The Presidential mansion sat alone atop the hill in the middle of the Capitol, perfectly positioned so that every resident in the city could see its imposing form from all angles. The surrounding night would have been still and silent if not for the raucous party in full swing in the mansion's vast courtyard, and in the center of it all, the star- crossed lovers of District Twelve.

The glittering lights and the loud music were headache- inducing by this point in the evening, and Katniss wanted nothing more than to go home. Peeta stood faithfully by her side, his hand wrapped around hers as it had been all night, but the wear was starting to show on him, too. It was long past midnight, their bellies were full, and their eyes were beginning to droop, but Effie had promised them only thirty more minutes at this final party and then they'd be on the train home. The Victory Tour was at an end at last, and Katniss and Peeta were nothing but grateful to be headed back to District Twelve.

A loud laugh from the partygoers echoed behind them. Katniss looked past the tables laden with food and the dance floor filled with people to see Venia and Flavius exiting a tent on the edge of the party. The pair of Katniss's prep team members tottered towards them on wobbly legs, clearly intoxicated out of their minds.

"Have you two gone to see Madame Alcina yet?" Venia slurred when she stumbled over to Katniss and Peeta.

"No, we don't really-" Katniss said.

"Oh you must go have your palms read! She's simply divine," Flavius trilled, pushing the pair towards the tent at the edge of the yard. Katniss looked to Peeta, who merely shrugged.

"Why not?" He murmured to her. "It'll kill some time, won't it?" Katniss couldn't argue with that, especially because she could spot a few more Capitol citizens making their way towards them. The hordes of party guests had hardly left the pair of them alone all night and Katniss wasn't in the mood to deal with any more of the colorful, self-possessed people than she already had. So Peeta hooked her arm through his and led her to the tent draped from top to bottom with glittering red shawls. On the outside, a sign: Fortunes by Alcina- Discover what your future holds.

Katniss had to resist rolling her eyes. It was exactly the kind of superfluous thing that would exist in the Capitol and nowhere else in Panem, where people had no better way to spend their time or money. Besides, President Snow's cold eyes had already told her what her future was going to look like, and she doubted very much that the truth of it lay in this tent. She followed Peeta inside anyway because the alternative was no more desirable than having her future predicted by someone who couldn't have the faintest idea of what her future as a victor could possibly mean. Upon entering, they laid their eyes upon the most eccentric women they'd seen anywhere in Panem.

Katniss and Peeta were no strangers to the bizarre fashions here in the Capitol, but this woman was something else entirely. What little they could see of her natural skin was ghostly pale and the remainder of it was covered entirely in spindly, black tattoos. They curved and twisted, creating a cacophony of indistinguishable shapes and patterns upon her skin. Her hair was a fiery, unnatural shade of red. Here in the glowing candlelight it seemed to flicker like a real fire. Her eyes were dark, the pupils so enlarged in the dim lighting that it was impossible to determine their true color. There was something peculiar about the eyes, too. Something in them that was steady and solid and perceptive. The vapid self- absorption that possessed so many people in the Capitol was entirely lacking here. This woman had eyes that could see right through your very soul. "Ahh," the woman purred. "I was hoping the star- crossed lovers would find their way to my tent." Katniss and Peeta shared a raised eyebrow glance, and then turned back to the fortuneteller.

"Well, we were told that you're the best," Peeta piped up on instinct. Katniss was grateful that he chose to fill the silence. Something about this woman and this place made her mouth go dry, her tongue thick and heavy in her mouth. An uncomfortable tingle slithered up her spine.

"Have a seat," the woman said, gesturing to the two armchairs across from her spindle- legged table. The pair did as instructed, and the woman turned to Katniss first. She extended a withered hand, palm up to Katniss. "Your hand, please, dear." Katniss placed her olive- skinned hand into the woman's heavily tattooed one. Madame Alcina ran a long finger down the center, eliciting a cool shiver that zipped up Katniss's arm.

She spent a long time tracing the lines of Katniss's hand before she spoke. "There's conflict," the strange woman whispered finally. "Oohh yes, and determination, defiance. But beneath your stubborn air, your heart has always known the answer you're seeking now. Find the place where your heart and your mind come together." Katniss blinked at the woman in confusion, her trademark scowl settling into place. What on earth could that mean?

Madame Alcina turned next to Peeta. Again, she studied his palm for several minutes, running a finger down every single line and crease of his hand. "You, young man, are at war with yourself. At odds with your love and your desires. The only way to fix it is to confront it." She grabbed a shocked Katniss's hand, entangled her fingers with Peeta's, and then began gesticulating wildly in the air between the pair of them. "Your destinies are intertwined so very closely together, you may not even realize it at this moment! You need to become one! Take the path that leads to each other and never look back. Your fates are sealed within each other! Realize that potential and all will be well."

Silence hung heavy in the air when the woman finished her impassioned fortune, her pupils blown and chest heaving with excitement. Katniss and Peeta gaped at her, their hands still laced together, and at a complete loss for how to respond. Luckily for them, time was on their side, for Effie chose that moment to poke her head through the front flap of the tent.

"Katniss! Peeta! Venia said you'd gone this way; the train leaves in twenty minutes and the there are some important goodbyes you must make!" Their escort placed a stern hand on both their shoulders and promptly ushered them from the tent, but not before Peeta could glance back at the mysterious woman, whose jet black lips were quirked into a smug smirk on her tattooed face. He couldn't explain the reason for it, but her expression gave him an ominous feeling in the pit of his stomach, as though the feast he'd eaten earlier had come alive and was attempting to make an escape from his belly.

The feeling stayed with Peeta as he led Katniss through the crowd of socialites and gamemakers and politicians. By the time they bid farewell to the highest-ranking officials in Panem and boarded the train, he couldn't keep it in any longer. "Do you think she was right?" he asked Katniss as soon as the door to their shared bedroom slid closed behind them.

"Do I think who was right?" Katniss asked, distracted as she went to work tugging the pins out of her elaborate braided hairstyle.

"That Madame Alcina woman. Do you think she was right about our… well, our destinies being so closely wrapped around each other and all that?"

Katniss gave a derisive snort and massaged her scalp, now freed of its updo. "Of course she was. We're engaged now, Peeta. The whole country knows that, so yes I guess you could say our destinies are entwined." She held up her fingers and made air quotes at the last word, rolling her eyes. "It's all mindless drivel, anyway, just like everything else in the Capitol. I wouldn't waste your time worrying too much on it."

"Yeah, but didn't you notice something… I don't know, something different about her? She seemed real, Katniss. Not like the preps, or even like Effie. I think she knew we've putting on an act." This gave Katniss pause as she thought it over. Yes, the woman's black eyes had given the impression that she was more intuitive than most in the Capitol, almost like President Snow in a way. Not quite in the same cold and calculating manner as he, but in a more discerningly subtle way. Then there was the fact that something about the woman had sent unusual shivers tingling down her spine from the moment they entered her tent, but Katniss had attributed that to the lateness of the hour and the awkwardness of the situation.

"I think our fates were pretty much sealed the moment I held out those berries in the arena. She probably realized that and took advantage of it to try and scare us." Katniss reasoned.

"Maybe you're right," Peeta said, though uncertainty clouded his voice.

"I am." She nodded her head as though the matter was settled. "Don't let it bother you. We have so many other things to worry about right now, as it is."

She has a point, Peeta thought, as they climbed into bed together. It was silly to worry about the fleeting words of a woman they didn't even know. Not when real dangers from real enemies lurked so clearly in the periphery of their lives. Katniss nestled herself into Peeta's side and he wrapped his arms around her, just has he had almost every night they'd spent aboard this train. Despite his troubled thoughts, his exhaustion- combined with Katniss's body heat and soothing rhythm of the train as it slipped through the night- lulled him into a dreamless sleep almost instantly.


It was Katniss who woke first the next morning, the sun a mere sliver of brightest orange on the horizon. The train compartment was still mostly blanketed in darkness, and the scenery was whipping by much too quickly to determine where in Panem they could possibly be. With a measure of sweeping relief, her first thought was that wherever they happened to be, it was certainly far from the Capitol. Also that sometime today, they would be home. Her second thought was that she needed extract herself from Peeta so she could use the bathroom. She made to gently disentangle herself from Peeta's still sleeping form, dragging back the blankets and attempting to exit the bed as quietly as possible. Then she lost her balance the second she tried to step down onto the carpet, landing on the floor with an almighty crash and an even louder yelp of shock.

The reason for her fall was explained at once when Katniss tried to pull her feet underneath her into a standing position, and she found that the left leg of her pajama pants hung flaccid and empty. The right was presently splayed out in front of her, but the left leg appeared to be missing entirely.

She only had one leg.

Her arms flailed as she felt around wildly for her missing leg, her hands landing on her upper thigh and following it to the end where it tapered into nothing but smooth skin and bone just below the knee. Katniss froze, the rising panic in her chest overwhelming her as the light from the bedside lamp flicked on and Peeta leaned over the side of the bed to investigate the commotion.

"Katniss, are you alright?" Only it wasn't Peeta's concerned voice that called out to her. And it certainly wasn't Peeta's face, either.

It was her voice. Her face. Her body.

As he peered down at the fallen body on the floor, Peeta realized at the same time Katniss did that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. For he was looking down at himself, sprawled out on the floor wearing only pajama pants and noticeably missing his prosthetic leg. His eyes flew down to inspect himself still in the bed, noting the tanned, slender hands that could not possibly be his own and the raven hair fanned out across his torso. He brushed the long strands away from his chest and his hands froze on his body. Were those… breasts? He ventured a squeeze, and sure enough, under his palms were two plump mounds of flesh. Small, but most definitely present. He gaped at his chest in horror, his newly silver eyes meeting the blue irises of the body on the ground that- by every law of common sense and plain reason- should have belonged to him. Yet inexplicably, it didn't.

They held the gaze for a long time, chests heaving with panting breaths and minds racing for an explanation. This wasn't possible. It simply wasn't and yet…

"Katniss," Peeta whispered, "I think we've been cursed."

As absurd as it sounded, as absolutely, utterly impossible as it was, instinct told Katniss that Peeta was right. What other explanation could there possibly be? Still in a state of shock, Peeta climbed out of bed and grabbed the prosthetic leg propped against his nightstand. It was subsequently the weirdest sensation in the world to help Katniss put the leg onto his body from the outside. He fastened it around the stump below the knee and watched as the Capitol grade alloy melded itself seamlessly with the flesh of her (his?) leg. He pulled her to her feet and she wobbled, unused to the indescribable feeling of solid floor beneath an extremity that did not exist.

"It takes some getting used to," said Peeta.

"I don't want to get used to it. I want to fix it!" Katniss snapped. But upon seeing the look on his (her?) face, she backpedaled at once. "Peeta, I'm sorry. I just- I don't get it. Howdid this happen?"

"I don't know," he replied, wracking his brain for a reason, any reason that would explain why he woke up in Katniss Everdeen's body this morning, and she woke up in his. If he was correct, and they were in fact cursed, someone had to have done this to them. But who? President Snow seemed the most likely candidate, but how on earth could he have managed something of this scale? And better yet without their knowledge? He was a cold, calculating, monster of a human, but still he was just a human.

"What if... what if whatever did this to us isn't… human?" Peeta supplied. Katniss merely raised her blond eyebrows. "What if the Capitol created some kind of mutt or virus and we came into contact with it unknowingly at the party last night?"

"It's possible," Katniss said, though doubt filled her voice.

"Maybe Haymitch knows something about it. He's been around the Capitol for a long time. He might be able to help us," said Peeta.

"No! We can't let anyone else know about this." There was an unmistakable ferocity in her voice that belonged to Katniss alone, regardless of the body she happened to inhabit at the time. "We have to hide this until we can find a way to reverse it!"

Peeta had opened his mouth to respond just as a sharp rapping on the door made them both nearly jump out of their skins. "Up up up!" Effie's voice trilled though the door. "We have our last big day in front us! You two will be back to District Twelve in just a few short hours!" With a mutual flood of relief, they heard the click- clacking of her heels marching away from the door.

"Look, we won't tell anyone," said, Peeta, his tone low and conspiratory. "Not yet, anyway. But for now if we don't want anyone to find out, I think the best course of action is for each of us to act as much as possible like the other. Do you think you can manage that, Katniss?"

Katniss wondered- could she pretend to be Peeta Mellark? He was so much better than her already, not only at putting on the act, but also at making it believable. Between the two of them, he carried most (okay, practically all) of the weight of the star-crossed lover's ruse. His were some awfully big shoes to fill, but at the moment she couldn't see any other choice in front of her.

She had a feeling her face showed as much doubt as she felt when she gave him an affirming nod, but if it did, Peeta did not say. Instead, they gathered the clothes Cinna and Portia had chosen for the day's closing ceremonies and headed their separate ways to change. Peeta into the bathroom while Katniss remained in the bedroom.

When the bathroom door had closed behind him, Peeta hunched over the sink, locked in a staring contest with his reflection in the mirror. His long hair hung in a wild tangle around his shoulders, his grey eyes over bright with shock in the sunken purple rings surrounding them. The strange thing was, he didn't feel any different in this body, save for the fact that he had two intact feet standing on solid ground. If he closed his eyes, Peeta could have sworn up and down that he was in his own body and this was nothing more than an elegantly crafted nightmare, courtesy of the Capitol. He switched on the tap and began furiously scrubbing his face with the icy water flowing from the jet, as though he could scour away the olive skin and return it to its normal pale and freckled state. When he looked up at last, Katniss's reflection stared back at him, entirely unchanged.

With a grunt of frustration, he turned defiantly away from the mirror and grabbed the pile of clothes he was meant to wear. I can do this, he thought. After all, how hard could it be to impersonate Katniss Everdeen?

Back in the bedroom, Katniss sat gingerly on the edge of the bed to remove Peeta's pajama pants, still unsteady on his prosthetic leg. How on earth had he learned to walk with this thing as smoothly as he did? Some days she forgot he even had it at all, as sure and steady was his gait. That was, until he'd take it off at bedtime with a groan of relief and her eyes would flit away from the remaining stump of his leg. The stump itself wasn't what bothered her so much as the reminder of how it had come to exist in the first place.

She wasn't brave enough to remove the underwear despite the fact that Peeta had been wearing them since yesterday; she knew they'd both worn underwear for much longer periods of time in the Games. One more day would do no harm. His jeans, however, did turn out to present a bit of a problem. Once she managed to finagle the left pant leg up the metal leg without tripping and falling flat on her face again, she found that the seam of the pants, centered as it was, rested uncomfortably against her crotch. Having had no idea this was how it felt to wear pants as a man, Katniss decided she wasn't terribly fond of the sensation.

Katniss took a couple of precarious steps around the room to test the waters before coming to the conclusion that this simply wasn't going to work. Given that she had no intention of asking Peeta how he always managed this situation, she did the only thing that made sense. She dove her hand valiantly into the pants and shifted his package away from the seam and to the right. It did feel better off to the side, though it still felt strange to have something dangling there at all.

She startled when Peeta exited the bathroom and tried to look as though she hadn't just had her hand down his pants. He was fully dressed with the exception of one article of clothing clutched in his first. "I don't need this thing." He thrust the bra at Katniss and she flinched away from it as though he'd tried to hand her a venomous snake.

Interpreting his reluctance to mean that he couldn't figure out how to put it on, Katniss fought to keep the corners of her mouth from turning upwards into a smile. "Oh yes you do," she said.

"Why? It's not like… well, I mean- it's not like there's all that much there to support."

She folded her arms across her new masculine chest and glared at him with narrowed eyes, but she had to admit privately that Peeta did have a point. Her breasts weren't particularly prominent, which is why all of the bras Cinna designed for her had a little additional padding in them. The extra boost was usually necessary to fill out all the pretty dresses he'd made for the Victory Tour, but she certainly wasn't going to tell Peeta that. "Because... because if you don't Haymitch and Effie and Cinna will definitely notice and they'll suspect that something is off," she said, which was true enough anyway. "Here, I'll help you. Take off the dress."

Without stopping to think of the ramifications of doing so, Peeta followed her instructions and slipped the dress over his head. Suddenly Katniss was face to face with her own bare chest; the small but proud breasts peaked with the cool air of the train compartment. "Turn around," she gulped, her mouth sapped of moisture while her face flooded with color. In the back of her mind, she wondered why the extra parts in her pants twitched at the sight.

Equally as beet red as Katniss, Peeta turned away from her to face the wall. He felt her arms encircle his waist and her hands at his back, fastening the garment. He was eternally grateful that he wasn't currently in possession of his penis when her fingers brushed his nipples as she adjusted the cups of his bra, but there was still an unfamiliar surge of electricity that jolted in the hollow valley between his legs.

The blush had not faded from either of their cheeks when they left their room to join the others for breakfast. For once they were grateful for Effie's incessant prattle about schedules and timetables, for all they had to do in response was nod and smile. Katniss thought she caught Haymitch giving the pair of them the occasional sideways glance from behind his flask. She looked away each time it happened, convinced that their mentor would see her behind Peeta's eyes if she allowed herself to make eye contact with him.

They stumbled through the rest of the day (for Katniss this was literal- damn leg) pretending to be each other.

While Katniss was prepped and ready for the cameras hours before they were to arrive in the district, Peeta gained an immediate understanding of why she always bemoaned the prep process when he was forced to sit through her beauty routine for the first time. He'd thought he had it bad, but the hours Venia, Octavia, and Flavius spent slathering him in pungent goo and curling his hair and powdering every inch of exposed skin was mind-numbing to the point of torture. It went on and on and on all morning long. Luckily the preps chatted amongst themselves about the party last night as they worked on him, with Octavia notably disgruntled about the fact that she'd not had her fortune read by the Great Madame Alcina.

"I'm going to be famous in the Capitol one day," Flavius said with a wistful sigh. "Madame promised that I'd soon have my very own tribute to style."

"Oh, that's just wonderful!" Venia gushed. "She told me I'm about to find the love of my life! What about you Katniss? Katniss?"

Peeta was only startled out of his reverie when Venia's hand landed on his shoulder, momentarily having forgotten that to the prep team, he was Katniss. "I'm sorry, what did you say?" He put on his most Katniss-like expression and tried to recover from the fumble.

"What did Madame Alcina tell you about your future?" Venia hedged.

And then it hit him. Madame Alcina. The fortuneteller. Of course. He could have slapped himself for not realizing it sooner. He tried to cover the moment of hesitation. "Oh! She… she said Kat-Peeta and I are going to have a long and prosperous life together."

"Did she say anything about children?" Octavia pressed eagerly.

"She... hinted at that." Peeta said evasively.

"Oh can you imagine!" Octavia gushed. "Any little baby of theirs would be absolutely adorable! With his hair and her eyes…" Peeta let them carry on about the nonexistent Everlark (really, how stupid) baby that would never be, but his mind was racing. What had the mysterious fortuneteller said to them last night? The hour had been so late and he had been so tired, but he squeezed his eyes shut, picturing the scene and willing his brain to remember.

Then his eyes flew open. He had to find Katniss.


A/N: Hello Hunger Games fandom, are you there? It's been so long since I've written anything, but I am so excited to finally be posting this story. It's an idea I've had on my mind for literally years but I haven't been able to bring it to fruition until now. In the past couple of years I've had some big life changes- I graduated nursing school with my Bachelor's degree and began my first real job. It's scary and exciting all at the same time. School didn't leave much time for writing, but when I finally put down the nursing textbooks, Everlark came pouring out. As you read, keep in mind this is totally for fun- it's not meant to be serious or even realistic. It kind of dives into crackfic realm, so prepare for shenanigans ahead! Let me know what you think, and as always, you can find me on tumblr as everlarkstoastbabies.