A/n: Hello there, and thank you for giving my story a chance! This is my take on an alternative ending for Suzanne Collins Hunger Games-book series. Had to be done, seeing as how I was seriously depressed for a whole week after finishing reading Mockingjay (I have a grip on reality too, i swear...). In other words, this is basically my daydreams on how it all could have ended... a little less depressing.
This is also the dubious sequel to my other story Home but yet so far away, but i say dubious because you don't have to read that to follow this storyline. Basically, I imagine here that everything during the Quarter Quell and the rebellion happened just like in the books, except for the very last few chapters of Mockingjay.
No rights belong to me, and if you recognize lines from the book in this chapter, it's because I took them straight from there, just to mark clearly where I imagine this story taking off. Um... it's all a bit surreal, i know. I wanted to create a sort of fairy tale-atmosphere, but if there's something too vague, please feel free to ask me!
Hope you like! I'm super grateful for any reviews or comments ;)
I think it's the crackling sound of the dying fire that wakes me from my shallow slumber. Startled, I fly up from the rocking chair where I spend most of my time, instantly alerted. I scan the darkness, fearing I will see the shadows come alive, but too scared to turn the lights on. The long fingers of firelight dance before my eyes, and i desperately need to get out of here. My legs are able to carry me only as far as the distance from the kitchen to the living room. These days, I just can't seem to stay awake. Consciousness does little to clear my head, as my life has turned into one endless bad dream since the war for freedom, the rebellion that overthrew the Capitol, ended.
My name is Katniss Everdeen. I'm eighteen years old. I survived a war, but i'm not sure if this counts as living. Other than that, I just don't know.
I fall sleep again, crashing on to the couch in my living room.
A terrible nightmare follows, where I'm lying at the bottom of a deep grave, and every dead person I know by name comes by and throws a shovel full of ashes on me. It's quite a long dream, considering the list of people. Not until the very end, when my mouth is full of dust and I can barely breathe or see their faces, comes the people whose deaths haunt me the most. The boy from district one, who was the first person I killed with my own hands. The rest of the dead tributes from my first round in the Hunger Games, who had to die in order for me to live. All the brave members of my squad, who I led to certain death. Finnick, of course. And then, the very last face I can make out before I wake up gasping for breath, with the sensation of grave dust still in my throat, that face is his. The one death I know I will never come to terms with. The loss that echoes in my head, twisting it until I lose my grip on reality.
Like now. Pale morning light comes around the edge of the shutters. The scraping of the shovel continues. Still half in the nightmare, I run down the hall, out of the front door and around the side of the house, because now I'm pretty sure I can scream at the dead. When I see who it is, I pull up short. His face is flushed from digging up the ground under the windows. In a wheelbarrow are five scraggly bushes.
"You're back", I say, my voice rusty from long disuse.
Peeta looks up, a now-familiar wary look on his face when he sees me. Other than that, he looks well. Thin and covered in burn scars like me, but with a healthier glow than last time I saw him. Which, I realise, must have been months ago.
"Just visiting" he says. "I got a job in 11 a while back, when they finally would let me leave the hospital. Agricultural stuff."
"Oh" I say in a lame voice, because I really couldn't find the energy to care even if I tried to. And I don't try very often these days. Who does he think he is, prince charming? Once, that was not very far from the truth. Unfortunately for him, I'm not the most pliant princess ever to be stuck in a tower. Tower, solitary mansion, it's all the same really.
"So why come visiting then?"
The last time I talked to Peeta, it seemed unlikely we would ever see each other again, seeing as how we could barely stand to look at each other. There was just too much bitterness, too much confusion between us. That was in the Capitol, right after the end of the war. I had just been discharged from the hospital, but the plans forming in my head had been anything but peaceful, still focusing on death rather than life. All I knew then was that I had one more death to smear my hands with, in revenge of the attempt to kill someone that I had spent all my life protecting.
Peeta couldn't understand me anymore, had probably had enough of my destructive mind. He is nothing if not a champion of light. Which is also why in return, I simply can't relate to him any more than he can understand me. As it turns out, the idea of our love was little more than just that: an idea. Shallow feelings based on the ideal of who we were in each other's eyes, which as it turns out had little to do with who we are deep inside.
No, he could not love me, not all of me and my faults, but it took him seeing me fall apart inch by inch, revealing every dark corner of my soul, for him to realise this. I was relieved, but underneath, I crumbled a little bit more at yet another loss. Under different circumstances, we would have made great friends. But never true lovers.
And then there was this look in his eyes, the one that always lingered after the rounds of tracker-jacker venom that the Capitol used on him. It still hasn't disappeared I see now, because he looks at me with badly hidden suspicion.
I don't blame him, though. If faced with my own reflection, I doubt I would look very happy to see me, either. I make a half hearted effort to push my hair out of my eyes and realize it's matted into clumps.
Nor am I the prettiest of princesses in need of rescue, it seems. I feel defensive.
"What are you doing?"
"I got these from a colleague, a gardener," he says, in a much kinder voice than a moment ago.
Perhaps I'm only imagining the resentment I see in him. It's not unthinkable that I'm reflecting my own feelings about myself onto him. But behind that door lies a whole realm of self-assessment, and last time I checked, I had locked that gate and swallowed the key.
Right, I'm more like the evil dragon than the lovely princess in the stories.
He continues talking, while his image dances back and forth before my eyes. Good or bad? Angel or demon? One second, he's a light, heavenly blue-eyed fairy come to set my world straight; the next, a menacing gnome trying to lure me into danger.
"To remind you not everyone is dead," he explains patiently. "I thought we could plant them along the side of the house."
I look at the bushes, the clumps of dirt hanging from their roots, and catch my breath as the word roses registers. I'm about to yell vicious things at Peeta when the full name comes to me. Not plain rose but evening primrose. The flower my sister was named for.
Prim. I nod my consent to him, because he's actually right. Prim is not dead.
Still, a nameless terror creeps up on me as I remember how close she came to death. Perhaps I'm lucky I don't remember much of it, after I threw myself over her body to protect her from the worst of the fire and instead went up in flames myself. It was pure chance, me spotting her in the square in front of the President's mansion and understanding the danger of the situation, right before the second bomb went off. I do recall screaming her name with such intensity that she just had to listen, had to turn her back to the massacre in front of us and run to me. Pure luck, and my selfishness in putting her life above every other life that could possibly be saved, before the flames devoured their high-pitched screams for help.
Prim was pretty badly burnt too, her more so than me despite my efforts, but she's alive. Unlike all those other kids.
At that thought I shiver despite the mild morning air and the sun breaking through to announce another day has begun. Exhaustion comes over me, and all I want to do is go curl up in the rocking chair again, because days are something I'm definitely not ready to face again. Then I realise Peeta has stopped digging up my garden, and is just standing there cautiously watching me. I stare back. Why is he being so nice anyway?
"Haymitch send you over here, huh?"
He laughs. "Haymitch is almost in as much of a state as you are, Katniss. I doubt he even remembers us anymore." His voice is still too cold and hard, but I can tell from his huge blue eyes that this really does bother him. The next thing out of his mouth surprises me.
"It was your mother. She came to visit me. Probably thought I could heal your broken heart, or something like that."
He says this as a joke, a tiny wry smile tugging at his lips, and it is kind of funny, because nothing could be further from the truth. We're not star-crossed lovers anymore. We both agreed on that that train had passed after the rebellion, to my great relief. I suppose to my mother this would seem strange, because once we really did love each other. As much as I wanted to deny it, I used to be in love with Peeta. When they brought him back from the Capitol, all broken and not able to remember who I was to him, it hurt me more than I cared to let on.
He did recover, but never fully; the reprogramming of his memory had been so strong that it altered him forever. I remember being crushed by this, since I had thought that being loved by Peeta was something I could always count on. But then we went on that insane mission to kill Snow and after all that happened there, love was just not on my chart anymore.
Not after Gale died.
I turn to go inside, leave Peeta alone to do whatever it was he came for. Apparently, my mother must have convinced him to look after me, because he calls after me,
"Go take a shower, Katniss".
And somehow, I do.
When I emerge from my room, hair damp but not as much in tangles anymore and a new set of clothes thrown on, I find a large box has been placed outside my door.
It's full of stuff. Not just any stuff, but the things that I left behind in 13. My bow and arrows, the locket Peeta gave me on the beach, my old family book. And my fathers old hunting jacket. Peeta must have brought them here for me.
How considerate.
I put on the jacket, sniffing the collar. Instantly, I'm overwhelmed by the onslaught of memories that the smell of old leather and wood smoke bring back. Turning on my heel, I retreat into my room and curl up on an old sofa in the corner, trying to hide from all the crushing emotions that come with the pictures in my head.
A bow and arrow is for hunting, something I did with him, back when things were alright and I was still me, Katniss who would roam the woods fearlessly with the best friend anyone could ask for. Back when said best friend was still alive. My mind racing down that train of thought, I'm soon thinking of the last time I saw him. Before he was dragged away by Peacekeepers to some fate I don't want to imagine, screaming for me to take his life with an arrow. It wouldn't have mattered though, even if I had been able to do it. He still died in the end, and indirectly, it was my fault.
All they told me after I woke up in hospital with half my skin burnt away was that they had identified his body. They were sorry, they said, but it was evident they couldn't care less. As for me, that's when I finally realised Gale was the one I couldn't live without.
It should have been clear a long time ago, I suppose, but I was just being too stubborn to see it, and perhaps too young. I remember coming home from the Games the first time, with the weight of deceit on my shoulders, but the happiness of coming home soaring in my heart, augmented by a force I had no name for in all my inexperience. I thought then that I could shut out the burden of love from my heart, keep my head cool and above the nonsense of feelings, but it took only weeks for Gale shatter that illusion.
One kiss in the woods, and I was deep under the surface, grasping for the world to make sense again. Three words, in a cabin by the lake, and it did.
But not until it was too late. I had to finish what I started, be it a rebellion or a pledge to marry someone I could never be happy with. In the end, the former happened first, and war made sure that nothing would ever be the same again.
And I suppose, that if I tried to sort out the mess inside of me, that would be the bottom of it. The guilt, the sadness that I'm the reason he's gone is a million times worse than the guilt I feel over all the other people who died in the rebellion I fuelled. I'd see that's why I haven't gone out the door for months. Why I feel as if I am weighted down, crushed and suffocated by darkness every single minute I'm awake, and why I find no peace in sleeping.
Right then, I wish I had never cleaned myself up. I want to be hopelessly dismissive of everything, about every aspect of my life, as if being clean somehow upsets my low self-respect. I wish Peeta would go away and leave me alone.