N/A: I'm still fighting writer's block for other stories, but this little one-shot grew out of my attempts to update other things. It's dark. The type of story that only grows from hope and fear in oneself.
WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE TRIGGERED BY DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE OR SCENES OF A GRAPHIC NATURE
Katniss and Peeta die a week apart. Him of blood-poisoning, shivering with fever in a murky swamp. Her by the sword of Cato, the burly boy who kills her atop the cornucopia. The mutts that bite at their heels have eyes like the dead tributes. Peeta's beautiful corn-flower blues gleam frighteningly. I know I will have nightmares about this for years.
I'm sitting on the loveseat with tears in my eyes as Katniss is impaled by the large sword. Cato collapses beside her as she dies.
"Remember who the enemy is," she says between gasps. I lean forward, heart hammering at her words. They won't pull the cameras away. This is the finale. It's a mandatory viewing.
"You don't win. The Capitol wins." She closes her eyes, unafraid to say the forbidden. Unaware of what they'll likely do to Primrose Everdeen. I grip the pillows so tight that my fingers ache.
"Every time. The Victor is the Capitol." She coughs these treasonous words. Cato stares at her, wide eyed, terrified in a way he hasn't shown in the Games.
"They don't own us," Katniss whispers. Her words are followed with blood as it seeps from her lips. She looks up at the unnatural rising of the sun, a muted orange. Then, the canon sounds. Her fire is extinguished and Snow never even felt the heat of the flames.
I scream into the silk Capitol pillows to muffle my anguish, then I run until I can't anymore, stumbling into the meadow, like a drunken miner. I find Gale Hawthorne beside a boulder, hands bloody where he beat it. We lean against the crimson stained rock and don't say a word. We stare into the sky where mockingjays are floating on the breeze. Do they know the loss we feel?
"Hope" is the thing with feathers – I think as I stand beside him. Words from a book I hide between the mattress and box-springs of my bed. A book with forbidden poems, forbidden words that echo of a time before. Katniss would have liked it.
The train pulls into twelve a few months later, carrying the Victor. Cato doesn't smile as he glares at the crowd. I half expected him to gloat, but he just looks hardened and the curve of his stern jaw seems to quiver as he stands through the meek applause. Most people are refusing to move, refusing to applaud. Refusing because Katniss Everdeen became their martyr. The girl on fire lit a spark that's rumbling through our district uncontained, dividing Town and Seam.
I grip Gale's balled fist so hard that my nails leave crescent shapes on his skin.
That night as the Capitolites and stylists dine with my family in the Mayor's Mansion I stare at Cato. He stares back. I see fear in his eyes. I see regret. In mine, I hope he sees determination. One mockingjay may be dead, but hundreds remain.
Primrose Everdeen succumbs to hemorrhagic fever a week later. It infects a quarter of the children in the Seam. People in town refuse to go anywhere near the place, calling them all infested rats.
"They live like animals! That's how the lot of them got it," they say. No one seems to notice that only Seam children are sick, that they aren't contagious to Townies in the slightest. Viruses like this can now be strategically spread. Only the Capitol could do something like that.
If I had known how ill Primrose was, I would have done something, but her mother thought she had it handled a the time. Allium Everdeen disappears shortly after that. Some say she wandered into the forest, some say she was taken. I never see her again and I never hear about her in my father's study. It's the place where I learn all my other secrets. The things I need to bring the Capitol down, brick by brick.
Somehow the Hawthorne boys don't contract the virus, but Posy falls ill within the month. Partly because she was loved by Katniss and partly because it's the right thing to do, I tend to her. I check on her daily, bringing her medicines and sleeping draughts. I demand that Hazelle quarantine her from her brothers
I sing to Posy for hours as she sleeps fitfully. I bring more medicines. I do something forbidden, I pray. I read my forbidden book of poems late at night in my bed and think of Katniss, Peeta, Prim, Gale, and then Posy. At his house, Gale watches me first with anger and then with something too close to gratitude.
"What can we do?" he asks.
"You can hope," I say quietly. And never stop - at all.
Hazelle cries when her daughter's fever breaks. I refuse anything she tries to offer in return.
"Katniss was my only friend," I say simply, "Your family is all she has left."
Hazelle understands. It's what Katniss would have done if Gale had gone to the Games in her stead. She wouldn't have given up on them. She'd fight tooth and nail to keep them fed and clothed, warm and safe.
Hazelle nods, her eyes hardening against the emotions inside. She's a small woman, but she's sharp and angular in the same strong way of her sons. I wonder for only a moment what her husband must have been like. I barely remember him myself, besides the fact that Gale and Rory look much like he did. The particular shade of gray in Gale's dark eyes must have been inherited from his mother though.
She presses warm hands around mine, but her eyes are the thing that pin me in place on her doorstep. "Girl, I will not forget what you did here. Never," she vows.
Gale walks silently beside me when I go home. I don't know why he comes. He's never walked with me before. There are more Peacekeepers patrolling the area, but they know who I am. They say nothing. They pay him no mind. He's untouchable by association with me. He'll be free game once he leaves my side though. They can taunt him when I'm not there, his shield from my presence will be gone.
"Madge," Gale speaks when I reach my front door. It's the first time I've heard him ever say my name. In his voice I hear that he's forgiving me. Perhaps, I even hear gratitude.
"We're not all that she has left. Not all they have left. They both still have you." He stands at the bottom of the steps, looking up at me with moonlight shining in his gray eyes. They're softer than I would have thought, almost soulful in their depth.
"If they had won, you would have been there to hug both of them when they got home," he affirms. I nod at the truth of it. He folds one hand into the other, biding time. For what, I don't know.
"Thank you," he whispers. The soft phrase strikes my heart with an invisible arrow, smooth and swift in my shock. "For Posy."
We stand facing each other a moment longer. Above and below the stairs, opposing pieces that need only climb up or down to meet.
"Be careful," I say quietly.
He knows enough to read between the lines. He'll be targeted next. It's the logical move in this game of deadly chess. He was Katniss' partner. He's as guilty as she. He's a vibrant angry wildfire that's growing and consuming everything around it. The miners follow him, like moths to a flame.
The Capitol may have underestimated their opponents in this match. Their white rooks killed our black pieces, assuming them all pawns. They won't make that mistake with him. By now they would know that he must be the ebony Knight, with feared forks, and an unpredictable pattern of movement. He's a risk. If they know of him, then they know of me.
At first glance they may have thought me a bishop, gliding on the diagonal lines of Capitol, Seam, and Town. I know though, that I am the fearsome charcoal colored queen. Katniss' defiance lives silently in me, no matter where I go I will know their moves. I will block them. I will take up the torch she raised.
I look at Gale and see we could be a team; we can use our dark pieces to knock over the unsuspecting pearly ivory Capitol pawns.
During the long nights, Twelve grows wild in its unrest. Dark like the coal that is mined, easily lit, easily burned. The days are kinder, but the embers still quiver under the sun. Three years pass much in the same way. Three more years filled with tributes dying, starving, killing and surviving. The Capitol moves its pieces and I move mine. In between, Gale, the dark knight divides. In between I bide my time.
I feed the underground resistance information from my father's study. Secrets that are filled with thinks I ought not know. Gale takes my messages like a poor man partakes in wine and cheese, savoring every drop and nibbling every crumb.
We play on, moving around the black and white checkered board. Dancing a fine line with pawns and rooks, knights or kings, and fearsome queens. I grow with Gale in strength and warmth until summer bleeds into Earth. He is my only friend and I will sacrifice my piece in this game, if he can check-mate and win. The warmth that spreads alongside us is trust, friendship, respect. It grows before I know the roots have spread.
"We're friends aren't we? I think she would like that somehow," I tell him as we walk along the fence. He nods, listening to the buzz. The fence is always on now. There is no hunting and he's long given up on refusing my random gifts of fruit, cheese, and bread for his family. He's willing to swallow pride for Posy.
"Yeah," he says, "She would." We watch each other, hands nearly brushing as we continue on our path.
We pass by the place where he would normally slide beneath the wires. I watch him watching those wires and that worn bit of earth. It's like witnessing a kicked puppy. His forlorn expression slips back into hiding though as he turns to look back at me. His eyes spark with the mischief that I know precedes him teasing me. I wonder a moment, if he used to tease Katniss. She had such a short tolerance for it. She probably just threw things at him. I smirk and imagine the things she would have done to get back at him.
"You know," he says wiggling his eyebrows, "Posy keeps saying we should be more than friends, because you're my – 'pretty princess and I'm the ugly rude frog prince who needs a good kiss so I'll shut up.' - Her words, not mine." He holds up his hands as if to say it wasn't his idea, but a sloppy grin peeks through his defenses. His cheeks are rosy today, kissed by the sun and the breeze. I flush at the suggestion and try to hide how it flusters me with the roll of my eyes.
I shake my head, looking him over from his glossy hair the shade of night all the way down to the patched leather boots on his feet. I keep a neutral face and shake my head, acting as though I'm entirely unsatisfied with what I see. I've always known that he's handsome, everyone knows it. Suddenly though, he's more. He's more than I ever thought and I hope to him I am the same. He laughs and gives me a shove on the arm, causing me to misstep in our trek. I shove him back like a child, shrieking when he whips me with a cat-tail by the little billowing stream.
"Ahh! You mongrel, put that weapon down!" I demand.
"Or you'll do what?!" He yells, spearing it toward me like a sword. His laugh is loud, booming and full. My heart swells with the radiance of it and because I know I'll give my emotions away, I shoot off into the meadow away from him, bidding him to chase me. I'm fast; always have been. I weave through the grass and underbrush, stumbling over rocks and down the small hill at the edge of it all.
He catches me ten strides later. His legs, longer than mine, catapult him until he knocks into me tumbling us into the tall grass. I find myself laughing and breathing hard alongside him. His right hand slides down my back where it still lingers after he caught me. We both continue to breathe heavily for a minute, grinning at each other. The rapid rhythm of my heart might not be due entirely to the running.
"Well, you tell Posy that I wouldn't kiss you, even if your lips were worth a million dollars," I boast, shoving him in the torso for good measure.
He fakes a look of offence, pressing his hand to his chest for dramatic 'heartbroken' effect. "You wound me deeply Madge Undersee. I'm worth at least 2 billion," he laughs and shoves me backward into the brush.
"Well, if you keep shoving me Hawthorne I'll have to up that to 3 trillion," I jest.
"Would you marry me for three trillion dollars?" He grabs my hand with a fake look of promise on his face.
"Of course not!" I groan. I can't wipe the silly smile off my face.
"Hey, didn't you say you had something to give me?" He asks, trying to draw his face back into a serious look of non-affect.
I brighten up again. "Yes! It's a book. A forbidden one."
I wiggle my eyebrows at him, much in the same way he did to me earlier. His eyes fill with intrigue and fire. "Well, let's see it then, Undersee."
Another year passes. Gale and I have a regular meeting to exchange information. We do it in the meadow where the prying eyes of the Capitol have less interest and the rigid Town and Seam prejudices can't touch us. It's almost a carefree place. It's almost okay here.
"Bristol proposed to Leevy last weekend. The stupid girl said yes, even though he made a fool of himself." Gale laughs as he narrates the whimsical story of his friends' engagement.
"I am never getting married," I murmur. "Not in this awful place." I throw the rock I've been fidgeting with. It thuds against the dirt about ten feet away. Gale snickers lowly and throws his about five times the distance. I roll my eyes for what feels like the millionth time in this friendship.
"You'll be burning toast beside me by summer's end," he boasts. Gale smiles against his own words, but there is strange note of passion in his timbre. Almost as if he's certain of it.
I scoff at him, feigning humor to fight the blush. He's always making me blush these days, teasing and goading me on. His smirking smile blooms into a heady grin. He's even more beautiful when he smiles this way, somehow less angular and rough around the edges. I inhale softly, feeling shaky under his brazen gaze. My fingers twist together while the toe of my right boot swings against some weeds in an effort to affect nonchalance.
"What makes you so confident that I would marry you Gale Hawthorne? I wouldn't marry you for a trillion dollars," I remind him. I attempt to sound haughty, but my voice quivers under my poorly hidden nerves. He shoots me a peculiar look.
I turn my face skyward, avoiding his piercing eyes. I fall into the tall weeds and lay back in the prickly grass. He doesn't immediately respond. He lowers himself beside me, folding his arms up under his head as he watches the blue expanse above us. I feel uneasy without a teasing retort from him. It's like him to try and get my goat, saying he would marry me. It's not like him to abruptly stop bantering with me.
I glance toward him. His eyes are already on my face, watching me, brow furrowed as though he's examining a snare that isn't quite functioning properly. The furrow softens as his eyes settle on mine. A sort of recognition passes between the hazy gray. It spreads an ease on his face and something in my heart starts to waver apprehensively, unsure why neither of us is looking away.
He swallows and his mouth parts for a beat before he says anything. He looks almost timid. Something I can't say I've ever seen on the man.
"I wouldn't call it confidence," he murmurs, voice so soft I hardly catch it. "I'd name it hope."
I exhale a breath I didn't even realize I was holding in. "Hope?" I question just as softly, though my heart hammers in my ears.
"Yes. It's something that you've taught me," he affirms, words caressing the breeze that is beginning to tickle the air between us.
Then he surprises me further, by reciting the first stanza of my favorite poem. One printed in a beautiful script within the book I had lent him. His lips form the words so tenderly I can't imagine that they are coming from his mouth at all. It's the wind, carrying my heart away.
Yet he defies all reason as he says,
"Hope" is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all –
I sit up sharply, surprising myself. He follows suit, rising just as quickly. We kneel across from each other like two skittish animals ready to run if so provoked. We hover there, staring at each other, barely a foot apart. It feels like a great precipice, a cavernous divide where a valley has formed between two mountains. I realize that the fear inside my own chest is visible just behind the stormy gray that gazes back at me. The breeze seems to push stronger against us and my hair begins to shiver across my face, but I don't move to brush it back.
Quietly I recite the second stanza, voice growing firmer as I go,
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
Gale's shoulders, drawn back just moments ago, slide forward with acceptance. I find myself melting toward him as well. We draw together, two unassuming mockingjays perched face to face on a little olive branch.
I realize suddenly that we were introduced in an elaborate mating ritual, a dance, a tango that we've been unknowingly performing since Katniss and Peeta's deaths in the arena. We ebbed and flowed as we fought and grew alongside each other over the years since, learning to create our birdsongs without them. We should have known. We were so busy dancing through a chess game with the Capitol that we didn't notice this beat underlining it all.
Why didn't we recognize the movements? Why didn't we recognize the tune? The dance drew to a close without us. Our birdsong, our words unspoken, our coupling calls quivering in the forest, the meadow, the mine. Here and now, Gale seems to have heard. He recognizes the lilt of my broken birdsong and he knows the stanzas that complete it.
Gale grasps onto my shaking hands. His palms are warm and envelope mine entirely. He firmly recites the last lines of the poem,
I've heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
I find that tears are gliding down the curve of my cheek and I'm really not sure why. "Emily Dickinson. That's my favorite poem," I say.
"Mine too," he admits. I turn my hands to tightly grip his in return.
"Do you really hope that?" I ask him. The breeze around us is turning colder, but the heat of him is spreading toward me despite it. He has a certainty to his expression now. I realize that some part of me has hoped too, that after all we've suffered we could build a new song, a new dance together. Under all the burdens of our warring district and the subtle game we play with the Capitol.
"I never dared to let it before, but now – yes, absolutely. I have hoped that you could be mine."
I bite my lip, "You're not teasing me."
He scoffs and the tension in my heart seems to wane. "You'll marry me by summer's end?" He asks softly and graces me with a tender smile that I've only ever seen given to Posy.
"Is this a proposal?" I whisper.
"After, I just said that I would never marry," I say, more firmly. I smirk at him, finding strength to grasp onto.
He doesn't reply, instead he lets his lips form the beginning notes of our new song. I melt into the softness and allow him to draw me into the tune.
We're engaged in spirit for only a few short weeks. With nary a chance to share the joy. We paused our game with the Capitol, but Snow kept playing. He kept moving his ivory pieces without us, unchecked, fanning the horrible fury of a different sort of flame. The fear that divides our district grows into complete unrest. The Capitol is taking more and more children. The Town blames all things different. All things Seam.
I wake in the night with flames shivering waves of light on my bedroom walls. I'm disoriented for a moment, before I realize the shadows and light are coming from outside. I run to the window and see the district alight. I hear people screaming, yelling in a horrible sort of glee. The sound of their boisterous voices fills my veins with ice and I don't know why. With shaking fingers I quickly get dressed. I scream for my father and mother, but don't hear anyone. Even the staff are gone. Were they taken?
I rush out onto the street, straight into a mass of people. Someone shoves me roughly into a burly wall of chest. I grasp onto the thick leather jacket to steady myself before I realize what I'm doing. The tide of people pulls at us, but we've rooted in the patchy grass.
"Watch it girly," the man bellows, spraying blood from a wound at his mouth. The droplets fleck on my cheeks. Gasping, I let go and lean away from him. As he turns, I catch sight of the leather I had clung to, Gale's hunting jacket. I glance around me confused. The man scoffs at me and attempts to push past.
"Where did you get that jacket?" I demand. I grasp back onto the material desperately. The large man glances down, sneering. I see that his blond locks are dipped in crusty crimson blood. Curls plastered to his forehead like jagged red teeth.
"I got it off a dead miner," he laughs, "It was too nice for a slum rat like that."
My breath stutters as a vice crowds my heart, as though I have been punched suddenly and intensely. Then it all breathes out at once until I'm gasping great gulps of air after nearly drowning.
"Dead?" I whisper.
Somehow he hears me in the boisterous jostling crowd. "Dead. The way they all should fucking be. Trying to make a resistance to the Capitol, get us all killed!" He shoves me away from him and my fingers lose the supple material. I desperately throw myself at him, catching him off guard.
"Give it back you pig!" I shriek, trying to yank it off his right arm.
"You crazy bitch, he ain't gonna need it anymore. He's burning in that smelly pile of Seam filth." He tries to shake me off his arm, but I cling as tightly as I can. Tears begin to stream down my face, nearly blinding me.
"It's mine! It's mine! Give it back to me," I wail in desperation.
"Let go! Were you that Seam rat's whore?" He growls, but I've snared him and I dig my fingers roughly into his bare wrist. I refuse to release him.
"Get off me," he barks as I throw all my weight toward him, screaming like a wild caged animal until he concedes. He rips the jacket off, tossing it into me heavily.
"Fucking crazy bitch," he mutters as I melt to the ground gripping the jacket tightly. The wave of people parts around me like a river rounds a jutted rock, splitting sharply against my immovable form. He stalks off, but I don't care.
Sometime later as the tide of bodies begins to slow, I rise. My legs drift toward the blazing Seam, my arms full with a heavy load. The sun is beginning to rise in the East, permeating the smoke-filled air with an ethereal glow. I meander, drunk with disorienting pain. It's difficult to determine the way through the rubble, but I reach the mine. There is a horrible choking stench in the air, coppery in its tang. I round the corner toward the slag heap and find the source of the metallic scent.
Bodies. Hundreds of bodies, burning like refuse.
Children draped like ragdolls against the legs of grown men bloodied devoid of faces. Women hung limp and half naked. I stumble forward, clinging to Gale's jacket. My feet wrestle against broken boards and debris. The flames shimmer full of odd colors against the dawn sky.
I hear myself moaning, long keening noises. I feel them deep in my chest, rattling my ribs wildly in fear. So many bodies, piled deeper than a tree is tall. The moans in my mouth like cattle dying at the slaughter. The blaze of burning flesh is too intense, but I let it overheat me as I cry. How could this happen here? How could people do this without thought of right and wrong?
I fall to the ground, Gale's jacket pillowing between my head and the coal-crusted earth. In all these bodies lies my heart. A man was once a cord within it, three notes in the key of D. Notes that will no longer play. My wailing sobs burn down like the bodies before me until I'm only whimpering and shaking without tears. My nostrils are caked with the bitter metal of the burning blood, so I push my breaths through dry lips.
No one comes to hold vigil beside me. I lie alone until nightfall, draped over Gale's jacket. As dusk begins to drift down I stand, pulling the jacket over my shoulders. My hands don't reach the cuffs and the rough edge of the bottom falls mid-thigh.
It's approaching a biting wind now. As I walk slow and quiet toward the town I push my hands past the cuffs and into the pockets of the jacket, searching for Gale's patched gloves. I pause in the jagged road as my fingers brush against smooth roundness. I grasp the tiny pieces and pull them out of the deep pocket, opening my shaking palm in the last light of day. Cushioned like eggs in a nest sit a pair of golden rings
Wedding bands.
The Capitol moved all their pieces and consumed all the mockingjays at once, using their own flames to snuff them out. They thought they had me cornered, the last mockingjay, ready to be defeated. They underestimated my game again. They underestimated my birdsong, my fight, my heart, my dance within their black and white board.
I know who can help me. I know what he can do for me. My feet take me to him. I numbly climb the steps of his horridly garish mansion in Victor's Village. He comes to the door, reeking of alcohol and carrying a near empty bottle, hair mussed, and clothes stale.
"Wha-da-ya want, sweet-har?" He slurs, peering blearily at me. "You know, wha tha smell is?" He waves his bottle around as though it's cutting through the horrid aroma. Summarizing his disgust with it.
"Yes," I say simply. "People in the Seam."
He scratches at his crotch and takes a swig of the bottle before he clears his throat and peers over my head at the last remnants of foggy smoke hovering over the area that was once the Seam.
"What the hell are they burning over there, smells like death rolled over." He complains, readying to slam the door on me. I shove my foot into the crack before he swings it shut. He glares out at me, forcing the door back open and stepping on my shoe with his bare foot, grinding his heel into my toes.
"I told you," I say firmly my voice starting to get some of its edge back, despite the gravel of the human dust in my throat, "People. In the Seam. All of them, burning."
He stares at me and suddenly a wave of understanding melts across his face, followed by something that can only be regret. It's like the face that Cato bore at my dinner table so long ago. In this situation my face remains the same. The look I gave Cato then, one of determination, stands proud on my face now. Except now, it's fearsome too. Haymitch's eyes widen as the truth bares down on him.
"They're all dead Haymitch - every - one. I found them stacked like a pile of garbage." He looks over my head, eyes hardening.
"Katniss' boy? His family?" He asks. "My boy, my family," I grit out. He realizes suddenly, what I am wearing. His eyes rake over my tear-stained, dirt-caked face, questioning me, coming to a conclusion already.
"I tore this off a man's back. It's mine and he took it from me," I say in explanation, my voice cold. The rings are still in my fist. I raise my palm to him, shaking slightly as I display the precious treasure. The golden loops gleam in the rising sun. Haymitch puts his palm under mine, quelling the shaking. I raise my eyes to his. A light grey, like Katniss' were.
"The Capitol will be mad that their miners were trapped and killed like the rats that people say they are. They'll be mad they lost so many pawns. They'll punish this district. They'll take double the children from Town. When that happens, Haymitch, I will volunteer. I will volunteer and you will train me. I will win and I will burn the Capitol to the ground. For the future that was stolen from me, and for Katniss and Peeta. Do you understand me?"
I move my pieces, I bide my time. In between the hope rises. In between I burn brighter. I act my part. I dance my dance. I float and fly. I win, I cry. When they crown me Victor I come prepared. I make my last move, a knife to Snow's heart. Before the Peacekeepers can get to me I've stabbed it into his chest several more times.
"Checkmate," I hiss into his face as the blood begins to dribble through his lips.
"Didn't your mother ever tell you not to play with fire?"