A/N: I've been holding onto this one for a while now and I just need to let it be free.
"What do you want, Clove?"
She leans forward and smiles. "I want them all to burn."
Their plans begin in the dead of the night, when the moon cowers behind wisps of cloud and the lights of the Capitol drown out any stars in the sky. They're both wary at first, afraid that the other will turn them in for what is surely treason of the highest form, but eventually a plan forms from the splinters of the past into a net, a snare, a spider's web with death at the center.
The woman who sits across from her for those first tentative meetings is the former Gamemaker's assistant. Fulvia is stout and stubborn and reminds her a little of the mutts that had chased her in the finale of the Games, the ones with the wiry fur and wolfish snouts and human eyes, but she thinks Fulvia would bite harder.
Fulvia says lots of things, questions without answers, beginnings without endings, and expects Clove to fill them in. She doesn't.
On their third meeting with Clove dodging every verbal trap like the nimble redhead had skirted their mines, Fulvia finally snaps. She unleashes a tale of secrets and lies, of mutually assured destruction and scandals swept under the rug, of a District watching from the shadows as the world they abandoned burns.
When it's over, she nods. "Take me to her."
She knows right away that there's more to the story than anyone will tell her. Why would a District bristling with weapons and clamoring for war slink underground at a threat? Why would they abandon their allies? The simplest explanation is that they're cowards, but she's not dumb enough to think it's the right one. After all, the other Districts might call Two the Capitol's lapdogs, but they don't ever stop to think about how practical it really is. There's always a better reason, she just needs to find it. So she stares at the wall beneath the ravaged landscape of Thirteen and thinks about why.
Maybe she's as delusional as they say. Who is she to go against the Capitol? Just a scared little girl clinging to the memory of a boy who probably hadn't even loved her anyway. It's suicide to follow her, they whisper. Sometimes she thinks they're right.
Maybe she's fighting for all the wrong reasons, for she's certainly not a good person. They wanted a martyr, but they got a Career. They wanted a love story, but they got a broken half of one. They wanted a savior, but they got a cold-eyed Victor who would gladly slaughter all the sniveling outlier brats she's supposed to be saving if it meant she could get her revenge. They tell her she should care about all the children born to die, but she doesn't. There was only one person in the world that she cared about, but now he's gone and so is her sanity.
Maybe she's crazy, but she'll burn the whole goddamned world because it reminds her of him.
Over the months, her smile becomes more unnatural, hard and jagged like broken glass. She touches her lips in the mirror and wonders if Cato died because he cut himself on her edges.
He didn't, of course. He died because she killed him.
But she had to kill him. She had to lean into his kiss and throw her arms around his shoulders. She had to pull away to see his face one last time. She had to plunge her knife into his back as he stared at her with bright, bright eyes full of betrayal and accusation and pain. She had to win. She had to.
Bloodied shards of mirror litter the floor.
They let her go to Two after the bombings, after her people lie dead and bloodied in the streets. She walks slowly among the carnage, trying to avoid looking at any of the faces, but it doesn't really matter if she fails: most are mutilated beyond recognition. She stops just once to brush her fingers against the crumbling frame of her childhood home before she heads down to the mines.
She doesn't go inside. She's been in there once before, back when a life in the quarries was all she could expect for herself. She remembers suffocating, clawing at her throat to gulp down air, feeling the walls press in as the earth trembled beneath her. She remembers shuddering, vision flickering, biting her lip to keep herself from sobbing as the mountain yawned and collapsed the tunnel that held her parents. She remembers promising herself that she would never, ever end up in there, buried alive under tons of dirt and stone, choking to death beneath the capricious mountain. She would kill herself first.
Instead, she finds the altar where people used to pray for safety before descending into the heart of the mountain. It's all rubble, the ceiling crumbled to the floor, open to the stars. Sharp stones dig into her skin as she kneels before it and bows her head. She never says what she prayed for, but when she stands, she's smiling.
She's been on fire all her life, or maybe she is the fire, but either way she's still burning as news of their victory reaches Thirteen. The Capitol has surrendered. Winning tastes like ashes in her mouth.
Coin wants vengeance against the people who'd laughed at her authority, forced her District underground with the rest of the vermin. Her hawkish face is creased with hatred and ice. Clove will never understand how she can be so cold- her own fury rages through her blood like flames in gasoline, bubbling up at her wrists, her throat. There is no more moderation here than there was in the Games, where she lapped blood from the edge of her knife and pursued her prey until she won. She might be crazy, but she's human, and that's enough.
Coin leans back and studies her with those too-light eyes. "Why are you doing this?"
Her lips are suddenly dry, so she licks them. They taste like salt, like the tears she doesn't cry any more because she told herself she wouldn't. "Because it's the only way to make them pay."
She replays Cato's death over and over again: the little half-smile he'd had when she looked at him, the realization flashing over his eyes too late, the way he'd slowly toppled over like a slain giant, the earsplitting boom of the cannon as it confirmed his fate and hers. She wonders if he knew how much she regretted it even as she tore the knife free from his flesh. She wonders if he forgave her as he died.
She builds herself an altar in her heart and lays before it the last memories of a happiness she'll never again experience: the first time she won a sparring match against him and the afternoon they ditched training to go hiking up the mountainside and the time he pinned a flower behind her ear and told her she was beautiful. She hides what's left of her heart in barbed wire and ice and dares anyone to steal it away, but no one tries. They all know she's beyond redemption.
"You underestimated me," she murmurs, all silk and honey. "You shouldn't have done that." She trails her fingertips down the side of Coin's neck and plays with a strand of silver-gold hair, twisting it around her finger like a noose. She yanks hard, and Coin jolts backward, head slamming against the back of her throne as her eyes gaze sightlessly at the ceiling.
Coin dies with a knife in her heart, and she laughs for the first time since the Games.
Sometimes she drowns in the very things that give her the energy and the will to go forth and destroy, the hatred and rage and pain that let her burn. Sometimes she wonders how easy it would be to slip beneath the surface of the waves, to let herself be extinguished at last. But in the end, she'll never go through with it. She'll see her revenge until the bitter end, even if it destroys her. The fire is all she has left.
She won. She won everything. She won the Games and the war and the country and the crown and everything. People cheer for her in the streets, their beautiful, vengeful princess who promises them a better future with her army behind her. They gloss over Coin's assassination and Fulvia's mysterious death and the cold fire in their savior's eyes as they make her their queen. They cheer. She won.
She burns.