A/N: Thank you to everyone for following, favoriting and reading. I hope you're enjoying this fic, do tell me if you are! Special thanks as ever to Thogje and Crankygrrl for their reviews, you guys are great. And thank you to the guest reviewer, so happy you like the story, stick with me!
Tomorrow we will only give them a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf which will fall on the earth like if it had been made by our lips ~ Pablo Neruda
The cannon sounds.
I have died, Katniss thinks, I've finally died.
She looks down at Peeta and asks him to come with her, wherever she's going next, come with me. He doesn't reply, the remaining colour in his face has seeped into the ground. She is still in her underwear and his head on her thigh is sticky and warm with blood, he bleeds into her skin. It will be all right. She kisses his lips and they are dry like paper. She is still, so still. They are leaving now. They will be together.
Hands close over her shoulders and they are lifting her away from him. She tries to scream but no sound comes out.
We need to go together.
He doesn't reach out for her. He lies, his torso twisted where he slid from her lap, broken in a place she can't see. Peeta is just a boy, a blond haired, blue eyed boy who looks away in the school cafeteria if she turns in his direction. He doesn't see her. She prefers not to be seen, visible only to Gale when her arrow strikes their prey in the eye and she emerges to claim the kill. Katniss is in the woods, she can smell the pine needles, their musk lodged in the back of her throat. She can see a rolling impenetrable forest. But, Gale is not with her. It is the baker's son who stands beside her and it is his hand in hers as if he was never the boy with the bread, as if he was always hers to keep.
The noise tears at her and the ground rolls beneath her feet. She is being held tightly around the waist by strong arms as before her a dark shape descends, a claw lowered, Peeta scooped into it.
He is leaving without her.
"No!"
The voice is her own but she is watching from the outside, removed from the girl flailing and ripping at the arms that enclose her, broken wings at her back.
Then, he is gone, and she remains.
Katniss is bent double over Finnick's hands, and he bends with her, his cheek pressed to her hair, words she can't understand in her ear. She can't take a breath, exhaling all the air in collapsed lungs as she begins to sink to the ground, still contained in arms that aren't Peeta's. Finnick is rubbing her back and telling her to breathe. The hovercraft is gone. Katniss screams and there is only darkness, only the poor ghostly excuse for night the arena can provide, no velvet black to slip away into. She will never find a perfect dark, again. The woods are gone and she is blinded by a light only she can see.
Finnick holds her and Chaff and Seeder sit down either side of them, silently, their faces turned to the sky. Johanna stands guard. They do not flinch whilst Katniss screams, they close their eyes and listen. She cries until she is empty, like a child who has nothing but the feeling of loss to fill their belly. When she vomits Chaff brings her water and drips it onto her lips with his fingertips when she can't swallow.
They stay with her.
Finally, dawn stirs red in the sky and she is hollow.
"Katniss," Finnick says.
"She's lost it," Johanna replies, flatly, crouching down next to her and putting her finger under Katniss' chin. "Hey, stand up, OK? This isn't over."
Seeder kneels down, a low shush coming from her mouth like wind moving in reeds. She reaches out and strokes Katniss' cheek with the curved backs of her slim fingers. "You can go home soon," she says.
Johanna snorts, but Seeder ignores her.
"Your sister and mother will be waiting for you, don't give up when there are still people to love you."
Katniss is shivering, her teeth chattering together, clashing in her mouth as she tries to speak. She can't. Chaff shakes his head, muttering under his breath and looking to the sky. When he looks back down on Katniss he touches the crown of her head and when she meets his gaze he is backlit by a bright red light. Chaff's eyes widen and the sound is deafening, a feeling more than a noise.
The sky is on fire.
Finnick shields Katniss with his body and she presses her face against his chest as the ground shakes.
She's leaving, after all.
A spiralling wind begins like a tornado above them but Finnick doesn't let her go even as the claw reaches down to pick them up. She thinks of what it would be to fly, to soar, and something like peace encases her as she and Finnick are lifted together into a pounding sky.
Katniss closes her eyes and waits for Peeta.
"You don't have to wake up, yet."
Prim tangles Katniss' hair through her fingers like the weave of a blanket, her head resting beside her on the pillow, her body tucked in next to her sister on the bed. Katniss looks brave even in sleep, and young, younger than Prim can ever imagine her being. Because her sister has never been a child, she is funny, yes, teases and tickles, but her poise, her bearing, is of someone carrying the weight of a family's survival. A mother. Katniss has always been a mother. Prim sighs and kisses her sister's cheek before unfolding herself from the bed and straightening the sheets after her.
She walks to the window that stretches across one side of the room, resting her hands on the sill and pressing her nose to the glass so her breath frosts in a star. The Capitol is beautiful, like an iced cake, but Prim looks to the mountains beyond and wonders what it is like up there, if it's like home. So far, nothing here is like District 12. Prim didn't know what a hospital was and now she does remembering what she and her mother tried to do for people back home seems so futile, so hopeless. Here, people can survive anything.
They saved Katniss, easily, and now the screens above the bed display everything going on inside her body in pictures, lines, graphs, things that make no sense to Prim who goes by touch, by intuition, who can make medicine from what grows in their garden. The drugs they give Katniss go through tubes that are stitched into her neck, women in white use sterile needles to draw samples of blood from Katniss' arms, but the marks disappear immediately. In fact, she is largely unmarked. She will survive, at least, her body will.
It has been a week since Katniss was prised from Finnick's arms inside the hovercraft, a week since armed peacekeepers took Prim and her mother to the Capitol on a train, since they were installed in an apartment in the hospital's family wing, their every whim catered for. If she stands still for too long Prim can still feel the crushing weight against her chest when she thought Katniss would die, when they sat in their living room with the television cruelly showing every slither of pain on her sister's face. Gale couldn't watch. He stood in the doorway with his back to them, his hand still bandaged from punching the wrought iron gates of Victor's Village after the interviews.
"I don't know if I want you to wake up," Prim says. "Not here, like this." She sits back down on the edge of the bed facing the window.
The Capitol are rabid for a piece of Katniss, there are banks of cameras and people pressed behind barriers outside the hospital night and day and television coverage is around the clock. Snow, himself, has been to visit, and Prim watched as her mother thanked him for saving her daughter, the image of their clasped hands repeated on every television screen in Panem.
The mercy of the Capitol.
The girl on fire rises from the ashes. But, she is a broken bird.
Their mother cried when they told her Katniss was still pregnant, that the baby had survived. They heard its heartbeat when they hooked Katniss to the machines, a stubborn, persistent whooshing and Prim didn't know if it was relief her mother was feeling, or what exactly Katniss would feel when she woke up.
Gale is not here and this makes Prim angry. He should be here, like Katniss was for him after the whipping. He feels like he's already lost her, that was what he told Prim; that it could never be the same and she could not understand why that meant he shouldn't come. Nothing will ever be the same. It is irreversible. Prim has accepted this but she is still afraid, frightened that when Katniss wakes there will be nothing left of the sister she knew, that she will be like that hollow eyed ghost their mother was for so long. Their mother thinks that when Katniss is 'better' they will be allowed to return to District 12 together, that they will be left alone. Prim struggles to maintain a neutral expression when she says things like this, things that are so ridiculous. Snow has no plans to let them go. Prim is not blind. She knows that as soon as Katniss can stand she will be given no choice but to appear before the whole of Panem.
There is a knock at the door and Prim turns as Finnick enters the room, his smile makes her heart flutter despite herself.
"How is she?"
"The same," Prim replies.
Finnick's eyes travel over the syringe pumps by the bed, their lights flashing. He squints to read the labels on them but the drug names aren't discernable. He looks the same as he did before he entered the arena, Prim supposes he's had a lot of practice. Finnick has already appeared on a special interview show with Caesar Flickerman, absorbing the adoration of the crowd as he talked about saving Katniss, about trying to save Peeta, about his gratitude to the Capitol.
Gratitude.
No gratitude shines in his eyes now when he looks at her, it turns on and off like a light. He cannot be grateful to the man who planned his death or to the people who were willing to watch. It's an act. Prim doesn't know what is real, here.
"Can I walk you back to your apartment?" Finnick says.
"Sure." Prim shrugs.
She kisses Katniss' cheek and they leave the room, Prim doesn't notice Seeder slip in after them. She hasn't noticed that Katniss is never left alone.
The voice tells her to stay still as if she has any other choice, as if she weren't crushed beneath the weight of something she can't see. She is waking up and a hole begins to open like the stretching of a scab, pinching and stinging, pulling open her skin. It doesn't happen at once but when it does it's a spasm that wracks her body as she attempts to sit upright and unseen hands hold her back down. Katniss tries to pull away, gaining control of one of her hands and yanking the lines from her neck in one movement so she feels warm blood on her collarbone and pressure against her throat. There are hands all over her and she thrashes on the bed as if they burn. Katniss sinks her teeth into something soft and a guttural scream reverberates inside her skull.
Peeta.
Where is Peeta?
Finally her vision clears and her eyes find a focus. The woman in front of her is holding her shoulders, violet eyes boring into Katniss' own.
"You're going to hurt yourself."
Katniss spits in her face.
The woman stops to wipe her cheek on the sleeve of her white tunic before turning to the others, "Everyone, get out!"
Katniss fights as they strap the restraints to her arms, legs, and across her chest. She continues to fight when she and the violet-eyed woman are left alone, a bright light streaming through the window so that red spots dance in front of her eyes.
"I can give you something to calm you down," the woman says, moving in front of the window so her face is in shadow. She taps a button on the wall and the blinds slide partially closed.
It takes several seconds for Katniss to adjust her eyes, to begin to feel her body again, stretching her feet and moving her fingers. She is whole.
"Peeta?"
The woman pulls a chair up to the bed. It is impossible to tell how old she is, in the Capitol she could be any age, her face is unlined but she isn't young, her hair is silver and short to her skull – less to grab when I fight her to get out of here, Katniss thinks. She smiles, and her eyes narrow, it is then that Katniss sees a scar running the length of her face, thinner than a seam in the best fabric.
"You are in the Capitol."
Katniss knew this, without thinking she knew, in no other place would she fight so hard to get free. The Capitol. The Games. Something cold floods her stomach, her heart pressing against her ribcage, her body realising before her mind does. She retches but there is nothing but a thin liquid that she can only turn her head to one side to get rid of. The noise, the place in her lap where Peeta lay, the closing sky. Katniss cries, shaking the restraints, the leather of the straps cutting into her arms like the curl of a whip. She cannot, will not, remember, but she knows that he is gone.
Peeta is gone.
"If you continue I will need to inject a sedative," the woman says, her eyes never leaving the patient. "You can sleep longer, if you wish."
No. She can't sleep. She has to leave.
"I'm Dr. Rowan."
Katniss doesn't care. She closes her eyes, tears sliding down her face, there is nothing she cares about hearing. A distance begins to lengthen, she is going, stepping away, running.
"You're still pregnant, Katniss."
She snaps back, she remembers, and Peeta is convulsing in her arms, once more.
There is nothing else she wants to hear.
"Do you understand?"
If she could Katniss would fly at this woman, pin her to the ground just to get her to shut up. She understands; she understands that Peeta is dead and that it is her fault. His voice is very far away, now, and she won't listen to what he says, she can't. He is a ghost. Peeta is a ghost. He will never hold her again and he will die in her arms over and over during every night for the rest of her life. There is nothing more to understand. Eventually, the doctor leaves, without loosening the restrains, and they begin to burn the skin on Katniss' arms and across the tops of her thighs. Someone, somewhere, makes her blinds close completely and when the room is dark, save for the machines above the bed, Katniss begins to cry, slow sobs that release some of the pressure in her chest but do nothing to relieve the pain.
Prim holds her mother's hand firmly, she can see her tightly folded lips out of the corner of her eye. The Capitol has made her mother seem so pale, so insubstantial; so vulnerable. Dr. Rowan sits opposite them, leaning forward slightly over the narrow white desk, glancing at a screen suspended to her right.
"So, Katniss is now awake, rather more quickly than we planned, but physically there were no complications when we withdrew the sedation."
"Can we see her?" Prim says.
"Soon. As you will appreciate she is extremely shocked, and… not entirely cooperative."
"I don't know how she will cope with this." Their mother says, her fingers plucking at her skirt.
Don't say anything else, Prim thinks.
"Katniss is strong," Prim says, and Dr. Rowan's gaze settles on her, penetrating and clear.
"She is, but she will need to be more than strong."
You don't know my sister, she is more than you can imagine, Prim thinks, her brow furrowed unconsciously. There is nobody like Katniss; the girl who volunteered.
"Did she remember about the baby?" their mother asks.
She doesn't stumble over the word, she has grown used to saying it; baby. Prim had never seen her mother so pale, her lips as bloodless, than when Peeta said what he did, the screen closing in on Katniss as she fainted and the camera tried to cut away. Her mother didn't speak for the longest time and Prim sat beside her on the couch, her hand on her knee, tears running down her own cheeks. They didn't move until a fist hammered at the door and they pulled it open to reveal a victim of the latest whipping in the square, his head hanging down, the shirt on his back pressed into the branches of his wounds. They worked in silence, cleaning, swabbing; applying ointment, before finally giving morphia. The rawness of his wounds granted them a reprieve from their own.
"There is a great deal she must accept," Dr. Rowan replies. "And the baby may be the most difficult."
"Katniss will love her baby," Prim blurts out, before she can stop herself.
Dr. Rowan tilts her head, like a watchful raven, but Prim doesn't flinch.
"She may see it as an unwelcome reminder, or an unfair exchange…"
"She won't."
"You know your sister very well."
Prim nods, but she also knows that Katniss never wanted a life where she risked watching her own children suffer, that she would never have chosen to have a child. Above all she knows her sister never intended to let Peeta die, that she didn't plan on returning.
"Don't expect too much from her," Dr. Rowan says, blinking those violet eyes like a strobe.
His hand opens like a flower and he pulls the tube from his throat, it withdraws bloodied like a thorn.
The name he calls isn't audible.
