The war is over and nobody has won.
We've all lost.
Loved ones. Innocence. Ourselves.
The world hasn't changed but the people have. No more capitol rule. No more getting thrown into arenas. No more kids being raised for the slaughter.
No more hunger. No more fear. No more.
Snow is dead. Coin is dead.
No more.
My name is Katniss Everdeen. I should be dead, five times over. Why am I not dead? Haymitch brought me back to district twelve. I am home.
If home is the place where I was raised. If home is the place I cannot leave from. If home is the place where I belong.
Then I am home.
I am in the woods as the sun meets me in the sky. I roam the forest in circles, waiting for hope to spring out of the darkness. I'm not just hunting squirrels anymore. I'm not just hunting out of hunger or desperation.
I am tired.
I've been looking for something to breathe in like air, to fill my lungs with purpose again. What is living anyway? I'm trying to catch whatever grace I can grab before it slips through my fingertips. I'm trying to rise again. It's still survival.
I am trying to live here. Without my mother. Without my sister. Without my best friend. I am trying.
The trees are whispering to each other in secrets. I wonder if they want to know mine, like Finnick did. They conspire with the wind, laughing triumphantly, as if they have made something out of absolutely nothing.
Like we love mad people and find peace in their eyes. As if we are still tying fraying ropes into knots over and over again.
Forever missing people.
Forever wanting them back.
I still see her. I see the blond braid cascading down her back as she turns to look at me. I see her lighting up in blazes of fury. Childhood dreams scorched by the flames we all had created.
She was made out of stardust. She was beautiful and fair, like a fawn in the dawn of the day. Like dew on the soft blades of grass. Like the gentle butterflies in the meadow and the bright full moon shining down on the bitterest of nights in all its glory.
My little duck. My sweetest flower. My Prim.
The world without her seems almost bare. The people lack her understanding. She is missing from the world. She is missing from me.
I remember when she was only skin and bones. When I gave her everything I had to survive and went to bed cradling my stomach.
Hungry.
It's when I learned what sacrifice was. A dead father, a disappearing mother, a little sister starving before my eyes. That was my family. That was what I fought for. That was why I volunteered. I volunteered to fight for her, to die for her.
Now I live for her. I have to live for her.
Because we fight and we win and we lose. I survived but I paid for it. I burned and she burned with me. She flew too close to the sun. My shooting star.
Stardust to ashes, ashes back to dust.
Sacrifice. It's what we do for those we love.
Sticks are cracking beneath my feet now. I tread carefully. The birds are singing songs of redemption. I sing back silently. I sing along.
I take out an arrow, lift up my bow and shoot for the bullseye. I cannot miss my target. I shoot for the stars. I shoot for home. I am the Mockingjay, my aim as pure as my heart. My song as true as the world I have known.
I have won. I have lost.
I can still hear him.
I owe him everything and all I could do was let him go.
I still hear his screams as the mutts tear into him as their last meal. I hear my name echo in those wretched sewers, my name erupting from his mouth like a desperate question.
Katniss.
His plea. His last words. My answer. I hear myself whispering nightlock, nightlock, nightlock as I drop the holo down. Everything explodes.
On repeat, I hear it. His suffering for everyone, his suffering for me.
My friend. The protector. Dear Finnick.
I'm so sorry.
I carry the weight of the past with me towards home. It's not quite as heavy as the weight of the world that used to sit on my shoulders. But it's heavy. I'm still learning how to lighten the load. It will take time.
I carry it all back to my big lonely house and place the game in the kitchen and my scarred body on the couch.
I wait.
He'll be here soon. He has been here everyday since he returned, returned to me. One of these days I think he'll stay forever.
My boy with the bread.
The beautiful blonde boy with the artificial leg and artificial memories and the blue eyes that I can see right through. Like broken glass. My Peeta.
Love creeps up on people. Finnick told me that once. I wasn't ready for it but now I know. I understand how it comes in slowly, in waves, and then suddenly drowns you out completely. You want to swim in the way that person makes you feel forever.
Can I call it that? Is this love? This beauty in the ashes? This blurry battlefield of nature versus humanity and mind versus matter and head versus heart?
I guess love isn't always that simple. Love isn't always so kind.
It just hopes. Always hopes.
He gives me hope. He'll come in the door with his heart on his sleeve while mine has still been buried deep inside my chest. I used to hate that heartbeat.
Not too long ago I was sinking in numbness, I was not wanting to exist while others didn't get to. I was hiding away in closets wanting to forget while trying so hard to simply remember.
Because maybe I don't want to forget. Maybe Haymitch needs to put down the bottles. There's no salvation at the end of a drink. Only regret. Only longing for another. I don't want to disappear now.
You can't have memories lost on someone who doesn't care. You can't make it mean nothing to you. It's been my greatest weakness. I care far too much or not at all and it's the kind of caring that can kill you.
Peeta knows this full well.
It's as if I was a dead language and he can somehow pronounce every word.
Haymitch told me once that I could live a thousand lifetimes and never deserve him. He should have just slapped in the face right there and then because it's true. It's so true that it hurts, that it sears worse than pain from any fire.
People can care so much it burns them to the ground. It rips them apart. It makes them explode from the inside out.
It's like Plutarch said, we're stupid, fickle beings with a seemingly great gift for self-destruction.
Because we care.
There are ghosts in this house.
I look toward the kitchen and I can still see my mother and my sister healing Gale's mangled back. Right there. It feels like a lifetime ago. Not a year ago.
But I can't remember everything.
I can't think of a specific time when my family was happy together. When my father was still alive and my mother was whole and Prim and I were little kids not old enough to be reaped and we were little kids with big dreams and we saw shapes in the clouds and our only true worry was about what game we should play.
There had to have been a time like that, right? But I can't remember it at all.
Now my mother and I are all that is left of the Everdeens and the last time I saw her I seemed to give her more pain than joy.
She couldn't have handled these ghosts.
She sees my father in me. She doesn't see my sister in me. She sees everything I have done and everything I have gone through and it isn't something to necessarily be so happy and proud about.
So I have to take care of myself now. I have to tell myself that I am still the kid with two braids singing the valley song in music class. That I am still the kid who sat on her father's shoulders and watched the world from above with wonder and longing. I have to tell myself that I need to feed her and love her and be there for her. That she is the little girl that her mother wanted to protect but couldn't. That she needs to forgive her.
Because I can forgive my mother. But I can't forget.
I can't forget the parachutes.
The trap. The bombs.
It's funny how one person can be everything to you and suddenly they become a complete stranger in a matter of days, weeks, months, then years.
Actually, it's not funny at all.
Gale will never be the same boy I knew before that reaping. The one who sat with me that morning and ate bread and cheese and said he wanted children.
He used to tell me that even though we weren't free, that I still could be. Because I didn't care what people thought of me and it was the greatest freedom I ever could have asked for. It was how I was before. Not now.
Shooting people is nothing like shooting animals. It's a different game. It's not a game at all. It's much, much worse.
The games changed me. And the war changed him.
And it changed us.
The living room walls feel like they're closing in around me now. Enclosing me into a box to be given away, to be used again.
I have to admit that during the war, things seemed easier.
There was purpose.
I would look in the mirror and see a girl dressed up in a black suit and a painted face with nothing to show for herself but her past failures and mistakes that people mistook as hope and defiance. It was my job to fire people up. To create unity.
I survived and I paid for it. It made me a target, it made me a symbol. I made people burn.
It was easier being the Mockingjay. She was needed.
Not Katniss.
So when I look in the mirror now, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
I only see me.
Did you know, I wanted to cry then?
That night when Gale and Peeta were sitting in Tigris' cellar, casually comparing themselves and discussing who deserved who. Who I loved, who I could survive without. How I would have to choose between them if any of us actually survived.
I wanted to cry.
I didn't deserve either of them. And they certainly didn't deserve me.
I was not going to be another piece in anyone's games. I was my own game maker. I knew how to play. I knew how to win.
You have to break the rules sometimes.
So later on I told Gale goodbye. I said yes, for Prim. I looked Peeta in the eye.
I pulled up my arrow and let go.
Snow laughed.
I shot Coin right through the heart.
My sister is gone.
Buttercup doesn't seem to understand. He jumps up on the couch and curls up near me.
Waiting.
We're so alike, him and I. I scoff and reach over to pet his soft fur.
The thing is, I didn't choose this damn cat. He found his way home.
I didn't choose Peeta either. I let him come to me.
Peeta understands. He planted primrose for her.
Buttercup just hisses.
I've grown to love them both.
Love is in his hands.
He holds me in his palm. The same way he held those poisoned berries in the arena.
They are the same hands that knocked the nightlock pill away. The same hands that threw me that burnt bread all those years ago. The same hands that held me at night on the train on the victory tour. The same hands that have saved me over and over and over again.
I just have to forget that the hands I hold were the same ones that once wrapped themselves around my neck.
Squeezing.
I just have to remember that they weren't his hands. It wasn't him. Those were Snow's hands trying to kill me, the wrinkly hands of an evil, bitter old man on Peeta's hijacked, young body. Snow trying to get to me, using him to destroy me.
And now he's gone and my boy's not completely back. He's not completely whole. I'm not either.
We never will be.
I can't hold it against him and he doesn't hold it against me.
There's no blame. There's no shame. It's a selfless crime.
Love.
The war is over and nobody has won.
But we're finding beauty in the ashes.
My heart is steady. I'm scratching at a mosquito bite near my ankle when Peeta walks into the room, and smiles at me, softly, like the rain that is falling in peace outside the window. This is a moment we're not hurting.
It's the kind of smile that makes me glad to see the blanket of darkness leave the sky each morning. Glad to be here, in this new world, watching the skies cry gently for us all. They're letting go. For everything we've lost, and for everything we've found.
I find myself smiling back at him.
Things aren't always bad.
A/N: Thanks for reading! I'm going to be honest. When I first read The Hunger Games five years ago I was turned off by it. But there was something about it that still intrigued me. I ended up reading the entire series and fell in love with a lot of the characters. They deserved so much better. I am forever screaming into a void over Finnick Odair. The Everlark ship also hit me quite fast, and quite hard. I saw the final movie recently and felt overwhelmingly compelled to write this out. Katniss is such a complex character and needs more understanding. Even with her as a narrator, we don't always know, much less understand her thinking or emotions or rationality. I wanted to show her thoughts while healing. This is what came out of it.
Feedback is always welcomed and appreciated! I am thinking of writing a second part with Peeta's perspective as well.