This piece is heavily inspired by azelmaroark's Until Your Last Heartbeat, particularly Parts 4 and 5, which I strongly recommend you read as a companion piece to this chapter. She's my co-brain for all things Hunger Games and District 2 especially, so a huge shout-out goes to her.
EDIT: the hate I've gotten for this story/chapter has passed flattering and is now gone round to annoying. The point of this story/chapter is to write realistic POVs of people in District 2 based on how they might feel about canon events. The opinions herein are the opinions of the characters whose POVs fit the scene. Some are forgiving, some are not, some are open-minded, some are biased. That's the way it goes.
If you want to talk to me about my writing, or my characterization, or my world-building, by all means. If you want to hate-mail me to tell me why I'm wrong about Katniss/Peeta/D12/everything, please don't bother. This is not an essay about my feelings. It's a story about characters who - canonically - do not have high opinions of the main characters in The Hunger Games. All clear? Yes? All righty, let's move on. :)
Chapter 1: Cato and Clove and the Girl on Fire
Bert slides a beer across the bar. Flint catches it in his broad hand, tips the mug and raises his chin to Bert in thanks, fishes in his pocket for the crumpled bill he knows is in there somewhere, but Bert shakes his head. "I'll put 'er on your tab, Flint," he calls, and Flint's tab is long as his arm and older than his baby girl but Flint's good for it, or he will be, once they fix the roof, and Bert knows it. Flint's always good for it, it's just that times are tough and Mary ain't hardly got out of bed since Shalene was born and sometimes Flint just needs to get away and rinse the dust out of his throat and think about something else, anything else, for a couple hours.
It ain't a bad life, in the quarries. It ain't an easy one, either, fifteen hour days if nothing goes wrong and eighteen if it does - last time they had a cave-in Flint worked straight through from six in the morning until midnight - but they don't complain. They sure don't huddle in bunches at the Reaping like the sorry-ass coal miners in Twelve who don't have it that much worse. So it's coal instead of granite or limestone or marble, it's all digging rocks out of the ground, but you don't hear Flint and his buddies acting like their lives are a fucking tragedy.
"What's the score?" Flint asks, elbowing Kale, who's got his eyes glued to the TV. According to the Capitol, all of Panem gets Games-month off so they can watch, but it's not like they can bring in robots to mine the granite while everyone else snoozes, so him and the other quarry rats trade off shifts and keep each other informed.
"Same's when you left," says Kale without looking away from the screen. "Clove's got four, Cato's at five."
Flint feels a burst of pride. He works with a guy who traded shifts with Clove's pa, not that he's seen her since she was twelve, but still, it's good to know that their town's good for something. When she was little she used to pull the wings off butterflies, or so says Jake. "Who's left, besides ours?"
Kale takes a pull of his beer, sets it down and spreads out his fingers. They're rough and callused, like Flint's, and the veins in his forearm stand out when he pushes each finger back as he counts. "Girl from Five. Boy from Eleven." He rolls his eyes and runs his tongue across his teeth like a cat that's smelled something bad. "The Girl on Fire and Loverboy."
Flint mimes spitting on the floor, though it's not the kids' faults, not really. It's just that the Twelves this year are eating up the airtime, all because some moon-eyed baker's boy said he had a crush, like kids don't have crushes every day. Like such a stupid reason makes them more interesting than the bright, beautiful kids from Two who actually scrapped and fought and bled and deserve to be there. "That's two down from this morning. What'd I miss?"
The last time Flint got to watch, Twelve blew up the supplies at the Cornucopia on Three's watch, and Cato turned and snapped the kid's neck. After that the Pack went hunting for Twelve, and Flint's seen enough Games in his time to know the Alliance wasn't going to last much longer.
"One freaked out and left the Pack. One got Eleven, the little one. Twelve got One. One got Eleven with a spear, Twelve got him in the throat with an arrow. They'll recap it tonight, lots of boo-hooing. Think Twelve's gone catatonic or somethin'. Cato and Clove are taking a break."
Flint didn't like the One boy all that much anyway, too tall and too skinny and not quite handsome enough, and for a Career that meant second choice, probably got bumped up when the frontrunner got himself in an accident. Hell, maybe the kid caused it himself to go in, Flint doesn't know and he doesn't really care. But while Ones and Twos are rivals for a reason, they usually try to keep it out of the Pack until it splits. This one kept up with the sneering, little snide remarks like oh ho ho don't they teach you monkeys to read and asking Cato to tell him how many tributes are left if you can count that high that is, here lemme hold your sword so you can use both hands.
Flint's money's on Clove. Cato's wild, unpredictable, he swings wide and moves rash and he has a Career's control, sure, but it's like laying a plank across a mountain of gravel and expecting it not to slip. He's raw and brimming with anger and he's strong, sure, and he ain't stupid - Twos don't actually make 'em stupid, no matter what the jokes are, he wouldn't get to that stage if he was - but he's too hot. He burns too fast, too much, like magnesium: hot, white and blinding, but nothing left when he's done.
Clove, now. Clove is mercury thiocyanate. Light her up and she'll take it, twist it and use it and just keep on growing. And maybe it's just because Flint's got a daughter of his own now and it's got him soft on girls, but he thinks Clove's got it in her. He thinks she could bring it home.
Flint leans back on his bar stool and watches, curling his hand around the front of his mug because his hands are too big to fit in the handle. Not much happening at the moment; Twelve's not on fire now but at least she's done crying, and she tears into a groosling while staring out at nothing. She watches the smoke from her signal fire with dead eyes, like little Eleven wouldn't have died anyway, like they could have skipped off into the sunset as best friends forever and ever. At least Twos understand how the game is played.
Five strips bark from a tree branch, peels the rough part off and sticks the green under-skin into her mouth. Her ribs stick out through her shirt. This one ain't gonna last much longer.
Eleven's still in his field, and Flint swears he looks better than he did when he went in. The lines of his cheeks don't look as gaunt. If he weren't a Two, Flint would be pulling for him; a big fella, honest muscles and honest head and sharp enough to stay out and let the others pick themselves off. But he ain't a Two, so Flint wishes him a quick death instead.
Loverboy's painted himself to look like a rock as the blood seeps out from a gash in his thigh, but even without the muck and mud on his face, Flint knows he's done for. He knows sepsis when he sees it, remembers it from when he was a boy and Uncle Brock stepped on a nail down in the quarries, went right through his boot and poisoned him because they couldn't afford the fancy shots from the doctor in the big city. It's a nasty way to go, and Flint doesn't envy Loverboy, who wouldn't be a bad kid out of the Games, just dumb. Maybe someone will come by and end it for him.
Flint decides to wait for the anthem, then pack up and go home, check on Mary - see if she maybe feels like sitting outside on the porch for a while tonight, if he carries her out so she don't have to walk - when history changes right in front of him.
Claudius Templesmith announces that both tributes from the same district will be declared the winners if they're the last two alive. Flint looks down into his drink - musta heard that wrong, Bert musta slipped him something stronger - when Templesmith repeats it. No mistake.
They can both come home. Cato and Clove can come home.
The sky in the Arena goes black as the Capitol anthem fades away and the logo disappears. The bar erupts into pandemonium.
Flint sucks in a long breath. The camera changes to Twelve, who says Loverboy's name in shock, then claps her hands over her mouth. Flint pounds his fist against the bar. "Nobody cares!" he snaps, and he tries not to yell at the screen because that feels a bit too much like cheering for a sports game, but he can't help it, not this time. He ain't the only one, anyway.
At least there's not much drama with Twelve crashing her way through the trees like a spooked boar, and her Loverboy's still unconscious by the stream, so the cameras don't stay on them for long. They cut to Eleven, a dark smear against the blackness of the sky, but the whites of his eyes show up clear enough as he rolls them. The rule change ain't gonna do him much good, and he stares up at the patch of the over-grid where his district partner's face hung a few minutes before. After a minute he shakes his head, looks back down and scrapes a stone over the blade of his scythe.
The girl from Five is next, and she rocks back and forth in the bushes, fingers splayed against her ribs, and cackles softly to herself. Ain't the first one gone crazy from the isolation, and she won't be the last.
Finally, finally they move to Clove and Cato, and they roll the footage back a bit so the audience gets to see their reaction to the news. There's silence - the bar holds still, dead still like a collapsed mine after the final rumble of falling boulders stops, before the shock wears off and the wailing starts - then Clove looks up at Cato, eyes wide, to see if he heard it, too.
And then. And then - then Cato, giant, bloody-fisted Cato, Cato with clotted chunks of red smeared in his golden hair and arms even bigger than Flint's - Cato scoops Clove up, grabs her right in his arms and crushes her to his chest. Flint holds his breath - for a second he thinks Cato's actually crushing her, squeezing the life from her, but then Cato presses his cheek against her hair and her fingers grip his arms, and oh, oh fuck.
For a minute Flint thinks he's kissed her - which, holy shit that is not a thing with Twos, not ever - but then the camera finds its focus in the dark and no, it's just a hug, except it ain't just anything. Flint doesn't know what it is but he knows it sticks him between the ribs and won't pull out.
Cato's breath shudders out in a gasp, and he noses her hair and shifts, tugs her higher so she can bury her face in his shoulder. Her feet dangle off the ground. They don't kiss and they don't let go and they don't say anything, not for a long time, just hold each other like they were drowning and now they're not. And in a way it's better, because anyone can fuck, and the star-crossed lovers from District Twelve can make cow eyes at each other, and Cato could spend half the night with his tongue down that pretty One girl's throat before there was no more kissing and no more pretty, but this is different.
"Welcome back," Cato whispers into her hair.
"I've missed you," Clove says into his arm.
Cato runs his massive, blunted fingers through her hair and tells her he's glad they're on the same team again, and Flint feels like somebody's gone and whacked him over the head with a brick, leaving him reeling. He's seen a lot of Games in his time, more than these kids will be old enough to remember, that's for sure, but he ain't never seen anything like this. Twos know how to play, they know not to make chums when at least one of them is going home in a coffin, and they might not seek each other out to kill but that don't mean they won't do it if it comes down to it.
It could just be the emotions from the rule change, but Flint doesn't think so. Cato said welcome back. That means this is old, older than the Arena, older than the training centre and older than the Reaping, and Snow only knows how far back it really goes. And this, this is so much better than a boy with an unrequited crush and a girl who's confused to know what to do with it. This is a knife and its target, a chisel into a fissure, and Flint's only seen this for about ten seconds but it feels more right, more real than anything he's seen from Twelve - and from Clove and Cato, too, ratcheted tight and moving together as twin hunters who always kept their distance - these past three weeks.
They've played him like his nana's busted old piano that he never figured out how to tune but couldn't bear to throw away. They could be playing him now, not like he'd know because he ain't Career even if he has watched some twenty years' worth of them. Either way, Flint's caring couldn't even piss out a match.
On screen, they talk too low for the cameras to hear, then finally Clove thumps him on the chest and Cato sets her down.
She tells him she gets the Girl on Fire. He asks her why she should let him have all the fun.
"Because," she says, and she glances at the camera with her mean little eyes like she don't know it's there, like she just happens to stare right at the screen and narrow her eyes like she's looking right at him. Flint knows Careers and he knows she's doing it on purpose, but it jolts him all the same. She smiles, wicked and slow. "I'll make it look good."
Flint always knew he liked her best, but now he doesn't have to choose.
The kids start talking strategy, and that's when Flint shakes himself, drains the last of his forgotten drink and slides off his stool. "Gotta get home to the missus," he says, and the men wave and wish her well.
"Tell her my wife's gonna bring over some of her famous roast tomorrow," says Ryland, and Flint would feel worse about the charity except he's got a baby girl now and it suddenly ain't so important to be proud.
"Will do," Flint says with a nod.
At home, the house is dark, and Flint picks his way through the rooms without barking his shins off the chairs or his hip off the table, which is something, until he gets to the bedroom. Shalene's in her crib, snuffling to herself, and she's awake but not crying, thank Snow for small mercies. Flint lifts her out and holds her against his chest, cradling her skull in his hand. She's so small in his hands, and he thinks of Clove, suddenly, dwarfed in Cato's arms, and she was a baby like this once - a little thing the size of her daddy's forearm with tufts of black hair - but that's not something any man who wants to wake up sane thinks about so he swallows it.
"You awake, baby?" he whispers, because he can't tell from Mary's breathing one way or the other.
"It's late, I was worried." He can see her now, the curve of her body under the blankets, facing the wall. "I turned off the TV after that little girl. Couldn't watch anymore."
"You don't have to watch nothin'," Flint tells her, stubborn, and he keeps Shalene tucked against his chest and slides into bed. He cards his fingers through Mary's hair. "Good news, though." He swallows, and maybe he shouldn't tell her, not with her moods up and down all over like thunderstorms off the mountains, but a little hope might mean she'll eat something. "They changed the rules today."
He waits, the breath he can't release pressing against his ribcage, but then Mary shifts, turns over and peers up at him, her face pale in the darkness. "What do you mean, they changed the rules?"
And so, Flint tells her. He tells her about the Capitol's generosity - "It ain't meant for them, obviously, it's for the lovebirds, but they don't deserve it and they ain't gonna get it" - and how as soon as Clove and Cato heard, a switch flipped and the two fierce, trained killers clung to each other like children. "I tell you, baby, I don't know what's going on in their heads or nothing, but it looked real."
"Well of course it was real," Mary says, and her voice trembles with tears like it usually does, but for the first time since before Shalene came out breech and he thought he was gonna lose them both right there in the house, there's a hint of the steel underneath that was the reason he fell for her. "They're just children."
Flint shifts a little, masking it by pretending that Shalene is fussy and needs a check. "They're Volunteers."
"Children," Mary says again, sharper this time, and if it means she's coming back to him then he'll argue with her all she wants. "It doesn't matter if they're trained, they're still frightened. And if they knew each other before it must be terrible for them." She struggles to sit up, and Flint arranges the pillows behind her, curls his free arm around her shoulders. "I want to see," she says, startling him. "They'll be on the recap station right now. I want to see them."
They are, and Mary watches the television and Flint watches Mary. When Clove and Cato turn and their eyes meet for the millionth and first time since going into the Arena together, Flint sees his wife drag herself a little way out of the darkness. When they embrace - when Cato finally sets her down, only to flop on her 'by accident' when they sit down to discuss strategy and she calls him a fuckface - Mary smiles, eerie and glowing in the light from the screen.
Mary settles in to sleep after that, and Flint strokes her hair and switches over to the live footage, just to check. Clove and Cato are hunting, like the Careers always do at night, but this time it's different. They still move with stealth and purpose that's too ingrained to throw away just because, but it looks to Flint like they're just passing the time - as they got the right, he supposes, given there's only four left and they'll all be hiding. Cato tries to stick a leaf in her hair without her noticing; Clove elbows him hard in the ribs and manoeuvres him face-first into a low-hanging tree branch.
They're playing. It takes Flint a second because he's so used to seeing them on the prowl, but for trained killers in the middle of a death game, they may as well be kicking around a ball in the gravel pits. Cato calls her "midget". She calls him "fucker". Both of them laugh, and it's not the kind of laugh they make when sliding a knife between someone else's ribs.
It's late and Flint's bone-tired, and exhaustion from the day's work seeps into his muscles and drags him down. He's on rotation again tomorrow, though it don't really make much of a difference to him since he wakes up the same time every day anyway. He shuts off the television and curls up with his best girl and his baby girl and lets sleep pull him under.
He wakes up a few minutes before the five a.m. shift siren, the way he always does regardless of whether he's working. It gives him enough time to sit up, get his head together, and stroke one finger down Shalene's face to wake her before the noise does, otherwise she'll wail like a sonofagun. She looks up at him with her dark eyes, face scrunched up in complaint, and Flint gives her his knuckle to gnaw on. That oughta hold her for a little while, let Mary sleep a bit longer.
It's a hot, sticky morning down here by the quarries, and the thin curtains they've rigged to keep out the dust don't even flutter against the sash. Flint sings a song to Shalene, getting her attention just before the blast tears the air, and it don't always work but this time it does, so that's something. She gets her tiny fingers around his thumb, and Flint looks at her with her tiny flat nose and tiny perfect ears and thinks, thank Snow he lives in District Two. The work may be hard and life might get shitty, but he will never, ever have to worry about his baby girl standing up on that stage, never have to watch her get torn to pieces by some kid with a spear, because that's why they have Volunteers.
The Capitol only told the Centre to withhold once, back in 53, when Two didn't do enough to crush the muttering of rebellion after the second Quell. It was way back, and Flint was just a kid, but nothing can erase the look on the girl's face when her name was called and no beautiful, athletic saviour stepped in to take her place. That's the only warning Two ever needed. Stay in line and their children stay safe. The other districts might not think it's fair, but nobody's stopping them from doing the same thing. Nobody says they can't make a deal to behave and save their little ones instead of grumbling away in the dark.
Flint ain't never had much sympathy for people what just feel sorry for themselves. Yeah, his life is hard, but the deal his district made means his kids stay alive and stay out of the mines, and that makes every busted knee and five a.m wakeup worth it.
He has a little time before he needs to get up, and so Flint flicks on the television, though he leaves the volume off. The Arena is a wash of grey, and a thin layer of frost rims the grass despite the temperature outside the dome, because the Gamemakers do what they want. No one's moving, and they keep cutting back between the tributes now, to highlights from the day before, just to keep things fresh
Loverboy shivers and convulses in the mud; his lips, chapped and peeling, form a word that Flint don't need the sound on to make out: Katniss. Flint really wishes someone would just come and stick a spear in him proper this time, get it over with, but little Eleven was the only one who knew is location and she's dead now.
Something startles the boy from Eleven awake; he jolts to a sitting position, scythe at the ready, but whatever it is must've been a false alarm. He lies back down, pulling a silver thermal blanket tight around his massive shoulders. He has ice crystals on his dark eyebrows. Back home he'll never have felt anything that cold before.
Fire-Girl sleeps the way she always does, dozing fitfully in a tree branch with a rope tied around her waist to lash her to the trunk. For a girl with absolutely nothing interesting about her - Flint ain't about to be captivated by a pretty dress, and it takes more than stepping in for her sister to impress a man who's seen kids go to their death for complete strangers - she's lasted this long, he'll give her that.
Five is awake and twitchy, moving through the underbrush, and she does what she's been doing every morning for the past two weeks: checking Twelve's snares before the other girl wakes up to do it herself. Five is smart, Flint will give her that, but smart won't win the Games this year, not with Cato and Clove. Even before, when only one of them would be coming home breathing, they weren't gonna kill each other with a wildcard missing, and now she's got even less of a chance. With Twelve out from tracker-jacker stings for days, it's been slim pickings for Five. Still, this morning she finds a rabbit, and Flint gives her props as she fishes it out of the snare and resets it so Twelve won't notice.
The cameras switch to Cato after that, conked out in a sleeping bag with his head pillowed on one of their packs. For a minute Flint thinks he's alone, but then he notes the dark hair just visible through over the edge of the bag at Cato's chest, and he clues in that they're sharing. That hasn't happened before, either. Cato and the girl from One slept curled up together the nights before she got herself stuck full of tracker jackers, but compared to the raw relief and open need he saw on these two's faces last night, Flint would bet his salary that Cato and the One girl were all for show, a bit of sex appeal to spice things up for the cameras.
Not too much exciting about watching them sleep, so soon enough the show switches to the early-morning commentators for their theories on the dramatic shift in the tributes from District Two, and that's Flint's cue to get up. He drags Shalene's crib over to the bed with his foot before putting her in it so it'll be easier for Mary to reach her if she gets hungry, and heads into their tiny bathroom for a quick shower. Water's scarce in summer, so he scrubs himself down with a hard sponge before turning on the spray, and as he scrubs his fingers through his cropped hair he can't help thinking how the other districts, the outer ones, think all of Two lives in privilege just because the Capitol favours them. They don't realize that privilege means a lot of things, and that money and fancy houses is just one kind. Flint will take five-minute showers and live with dirt ground into his fingernails for the rest of his life if it means they get to keep the Centre.
Mary shocks him by being up and in the kitchen when Flint makes his way there, and she pours him a mug of coffee and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. "You okay?" Flint asks her, shocked. He can't remember the last time Mary got up the same time he did, but he's pretty sure it was before Shalene. "You look happy."
"It's the tributes," Mary says, and she's pale and thin and she has to hold onto the counter for support but she's here, she's up, and she's smiling. "I realized that if they can keep moving day to day with everything that's going on with them, I could get up and make my husband some lunch."
Relief squeezes Flint so hard he has to fight to breathe, and once again he's pathetically, staggeringly grateful for those two little killers there in the Arena, for giving up everything they had so that his wife could find hope again. They'll never meet her, like as not, and sure as a rockslide will never hear her story, but it doesn't matter. They got her out of bed, and for that Flint can never pay them back. He just wishes he had two coins to rub together, never mind send to the Capitol as a sponsor gift. Maybe he can ask the boys, get a collection going. Wouldn't be much even if they all pooled together, but if District Eleven could send Twelve a loaf of bread like the recap showed, surely Clove's hometown could do the same for her.
That night he slips back into Bert's, though he doesn't go as far as the bar. He snags Ferris' sleeve. "Score?" he asks.
"Same," Ferris says, and his cheeks are flushed and he grips Flint's shoulder. "They took a break I guess, not like they don't deserve it anyway, been fishing all day down at the lake. Damn cutest thing I ever seen, it's like they're kids. Clove's got her knives, but Cato can't throw for shit and just keeps trying to grab 'em with his hands."
Flint grins. "All right, I better see to my girls," he says. That's all he needed to know, what the mood is so he can be prepared for however Mary might be when he walks in the door.
For the first time in what must be six months, there's food cooking when Flint walks in the door. He has to stop, take a second with his hand pressed to the warped wooden door frame, and let out several long breaths before he trusts himself to kick off his boots and head in. "How're the prettiest girls in Panem?" he calls out, and when Mary's laugh follows him out from the kitchen it's like he just spent the past fifteen hours lifting feathers, not hefting rocks the size of a ten-year-old.
"Got yourself some stew cooking," Mary says, and she's barefoot and her hair is loose and she's absolutely beautiful. Shalene burbles in her basket on the counter. Flint drops a kiss on Shalene's silky-soft cheek, then slips his arms around Mary's waist and nuzzles her hair.
"You okay to be standing?" he asks her. "Don't want you pushing it, now."
"Mmhmm." Mary pats his hand. "Been taking it easy all day, don't you worry. Just me and Shae watching the Games."
"What'd I miss?" he asks, and he doesn't let go of her even when she pulls away, keeps his hands curled on her hips as she dips a wooden spoon into the pot and holds it out for him to taste.
"The Twelves found each other," she says. "She dragged him into a cave, fed him some soup. They've been awful lovey."
Well, of course they have, what with the rule change meaning they don't have to hold it back anymore, and at least they'll have a day or so of that before the end. Flint can't wish them well, but he don't wish them nothing but suffering, either. Let them kiss for a while, it won't hurt nobody. "How're ours?"
"Having fun, I think," Mary says, and she adds some herbs to the pot before deciding it's done. "Most of the cameras are on the Twelves and their love story, but when we see the Twos, they look happy."
Flint ladles the stew into bowls, moves Shalene's basket over onto the couch, then picks Mary up into his arms and carries her over, despite her protests that she's fine. "I know you're fine, but that don't mean I can't carry you," he tells her, and he's gentle because better or not she's still hurting, still delicate, and the last thing he wants to do is jostle her too hard.
Flint turns on the television and changes it to the District Two channel, which should at least keep the minimum of the star-crossed coal miners off his screen. He's afraid too much of that will upset Mary. Instead he finds Clove and Cato, roasting their day's catch over a crackling campfire. He thinks back to the day they killed the girl from Eight and used her campfire to roast marshmallows, how Cato skewered them on the tip of his sword and ate them with the blood still drying on the blade. Now, Cato hands Clove a fish on a stick, and passes her a tin of salt they got from the sponsors and a wide leaf to roll it all in.
For the hundredth time since the rule change, Flint wonders which Cato is real: the boy whose hot breath teased the curls at the nape of One Girl's neck as he slid a hand up her shirt and told her how hot the girl from Nine's death made him; or the one who tousles Clove's hair and laughs when he nearly gets a stick in his eye for the trouble. Maybe it's both, who knows. Flint gets the feeling these kids are more complicated, more stuffed full of different ideas and contrasting images, than any of the adults he knows in real life. In the quarries it's pretty simple; you lift rocks, you have a drink, you go home to your wife or your girlfriend or your empty house, and start the whole thing over. He can't imagine what it must be like to fill his head with so many different lives all at once.
"So what do you want to do when we get home?" Cato asks, leaning back on his hands and looking up at the sky. No Parade of the Fallen tonight, no surprise announcements.
"Don't," Clove says, sharp, and Flint's with her. You don't go holler at the base of a loose mountainside, you don't kick a loose beam in a half-demolished house, and you sure as hell don't tempt the Gamemakers to send a bunch of mutts just because you're too cocky. Then again, if an eighteen-year-old boy with arms like tree trunks and a body that makes the Capitol piss themselves can't be cocky, no one can.
Cato rolls his eyes, but his jaw tightens. "Fine, be a spoilsport. What would you want to do if we get home?"
Clove shoots him a look, but he just opens his eyes wide and innocent - as innocent as he can be, anyway, with five kills to his name, but it's easier now that he's been in the lake and washed the blood out of his hair and from behind his ear - and eventually she snorts. "Drink some juice," she says in a dry voice, and Flint barks out a laugh because she's got a sense of humour, that one.
"I'm gonna sleep," Cato says, and he keeps his tone light but his voice is hoarse and rough with exhaustion anyway, like a blanket dragged over the rocks until it wears thin in the middle. None of them have had a good, solid night since they went in, almost three weeks ago. Flint's pretty sure the both of them sleeping at the same time this morning was a mistake. "Seriously, every blanket we've got, I'm just gonna roll up in them, and anyone who wants me to do anything can fuck off."
Clove shakes her head. "It's July and you're already a furnace, you moron. You'll sweat to death."
"So I'll turn up the air conditioning," Cato counters, and he jostles her shoulder. "Shut up, midget, you don't hear me ragging on yours."
"That's because yours is stupid, and mine is juice, and juice wins," Clove shoots back. They toss insults back and forth, insults that sound almost like pet names and are, at the very least, ones they've used on each other for a long time, because Clove calls Cato 'fucker' the same way that Mary calls Flint 'oaf'.
That night, after they put Shalene down in her crib, Mary curls her fingers behind Flint's neck and draws him down for a kiss like as they haven't had in months. It isn't the first time she's kissed him at all since Shae's birth, but it is the first time she's kissed him like this, slow and full of promise, and when Flint trails a hand over her side and skirts the hem of her shirt, she doesn't push him away. Far from it. Afterward, curled against each other in the late-night heat, sticky and sweaty and sated, Flint thinks it's a probably-dumb, definitely-inappropriate thing to thank two strange teenagers for, but he does anyway.
Two days later - two days of Cato and Clove and half-hearted tribute-hunting that turns up no one, two days of frolic and hushed, uncertain talk of Talents, of wrestling in the sand and throwing knives at squirrels; two days of Twelve watching her Loverboy slip closer and closer into the dark; two days of Mary glowing brighter, smiling more, taking Shalene in her lap and blowing raspberries on her round little cheeks - Flint's free shift comes up on the rotation. A full twenty-four hours of nothing to do but sit with his girls and watch Cato and Clove bring it home.
Flint's day off comes just in time for him to catch the broadcast of the Feast. Just in time to watch Clove die.
The thing about hope is that it's tenuous. It's slippery, like the sides of a mine in the dead of winter when the rocks are lined with frost and chunks of ice. It's like the cobwebs that Mary knocks down from the corners of the ceiling with her broom, because she hates the look of them in her house even when Flint points out the spiders do nothing but eat bugs. It's the slow burn of red, orange, and pink across the sky before it all fades to black. Hope changes as quick as the weather here at the base of the mountains, where one minute the wind is light and teasing on your face, and the next it's driving shards of ice hard into your skin and sending rivets of rain down the back of your shirt.
The Arena and hope are a lot alike.
It all happens so fast. Clove has Twelve on the ground, and she keeps pulling knives out of nowhere as she reels out a terrifying speech that's less scary because of what she's saying and more for the calm, almost blasé way that she says it. Twelve struggles beneath her on the ground, but her bow is gone, out of arm's reach, and Clove has her hands pinned and a knife at her throat and there's no way the Girl on Fire is going to twirl her way out of this one.
Except that the camera changes, and Mary jerks in Flint's arms because this stuff with Clove and Twelve, that's television gold, no way would they cut away to Eleven when he's doing nothing but running, except oh, oh fuck, that's the Cornucopia in the corner of the screen.
Clove never misses. She makes every kill she aims for, hits every target, delivers every line with practiced ease. She only makes one mistake the entire time she's in the Arena.
Too bad all it takes is one.
Her mistake is this: getting so wrapped up in her big speech to Twelve that she forgets to check where she is. Eleven's giant fist twists itself in Clove's jacket and rips her off Twelve while she's in the middle of dragging the tip of her knife over Twelve's lips, and he crushes her in his arms, her feet dangling off the ground, just like Cato did when Templesmith's voice changed everything. Except not like that, not like that at all, because Eleven's eyes are wide and crazed and his giant arms squeeze her hard enough that she cries out, and she'd fanned out all her knives to make a good show for Twelve and has nothing left.
Eleven throws Clove onto the ground, screaming at her about the little girl, his district partner, and Flint can't move, can't do anything but clutch Mary tight as her breath comes short and ragged. He has a rock twice the size of Shalene's skull clutched in his enormous fist. Clove's eyes flicker to it, then her whole face contorts and she screams for Cato.
Shalene starts wailing at the sound. Flint wonders for a hysterical second if Shalene feels a connection, because for the first time in weeks, through the blood and the steel and the tracker jackers and the fire, through all of that Clove has never sounded anything but the well-trained killer that she is, but now she sounds every bit a child. Her voice is high, hysterical, and it trembles and cracks as she skitters backwards on all fours, and she's scared. The implacable Clove is scared, and not just scared but terrified stiff and brainless, because otherwise she would have rolled away and run off instead of scrambling on her hands and feet like a confused crab.
The cameras cut to Cato, waiting in the woods as lookout. His head snaps up at the sound of her voice, and Flint sees the horror smack him full in the face. "Clove!" he shouts, and his voice, too, is way too high and out of control as he tears through the trees after her.
They're children, Mary said the night hope blew its sweet breath over the Arena and down through the mountains of Two into its citizens, into Flint, into his marriage.
They're just children.
The rock bashes in the side of Clove's head like it's made of aluminum. Her body falls to the ground in a broken heap.
Eleven and Twelve have a conversation that Flint can't hear because his head spins too hard for him to make it out. The toe of Clove's boot pokes out from the edge of the frame.
No cannon. No Cato. Not yet.
Eleven grabs District Two's pack from the Cornucopia and runs. Twelve takes off in the opposite direction.
Cato crashes through the line of trees and skids to a stop by Clove's body. Twelve hesitates just long enough to see him drop to his knees before she's gone, too. "No, midget," Cato rasps out, tossing the spear aside. "C'mon, stay. Stay with me." He pulls her head into his lap even though you never move a person with a head injury because it don't matter, not one like this, and there's not that much blood on the outside but Flint's seen his share of accidents and he knows what that means for what's going on inside her skull.
Mary turns her face into his chest and sobs, and Flint should turn it off - it's his wife and she's just clawed her way back from months of skirting the abyss but he can't, he has to watch this because Clove is dying and Clove is Two and Flint is Two and Twos look out for each other, they always have, and he can't save her and he can't help her but he can watch, and not watch like those fuckers in the Capitol with their popcorn and their betting sheets, but really watch, feel the pain in his gut like Cato stuck him with his spear and popped his insides. He has to watch.
Clove owes Flint nothing, but he owes her this.
Cato pets her hair with hands the size of her head, bends over double so he can press their foreheads together and talk in a voice too low for the cameras to catch. The line of his shoulders is taut, trembling from the effort of controlling himself, and Flint has the insane thought that skin is all that holds people together, that without skin they'd all just fly apart, the bones and the blood, and Cato's skin seems to be just a hair away from bursting with the rage that's crawling through him.
The words that the microphones do pick up are gruesome, threats and promises of violence that Flint in his twenty-five-some-odd years of watching the Games has never even heard of, and Cato says them in the same tender tone that Flint used when he stroked Mary's cheek and called her beautiful the night he took her out to the hill at the edge of town, told her to look up at the stars, and promised to rip all of them down from the sky if she'd be his wife.
I swear to Snow I'll move the moon for you, Flint had promised, clumsy but sincere. Mary had smiled and ducked her head.
I'm going to tear out his fucking liver and shove it down his fucking throat, Cato vows, with every bit as much conviction. Clove smiles up at him, her eyes glassy, and trails bloody fingers down his cheek.
Sometimes Cato's expression turns ugly and his words growl and dive down into his throat and his eyes burn, and when that happens the camera cuts away for a few seconds - to Twelve, skirting the riverbank back to the cave; to Eleven, pounding the ground to his field - and Flint wonders what Cato's saying, what could possibly be more disturbing than what's happening right now that they can't show it, but it always comes back to the two of them, alone in their own world, a world that's disintegrating underneath them while somewhere in a big white room a Gamemaker's hand hovers over the button that signals the boom of a cannon.
Mary's tears soak through Flint's shirt. Shalene's still wailing, but Flint can't make himself get up and go to her. He's fixed on the screen, and Cato holds Clove's face in both his hands and vows to kill the others for her as her eyes flutter closed. And then there's nothing left, no more promises, no more bargains, no more begging her to stay with him, nothing but I love you and gonna kill them and Clove just keeps smiling, still and sweet as her blood soaks into his lap and the grass around him and her chest stutters with the effort of keeping her here.
The cannon fires. Cato stands up, back and shoulders straight as Twelve's bowstring. He picks up his spear and marches off in the direction that Eleven fled, and President Snow himself could come and offer Flint all the money in every bank in all of Panem to trade places with Eleven for an hour and Flint would run in the opposite direction until his legs fell off.
Cato disappears into the forest. The camera changes to Twelve, crawling into the cave and jamming a syringe into Loverboy's leg, and Flint is so sickened that they expect him to care about this insipid, childish excuse for a love story when the greatest one he's ever seen - the greatest one Panem will ever see - just burst into flame back at the Cornucopia, that he wishes Cato would find Twelve now and tear her head from her shoulders. But Clove's gone, and all the Capitol cares about now is their star-crossed lovers with their little stories of bread and pigtails and birds singing, and all of it means nothing.
Flint turns the television off, and the remote is heavy and burns his hand like coals and he can't hold it anymore, and so he throws it across the room where it smashes against the wall. Mary pulls away from him and curls in on herself, and Flint forces himself to stand and pick up Shalene, who's screaming and red-faced and furious, her little fists waving in impotent baby rage.
"It's okay," Flint says, and he brings her up against his shoulder and rubs her back and stares at the grey screen of the deactivated television. "It's okay, baby. It's okay."
It's not okay. Nothing's okay. Mary cries into her hands and Flint has nothing, absolutely nothing, to comfort her.
Flint slips away the next morning at the siren. He checks the television just for a second, to see if there's been any change, but all he sees are the lovers from Twelve sleeping peacefully, all signs of infection gone; Eleven wide awake and shaking in his field, sickle out, turning to snap around at every sound; Five checking another snare and finding it empty, her wide eyes desperate and red-rimmed; and Cato, or what's left of Cato, marching through the Arena with sword in one hand and spear in the other, going to kill them, going to kill them drumming through his body as his boots hit the ground. He still has his blood on her. If he wins, Flint's not sure if he'll ever wash his hands again. How he ever could.
He turns off the TV and leaves Mary in bed - he gave her one of the pills he had to take on four extra shifts to get, working until he tore a muscle in his shoulder, and she went down quick after that and should stay down until around noon. Daisy, Brim's girl from next door, promised to come by after breakfast and stay with her so she won't be alone, and Flint would rather do it himself but he's gotta go to work and that's that. Besides, a little girl died last night so his little girl won't ever, the least he can do is his job.
Not much chatter in the quarries today. Most everybody saw what happened, and the ones what didn't have already heard, and absolutely nobody wants to talk about it. The work ain't any harder today than it was before Clove died but it sure feels like it, and Flint pictures the coal miners in Twelve applauding when Eleven bashed Clove's skull in and he feels sick all over again. The other districts, they hate the Careers and that's no secret, they hate them because of the training and the privilege and the smiles they paste on their faces when they kill but what does all that matter? In the end it all comes down to who's got the bigger rock, and all Clove's wicked smiles and flayed squirrels and her face in Cato's shoulder couldn't stop it.
He thinks of all the babies being conceived in Twelve this week - babies they can't none afford to feed, mind - that'll grow up named Katniss, and a sour taste fills his mouth that not even the granite dust can overpower.
Around four, the foreman stops them. "Boys, let's pack it up and go," he says. "Ain't nobody feels like working today. We can pick it up tomorrow no problem."
It ain't bread, like District Eleven managed, but it's all the people of Clove's hometown can do. Nobody argues, and they shut it down and trickle back into town in a silent line.
Flint stops by the bar on the way home. He uses the phone in the corner to call his house, and when Daisy answers and says Mary's still sleeping and Shalene's an angel, Flint decides to grab a drink first. Why not. He orders the worst thing Bert's got and Bert hands it to him without a word. It tastes like piss and motor oil and that's about right.
"Score?" Flint asks dully. TV's on but he can't look, not yet.
"Six for Cato," says Rook next to him, and Flint glances over. Rook thins his mouth. "He got Eleven 'round two this afternoon. Cut him open, peeled his ribs right off his body, punched him in the lungs, all sorts of sick shit. There ain't nothing left of that boy now. Whatever was, it died with her."
Flint's not surprised. "Five?"
"Still hiding. Lovebirds got themselves a nice feast from the sponsors."
Of course they did. Flint finishes his drink - spits on the ground once he's through the door - and heads home. Mary's awake but back to the way she was before, staring at the wall, and Flint curls up in bed behind her and strokes her hair and calls her every pet name he knows but none of it makes her stir. He closes his eyes and tries his best to keep the tension from his hands as he rubs her back.
The next night there's another face in the sky, the girl from Five, and the recap shows her popping toxic berries into her mouth and convulsing on the ground. Flint shudders. Nightlock is one of those invasive plants that gets everywhere, from the woods of Twelve all the way to the mountains of Two, and the first thing Flint's gonna do as soon as Shalene's old enough to go outside is teach her not to go anywhere near it. A smart girl like Five not recognizing the most well-known poison plant in Panem is terrifying. The urban districts freak him the hell out.
That leaves just Cato and the lovebirds, then, and a chill runs through Flint that makes him clutch Shalene closer even as she sleeps. Chances are this is it. With Cato's humanity burning away step by step, the skin falling off and leaving the flame-licked bones clean, the Gamemakers aren't likely to want to draw this out - but more than that, Flint hopes they don't. Because with every day that passes Cato's turning more and more the monster, the final dragon for the heroes to defeat, and that's even worse than death.
Twelve cradled little Eleven and sang to her about valleys and meadows and the whole nation wept to see such innocence lost. Cato held his partner's smashed-in head in his lap as her blood and brains stained his pants, and he sang her to sleep and death with tales of blood and vengeance and he kept his promise in the end. One of these things is not like the other except it is, it is, because two little girls are dead and the boys who killed them are dead and the ones who had the courage to love them are still alive. Except it's easy to love a little girl with big doe eyes who danced in the trees and wore gossamer wings on stage. It's something else to love the one who slid her knives into a boy's throat and blew him a kiss as he choked on his blood, but Cato did, and Flint did, and all of this is wrong.
Cato deserves more than to be the final hiccup on the lovebirds' road to Victory. Flint looks at the screen, sees the boy with the gore-smeared face and death's-head grimace and knows he'll be lucky to get even that.
It's Flint's day off again, go figure, when the whole thing ends. Mary can't watch but Flint has to, and he don't trust himself to be in the same room with his girls when it goes down, so he calls Daisy again and heads back to Bert's when the three remaining start making their way back to the Cornucopia. "Won't be long," he tells Daisy. It's ending today and Flint knows it. He feels it in his bones like his granddad used to say about the rain an hour before the clouds swirled in. He gets to Bert's just in time to see the Gamemakers make their final play.
Idiot Twelve thinks the mutts are for them. Of course she does. To her it's all for them, the star-crossed lovers, the Girl on Fire and the Boy with the Bread, this whole damn show's been for them, why wouldn't it be, but Flint knows an execution when he sees one. And when Cato looks down from the Cornucopia into the crazed eyes of the mutt with a scruff of dark hair and a 2 on its collar, Flint watches as every last breath of the boy who tugged Clove's hair and pushed her into the sand disappears, and he knows Cato sees it too.
When Twelve's arrow takes Cato down and Loverboy knocks him to the ground, the whole bar lets out a collective cry. Bert stops serving, the boys quit asking, and all the games of cards or dice or knucklebones or darts that the people been playing to keep their minds off it, all that dies. Silence settles over the bar like the dust after a rockslide, and it's over, it's all over.
It's over, but Cato still fights. He fights, and damn it, he's beautiful, the kind of beauty that squeezes Flint right in the chest and yanks the tears from his eyes in a way that ain't happened since his baby girl squalled for the first time. Anyone else would look into the face of death - into the mad, mad eyes of the girl he loved, eyes that got torn out of her face and stitched into the face of this mutt-monster, as she dives for his throat - and give up, not like it would be hard, but Cato doesn't. Flint ain't sure if he's stubborn, crazy, well-trained, or just don't care, but Cato fights them, and he takes down mutt after mutt after mutt with the short-sword he had strapped to his leg.
He is beautiful, and Flint will smash the teeth of any fucker who dares say otherwise.
Cato fights for a whole hour, sixty Capitol-damned minutes against the best, most twisted end the Gamemakers could engineer for him, with nothing but a piece of metal the size of his forearm. He fights as they jump on him and tear at his flesh and their fangs snag on his clothes or the body armour that ain't gonna save him but will make it last longer. He fights as the lovers shiver and cling to each other up in safety like the cold is the worst thing that could happen. Flint hates them.
He fights until he can't fight no more and what mutts he didn't manage to kill or hurt too bad drag him back into the Cornucopia.
"Now it'll be over," someone says in a hoarse, raw whisper, breaking the silence. "They'll end it now, thank Snow."
They don't end it. Not the mutts, not the Gamemakers, and the cameras stick nice and close to the mouth of the horn so the viewers can see every hunk of skin and muscle they tear away from his hands, his neck, his ear, and they leave the microphones to catch every begging moan.
Night falls. The anthem plays. Cato's missing six fingers, one foot, and half his ear. Fire-Girl fusses over Loverboy's leg while Cato punches the smaller Eleven-mutt between the eyes with the stump of his ruined hand. They whisper comforting nothings into each other's ears and Flint wishes the big Eleven mutt would just jump and take them down, but no, no, that's not how this story ends. The heroes defeated the giant.
Twelve shivers against her boyfriend's chest. "Cato may win this thing yet," she whispers through chattering teeth, and it takes Flint a second to get what she means because it's so colossally fucking stupid that his brain can't take it. She's talking about the temperature. She's talking about dying from the thrice-damned chill before there's not enough left of Cato for them to take home and crown.
"Don't you believe it," says Loverboy with the kind of fierce bravery that can only come from someone self-centred enough to believe that braving a little cold and blood loss is even on the same continent as being chewed alive.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me!" someone explodes, and a tankard shatters against the floor. Bert says nothing about the mess.
Hours pass and finally Cato stops fighting. The inside of the Cornucopia is splashed red and dripping with his blood in the dark, barely a hint of the original gold when the moonlight arcs through the clouds, and Cato slumps back against the ground, gives up as they tug at his arms and peel the first strip of body armour away. His eyes are glassy in his torn face.
Somewhere behind Flint, a grown man bursts into quiet sobs. He ain't the only one. Flint's vision blurred ages back, and ain't nobody saying nothing.
Finally Twelve has the decency to remember that a boy is dying underneath her, though from the look on her face it seems like she's thinking more about how much this sucks for her to have to hear it. "Why don't they just kill him?" she asks.
Loverboy shakes his head. "You know why."
Flint does. He's nowhere near convinced they do.
Beside him, Rook, who showed up after his shift and ain't even seen the half of it, slams his fist against the bar. "You're the one with the fucking bow!" he shouts at the screen. "Why don't you fucking end it?"
"Because," says someone else, and it's Ryland with dead eyes and dead voice and an untouched drink in front of them. "That would be taking responsibility, and Twelves are the victims, remember?"
Ryland was always a little quieter, a little smarter than the rest of them. And he's right, because Twelve put her last arrow in Loverboy's fucking tourniquet, and so they keep on shivering and keep on clinging and calling to each other and fighting to stay awake as the moon creeps across the sky and more and more of Cato disappears into the mutt's gaping maws.
Last call rolls around, but Bert doesn't bother. It's three in the morning and they're all awake, frozen in their seats and staring at the screen, and they'll pay for it tomorrow when it's time to work but Flint can't bring himself to leave and neither can anyone else. Daisy hasn't called - none of their wives or girls have - and Cato's inability to give up and die has the whole town gripped in a terrible paralysis.
Now and then Cato speaks, and it's never more than a word or two - the most common are 'Clove', 'no more', 'I can't' and 'I'm sorry' - bubbling up through the blood and half-intelligible in his ruined mouth, but whenever he does another man breaks down crying. Devon once put his own shoulder back into place while waving away a belt or glove to bite down on, but when Cato chokes out a mangled please, Devon buries his face in his hands, his entire body shaking.
It's not until the sky turns light that Loverboy clues in that they might actually be able to speed things up, but by then Flint is numb with horror and rage and all he can think is about fucking time. Flint listens to the lovebirds justify their hoursand hours of doing absolutely fucking nothing with a half-assed comment about Cato being too far from the mouth of the Cornucopia, as if the whole theme of these damn Games hasn't been that the Girl on Fire is wicked with a bow. 'Preternatural', one of the comments called it after she took down two grooslings with one shot, but nope, can't kill a six-foot-five two-hundred-pound boy who ain't even moving anymore. Sounds legit.
The cannon fires. The bar lets out the breath it's been holding one way or another for the past eight hours. The wake-up siren cuts through the ensuing silence.
The lovebirds embrace, but Bert reaches up and shuts off the television. "Show's over, boys," he says, and no one argues. Nobody begs to see the Twelves get their happy ending, though Flint does hope the Gamemakers revoke the decision and return it to only one Victor. Let Twelve feel the gut-twisting punch of hope destroyed. He tries not to think about the other districts, who won't care which one of the lovebirds will win just as long as it's not one of the monsters from Two.
Flint drags a hand over his face and pushes himself off the barstool, gradually aware the other men on his rotation are doing the same. Exhaustion presses at his eyes and digs hooks into his shoulders but it don't really matter. Another year, another twenty-some kids shipped off home in coffins, though this year they're missing their eyeballs so that's new.
This time the foreman shuts down the mines at noon. Flint heads home to his girls, doing his best to shrug off the disappointment and the sickening taste of injustice in his mouth.
He hears, soon enough, that the Gamemakers did try to change the rules back, but the Girl on Fire outsmarted everyone again with a handful of poison berries. They play it off like she was so in love with her boy that she couldn't live without him, but Flint knows what he saw. He saw the lovebirds running for the Cornucopia. He saw her forget all about him, saw her leave him behind. Saw her face when she remembered and tried to smooth it away.
It's not real. Maybe for the boy, but not for the girl. Maybe the painted Capitol floozies believe it, but not Flint. Not a man who found the love of his life in a tiny diner when he was seventeen and knew right then she was the prettiest girl that ever walked the earth, but knew he had to wait because a dumb kid like him didn't deserve a girl like her. Not a man who moved heaven and hell to make himself good enough for her, not when he and Mary's house is small and they're poor as dirt but none of that matters when she looks him in the eye and smiles. Flint knows love. These kids don't know shit.
Cato and Clove died in the dirt for a love story that ain't even true, for a girl so bursting with love that she let another get torn to pieces the whole night while she didn't do a damn thing.
Flint doesn't begrudge Twelve their win, not exactly. Two's got its share of Victors and Twelve's only got Abernathy, so fair enough. He'd even be happy for them, in a sad sort of way - Two understands better than most of the districts about sacrifice and loss and practicality - but he can't get past it, not this year, not that girl. Not the one with a bunch'a gears and calculations where her heart should be.
He's glad to hear the rule change will never happen again, no matter how special the story. He's glad that the star-crossed lovers ruined it for everyone else forever. If Cato and Clove couldn't have it, no one else will deserve it ever again.
Flint doesn't watch the rest of the ceremonies. None of them do, though maybe a couple turn on the TV out of a sense of masochism before flicking it off again. He has a sick girl and a baby girl, and it kills Flint to see the hope that started to blossom in Mary's cheeks get cut off like that. He spends every minute he can with them at home, and as the air turns crisp and the leaves turn, the cloud finally starts to slide from Mary's shoulders and she remembers how to smile again. When Shalene turns a year old, Mary coos and sings and pulls Flint in for a long kiss right there in front of all their friends, and that's good enough. Good enough.
The whispers take longer to reach Two than they do the others, but they do get there. One day in the quarries, one of the younguns - idealistic, dissatisfied and stupid, like so many kids are these days - turns to Flint in a low whisper and says, "So whatcha think about that Mockingjay?"
Flint digs his shovel hard into the ground, shoving the point into a fissure and digging until it splits the rock in half. He kicks one half away down the hill, turns and spits on the piece that's left. "That's what," he says.
"Hear fuckin' hear," calls Rook.
When the Mockingjay shows up on his screen and starts talking about injustice and murder and unfairness and asks them to follow her, to trust her, Flint throws a bookend right through the television screen. They never bother to get a new one.