A/N: for day five of Caesar's Palace shipping week. I wrote this in five minutes and I am sorry.
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The Reaping for the 74th Hunger Games is the first time you see her in twenty years, the first time since you said forever, and she smiled before she broke your heart for a boy from the Seam. She is drawn and shaking and she clutches a tearful child to her chest.
If you concentrate you can remember her as the girl you walked to school every morning, the girl who twined sunshine into her hair alongside ribbons begged from her father's shop. It was fitting, you thought then. She smiled like the sun in those early days.
You do not see her as that girl any longer.
They take your son from you. You do not fight them. It is pointless: they will take him anyway, then kill you and make sure your family sees the body. You think, he would have fought them. Perhaps that's why she left you.
Her daughter goes too. The children are not siblings. You love her as naturally as you breathe, but you were never awarded the luxury of a returned sentiment. It's your fault, you suppose, for believing you deserved that in the first place. The seasons have changed a thousand times since she ran from you to the Seam, left you with a promise unspoken on your lips and your heart shattered. You'd picked the pieces up yourself, later, scrounged them from where they lay lodged in the dirt and pledged — again, yet again — to love the harshest woman District Twelve has ever nurtured.
You leave your house early on the morning the Games are scheduled to begin. District Twelve, Seam and Merchant sectors alike, has shuttered its windows against the day, but somehow it has seeped through cracks as all dark things do, rousing first the workers who must begin the long trek to the coal mines, and now you. The streets are barren at such an early hour, and you are undisturbed as you walk through the Seam. In person it is the first time you have visited her house; mentally you have beaten a path to her door time and time again, but the things you have done in your head do not come true very often.
You knock, wait a hundred and one heartbeats before the door cracks open a fraction. She does not look as she did when she left you, seperate and beautiful and tragic in her refusal, but maybe you're not the same person who stood in the rain and watched her leave.
She says, "You don't owe me."
You say, "I promised her."
You're not invited in, but when you leave soon after, your basket is empty.