Author's Note: Another Hunger Games ficlet. This time I chose to focus on Cinna, who has always come across as a rather intriguing mix of creative genius and selfless martyr. I hope you enjoy!

Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of The Hunger Games trilogy nor any of the characters associated with the series.

The Music of Martyrdom

Cinna likes to listen to opera when he works. It's not worth going to the theater in the Capitol, that monstrosity of a building cruelly juxtaposed by its neon lighting and baroque-era, gilded molding. He considers it an architectural joke. A sin against style and taste and all the things he used to care about. Not now, though. Not anymore, really. Because it's much better, he knows, much easier for the condemned man to take comfort in apathy.

But there's still something redeeming in the old music. Crisp notes of sound plucked from thin air. Balance and reserve. Harmonies blended, melodies layered. He has made it a habit of sitting in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that encircle his penthouse, looking to the farthest reaches of the horizon and sampling the colors of dusk as though they were his own palette. And the music, yes, the music helps, adding a delicacy to the atmosphere until the stillness around him reverberates with high, pealing voices and the plaintive keening of a violin.

Lascia ch'io pianga…

On this particular evening, Cinna is perched on a high stool, his legs sticking out at odd angles. The low heels of hand-stitched leather shoes slip over the metal rungs of seat and he leans forward on his slanted desk, his hands pressed against a sheet of blank sketching paper. The night sky has rewarded him with the most subdued opulence. There are full, thick streaks of red rising over the distant mountains and bruised plum-colored shadows hiding the ugly pattern of the streets below. Cinna wonders if Katniss admires such a sky in her beloved woods and his heart twists with a strange longing for things he has never known, for trees grown wild and empty fields and birds that sing not because they have been trained to, but because their souls demand it of them.

Mia cruda sorte…

The sound system in his penthouse brings him crystalline notes from a cultivated voice, the soprano's vibrato stirring and accentuating the quiet warmth in the pit of his stomach. He closes his eyes for a moment and listens, willing his mind to reconstruct the fine features of Katniss, the particular hue of her flesh, the angular planes of her face. Memories of her plebian honesty and rustic common sense make him smile. It is not for him, he knows, to transform her beauty, only to highlight it, as the purling harpsichord coaxes ornamental trills from the soprano.

But even sitting as he is, his cheeks warmed by eager sunlight, his spirit moved by all things simple and in that simplicity, beautiful, Cinna is sad. The aria becomes a lament and he considers matters of sacrifice, denial and the greater good.

And then, for a moment, he becomes selfish and thinks of his own legacy.

Katniss, the Girl who was on Fire. Cinna…the man who lit the flame.

It has a hackneyed sort of ring to it. A pleasant, nostalgic cliché. Cinna's eyes flutter open and he has to laugh at his own ineloquence. If only there was something of certainty to his life and not so much resounding doubt. If only he could trace the lines of his soul onto a canvas and find himself not lacking.

e che sospiri la libertà.

The smooth pads of his fingertips touch one of his charcoal pencils and with it, he outlines a vague sketch of a female body, a figure of soft lines and wispy hair and a stranger's face. For some reason Cinna hates to think of this inelegant drawing as his masterpiece, his one stunning, graceful achievement that will resonant in distant ages, after those who first witnessed it are gone and the world, perhaps, is changed. There is enough doubt in his mind to assure himself that he is not up for the challenge, that he cannot create a new Panem from thread and stitched fabric and the brash emblems which he plans to sew to the breast of the suit. And wings. He must add wings.

This will be his Mockingjay. His clever magician's trick. Turning a girl from District Twelve into a savior. It's a miracle Cinna isn't sure he can work.

With long, impatient strokes, he adds form to the protective suit Katniss will need, the disguise she must don to prove her own strength, which Cinna would never have tried to test in the first place. He decides that's what makes him sorrowful now. And he admits that Katniss never really had a chance, a chance to refuse everything she's been offered since the Games, a new life, power, freedom…

But revolutions aren't meant to be enjoyed, he reminds himself. They aren't meant for the selfish, only the altruistic, which is why Cinna is ready to give his life for it. To bleed out through his work in one last desperate attempt to blind the Capitol and then make them see again.

Il duolo infranga queste ritorte

He stands suddenly, his clever fingers pressed to the small of his back and he stretches, luxuriantly, in the way of felines. The lower half of the sun has reached the horizon now. Its belly is curved with the same exquisiteness that reserves itself to pregnancy and the feminine. Cinna wonders if the symbolism is obvious only to him, if there is no one else in Panem who might gaze at the sun and see what he sees.

Katniss, maybe…

Bur then he laughs, cowed by his own imagination which is no longer limitless but set within the confines of this unforgiving world, in equally dark, unforgiving time. He thinks of children and the exact color of their blood when it blooms in hectic starbursts on T.V. screens. That is the color he will make his Mockingjay's wings, a sign of retribution for those who seek recompense, but the mark of martyrdom as well.

He reaches across his desk and takes up one of his colored pencils to fill in the empty spaces of his sketch. It will be a thing of loveliness, his creation. A thing of terrible, perilous beauty.

Cinna works feverishly, imagining what Katniss will look like, crowned not in flame, but her own unrepentant glory. But then he thinks of the child with her grey eyes, still wearing her mother's braids. He thinks of her, who loved her sister more than her own life. He thinks of Katniss, the Girl on Fire, who defied the Capitol and so stirred something deep within the peoples' hearts. And his heart too.

de' miei martiri sol per pieta

His penthouse is filled with the last glittering notes of the aria, a mournful cry in the night, like a child who is alone and frightened with no one to hear him. Because he is alone too…and afraid.

Cinna puts down his pencil and looks at the sketch. His lips fold in a frown. There is something missing, something he wishes he could give her when she'll need it the most. But Cinna isn't naïve. He knows that he will never make it that far.

Lascia ch'io pianga…

And then the spark within him ignites. The flame rises and devours what's left of him, burning him on his funeral pyre even as the sun sends the last of its light cascading over the horizon and through the penthouse windows. He makes a quick sketch on a blank piece of paper, a few strokes of his hand and it's done. The relic he's come to admire, the symbol of his own resistance, which comforts him now in his Gethsemane.

Cinna looks at what he has drawn and smiles. The Mockingjay pin. And beneath it, in a hand that trembles, he scrawls I'm still betting on you.

The aria ends and like a curtain sweeping across a stage, night falls and the fire, finally, goes out.

Author's Note: The song Cinna listens to is Handel's "Lascia ch'io pianga" an aria from his opera "Rinaldo". The translation into English is as follows.

Let me weep
my cruel fate,
and I sigh for liberty.
May sorrow break these chains
Of my sufferings, for pity's sake.

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