I remember tears streaming down your face, when I said, "I'd never let you go."
Tears streamed down my face. I looked at her, her tiny, prone body, whose life was long gone. Her eyes were closed, like she was peacefully sleeping a perpetual slumber. I was holding her cold hand that still smelled like her, but only faintly. I remembered my hands wrapped around hers as we slept, in the arena, in that night when we found each other. I remembered the shock and the pain I felt as I saw her there, tangled inside the net, with the boy from District One's spear struck through her stomach. I remembered my voice, hoarse and almost inaudible from crying, as I fulfilled her last wish. These were the things I wished I could forget, but could not.
Right now, right here, in one of the Capitol's hospital rooms, with its white walls and the smell of antiseptic in the air, everything I felt in the arena came back to me. It was suffocating, and I knew I was dying, but Rue's cold hand was against mine, comforting me, and suddenly it was if she was the one trying to save me from inevitable death, not the other way around.
Peeta, who I forgot was there, shook me gently on the shoulders. "Katniss," he said. I wiped the tears on my cheeks with one hand. I kept the other fast on Rue's hand. I looked over at Peeta, whose eyes were morose. "Let's go," he said. I didn't budge, because I wasn't done mourning Rue, my little ally.
"Katniss, we have to go. They're going to take them away now." Peeta said, more firmly.
I let go of Rue's hand, realizing with a heavy heart that it would be for the last time.
I surveyed the room with my eyes, and I saw the bodies of the twenty-two tributes that died in the Capitol's Hunger Games. I saw them now as limp, lifeless human-shaped flesh. But to their families they must have been everything. A lump formed in my throat. I hated the Capitol now that I was a victor than when I was just an outlaw in District 12. But was there anything I could do?
Peeta and I went out of the room, and were about to leave once and for all when one Avox grabbed Peeta's arm. He jerked it away, more out of shock than disgust, I figured. "What?" I demanded. But by then we both remembered that Avoxes couldn't speak. The Avox, a young man with blond hair, indicated with his thumb that we had to stay right where we were. Peeta asked, and the Avox nodded affirmation. We took our place by the glass window and let the Capitol attendants, the Avoxes, take the tributes. There were twenty-two attendants, one for each dead tribute. I could see what they were doing through the mirror.
An Avox woman proceeded to Rue. She undid the sheets on Rue's hospital bed from the corners, raised the sheet until Rue was completely out of my view and appeared to lie in a makeshift hammock, and slowly wrapped it around the child. The Avox tied the ends of the sheet Rue was encased in. I saw that all the other tributes were wrapped in the same manner. Then they were piled in a huge clear wagon, a massive box with an assortment of wires and a large tank of something on its left, from the side of the room. All twenty-two of them in one coffin.
Subconsciously I reached for Peeta's hand. It was cold. And so was mine, most probably. Those tributes were dead, but they were still human. They didn't deserve being thrown into a glass box like garbage. Why was this happening? Why were they letting us see this monstrosity? It surely wasn't on television.
One question rang around my brain, though, louder than the others: Weren't the dead tributes sent back home, in a wooden coffin, like they made us believe for seventy four years?
"They should be sent home, shouldn't they?" Peeta voiced out. I nodded, unable to speak. One Avox man, the one who signed for us to stay here, pressed a button on the console of the wagon. The wagon started filling with a thick black liquid. The sheets wrapped around the tributes were soaked through. After about two minutes, the entire wagon was filled to the brim. The other Avoxes were bringing out the beds and depositing them into the next room.
"Is that petroleum?" Peeta asked. I looked at him; he was pale white. And I was shaking. I already knew what was going to happen. And I wanted to bolt out of there like I had when sick people were brought to my mother. I wanted to run.
But two Capitol guards arrived, as if they knew I was going to run, and clamped my arms behind my back and bound my legs with cuffs. I screamed. Another pair of guards did the same to Peeta before we could react. If I moved one inch, I would topple over.
I looked away, but one guard twisted my face to see it: To see the Avox man press another button on the console and run out of the room as if his life depended on it.
I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn't. I was shaking so hard. I couldn't breathe. I was cold all over.
Darling everything's on fire.
Fire. The wagon flashed a brilliant red, and it started to burn. Inside that wagon were twenty-two bodies of twenty-two people, which by severe misfortune, were part of the Capitol's ruthlessness and wickedness. Clove was burning. Cato was burning. Foxface was burning. Glimmer was burning. The boy from District 1 was burning. Thresh was burning. All those other tributes, the ones I never knew the names of, were burning.
RUE WAS BURNING.
The fire was so radiant and strong I thought the glass windows would break, but they held, like it was designed to withstand this very evil. The red-orange flames emitted black smoke I couldn't smell. After an indeterminate time, the fire went out, as quickly as it had started. The smoke cleared though there wasn't a visible opening. I saw that the wagon was unscathed. But everything, everyone that had been inside it was now nothing but ashes.
I came to my senses. I realized that the Capitol never brought the dead tributes back to their Districts. I realized that even at the point of death, the Capitol's evil knows no bounds.
You and I'll be safe and sound.
Rue was dead. I thought she was safe from the Capitol. But she wasn't, until now, when all that's left of her were black ashes. I forced myself to look ahead. At least now, she is safe and sound. Nothing more could be done to her. Nothing that would mutilate her body even more.
I heard Peeta's guard ask mine, "Are you sure this will work?"
My guard rolled his eyes. "Of course, idiot. Snow's been doing this for years."
And my eyes widened with this realization of the truth. They made all the victors see this done to their fellow tributes. Everything, it seemed, that would scare anyone from inciting a rebellion, the Capitol would do. President Snow would do everything, anything to hold on to power.
Peeta went limp in his guard's arms. They injected something into the skin of his forearm. He wouldn't remember anything at all. And as I felt a piercing pain on my forearm, I knew that I wouldn't, too.
Maybe Rue was safe and sound, but the rest of us were not.