two weeks never happened, that she was never reaped and that she never had to kill people to please the people who killed her father.
She doesn’t know what her mother will do or say now that she’s slaughtered other children, or what her brothers will say knowing Connifer might’ve been at the same school as them, but at the same time, she doesn’t care. Anywhere is better than the fucking Capitol.
Dove tries to move her arms so she can pull off her blanket, but she finds that they’ve been cuffed and chained to the bed. The same thing happens when she wiggles her legs. Frustrated, she screams out a loud, wordless noise.
That brings about footsteps in her direction that she soon finds out belong to a flummoxed male nurse who swings open the door to her room. “You’re awake,” he says in a tone that makes him sound like he’s asking a question.
Sharply, Dove breathes in through her nose. As much as she wishes otherwise, yelling at this man isn’t going to do her any good. It’s not going to bring her closer to Seven.
“I’m awake,” is all that Dove decides to reply with.
That’s when the nurse has the audacity to say, “you got very lucky,” and Dove suddenly wants to rip his skin clean off his bones.
“You’re fucking kidding, right?” She rasps.
In what fucking way is she lucky? If she was less angry, she’d be laughing. Her father’s dead and he doesn’t have to be. Her family struggled and starved for two whole years. Dove was basically abducted from the only place she knew, and the only reason she’s even alive is because she killed three people who will never live to see adulthood.
The nurse blinks at her. He looks young enough that maybe he hasn’t had this job for very long. Maybe this will get him fired— that’d be fun.
He shakes when he replies. “I only meant—”
“No, I know what you meant.” Dove jerks hard against the cuff around her right wrist, pain ripping through her side. “I know exactly what you meant. You meant that I’m alive with all my limbs.”
Another yank. This time, the chain loudly clinks against the bedframe.”
“You meant that I should be grateful.” Her voice scrapes against the back of her throat. “You meant that I should smile and say thank you so much for dragging me out of an arena, as if I didn’t have to kill people.”
“That isn’t—”
“Lucky would’ve been my father not dying because you people price medicine like it was made of fucking gold.”
The nurse goes still. Dove hates how good that feels.
“Lucky would've been not having my name picked at all. It would’ve been not waking up in chains like some kind of animal.”
His eyes flick down to the restraints, then back to her face. “Those are only there because you tried to run when we took you from the arena. You were being very combative.”
A laugh rips out of Dove before she can stop it. “Combative?”
“You could have attacked a member of the recovery team.”
“I should’ve.”
The nurse takes an involuntary step back. There. That’s better.
Dove shifts again, slower this time and trying to ignore the way her entire body feels wrongly stitched together all of the sudden. The room is still offensively white around her, every surface clean and polished and bright in a way nothing in Seven has ever been. Whatever medicine they used on her to fix a week without much food probably could’ve saved her father ten times over.
Yet she’s supposed to feel lucky.
“Take the cuffs off,” she says.
“I can’t do that.”
“Can’t,” Dove repeats. “Or won’t?”
The nurse swallows. “Doctor’s orders.”
“Get your fucking doctor in here then.”
He hesitates just a second too long, and Dove knows what he sees when he looks at her. He sees the girl on the screen, caked in snow and the blood of her allies, ripping a knife out of a dead girl’s body. He sees her as a savage.
Her lip curls. “You scared?”
Before he can answer, Dove slams her head back against the pillow and wrenches at both wrists at once. Pain detonates through her. Something in her side burns so badly, her vision whites out at the edges, but it’s worth it for the way the nurse startles and stumbles for the door.
“Hey!” he calls, already halfway into the hall. “I need help in here—”
“Yeah,” Dove snarls after him. “Go cry about it.”
The footsteps come fast after that. More than one person with soft-soled shoes and hurried breathing. Dove turns her head just enough to see two more nurses and a woman in a long white coat sweep into the room.
The doctor is trying to arrange her face into a calm, professional, expression. Dove wants to watch her snap.
“Dove,” the woman says, like they know each other. “You need to stop moving. You’re still recovering from your treatment.”
“I don’t remember asking.”
“You’re dangerously deficient in many key nutrients.”
Dove bares her teeth. “And whose fault is that?”
Nobody answers.
The doctor steps closer to the bed, though not close enough to touch her. “You were restrained because you posed a risk not just to other people, but to yourself.”
“Myself,” Dove hums. “It’s funny how you’re pretending it’s about me.”
One of the nurses reaches toward her arm, eyes on her IV line. Dove jerks away so violently, she feels it in her ribs.
“Don’t,” she shouts.
The nurse freezes.
“Do not fucking touch mme.”
The doctor’s professional smile gets thinner. “No one here is trying to hurt you.”
Dove stares at her for a second, then chuckles to herself. “That has to be the stupidest thing anyone’s said to me since the Reaping.”
Still insistent, the doctor says, “You are safe here.”
Dove turns her face toward the ceiling and laughs again, quieter this time. “Safe,” she mumbles. “Right.”
Safe, in the Capitol. Safe, in a room she can’t leave. Safe, with metal around her wrists and ankles. Safe, after twenty-three other kids died.
Safe, after her father died gasping because medicine cost more than his life was apparently worth.
“I want to go home.”
The doctor doesn’t answer her right away, which is answer enough.
Dove turns her head back toward her. “I said, I want to go home.”
“We need to make sure you’re stable first.”
“No you don’t,” Dove says. “You need to unchain me and let me leave.”
“We can discuss discharge once—”
“Discharge?” Dove cuts in, incredulous. “You talk like I checked myself in. Like I had a choice.”
Her chest starts rising too fast. She can feel it happening and hates it, hates that her body’s doing this in front of them, hates that they’re all standing around staring like she’s a problem to be managed. Her skin feels too tight. The room feels too small despite how big it is. White wall, white light, white sheets. Capitol white everywhere, scrubbing every drop of blood away so they can pretend what happened wasn’t terrible.
Dove’s eyes land on the cuff around her left wrist.
For one sharp second, she thinks about biting through the vein there just to ruin the sheets.
The doctor notices the direction of her stare. “If you continue like this, we’ll have no choice but to sedate you again.”
Like what they did after she won. Not saved. Not rescued. Shot full of whatever made her legs give out so they could drag her off like a carcass.
Hatred rises inside her so sudden and pure it steadies her.
“Try it,” she says.
The nurse from before shifts uneasily. One of the others glances toward the door, like they’re hoping someone else will deal with her. Dove hopes they keep hoping.
Then, from the hall, a semi-familiar voice says, “Everybody out.”
Luther, her mentor, steps into the room looking older than he did before the Games, which is saying something. There are deep shadows under his eyes and a fresh crease between his brows. Dove wonders if he’s always looked this tired and she just never cared enough to notice.
The doctor straightens. “She’s agitated.”
“No kidding,” Luther says. “Out.”
Something in his tone must work, because after a brief pause, they listen. The nurses file out first. The doctor lingers half a second longer, then follows, though not before giving Dove one last stern, disapproving look.
As soon as the door closes behind them, the room goes quiet.
Not silent. There’s still the hum of lights overhead, the soft machine-noise coming from somewhere near the bed, Luther’s breathing. But quiet enough that Dove can hear her own pulse in her ears.
Luther drags a chair closer and sits down in it with a sigh. “You done?”
“No.”
“Great.”
Dove glares at him. “Take these off.”
He doesn’t even look at the restraints. “They’ll just put them back on.”
“I said take them off.”
“And I said no.”
“I won,” Dove says, as if maybe he’s forgotten.
He lifts one shoulder. “I was there.”
“So I get to go home.”
“Eventually.”
The word hits her like another knife. Dove’s jaw locks. “No.”
“Yes.”
“No.” Her voice gets louder with each word. “No, I’m not staying here another second. I’m done. I did what they wanted. I killed who had to be dead and now I’m done.”
Luther’s face tightens, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“I’m going home,” Dove says again, and now it comes out uglier, needier than she intended. “My family’s in Seven.”
“I know.”
“So send me back.”
Luther scrubs a hand down his face. “It’s not up to me.”
“Then who is it up to?”
He looks at her for a moment too long.
And Dove knows, before he even says it.
Of course it’s not over. Of course winning doesn’t buy freedom that easily. Of course the Capitol would squeeze every last drop out of her before sending her back to bury whatever parts of herself are left.
“You’ve still got the victor’s interview,” Luther says.
For a second she honestly thinks she might throw up. “No.”
“With Caesar.”
“No.”
“They’re not giving you a choice.”
Dove’s stomach twists so hard it feels like someone reached inside her and wrung out all her organs by hand. “The Games are over.”
Luther laughs once, but there’s nothing amused in it. “For them? Not even close.”
She thinks of lights. Crowds. Caesar Flickerman’s smile stretching waxy and bright beneath stage lights while he asks questions he doesn’t want answers to. She thinks of the interview before the arena, of the way the audience’s faces had fallen when she yelled at them, and some vicious part of her is glad they had.
This will be different. It’ll be worse, because now there’s a victor for them to dress up and parade around and make speak pretty about all the things they ruined.
Dove pulls once more against the cuffs. “I’m not doing it.”
Luther’s expression barely shifts. “You are.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’d hope not,” he scoffs. “You’re still doing it.”
She stares at him with such concentrated hatred that she almost misses the softness tucked way back in his voice when he adds, “Best thing you can do right now is relax and enough to sit upright and get through it.”
Get through it.
Like it’s weather. Like it’s a bumpy train ride. Like it’s anything except one more humiliation laid carefully at her feet.
Dove’s breathing turns shallow again. She can’t seem to stop it.
“They’re going to make me watch everything,” she says, and she doesn’t know how she knows, only that she does. The Capitol never wastes a chance to traumatize people. “Aren’t they?”
“Of course they will.”
Dove turns her head away from him and stares at the blank wall until it blurs. Her whole body hurts. Her mouth tastes metallic. She’s alive, she won, she’s going home eventually, and somehow none of it means a goddamn thing because first they get to clean her up and sit her under hot lights and show her every terrible thing she did to survive.
𐄁𐄁𐄁
Dove sits in a chair with her spine ramrod straight and her hands dug so hard into the armrests her knuckles ache.
“You need to unclench your jaw,” someone murmurs near her.
Dove doesn’t look at them, eyes fixated on the curtain ahead of her. “You need to mind your business.”
A beat of silence and then slow, deliberate, footsteps.
“Ah,” Caesar Flickerman says, voice smooth like velvet. “There she is.”
Dove flicks her eyes to see he looks exactly the same as he did before the games. Bleached white teeth, ridiculous pink hair, and a sharp sequined suit. Not a single thing about him and the way he grins suggests that twenty-three children died over the past two weeks.
Caesar smiles wider, though something uncertain flickers in his eyes when Dove doesn’t smile back. “How are we feeling?”
“Like I could kill you,” Dove deadpans.
Caesar laughs, probably because he either thinks Dove is joking (she isn’t), or because he doesn’t know what else to do.
“Oh, Dove.” He wipes the sweat beneath his left eyebrow. “You’re still so fiery. Seven does breed ‘em tough, doesn’t it?”
Dove just stares.
“Well,” Caesar strains. “The audience loves authenticity.”
“They won’t love mine.”
Somewhere offstage, someone hisses Caesar’s name in warning. Probably a producer who’s worried Dove will say something wrong the second she’s in front of a crowd.
Good. She’s right to worry.
“Listen to me.” Caesar crouches a bit so that he’s closer to eye level with her. “We all know you’ve been through an extreme life event and that emotions are high. It’s completely understandable, but remember, tonight is your night. The nation wants to celebrate you!”
Dove’s lip curls. “The nation can go fuck itself.”
Before Caesar can make another poor attempt at rationalizing with her, a stagehand appears and counts down with their fingers. He rises smoothly, his grin already reassembled as if he and Dove’s conversation never happened.
The applause hits like a blunt force against her chest when he steps out through the curtain.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Caesar booms, “please welcome our newest victor. All the way from District Seven, it’s Dove Briar.”
The curtain parts, revealing an enormous crowd. Dove steps forward because there’s nothing else to do, and because if she refuses, someone will drag her by the arm and she doesn’t want to give anybody that satisfaction.
The audience erupts into cheers, whistles, and wild clapping when they see her. It’s like she’s a performer and not somebody who woke up yesterday with metaphorical blood dried beneath her nails.
Dove doesn’t wave or smile. She just crosses to the chair opposite Caesar’s and sits down stiffly. He settles into his own seat with ease. “Dove,” Caesar croons, voice warm with admiration. “What a journey it’s been.”
She doesn’t say anything.
Caesar pushes on. “From the moment you were reaped, there was something unforgettable about you.” Dove rolls her eyes, easily catching his lie. When the escort called her name, she purposefully drew as little attention to herself as humanly possible. “We all knew that you would be a tribute of immense determination and tenacity. Tell me, what was going through your head in those first few days in the arena?”
“This sucks. I want to go home.”
The audience starts to laugh.
“Of course.” Caesar wryly smiles. “But beyond that, did you have a strategy?”
“Yeah.”
“And what was it?”
Ally with the people weaker than her. Those least likely to be physically capable of tearing her down, and then betray them without even caring.
Dove doesn’t say that. “Don’t die,” is what she says instead.
A few people clap politely, but Caesar isn’t one of them. Dove wants to get out of her seat and see if Capitolites really do bleed gold instead of red.
“Well, you certainly succeeded there,” he replies, his posture tightening. “You know, Dove, many victors like to talk about what kept them going in their darkest moments in the arena during these interviews, so I have to ask you too. Was there a person you were fighting for?”
Dove feels the question settle inside her like a nail settling in her father’s coffin. The audience leans in, every face upturned with hunger.
She lets the silence drag a bit before saying, “my father. The one you killed.”
Caesar nods slowly, ignoring the last half of what she said. “Ah yes, you mentioned this in your interview before the games.”
“I know I did.”
“And he was on your mind out there?”
Dove turns her head to the massive screen mounted behind them just as it flickers to life with a clip of her watching the clock tick down before the bloodbath.
“Let’s revisit some of Dove’s most remarkable moments,” Caesar drawls.
Dove says, “no,” under her breath.
“From the beginning all the way to that unforgettable finale where—”
“I said no!” This time the microphone catches it.
A murmur moves through the audience while Caesar turns to her, his smile suddenly eerie and twisted. “It’ll just be a brief look back for our viewers at home who—”
“I was there,” Dove shouts. “I don’t need a recap.”
Caesar nervously laughs before gesturing to cut Dove’s microphone while the video continues to play.
Dove watches herself dart through the bloodbath. She watches herself shiver alongside Connifer, Roewan, and Azaelea. She watches herself do nothing as the wolf tears through Roewan’s flesh, the audience cheering.
Caesar, still facing the crowd, says, “There was such ferocity in you from the start. Choosing to let Roewan die like that because you knew he was a liability in the grand scheme of things.”
“She was fourteen,” Dove says. Even though there’s no microphone to pick up her voice, the audience is so quiet they hear her and react accordingly. “Roewan was fourteen and you let your thing kill her.”
“You let her die,” Caesar tells her quietly. Then, louder, “the Games do tend to ask a terrible price from everyone involved.”
“Oh, fuck you!”
Caesar blinks as a collective inhale sweeps the room.
Dove takes it as a sign that she should keep going. “Everybody whose death you’ve broadcast was a child. You plucked them from their homes, away from their families, and then you killed them in a way where everybody could see.” Each word comes out meaner than the last. “You talk to me like I’m some kind of unforgettable figurehead when really, I’m just a kid too. The only difference is that I managed to survive. That doesn’t make me special. I betrayed my allies — so what if that’s smart? You all would have been just as happy as you’re pretending to be now if somebody else won.”
“Dove,” Caesar warns, his voice low. “You’re just kidding, right?”
“No, I’m serious,” she shouts, twisting herself so she can address the audience. “You all had other favorites, right? How much money did you spend when you placed your bets on them? Did you clap extra loud when they killed someone? Did you pretend to cry when they died?”
“Dove,” Caesar repeats, his entire body twitching. “I think, perhaps, what our victor is trying to express is how overwhelming survival can be.”
“What I’m trying to express,” Dove says, “is that you’re all full of shit.”
Caesar glances briefly offstage, waiting for instruction that nobody gives. He folds his hands neatly in his lap. “You’ve endured a great deal.”
Dove laughs under her breath. “That’s one way to put it.”
“And yet you’re here” Caesar pauses, careful with his words. “You won. There must be some part of you that feels pride in what you accomplished.”
Dove stares at him so long her eyes start to burn. “I feel like my father’s still dead.”
She can feel the whole room sink.
Caesar opens his mouth to speak, but then immediately closes it. For one brief, glorious second, Dove’s actually managed to leave him without a line.
“We know,” is the best he can come up with once he recovers. “And we know how much that loss shaped you.”
“No,” Dove scoffs. “You don’t.”
“Help us understand, then.”
Dove thinks she might bite through her own tongue.
Help them understand. As if they’re confused. As if this is some unfortunate, random misunderstanding and not the entire architecture of Panem working exactly as intended.
She looks out at the audience. At the people who got to watch her starve until she split herself open and killed.
Then, she tells them, “What kept me going out there was that I already knew what it felt like to lose someone and have nobody care enough to stop it.”
Again, Caesar’s stunned.
He takes a second to clear his throat, then says, “Your father’s passing was a tragedy.”
“Was it really?” Dove’s mouth twists. “Or was it just a matter of your people not caring whether or not mine live or die, and pricing medicine accordingly?”
Caesar’s eyes flash, not with hurt or remorse, but with irritation and recognition that she’s making a mess he will have to mop up live in front of the country.
He leans in slightly, still trying to smile. “I think what Dove means to say—”
“I mean exactly what I said.”
Somewhere in the wings, someone makes the cut sign across their throat. Caesar sees it and pivots with breathtaking speed. “And what honesty from our victor,” he says brightly, turning back toward the audience like he hasn’t just been verbally gutted on national television. “A young woman of incredible passion.”
Passion. Dove almost laughs.
The screen behind them flashes back on, but instead of more arena footage, it shows her victor portrait from a few hours ago, cleaned up and composed. The audience, grateful for easier material, starts clapping again.
Caesar rises and extends a hand to her. “Panem, one more time for Dove Briar, your victor!”
Dove stares at his hand. He keeps smiling. The audience keeps clapping. Finally, Dove stands under her own power and leaves him there with his arm half-outstretched like an idiot.
The applause follows her all the way offstage. Back behind the curtain, the sound dims to a muffled roar.
No one speaks to her right away. For once, the loudest place in Panem doesn’t seem to know what to say.
Dove keeps walking until somebody catches her lightly by the elbow. “Easy,” Luther mutters.
“I’m fine.”
“You look like you’re about to pass out.”
“Then maybe they should’ve let me go home.”
Luther doesn’t answer.
Dove shrugs him off and makes it another three steps before her vision flickers black at the edges. Her knees threaten to fold. Luther catches her before she can hit the floor, one hand braced under her arm.
Behind them, Caesar’s voice is still booming for the cameras, already smoothing her into something watchable. Something salvageable.
Dove digs her nails into her palms until they hurt.
Let him try.
𐄁𐄁𐄁
Dove hardly makes it down the hallway before two Peacekeepers step neatly into her path, their white uniforms as blinding as the hospital.
The one on the right doesn't even look at her when he says, “This way, Miss Briar.”
She laughs a ragged laugh. “Absolutely not.”
“You weren’t asked,” says the one on the left.
Dove considers lunging past them anyway, just to force them to put their hands on her. Then she’ll scream and make so much of a scene that the people in the audience hear.
But, she knows how good the Capitol is at swallowing noise, and she’s so very tired, so she just goes.
They lead her away from the main hallway and down a narrower corridor until they stop in front of a black door with no markings on it. Suddenly, Dove’s skin feels very tight on her bones.
One Peacekeeper opens the door. “Go inside.”
The room beyond is small and ordinary. A sofa upholstered with some cream-colored fabric, a low table with a glass pitcher of water and two crystalline glasses, and a lamp in one corner casting soft yellow light.
President Coriolanus Snow stands by the window with his hands clasped behind his back.
For one, ridiculous second, Dove thinks he looks frail and small.
Then, he turns around.
She realizes he’s not frail, just kind of old in the same way a blade can be — still sharp and polished. Kept in excellent condition because other people do the work of making sure it never dulls.
His eyes settle on her like a hunter’s would on a deer.
“Miss Briar,” he says, the door shutting behind them with a soft click. “What an eventful evening.”
Dove doesn’t move farther into the room. “If you’re here to congratulate me, save it.”
He smiles a terrifying, wolfish smile. “No, I don’t think congratulations are what you’re owed at the moment.”
“Then what?”
“Sit.” Snow gestures to the sofa.
She doesn’t, so he waits, just staring at her. After two whole minutes, Dove finally crosses her room and lowers herself onto the edge of the sofa, more so because her body is beginning to shake with exhaustion than because he told her to.
“That interview,” Snow begins to say, still standing, “was a disappointment.”
Dove says nothing.
“I do not expect all victors to be cheerful,” he continues. “In fact, a certain amount of residual emotions from the arena can be seen as useful. The audience enjoys sincerity, provided it is pointed in the correct direction. Grief, relief, reverence, and even anger, when tastefully contained.” A beat. “What I do not enjoy is ingratitude dressed up as courage.”
Dove’s mouth twists. “Then you must have hated me from the start.”
“Not at all.” Snow folds one hand over the other. “I found you quite compelling. A grieving daughter and a hard worker from a hard district. A girl with enough resentment in her to fight almost like an animal, but not enough polish to disguise it. It was all very usable.”
Dove stares at him. “Go to hell.”
Snow chuckles softly, as if he sees Dove as merely a child. “You were meant to emerge from that stage bloodied but grateful. Bereaved but inspired. The sort of victor who reminds the districts that pain can be redeemed through obedience.”
He glances at her dress and makeup. “Instead, you chose to harass your betters on live television.”
“My betters,” Dove repeats, flat with disgust.
“Yes.” Snow tilts his head. “Surely you noticed the audience and how uncomfortable they became. You ruined their appetite, which I will admit takes a certain talent.”
She thinks of the way Caesar’s face became strange and tight, and how silent the audience grew. The memory thrills her.
Snow seems to read something of that on her face, because his smile sharpens. “I would advise you,” he says, coldly, “not to mistake a momentary disturbance for power.”
The room goes colder, Dove’s fingers digging into her knees. “I’m not mistaking anything.”
“No?” Snow steps closer. “Then allow me to clarify.”
She leans forward.
“You are alive because we permit it. Your family is fed because we permit it. The house waiting for you in Victor’s Village, the medicine in its cabinets, the coal in its cellar, the fresh bread that will appear on your table tomorrow morning — all of it exists because I allow it to.”
Dove’s whole body goes rigid, which Snow, of course, notices.
His gaze doesn’t leave her face. “You seem very attached to the memory of your father’s suffering. I can understand that. Such losses are formative.” He pauses. “It would be unfortunate if your mother and brothers became formative too.”
For half a second, Dove forgets how to breathe. Then she stands quickly, staring at him with murder in her eyes.
“You touch them,” she says, words scraping raw against the back of her throat, “and I’ll kill you.”
Snow doesn’t even react. Instead, he simply studies her with bland interest, like she just proved something. “There,” he tells her. “That is the problem.”
Dove’s hands curl into fists.
“You still think violence is a language you alone can speak,” Snow says. “That because you survived the arena, because you have looked children in the eye and ended their lives before they could end yours, you understand brutality.” He smiles again, very faintly. “You don’t.”
He turns away from her and pours water into one of the glasses, taking an exaggerated sip.
“When I threaten someone, Miss Briar, I do not do it with raised voices or dramatic gestures. I simply consider what they love, and then I prepare to take it away.”
Dove can feel her heart beating so loud, her chest swells with pain.
Snow continues, his tone casual as if he was simply discussing the weather. “Your mother. Your brothers. Their neighbors. The children they walk to school with. The men who work beside them. Districts are so interconnected, after all. Accidents travel. Inspections turn up irregularities. Supplies are delayed. Names appear on lists.” He turns back to her. “One defiant girl can create a remarkable amount of inconvenience for everyone around her.”
Dove cannot tell whether she is more angry or afraid. Worse, she’s disgusted by the notion that she may genuinely be afraid of this pig.
“There,” he says again, noticing the look in her eyes. “Now you understand.”
“No.” Dove’s voice shakes. “All I understand is that you’re a coward.”
At last, something flashes in his face. It’s not rage, exactly. Rather, it’s something smaller and meaner. Just a pinprick of irritation.
“Perhaps.” When he answers her though, his tone still smooth. “But cowards tend to live longer than brave little girls.”
Dove takes a step toward him before she can stop herself.
The door opens instantly.
The two Peacekeepers are inside in less than a second, rifles angled not quite at her but close enough for her to go still.
Snow doesn’t even look at them. “It’s all right,” he says. “Miss Briar is emotional. She has had an overwhelming evening.”
Dove stands there breathing hard, trapped between the rifles and the old man in front of her, and understands with nauseating clarity that this is what real power looks like in Panem.
It’s not the arena or knives or the roar of the crowd when somebody dies.
It's a room with no windows worth breaking. Guards who move before he has to ask. A voice stern enough that you have no choice but to listen. A threat that never becomes specific enough to repeat without sounding hysterical.
Snow stares at her for a moment longer, then gives the faintest nod to the Peacekeepers. They step back but do not leave.
“I imagine,” he says, “that tonight you’re feeling very righteous. Injured. Grieving. Honest.” He says the last word like it’s filthy. “You think you said something brave out there.”
“I said something true.”
“Yes,” Snow says. “Truth is a particularly dangerous thing in a country like ours. Fortunately, most people learn to live without it.”
The best she can do is nod.
“I am going to offer you a future now,” he tells her. “It is not the future you deserve, perhaps, but it is the only one available.”
Dove says nothing.
“You will go home to District Seven. You will be seen weeping where appropriate and grateful where required. You will speak well of the Games, if not with enthusiasm then with solemn respect. You will not repeat your performance tonight. You will not encourage unrest, insolence, or the fantasy that grief excuses rebellion.” His gaze hardens. “Next summer, when it is time for you to mentor, you will do that too.”
Something inside Dove recoils at the thought of walking two others down this same miserable road, year after year. No wonder Luther’s so grumpy.
Snow goes on. “If you behave, your family will live comfortable, unremarkable lives. Your brothers will eat. Your mother will grow old. You will have the privilege of being unhappy in safety.”
Dove watches him take a napkin off the table and dabs his mouth. She swears she sees blood on his lips, but she could just be imagining.
“If you do not, then I promise you this: your father will not remain the worst thing that has happened to your family.”
The words hit like an axe to the throat. Dove doesn’t realize she’s crying until she tastes salt.
She is so shocked by it she almost wipes her face, but that would mean giving him the satisfaction of seeing her react. So she stands perfectly still and lets the tears cool on her skin, hating herself for every second of it.
“I’m glad we understand one another,” he says, expression not changing.
“We don’t,” Dove whispers.
“No,” he agrees. “But you understand enough.”
He steps toward the door. One of the Peacekeepers opens it at once. Before leaving, Snow pauses beside her, long enough that she can notice that he smells like dying roses.
“I do not mind being hated, Miss Briar,” he says softly. “Hatred is useful. It keeps people facing the wrong direction.” His eyes flick briefly to the tears on her cheeks, then back to her own. “What I mind is mess. Do not make one.”
Then he leaves, the door shutting behind him, and the room is silent.
Dove stands there for a long time without moving. The tears on her face are drying sticky and cold. She wants to scream, or break something, or die, or all three.
Instead she lowers herself back onto the sofa. One of the Peacekeepers remains by the door. The other stares resolutely ahead, as if he can’t hear her breathing.
After a minute, the one nearest the table slides the pitcher and the empty glass toward her. Dove knocks it onto the floor.
It shatters spectacularly, but neither of them reacts.
That, somehow, is the worst thing yet.
𐄁𐄁𐄁
The train slows before Dove is ready for it to.
Not that she’d been ready at any point in the last two days, but the train’s deceleration still feels abrupt, offensive somehow, like it ought to have given her more warning before depositing her back into the life she’s spent the last few weeks trying not to lose.
Luther looks up from the seat across from her at the subtle shift. “We’re here,” he says.
Dove, of course, does not reply.
Outside the window, Seven unspools in gray-green strips of familiar land. Pines. Fog. Rough ground scarred by logging routes and cart tracks. The sky hangs low and colorless overhead in a way that has always made the district seem less like a place people lived and more like a place they endured.
Home.
That word doesn’t feel right in her head anymore.
“We should talk before we get off,” Luther tells her.
Dove drags her gaze from the window to him. “No.”
He almost smiles. “I wasn’t asking.”
“Then you can save your breath.”
“It’d be easier for both of us if you’d at least pretend to hear me out.”
Dove lets her head fall back against the seat. “I already did my pretending.”
“Fine. Then hear this without pretending.” Luther exhales through his nose. “There’ll be a crowd.”
Yeah. Dove could’ve figured out that much.
“The mayor,” he continues. “Your family. Half the district if they’re allowed time off work. They’ll want to see you. People will cheer. People will stare. Some of them will cry. A lot of them won’t know what to say.”
“And?”
“And you need to keep walking.”
Dove shakes her head “That’s your big advice?”
“It’s the only advice that matters.”
Outside, the train whistle blows long and low. The platform is coming into view now — dark with people packed shoulder to shoulder behind barriers. Even from here, Dove can make out movement.
“They’re excited,” Luther says quietly.
Dove can only laugh. Excited, like this is some kind of festival and not her coming back from hell.
When the train fully enters the station, the noise hits all at once.
Cheering, mostly. Shouts. Applause. Her name being taken up in different voices and shapes until it stops sounding like a real word.
She stares out the window at them and feels nothing warm at all.
Luther stands once the train shudders to a stop. “Ready?”
“No.”
“Good enough.”
He slides the compartment door open and offers Dove his arm.
She looks at it as if she’s being insulted.
Luther shrugs. “Suit yourself.
She stops at the train door, cold air sweeping inside. It’s damp and pine-scented and unmistakably the Seven she knows. For a moment it whips against her face so hard she can’t breathe. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s familiar. Because she hasn’t smelt trees like this since the reaping, and the suddenness of it makes something inside her go raw.
When the crowd sees her, the volume doubles. The whole place erupts when she steps down onto the platform.
People are screaming her name now. Crying it. Reaching for her from behind the barriers. The mayor is clapping too hard with both hands and smiling like his face might split. Somebody from the lumber crews is waving a rough-cut sign with the word “VICTOR” painted across it in dripping green.
This is all the worst thing Dove has ever seen. She doesn’t hate that they’re happy she lived. Rather, she hates that they think that’s enough.
Flashbulbs pop from the Capitol cameras stationed near the front. White light. Sharp clicks. Record of a happy homecoming. Something the rest of Panem can watch later and say, “wow, what a moment.”
Dove keeps walking until she sees her family.
Her mother first, thinner than Dove remembers, though maybe that’s impossible. Her hands are clasped so tightly in front of her that the knuckles have gone white. Aspen, one of her brothers, is pressed against her side, staring wide-eyed through the crowd. Orion, his twin, is standing upright with the kind of expression people wear when they’re trying desperately not to fall apart in public.
For a brief moment, Dove thinks they look afraid of her. Then, the barrier is moved aside and her mother is running onto the stage like a person who has been half-dead for two weeks and has just now been told she can breathe.
Dove doesn’t know what to do.
During the worst nights in the arena, when the cold got too deep or the hunger too loud, she had pictured getting home. She imagined her mother and the twins, and maybe her father standing just behind them with his coat still smelling like sap and smoke.
But he isn’t here because why would he be? The space where he should be is so wide, Dove feels like she could drown in it for a second.
Her mother reaches and throws both arms around Dove’s shoulders. She looks wrecked, eyes red-rimmed and her face hollowed with worry. Dove can feel the whole district watching them, waiting for something they can perceive as beautiful and triumphant.
Instead, Dove just stands there, watching her brothers stop a few feet away.
Aspen looks like he wants to barrel into her too, but suddenly he’s hesitating. Orion stares at her, examining her face to see if he can still recognize her.
He realizes he does, thankfully, and steps forward. “Hey Dove,” he says, almost carefully.
Dove stares at him, then at Aspen, at her mother, and at the empty place beside them where her father should’ve been if the world made any kind of sense at all.
The cheering is still going on around them, but it at least it sounds farther away now. “She should say something!” somebody out there shouts.
The mayor laughs nervously. “Our victor’s had a long journey, I’m sure—”
A microphone appears out of nowhere, attached to a Capitol interviewer who smiles too widely and lifts it toward Dove’s face.
“Dove,” she says, syrup-sweet, “what does it feel like to be home?”
She looks at the people of seven packed together in their worn coats with patched sleeves, her mother’s fingers brushing her wrist while the interviewer waits, bright and eager.
Finally, Dove says, “Cold.”
The woman blinks, then laughs when she realizes that’s what the crowd is doing. “Yes, well, District Seven is certainly known for—”
Dove walks past her.
Luther catches up a second later, just close enough to intervene if she makes another scene. But Dove’s done making scenes for now. She’s too tired. Too hollowed out. Every cheer feels like sandpaper against her skin.
The mayor says something she doesn’t hear. Someone places a laurel-like victor’s wreath over her shoulders that smells damp and green and wrong. Hands keep trying to guide her. Cameras keep flashing. She notices the town square has been dressed up with banners and flowers and tables of food, and she can’t stop staring at it.
There’s bread, fruit, and roasted meat — enough of it to feed families for days. People are smiling around it, somehow proud, and Dove feels an ugly crack split through the center of her numbness. Now, now, there’s enough. Now, when her father’s in the ground.
Luther must notice her pace getting slower because he says under his breath, “Not here.”
Dove barely hears him, or anything for that matter.
Her mother is saying something to her from one side, soft and frantic. Aspen has reached for her hand only to drop it. The crowd still presses in from behind the barriers, shouting blessings and praise and her name, but all Dove can see is the spread of food on the tables and all she can think is that if any of this had come just two years earlier, maybe—
No. Maybe nothing. The ache in her chest rises so fast, it feels like choking.
She turns sharply away from the square, toward the line of official cars waiting to take them to Victor’s Village.
“Dove,” her mother says, startled.
Dove yanks the wreath off her shoulders and lets it drop onto the muddy ground and people thankfully stop cheering. She just keeps walking.
Behind her, there’s a beat of confused silence, then the rustle of people scrambling to decide whether this is part of the show. Capitol cameras pivot to follow her. Of course they do.
Luther mutters a curse and then he and her family hurry after her.
By the time Dove reaches the car, her hands are shaking so badly she can barely get the door open. She climbs in anyway and stares straight ahead at the opposite window, jaw locked. A moment later her mother slides in beside her, brothers after, all cramped awkwardly into the backseat because none of them have ever been in a car before so they don’t know the rules. Nobody speaks at first. Outside, the station is still loud with voices, but muffled now by glass and distance.
Orion looks at her for a long moment before asking, very quietly, “Are you really home?”
It nearly makes Dove cry.
She turns her face toward the window before anybody can see.
Outside, Seven passes in wet gray smears as the car pulls away from the station. Pines. Mud. Smoke from chimneys. Familiar roofs. Familiar roads.
After a long silence, Dove says, “I guess.”
No one answers.
Her mother’s hand hovers once over Dove’s sleeve, wanting to touch and not quite daring to. She watches the district roll by and thinks, with something close to horror, that Snow was right about one thing.
She made it back, but that doesn't mean she’s free.
𐄁𐄁𐄁
The house is waiting for them at the end of a road Dove has never been allowed to walk down before.
Victor’s Village sits a way’s away from Seven’s main drag with bigger houses, wider porches, and cleaner windows all lined up in a neat row as if they belong somewhere else. The trees around them seem arranged and the roads are less mud than gravel. The only thing stopping these plots of land from being identical are the fences, each one painted a different color.
Dove stares out the car window at the nearest house — hers, apparently — and feels sick.
It’s too large and too polished. Even from the outside it’s too warm-looking with soft gold light glowing through the windows and smoke rising in a thin elegant stream from the chimney. The front steps are swept and a dozen different flower boxes are filled with perfect roses. Unlike the Briar family’s old home, the roof doesn’t bow in the middle and the porch doesn’t lean. There’s no missing wooden planks on the walls and no water stains running down from the gutter.
When the car rolls to a stop in front of it, nobody moves.
The driver gets out first and opens the door with stiff politeness. “We’ve arrived,” he tells her, like it’s not obvious.
Dove climbs out of the vehicle without waiting for help. Gravel crunches underneath her boots and the air smells like pine, wet dirt, and woodsmoke. Faintly, she can smell something else when the front door opens — warm, fresh food.
Her mother gets out next, then her brothers, all of them slowly turning toward the house like they’re afraid it might vanish if they look at it for too long. Aspen actually takes a step closer before stopping himself, hands shoved into his pockets so hard his shoulders hunch.
There’s a Capitol attendant lingering by the porch, smiling with all her teeth. “Welcome home,” she says brightly. “As part of your victor’s privileges, this resident has been fully prepared with a stocked pantry, coal, fresh linens, medical supplies, and a small wardrobe of clothes. Of course, more can be arranged if—”
Dove walks past the attendant, making her fall silent behold her.
Immediately, she recognizes how warm it is inside. It’s not the cramped warmth of four people huddled together to save on coal, hoping the fire lasts until the morning. It’s real, even heat that seems to reach every corner.
The floorboards are smooth, polished dark wood and there’s a rug in the entryway thick enough that mud might never dare touch it. A coat rack stands by the door, empty and waiting. Beyond that, a sitting room opens wide with a soft chair, lamplight and shelves. There’s a staircase, broad and cleaned and framed pictures on the wall. They’re not family pictures, just landscapes, pressed leaves, and deer.
Her mother lets out a tiny sound behind her. Not quite a gasp, but not a sob either.
“Dove,” the attendant says from somewhere near the door, “If you’d like, I can give you the tour.”
“No.”
“Of course.” The lady sighs. “Well, everything has been arranged for your comfort.”
Dove looks at the back of the sofa nearest her and considers setting it on fire.
“Wonderful,” her mother says, a bit too quickly. “Thank you.”
The attendant brightens. “There’s enough here for your whole family, Miss Briar. This is all yours now.”
Dove turns then, slowly enough that the attendant’s smile starts to falter.
She wants to ask her, “Where was this before? Where was this when we needed it most?” but she doesn’t because Aspen and Orion are standing right there, and her mother already looks on the brink of shattering. Dove can still feel Snow’s voice in the back of her skull like a nail being pressed inward one inch at a time.
So, all she says is, “Leave.”
“I'm sorry?” The attendant hesitates.
“Get out.”
Her mother draws in a quick breath while the twins look around, concerned.
The attendant’s smile freezes on her face, held there only by force. “Miss Briar, I’m only trying to—”
“I know,” Dove says. “That’s why I want you gone.”
For a second, Dove thinks the woman might protest. Go on a rant about respect like every other Capitolite but instead, she just tilts her head. “Very well. There will be staff nearby if your family requires anything further.”
Dove’s mouth twists. “That’s reassuring.”
The door closes behind her and the house goes quiet. Quiet, but not silent — there’s still the pop of logs in some fire somewhere deeper in the house, the settling creak of floorboards, the faint hum of a refrigerator Dove doesn’t realize she’s hearing at first because the concept is so foreign to her body it takes a second to place.
Orion is the first to move, walking into the sitting room with slow, careful steps. He reaches out to touch the arm of one of the chairs, then snatches his hand back as if he’s expecting someone to yell at him for it. Aspen heads straight to the mantel, standing there and staring at the clock on it while Mother is still by the door.
Dove can feel her staring at her like she’s afraid of what Dove might do next. All she does though, is shrug off her coat and drape it over the bannister.
Then the smell hits again, stronger this time. Roasted meat, bread, butter, and sweetness coming from the room off to the left — the kitchen.
Each step toward it feels wrong somehow, all too smooth. The hallway opens and the kitchen comes into view all at once — wide counters, a long wooden table, cabinets painted white, a black iron stove polished to a sign, a sink that likely has actual running water, and on every available surface, food.
There’s a loaf of bread, a crock of butter, a bowl piled with apples and bears so glossy they look fake, jars of preserved fruit, a slab of smoked ham, potatoes, onions, carrots, and a pot on the stove with steam curling from beneath the lid.
At first, all Dove just stares.
Then, she crosses the room and yanks open the nearest cabinet just to see canned goods stacked in neat rows. Another has flour, sugar, and rice. The pantry door stands half ajar at the far end of the kitchen and when Dove pulls it wide, she sees shelves from floor to ceiling packed with beans, grain, salt, dried herbs, cooking oil, tea, and more jars and more cans. There’s more food than her family ever could have dreamed of keeping in one place at any point in the last five years.
All she can think about is her father at the old table in their real house, pretending he’d already eaten so the rest of them would take bigger portions. Her father scraping mold of bread in case some of it was still good underneath. Her father coughing into his sleep and waving away concern because medicine cost money that they had to save for winter. Her father getting thinner and lying that he wasn’t hungry.
But now, here, in this obscene kitchen in this obscene house, there is enough food to make all those lies unnecessary.
A barely-human laugh tears out of Dove so suddenly, it startles her.
“Dove,” her mother says from behind her.
Dove turns around to see that her family is all standing in the kitchen doorway. Her mother has one hand over her mouth and the boys are peering around her elbows, faces blank with the realization that this was always possible and no one let them have it.
Dove points wildly at the pantry. “Look at this!”
Nobody answers.
“Look at this,” she repeats, louder. Dove can hear herself breathing too fast again, but there’s no stopping it now. “There’s enough food here for months.”
Her mother lowers her hand slowly. “Dove.”
“For months!” She laughs again. “What, did they rob a whole market for us? Is this supposed to make it worth it?”
Her mother takes one cautious step into the room. “Nobody said that.”
“No?” Dove snaps. “Then what is this for?”
She hates all of it. The heat in the room even though it’s still July and not that cold, the smell of meat, the sight of bread with a proper crust, the clean floors and stocked shelves.
“What is this for?” Dove demands again. “He’s dead.”
Silence. The twins flinch while mother goes very still.
Dove’s chest is heaving now, each breath cutting her open from the inside. “He’s dead,” she says. “So what exactly are we supposed to do with all of this? Sit around this nice warm house and eat ourselves sick and act grateful because they finally decided we’re worth feeding?”
“Dove,” her mother says, tears in her eyes, “please.”
“Don’t.” Dove backs away from her. “Don’t tell me to calm down.”
The boys are staring at her and she wishes it was enough to get her to stop, but it isn’t.
“Do you know what’s in the cabinet by the stove?” Dove asks, swinging open the door. “Medicine, bandages, and proper medicine. There’s probably enough coal out back to heat this place for three winters. There’s fresh meat and sugar and more fruit than we’ve probably seen in one room in our whole lives.” She points at the kitchen around them, exhausted. “And none of it was here when it would’ve mattered.”
Her mother’s face folds in on itself and Aspen says quietly, “Dove, stop.”
But she can’t, because this is the thing she’s been looking for ever since Father got sick. Proof that it could be different. That there was enough somewhere, but her father died anyway.
Dove grabs the load of bread off the counter and hurls it across the room. It hits the far wall and drops to the floor with a dull thud.
Everybody jumps, but Dove just starts crying. Not prettily, in the quiet wounded way she’d cry in the Capitol. The tears just spill over all at once while she’s standing there furious, in a mix of grief and rage.
“I killed for this,” she says, voice shedded. “I killed for this and he’s still dead.”
Her mother crosses the room before Dove can stop her, and she wraps her arms around Dove. She tries to wretch away on instinct, but her mother holds on anyway, now crying too. Dove’s knees buckle and then awkwardly, they both sink to the kitchen floor.
She can hear the boys crying too while her mother’s hands keep moving helplessly over her shoulders, like she’s trying to reassure herself Dove is still here.
“I know,” Mother says hoarsely. “I know. I know.”
“No, you don’t,” Dove sobs into the front of her dress, the words muffled and childish and ugly. “No, you don’t.”
And then, because that isn’t true, because of course her mother does know at least part of it, because they have both spent two years living with the same absence from opposite ends, Dove starts crying harder.
Her mother doesn’t shush her or try to change her mind. She just holds on while Dove falls apart in the middle of a warm kitchen full of everything they needed too late.
On the floor beside them, the load of bread lies split where it hit the wall. Dove stares at it through blurred vision and imagines her father telling her to pick it up before it goes bad.
Dove presses a hand over her mouth and makes a noise so raw, it doesn’t sound like one that belongs to a person. Her mother tightens her grip and the twins stay close.
And the house — the beautiful monstrous house with its heat and food and polished floors — does nothing except stand there around them, dumb and full and far too late.
𐄁𐄁𐄁
That night, Dove sits curled into one corner of the new sofa in the sitting room with a blanket she didn’t ask for, staring at the fireplace while logs burn down slow and even.
She’s still crying like she was a few hours ago, only now there aren’t any tears — she has none left. She doesn’t notice her mother walk into the room until she’s close enough that Dove can smell the two mugs of tea that she’s carrying.
She sets one mug on the table in front of Dove, then carefully lowers herself into the chair opposite the couch. For a long time, neither of them touch the tea, instead just sitting as the fire cracks softly.
Keeping her eyes on the flames, Dove finally asks her the one question she’s been afraid of learning the answer to. “How long did he know?”
Her mother stills. “What?” she says after a moment, though she knows perfectly well what Dove means.
“How long did he know he was dying?”
Dove’s imagined asking this a hundred different ways over the last two years. She thought she’d ask it more angrily and accusatorily when she eventually did, but instead it comes out flat and exhausted.
Her mother folds her hands in her lap, looking into her tea and not at Dove. “A while.”
“A while,” Dove repeats under her breath.
“It wasn’t all at once.”
“That’s not what I asked.” Dove digs her fingernails into the blanket over her legs. “Was it before winter?”
Dove turns her head to look at her mother who doesn’t answer. Her face is lit orange by the fire and she looks like she hasn’t had a proper night of sleep since the Reaping. She probably hasn’t, now that Dove thinks about it.
“Was it?” she asks again.
“Yes,” her mother quietly says.
She feels like she’s been slapped. He knew before the worst of the cold, before the cupboards had gotten bare enough that everybody started lying to one another at dinner. Before the coughing got so bad, it kept Dove up at night. Before the medicine bottles started appearing in smaller and smaller quantities on the shelf because each one cost something they no longer had.
And nobody told her.
Dove winces. “You knew.”
Her mother says nothing.
“You both knew,” Dove pushes.
“We knew he was sick.”
“No!” Dove leans forward. “Don’t do that. Don’t say it like that. You just admitted you knew he was dying.”
The fire pops between them as her mother swallows. “We knew there was a chance.”
“A chance?”
“Dove—”
“A chance?” she repeats, louder. “He was coughing blood and you wouldn’t answer any of my questions.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Why?” Dove demands. “So the twins can’t hear? They lived in the same house with us. They heard him too.”
Her mother takes a deep breath. “We knew he would die.”
Dove just stares at her.
“Not at first, not when it started.” A tear forms in her eye. “But by the end, yes. We knew there wasn’t hope.”
Dove tries to puzzle out a response but she can’t make her brain or her mouth work.
“We took him to the doctor in town.” Her mother wraps both hands around her mug and takes a sip. “Then to another, a few towns over. He sold us powders and tinctures and swore it would help when we couldn’t afford real medicine.” Her mouth twists. “He couldn’t.”
“You should have told me.” Dove wants to throw up. “I could have done something to fix it.”
“Tell me,” her mother says, sharply. “Tell me what you would have done, Dove. You were fourteen. We still had the boys to feed and winter was coming on and your father couldn’t get out of bed some mornings. What should I have said to you? Your father is dying, so start grieving now while I figure out which of you three kids can starve next month?”
Stunned completely, Dove just nods.
“You think I didn’t want to tell you?” her mother asks, gaze shifting back to the fire. “You think I didn’t lie awake every night listening to him breathe and counting the seconds between coughs while I wondered which would be the one that would kill him?” Her voice catches in throat. “He asked me not to tell you and the boys until we had to.”
Dove’s throat tightens. “Why?”
“Because he knew you.” Her mother’s eyes shine more, but she blinks back any more tears. “He knew what you’d do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Her mother finally meets her eyes again. “It means he knew you would stop eating if he needed it more. He knew you’d try to quit school and work more shifts. He knew you’d start looking at the boys like they were competition for resources instead of your brothers, and then hate yourself for it after.”
“That’s not fair,” she says, gripping the blanket tighter.
“No,” her mother agrees. “It wasn’t.”
The fire goes blurry in Dove’s eyes — she’s finally regenerated enough tears just to cry them all over again.
“He said,” Mother goes on, slowly, “that if we told you too early, you’d spend whatever time he had left trying to save him instead of being with him.”
That, she can admit is true.
She can see it clearly — herself at fourteen, furious and frantic, stealing and bargaining and fighting and starving. Making his illness into a problem that only she could solve at her young age. Dove hates that her father knew that about her.
“So you just…what?” Dove asks after a moment. “You just waited?”
Her mother’s face folds. “We managed. We stretched any real medicine we could afford and sold what we could. We took help when it came and pretended not to see the pity with it.” Her voice drops. “And then, near the end, when it got so bad he couldn’t even pretend, he asked me to let him go.”
The room goes very still.
Dove hears and understands the words, but she rejects them immediately. “No!”
“Yes.” Her mother shakes her head.
“No!” Dove repeats. “No, he didn’t.”
“He did.”
“You’re lying.”
Her mother flinches like Dove just hit her. “He did,” she whispers. “Dove—”
“He wouldn’t.” Dove is shaking now. “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t just leave us.”
Her mother sets the mug down before she can drop it, her fingers trembling. “He wasn’t leaving you.”
“He asked to die.”
“He asked our family to stop hurting ourselves trying to stop it.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“It isn’t.”
“Yes it is.”
“He knew,” her mother says, her voice breaking, “he knew how expensive it was. Every dose we bought, every day you kids went with less, every hour I wasn’t working because I was sitting by his bed.” Finally, her eyes fill with tears. “He looked at me and said it’s enough.”
Dove’s whole face feels hot.
“He said the boys were watching too much and that you were angry all the time and too young to be that angry. He said that if we kept going the way we were, he’d die anyway and take the rest of us down with him.”
Dove’s breath starts coming too fast. “No.”
“He made me promise.”
“No.”
“He made me promise,” her mother repeats, tears now falling freely down her face, “that when it got bad enough, I would stop spending money we couldn’t spare and just—” She folds in on herself. “And just let him be done.”
Dove is on her feet before she realizes she’s stood up. She’s staring at her mother like she’s become a stranger. “You promised him that?”
Her mother looks up at her, then softly mutters, “yes.”
“How could you?” Dove whimpers.
“Because he asked me too.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It had to be.”
“No.”
“Yes,” her mother says. “Yes, Dove it did. By then he was in pain every waking minute because he couldn’t breathe and he was still himself enough to know what was happening and ask for an end to it.”
Dove backs away a step, her vision no longer blurry from tears but from rage. “He was my father.”
“I know.”
“No you don’t.” Dove shakes her head furiously. “If you did, you would have kept trying.”
Her mother stands too quickly, nearly knocking into the table. “I did keep trying.”
“Not enough!”
“I tried until he asked me not to!”
“And you listened!”
“Yes!” Her mother’s voice is finally loud enough to match Dove’s, angry and wrecked. “I listened because he was my husband and he was dying and I loved him enough to hear him when he said he couldn’t do it anymore.” She presses a hand to her own chest and says now in a whisper, “sometimes love is knowing when the person you’re trying to keep has already suffered enough.”
She wants to rip her mother’s words apart and make her take them back, but she can’t. Now that they’ve been said out loud, she can see things she has spent two years refusing to look at directly.
Her father’s hands shaking too much for him to lift a cup. The way he turned his face toward the wall after coughing fits, not because he wanted privacy, but because he didn’t want his family to see. How damn exhausted he was by the end.
Dove sinks back down onto the sofa without meaning to.
“He told me,” her mother says after a long moment, “to take care of you.”
Dove lets out a wet, angry sound. “Clearly that worked out well.”
Her mother almost smiles. “He said you’d take it the hardest.”
“He was right.” She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes until stars burst in her vision.
“I know.”
“He was my father.”
“I know.”
The words come out before Dove can stop them. “I was supposed to fix it.”
Her mother kneels in front of the sofa like she’s approaching a skittish cat. When Dove doesn’t recoil, she pits one hand over the fist Dove didn’t realize was still clenched. “You were a child,” she says.
“I wasn’t.” Dove shakes her head.
“You were.”
“I could've worked more.”
“You already worked too much.”
“I could’ve found somebody.”
“We found everybody.”
“I could’ve—”
“You couldn’t.” Her words are unforgivingly gentle.
Dove drops her hands and stares at her mother through swollen eyes. “Don’t.”
Her mother squeezes her shoulders. “You couldn’t.”
And that’s the ugly truth about it all, the truth she was hoping she could die before admitting. Nothing she could’ve done would have changed a single thing.
“I know you wanted to,” her mother whispers. “I know. But there was nothing left for you to fix.”
Dove folds forward with a noise she would hate to make in front of anyone else and her mother catches her before she slides off the sofa entirely. This time, the crying is quieter.
Her mother holds her head against her shoulder and says very softly into Dove’s hair, “He loved you very much.”
“Then he shouldn’t have gone,” Dove sobs.
Her mother’s grip tightens. “I know.”
And because there is nothing else left to say, they stay like that in the lamplight and fireglow.
𐄁𐄁𐄁
She finds his coat in the hall closet a few days later, and not because she was looking for it. At least, that’s what Dove tells herself.
Earlier that day, in the afternoon, a truck came with everything that was in the old house, but she didn’t think anyone had gone through and unpacked anything yet. She especially didn’t think anybody went through the one box with all of father’s belongings — the ones nobody had touched for two whole years.
But there his coat is, hanging casually between Aspen and Orion’s like it’s always been there.
When Dove sees it, she goes still.
It isn’t much to look at. Faded brown wool, rough at the seams, one cuff mended with darker thread where her mother must have patched. The shoulders are broad in a way that now seems wrong. Not because he hadn’t been broad, once but because by the end Dove had gotten used to thinking of him only in smaller and smaller pieces. The coat at least remembers him bigger.
When she pulls it down, the wool is cold from the closet. Something in one of the pockets knocks lightly against her leg, but Dove doesn’t check what it is. She just stands there in the dark hall with the coat bunched awkwardly in both arms, staring at it.
It smells wrong, or maybe that’s not the right word. It smells different, a mix of dust from the box and cedar from the closet. Then she buries her face in the collar and there he is.
Smoke, pine sap, sweat — Dove makes a sound so small she barely hears it herself. She closes the closet door with her heel and sinks down onto the polished floor, the coat dragged into her lap.
For a while she just sits, breathing her father’s coat in and holding on tight.
Dove presses her thumb over the frayed patch at the cuff and suddenly, without warning or permission, she isn’t thinking about him being sick in bed anymore.
She’s not thinking about the blood or the coughing or the way everyone in the house started speaking with their voices lowered as if grief would wait politely outside the door if they whispered.
Instead, she’s nine years old and standing knee-deep in dirty snow while her father laughs at her.
He’s bent over with both hands braced on his thighs, chuckling because Dove had insisted she could split kindling on her own and then immediately managed to send the axe flying out of her grip and straight into a pile of snow.
“You aiming for the tree or just trying to scare it,” her father asked, grin crooked under the steam of his breath.
Dove had glared up at him, furious with embarrassment, cheeks burning in the cold.
“I know how,” she’d snapped.
“Clearly.”
He’d gone to yank the axe from the snow, and then paused, eyeing her in exaggerated thought. “Maybe you did something to offend the wood somehow. Maybe this is personal. Maybe it thinks you’re a woodpecker instead of a dove.”
Even now, exhausted on the hallway floor, Dove’s mouth flicks up at the corners. He teased her all the time but she knows he never meant a word of it.
She can see him now with startling clarity, wearing this coat and a knit cap. She can see the redness in his hands since he forgot to put on gloves and how he stepped behind her afterward and adjusted her grip on the axe, one calloused palm over her small fingers.
“Don’t fight the weight,” he’d said. “Just let it fall.”
She still doesn’t know what he meant then but the memory sits heavy in her chest. Just her and father laughing in the snow.
Dove presses her face harder in the coat and another memory comes.
This one is from a bit later — she’s eleven or maybe twelve. Rain is pounding the room so hard that at the time, she had thought it might cave in. Orion and Aspen are feverish under blankets and her mother is out trying to barter for medicine. Dove was trying to patch a leak in the kitchen pipes with a rag and a bad attitude while her father sat at the kitchen table carving something small out of scrap wood.
He’d watched her stomp around for a while before saying, “Are you planning to glare the house dry?”
She had shot him a look. “Maybe.”
“Worth a try, I guess.” He’d held up the thing he was carving. A crooked little bird, a dove, barely more than a shape. “Think this looks like anything yet?”
“It looks deformed.”
“Cruel,” he’d said, hand to his chest.
She’d taken it from him anyway when he offered it over. It had fit inside her palm, unfinished and rough with the wing too thick on one side.
“You can keep it,” he’d said.
“Why?”
He’d just shrugged. “In case I become famous for something so you can sell it after I’m dead.”
It was just a joke. Back then, he was so alive that he could joke about dying.
Dove squeezes the coat tighter until the seams protest faintly under her grip.
She’s spent so long replaying the end of his father’s death in her mind, that she swallowed everything before it. That’s what happens when you’re as angry as she was. As angry as Dove still is.
But her father wasn’t always a dying man.
He had also been a man who laughed in the snow. A man who carved ugly birds out of scrap wood. A man who smelled like smoke and pine and rain and work. A man who knew Dove well enough to tease her out of her worst tempers
All at once, she is furious again — not at her father at the fact that the world can lose someone like that and keep going. That she had to keep going.
Dove reaches blindly into one of the coat’s pockets. Her fingers brush lint, a bent nail, and then something smooth. The wooden dove, not finished just like in her memory. One wing is still thicker than the other, the body roughly shaped, and small enough to fit in her palm.
How the hell did it even get in there?
She turns the dove over between shaking fingers. There’s a notch near the tail where the knife must have slipped. A thumbprint worn dark into the wood grain. It is a stupid little thing and she loves it more than anything.
Dove bows over it and cries with her forehead pressed to the collar of his coat, quieter now than before, the sound soaked up by the wool.
Nobody comes downstairs. Either they can’t hear her, or they can’t and are kind enough to leave her to it.
The house is still, moonlight stretching pale across the floorboards. Somewhere outside, wind moves through the pines with the same long hush it always has. The district has not changed its sounds just because Dove has.
She’s still angry and she doesn’t know what to do with that.
She thinks of her mother upstairs reading a fancy new book and of her brothers asleep under an unfamiliar roof. She thinks of the pantry full of food, the medicine, the surplus of coal. Too late for Father but still here for the rest of them.
She thinks of Snow saying hatred keeps people facing the wrong direction. He’s not wrong. Dove has been facing backward for so long that she doesn’t even know what forward looks like.
Dove pushes herself unsteadily to her feet, pulling the coat over her even though it hangs too big and heavy on her frame. The hem brushes her calves and the sleeves swallow her hands almost to the knuckles.
She walks to the front window, bird still in hand, and stands there for a long time, looking out at the dark shapes of the pines and the empty roads. Somewhere in the distance there is the graveyard where her father rests. Somewhere even further there is the old house that will soon house a new family and hopefully treat them kinder than it did the Briars.
Dove opens her hand and looks at the little wooden dove in her palm, then very carefully, she sets it on the windowsill where the moonlight can reach it.
Leaving the coat on, she turns back toward the stairs. The house is as quiet as ever, but it feels fractionally less like a stranger’s. It’s not home, but maybe some day it will be.
At the foot of the stairs, Dove pauses and looks once over her shoulder at the dove sitting in the silver wash of moonlight.
Then, she goes upstairs.
𐄁𐄁𐄁
Eighty years later, Dove Briar dies in a bed that no one had to chain her to.
By then the country has been renamed twice, rebuilt badly and then better, and the Hunger Games have been dead long enough that children learn about them in classrooms with hushed voices and books instead of from fresh graves. The arena that made Dove famous is gone. The Capitol that made it is gone too. President Snow has been dust for decades. Even some of Dove’s anger, impossibly, has gone with him.
The room is warm. Not Capitol warm. Not the fake warmth of her Victor’s Village when she first saw it and thought it might split her open — real, lived-in warmth. The soft clutter of a long life arranged around her, books, photographs, carved wood, the old dove on the bedside table that’s still thicker on one side.
Someone is holding her hand and someone else kisses her forehead.
The voices in the room blur together after a while, beloved yet indistinct. Dove is too tired now to separate them all. That seems all right. She knows them by feeling.
She had not expected to live this long.
At fourteen, she had not expected to live through the week. At fifteen, she had to expected the anger to never loosen. At sixteen, she had thought perhaps she would die with it still clenched between her teeth.
Instead she had lived. Long enough to watch Games end and the country crack open and try, however imperfectly, to become something less terrible. Living this long almost feels like a rebellion.
The edges of the room have begun to soften now. The blanket is lighter on her legs, the mattress gentler under her spine. The ache in her joints, the weight in her chest, the decades in her bones — all of it loosening and loosening.
She thinks, unexpectedly, of snow.
Snow falling off pine branches in sudden cold showers. Snow with her father laughing in it, one hand over hers on an axe handle, telling her not to fight the weight.
Just let it fall.
Dove exhales and the room disappears so quietly, she barely notices it going until it's gone.
Then there is a forest.
For one suspended second she is only standing there. Then, she sees him.
He is leaning against a tree as if he has only stepped away for a moment. Broad-shouldered and alive in the face in the way illness erased by degrees and she had nearly forgotten how to picture. His coat hangs straight on him. His hands are rough and steady. When he smiles, it is the same crooked smile that once met her across woodpiles and dinner tables and all the ordinary hours she had to learn, too late, were the real treasures.
“Dove,” he says.
She tries to laugh but it comes out as a half-sob. “Hi, Dad.”
He opens his arms as she goes to him, the scent of smoked wood filling her nostrils and the unbearable relief of finally not having to miss him anymore filling her soul.
Her father pulls back just enough to look at her, eyes warm. He says, “you sure took your time, kid.”
Dove smiles through tears that no longer hurt,
“I know,” she replies.
And then, because she can at last, she lets the weight fall.