Chapter Three
We sit down and an attendant advises us that we will be beginning in about five minutes. The feeds into the other district begin to become alive with people walking around and some even sitting already at the table. Thom has been the three term Mayor of District Twelve, the only original Mayor from the formation of the new government.
Most of the people here in District Twelve love Thom and his wife Millie. They have two boys, Peeta and Gale. Imagine that, the two brothers were named after us two. Of course the first boy was Gale, and the second smaller was Peeta. We all joke about if they each fell in love with same girl. Katniss of course didn't find the humor behind it, but accept the boys.
The attendants pass out sealed packets to each one of us. Once all of us are seated, we see the current President of Panem come onto the screen. President Mason was elected through an election after President Paylor declined a third term. Everyone loved President Paylor, she did bring the districts together and had left the government with many safe guards so that we would never go back to the way things were.
"Good afternoon everyone," says President Mason. "The reason behind this meeting is to discuss the next project on the agenda that requires input from our council, our mayors and our remaining victors."
Looking at the screens I see that out of the seven victors at the end of the war, only six of remain. Enobaria died a couple of years ago in a training incident, that was ruled an accident. Everyone had thought that it was Johanna but when she was found in District Seven, it was ruled an accident.
I see on the screens, Annie, Beetee, and Johanna. They are all opening the packets and taking a look at the next initiative.
"The question before you is what we do with the sites?" says President Mason.
The proposals are for the arena sites. Before the war, any old arena could be visited by people from the Capitol only. The people from the districts couldn't visit because of the travel restrictions, and I don't think they would ever go because of what happened there.
On the proposals are the 75th, 74th, 73rd, 72nd arena sites. Currently they have been shut down but there are looking for a permanent solution to this.
I raise my hand to be acknowledged.
"Question, Peeta Mellark, District Twelve," says an attendant.
"Yes, Peeta," says President Mason.
"Are the sites active?" I say.
"To answer your question, Mr. Mellark, the sites are currently still active and therefore would need to be manually shut down and cleared for demolition," says a technical advisor.
"This is why we need the help of the remaining Victors, who have first hand knowledge of the traps" says President Mason. "Minister Plutarch has volunteered his knowledge on where the manual shut downs are located."
The impact of what is being asked of us finally hit us.
"You want us to go back?!" blurts out Katniss as she slams her hand on the table. "Why can't you just bomb it and get it over with?"
There is a silence in the room and everyone in the conference call just looks at her. She is standing still not moving, still as defiant as she was back in the rebellion.
"Still got it," a familiar voice says over the speakers. The voice is enough to have your skin crawl; it causes my hands to slowly close to a fist.
"Katniss, I have it on good authority that there are many high yield explosive devices that were hidden there in the arena sites by President Snow," says Plutarch. "Turn to page four in your package and you will find Capitol memo listing the plan for the high yield explosives being hidden in the arenas."
We turn to the fourth page and find the memo that is signed by President Snow. It all sounds very complicated and honestly all gibberish. If that was the case then why plant them there?
"When? Why?" I stammer.
"They strategically moved them when the uprising had begun, that is the when" says Plutarch. "The why, is from what we have concluded was to be able to strike the rebel base when the location was uncovered."
The information that they thought I had. It was what got them killed. It is something that I wished I knew. It could have saved them long enough for the Plutarch to get them out of the Capitol.
"If...if I may," says Beetee. "If I am reading these correctly and I think I am the uranium high yield explosives..."
"Yes, the high yield explosive," interrupts Plutarch.
"No, no, no..." says Beetee. "Uranium high yield is not just simple explosives, they are nuclear devices."
The weight of this stops everyone and even causes the color to disappear from the President's face. It is one thing to hide bombs, but to move nuclear bombs it is another thing. Not even President Coin threatened the Capitol with nuclear devices, because she knew that if one went off, it would be bad for everyone.
"Well who cares," says Johanna Mason. "Just leave them there; it hasn't done any harm all these years."
"Thank you Ms. Mason. We had thought of that but found that some of the devices could begin to leak and are showing signs of stress fractures," says the President. "The locations of the active arenas are what trouble me. If we could all turn to page six."
Turning the packet we find the locations of the active arenas. Each one labeled with a red bulls-eyes on them. No one but the game makers knew the exact locations of the arenas. Even after the Games, Capitol officials would be blindfolded when they wanted to visit the arenas and vacation there.
A couple of pages in and finally the location of our Games come into view. Once Katniss told me that in the arena she thought that the sky looked and the forest looked like it did back in District Twelve.
I grab her hand and she looks at the page. The red bulls-eyes are only beyond the mountain range of District Twelve.
"No," she says shaking head, trying to forget the pain. "Even in death, President Snow still has the power to kill us."
I slowly stop her by placing my hands on her face. She looks up at me with those eyes, that fiery passion that was there is no longer, looking at me for some sort of answers when I know that I have none.
I turn and face the screen where the President is looking.
"What do you need us to do?" I say softly.
"It is quite simple," says the technician. "We will provide you with the map to where the kill switch is. You simply have to turn it off. Our scientists then will come in and disarm the bombs. That is it, simple."
I stand, lifting her to my arms.
"No," I say. "It is never... simple, when it is the old Capitol."
We begin to walk out, when I see him there propped up near the door sipping from his flask.
"Stay alive ...right?" I say walking pass him.
No one tries to stop us, but sooner or later they will come for us. They will come to take us back to the Capitol. When will this be finally over?
Once outside, I walk with her, not really talking just want to get as far away from this as possible. Really I just need to think, need to calm down. The breathing was hard enough inside; pretending that I was holding it together took every ounce of concentration to stop the shaking.
I pick up the pace and I think that is when she notices, because I feel her hand climb up to my chest. When she feels the irregularities of my heart she stops me.
"Peeta," she says.
"I am okay, I can at least make it to the house," I say.
"Ssssh, let me help you," she says.
She moves me back to a nearby crate, and helps me finally sit down. Sitting next to me, she begins to hum a lullaby.
"Concentrate on the song, let you mind pick up the melody," she says.
I can feel my heart start to slow down. My breathing begins to become normal. It is only then that she lifts my chin and kisses me.
The kiss has the most calming effect of all, and finally just like it didn't happen, everything has normalized.
"Come on, let's get home," she says. "We have to think this through."
We walk back through the back road that leads to the Victors Village. This isn't the time to talk with anyone, to chit chat about how everything is going great and that they are happy.
They don't know what we do. That only a couple miles away is the old arena, holding the ghosts of the past. The place where the Capitol killed everyone we knew and hide its greatest weapon, to destroy us all.
Getting to our house and inside we each has a feeling of a small victory. That is the only thing that we can think of, because what is about to happen is probably our greatest challenge yet. It is like me returning to the Capitol, but for Katniss, it is returning to where it started.
We both sit in the sofa, unsure on where to begin. How do you think this one through? What strategy do we have? Even if we make it through the arena and find the kill switch, what about the other two arenas? We only know the 74th and the 75th, but I don't even remember the 73rd or the 72nd.
"So, if you say no then I say no," I say. "We do this as a family or none at all."
She lifts her eyes from the floor which had been staring at it for the last ten minutes.
"If we don't do it, who will," says Katniss.
"I don't know, someone else, anyone else for all I care the President can go in our place...Katniss, we have given so much to the Capitol," I say. "Why can't it be someone else?"
She tightens my hand, and I know that I cannot hide anything from her.
"You are still trying to protect me," says Katniss. "Real or not real."
"Real," I say. "If I could, I would put you in the farthest place away from here."
She slides closer to me and I can feel her arms wrap around my waist. She places her head on my chest, and for a moment we just think about it. Running away through the night, no one would find us.
"Haven't we been here before," she says.
"And I said yes," I say.
"Hard to believe that you were ready to go into the forest with me, even with Gale," she says.
"Just to be with you, I would go anywhere," I say.
There is a pause in the air, almost like we all know the answer.
"You know we cannot leave," she says.
"I know, but it would have been an adventure," I say.
"We would have to prepare," she says. "After all who know what traps where laid for us back in our Games," she says. "Now that I remember, there weren't any really that you or I triggered."
"You know, I think Plutarch will give us the details on what the triggers are and where they are located," I say, but quickly remember. "Although we were given the same information of the Pods on the Capitol streets and that didn't help us."
Thinking about, and all the chaos that happened due to lack of information. This time around it will not happen to us again, I will not risk our lives with guesses and uncertainty.
"There is something that I have this time that I didn't back then," she says.
"What?" I say unsure.
She lifts her hand and places it on my chest.
"I have you," she says. "Before we had to keep an eye on you, this time, I have you to take care of me."
"That and I can actually use a weapon now," I say.
She makes the so-so sign with her hand. Smiling she knows exactly how to take off the edge of a very serious situation. I stand and I hold her.
"Thank you," I say.
"No problem," she says.
I run my hand around her back.
"Peeta, don't you even think about it," she says starting to squirm.
I start to tickle her, which causes her to cry out in laughter. She tries to separate from my but one of my arms have her pinned. She tries to tickle me, which causes me to try and separate from her.
"Okay, okay, okay...truce?" I say slowly letting her go. Right as I am in the clear she gets one more tickle stab at me, which causes me want to grab her.
"Let's forget about this until tomorrow, okay?" says Katniss.
"Forget about what? All I remember is how hungry I am, and how much I love you," I say. "And not in that order."
We walk together to the kitchen where I grab some ingredients to make some bread. She gets out the squirrels that were caught in the trap. After preparing the meat, and waiting for the bread, we sit down and eat.
Walking with her to the living room, I open all the windows to let in the wind. We have to know the things that we like.
"You know there is something I always wanted to ask," I say.
"Hmm," she says looking up as she sits down on the sofa.
"Why do you like to have all the windows opened?" I say.
She smiles, like she knows something that I don't. She pats the seat next to her. I walk over and sit in our little sofa that has seen many kisses, and many tears.
"That is easy," she says. "When I came back to the District after the war had ended, I had never felt so alone," she says. "But one day, I looked outside and saw you, there just sitting at the base of a tree."
Trying to remember what she was referring to and nothing comes to mind. The torture that the Capitol had administered had a lasting effect of one thing. Every memory I have to fight to remember. It is like for others it is easy to remember, but to me, I have to relive it a couple of times in order to fully remember.
"Well I think a butterfly had landed on your hand because you just sat there examining it," she says.
The picture in my mind becomes something familiar. It was probably the fourth day back in the District. It was probably a day or so before I went into the forest to find the primroses to plant in front of her house. It was actually the reason why I did it.
"I opened the window and wanted to yell out to you, but I couldn't," she says. "You got up and started to walk towards the Square, so I followed you in my house opening windows."
"So that is why you like it?" I say.
"Well I would fall asleep on this sofa and hearing you outside, helped me feel not so alone," says Katniss. "You once told me that you like it when all the windows were opened. So I wanted to like something that you did, it kept me close to you, even though you weren't here."
I lift her hand and give it a kiss.
"You want to know why I liked to have all the windows opened." I say.
She nods her head no.
"It was a dream of mines that one day, if I had the windows opened I could catch you singing to the birds. I didn't want to miss the opportunity of that so everyday I would open the windows," I say.
Again we both like things because of the other. It makes me smile, how we were always trying to be close to the other even when we didn't know. She wanted to be next to me, but didn't know how, and I longed to be with her, but was waiting for the right time.
"You remember when you gave me this," she says showing me her ring.
It was a month after our celebration, and winter had already came in. I was out shoveling the snow from the walkway to our house. She was just there looking at me.
"You know there are two shovels," I say to her.
She laughs at me.
"I see that, although you wanted the walkway cleared so people could up here. I would rather have them not come and bother us," she says.
"Well if it wasn't snowing we would be in the house by the lake," I say. "Although we couldn't swim in the lake."
"Then you can skate on it," she says.
"You can skate on it?" I say surprisingly.
"Hmm, hmm," she says. "One day I will take you ice skating."
That would be the day, me skating on ice. The very thought opens a whole new level of excitement for me. It allows me to see that there are things in my life that I haven't experience, a world past my own imagination.
"You are a total surprise, Mrs. Katniss Mellark," I say.
She smiles at the fact that I just called her by her new name. It was the first time in about a week since I had done that. The way it sounds, it is almost like a dream, like I imagined it.
"Just like the time you found the pearl, you really surprised me back then." she says. "I just couldn't tell you back then, because we had all of Panem watching and the alliance that we had with the...other...victors."
I walk over to her placing the shovel on the step. I hold her, knowing that the memory still brings a small pain for losing Finnick in the war.
"The pearl," I repeat.
"Yeah, I found it a couple days ago in an old box that I never unpacked," she says walking back inside. After a couple of minutes she comes back with the silver parachute. Once she unraveled it that is when I see it, a perfect round pearl, still as beautiful as when I first saw it that day in the Quarter Quell.
I run it through my hands and there in the palm of my hand is the one thing that I knew was the sign that we were meant to be together.
"Peeta," she says.
I lift my head to see her playing with something.
"Remember this?" she says twirling something in one of her fingers.
There in her hand was the silver spile.
"Isn't this what we used to get water?" I say.
"Yeah," she says. "Funny little thing that was reason why we lived. We wouldn't have lasted that long without water."
That comment, just stuck in my mind so much so that I later asked if I could have the spile.
"Sure," she says giving me a kiss as she handed it to me.
The next day, I walked to the blacksmith and had him cut the spile into two rings. He did have to expand it for me, and tighten it for her, but in the end we did exchange rings. I even had him place on hers the word 'reason.'
"What does this mean," she says.
"This was the spile, and it was the reason why we lived in the arena," I say. "But now, you are my reason that I am alive."
She grabs my ring and walks over to the blacksmith and had him place a word on mines. When he was finally done, he gave it to her.
She looked at it with this shy look in her face. When she handed it to me, she made me close my eyes as she slipped it on my finger.
"Living," I say as I read it in the light. "What does it mean?"
She holds my hand, in hers, and when she lifts it to the light, it becomes apparent.
"Reason...living," I say to her.
"You are my reason for living," she says.
"And you are mines," I say.