Chapter Text
It is silent when I step down onto the platform. The town square is empty. The train departs behind me like a ghost, leaving only a trail of quiet smoke in its wake. I thought someone would be here to meet me. To welcome me home.
I start towards home, grateful for the cool night air that fills my lungs. Still, something in me feels unsettled, like there’s a critter wheedling its way through my ribcage. No matter how many gulps of air I take in, my heart rate doesn’t slow. Maybe it's the thought of seeing everyone again, the only one to return home alive tonight when four left on the train just weeks ago. After all I’ve done, that feels more terrifying than anything else I’ve seen. I push thoughts of Louella, Wyatt, and Maysilee’s grieving families from my mind. I try to silence the haunting echo of Maysilee’s voice in the arena: “I keep wondering, will Merrilee still be a twin when I’m gone?” I don’t know—I don’t know what to tell any of them.
I wonder if they were too ashamed to meet me at the station. No cheering crowds and tearful reunions for me, the lone survivor against forty eight dead kids. No one wants to congratulate that person. No one should congratulate them.
Somehow, I know where this will end up, but I keep walking anyway. I pass the candy store, and the apothecary, and the graveyard that holds the bones of too many small bodies. Somewhere in District Three, Beetee is putting what remains of his son into the ground. I walk past the fence. Past the entrance to the mines. Past the Hob. Past Hattie’s place, where I can almost smell the pungent liquor odor that sticks to her hair, her clothes. The smell is stronger than ever as I approach the house at the end of the road—the house where I was born, and where I’ll probably die, if I have any say in it. Home. Something in the back of my mind knows what to expect, what I will see as I get closer. What I will lose. My subconscious braces me for a rush of heat, for chaos, for sounds I can never forget. Towards a house that no longer exists, where there is now only a blackened shadow where the walls of my youth once stood.
I brace myself, my eyes squeezed shut; maybe if I’m not caught off guard, it won’t hurt like it usually does. But I don’t stop. Inexplicably, I keep walking. Past the empty space with that scorched shadow. I barely even take it in before I’m around a corner. I don’t understand. I always stop; in every dream I go there and watch them die all over again. Why can’t I stop?
The sky continues to lighten, streaks of pale blue and orange stretching beyond my vision. I’m walking east now, towards the vivid orange sunrise. The world warms. Sweat forms on my arms, my forehead, drips down from my nose. Closer, closer. To what? The air is tight in my chest. Trapped. I cough, my lungs dry as sandpaper. I can’t breathe. The world’s too bright now. I look down at my hands, and am shocked to see the hands of an old man. Wrinkled and veiny and shaking. I’m shaking hard, and I need something. The acrid smell of liquor is overpowering. It’s mixed with something else. The thick, cloying scent of smoke. In the distance, the sign for Victor’s Village stands against a hazy backdrop.
I break into a run.
I reach the entrance to the village—this place that has only ever felt cold and foreign and empty, devoid of any sense of the word “home”—to find that it is not my house that’s swallowed by flames, but the one a few yards away. The home of three women who rummaged through kitchen shelves full of salves and potions and hung up game on the walls to cure and cared for one very old, very ugly cat. I rush towards it, this mass of wood and steel and stone crumbling into blackened heaps on the ground.
I choke on the fumes as the Everdeen house burns, flames reaching towards the sky, growing and catching and destroying everything in their wake. Terror threatens to paralyze me, but something in me refuses to give into the fear. I look around frantically for something to quell the flames, straining to see through the thick smoke. There’s no one else around; I am utterly alone, my shouts for help lost in the black clouds of ash. Something screams at me inside my mind, begging me to remember. There is something that I’ve missed before, something that could fix everything now. Time’s running out, and the pounding in my head only grows louder.
Water. That is what I need. Like a mirage in a desert, I see the cistern a little ways off, built into the ground beside the house. It glows as bright as the fire that surrounds it—a beacon, a sign. I stagger towards it, each bone in my body aching in the heat. I know that if I can just make it there, I can stop this, I can save them. The house is burning faster now, I can see the wood char under blankets of red flame, growing brittle. I inch towards the cistern, my steps drawn out and slow despite my pleas for them to just move faster, until my hands find a bucket on the ground nearby. The smoke hangs like heavy curtains all around me, pressing in too close, and my throat constricts with dust and ash. The world is a blur of fire and darkness, swallowing me whole, but I just keep moving. It’s so close. A few more steps, and I’ll make it. It isn’t too late yet. Finally, I throw myself on the ground next to the cistern. Shakily, I pull myself up, looking over the edge into the pit below. And there is nothing.
It’s empty. With a sickening feeling, I remember it was my job to fill it up. For the washing, and the bath, and the drinking water. It was my job. I’d told Ma that I would and then…What had happened then? It’s lost in the haze of black smoke, somewhere I can’t reach. The house continues to burn, the growing flames searing my skin until it's raw. I throw the bucket to the ground with a scream. What is it that I’m forgetting? What am I missing?
That’s when the screams start. They stand out clear and sharp as a knife against the blurry world. Two voices: a girl and a boy. They are voices I’ve heard in sleep and in waking, voices that filled every screen in the country ten times over. They call my name. I yell back, into the fire. They beg me for help. Desperate. Terrified. Victors turned once again to children, looking for someone, anyone, to protect them.
It is my job to protect them. I’m all they’ve got now.
I try once again to run towards the house—towards them—but fear has finally set in, its strength holding me back. I struggle against the force, but I can’t seem to move, and the flames only rage harder. Panic wells up inside of me. “Katniss!” I scream, my throat raw. “Peeta!”
“Haymitch! Please—”
Is this what they sounded like? I try to remember. Ma and Sid, clinging to each other as they burned. Ampert’s screams cut short as vicious teeth tore into flesh over and over until he was only bone and sinew. Maysilee gurgling, choking horribly on the blood filling her throat. All waiting until the last moment for me to help, to save them, only to realize that I’d failed them. I fail them, again and again and again. I’ve imagined losing Katniss and Peeta in a thousand ways. And I always knew, no matter who threw the knife or shot the arrow, that their deaths would ultimately be my fault. I anticipated the grief, all too familiar a feeling, and let myself become numb to it. I’d always believed that I’d look away, when the time came, sparing myself as best I could. But I can’t seem to, now. I will myself to stare, to imagine what I can’t see, to force myself to feel every ounce of pain that they feel and more. The screams start to fade, swallowed by the smoke, until they become piercing whispers in the back of my mind.
“Katniss,” I choke, watching the flames consume the only family I have left.
***
I’m clawing at my throat when I wake up, gasping for air. My clothes are soaked through with sweat—I can still feel the heat, like the fire has made a home inside my body, boiling me from the inside out. My heart races as I look around, and I think I might die, so I instinctively grab the bottle on the bedside table and take a long, deep drink. It burns going down. I need to get out of here. I need to find them, to make sure.
Twenty yards. I just have to make it twenty yards, and then I’m at her doorstep, taking swigs of liquor in between each panicked bang on the door.
“Katniss!” Bang. “Wake up—” Bang. “Katniss, open the damn door!” Desperate, I try the doorknob. The door swings open. Dread fills me up, and the scent of smoke is heavy in my nostrils. The house seems quiet, which is not unusual for her, but only solidifies my certainty that something isn’t right. The wind was howling before, and it’s gone silent, like the moment before a storm. Her bow and quiver aren’t by the door, her father’s hunting jacket is gone. She’s not here.
“Katniss?” I hear my voice, and it sounds like another version of me, one from too long ago. It sounds scared. The smoke only grows stronger, and though I can’t see the flames, I know they’re getting closer—the heat is coming back, worse than ever. I need to warn her, before the fire catches and we’re lost.
I stumble backwards out the door, my chest tight, and run. I don’t think about where. I just go, hoping there’s still time. I find myself at the only other house in the village that’s ever been lived in—a house I haven’t dared to approach, not since he’s been back—and I pound my bloodied fist on the door.