I am trapped for days, years, centuries maybe. Dead, but not allowed to die. Alive, but as good as dead. Foam. I am really floating on foam. I can feel it beneath the tips of my fingers, cradling parts of my naked body. There's much pain but there's also something like reality. The sandpaper of my throat. The burn medicine. The sound of my mother's voice. In the dazzling white Capitol hospital, the doctors work their magic on me. Draping my rawness in sheets of skin. Coaxing the cells into thinking they are my own.
I hear over and over again how lucky I am. "If Peeta hadn't been there, I think she would have burned alive," I hear one nurse say. I try to concentrate for a minute, to think of Peeta, but my mind inevitably drifts to my sister. To watching her incinerate. There one minute, gone the next. All I ever wanted was to keep her safe. All I ever wanted was Prim. I let the morphling pull me back under.
Other visitors start to arrive. The morphling opens the door to dead and alive alike. I see Haymitch, drunk and heartbroken, reaching to hold my hand but afraid to touch me. Cinna, sewing my skin together. Peeta, the day of our first reaping. He looks so young now, just a boy. My father sings to me, Delly gossips, my mother just sits in silence and avoids looking at me. Slowly, I am more able to grip reality. It's not a place where I want to be. I am in hell. A world without my beautiful sister. We won the war, but what was it all for if she can't become a doctor one day? Get married? Have the babies she practiced for with a tattered doll I got her at the Hob? There is no point to being here. My voice is burned like my body, and I remain silent.
My silence puzzles the doctors. Physically, I should be able to speak, but I don't. I stare at the ceiling and curse these stupid people for keeping me alive like this. I curse Peeta. He should have just let me go. Why can't he ever just let me go? Dr. Aurelius, the head doctor, decides my muteness is mental, not physical. I am a self-imposed Avox. I think of the Avoxes that littered the floor while Snow stood nailed to the wall, the ones the Peacekeepers killed while fighting Mutt Peeta. I can be an Avox.
People bring me updates on Panem, post war. The Capitol fell the day the parachutes went off. No one can find Snow, he is presumed escaped. I know better. I know about the tunnel under his mansion, his marble tomb. It is the only thing that brings me solace. Cressida and Pollux are alive and out in the Districts, covering the aftermath. Gale was released from the hospital weeks ago. He suffered two bullet wounds and a serious concussion, but he is expected to make a full recovery. They offered to do a full body polish and wipe away the whipping scars from his back, but he refused. He is conspicuously absent from my room, and doesn't come see me. Peeta is still in the burn unit. He has yet to regain consciousness, but the doctors assure me that's due to the medically-induced coma they've put his body in while he heals.
Eventually, I'm released from the hospital and given a room in the President's mansion. I don't spend any time there, other than to sleep. I mostly wander the halls of hospital, find my way to Peeta's room, sleep in the chair next to his bed. I vacillate in my silence. I grieve. I speak to no one, and eventually the hospital staff stops speaking to me. I don't touch Peeta, I just stare at him. I wait for him to come back to me. He always comes back to me.
Weeks later, the staff communicates to me that they are going to wake Peeta up. They warn me he will disoriented, that he won't know where or when or maybe even who he is. They explain his skin will feel foreign and it may confuse him that his body doesn't look how he remembers. I know what they mean. I am not who I remember either. When they push the drugs into his IV to bring him to, they don't work right away. They assure me it's normal, but I can't wipe the panic from my eyes. When he finally stirs it's not as dramatic as I thought it would be. He's not suddenly awake, screaming and asking questions. His eyelids droop and he looks at me. He slowly lifts the blanket up and, despite the protests of the hospital staff, I crawl in beside him. I put my head on his chest. It's gaunt, weak, the muscles sinewy and absent; but when I hear his pulse beating steadily under my ear, I doze off.
We stay that way for days. We don't sleep or eat or move really, but we just stay. It's the only thing we both know how to do anymore. Eventually, Peeta whispers to me, "I'm so sorry, Katniss." I know he means Prim, he means the war, he means the Reaping. He means all of it. I cry for the first time since I lost my sister. I cry for hours, snot dripping down my chin. He uses a damp washcloth to wipe my face. The doctors close the door to his room, shut off the lights, and let us grieve in peace. In the dark, hours later, I whisper back to him, "Me too."
Eventually Peeta is discharged, and we both move back to the President's mansion. We sit in one of our rooms, I'm not even sure whose, in silence, when Haymitch bursts through the door. "They found Effie!"
We had all assumed Effie was killed around the time Peeta's prep team was executed. Nothing aired on TV, but we were certain she wouldn't be allowed to live. Haymitch is running down the hallway, and we are chasing behind him.
"Where?" I cry out as we turn a corner.
He stops for just a moment and looks at me. "The Mockingjay speaks."
"Shut up, Haymitch. Where was she?" I scowl.
"They found a tunnel under the mansion. It connects the mansion and the Tribute Center. There is a lot of carnage down there. It took them days to eradicate a pack of Mutts that had gotten loose. But at the end of the tunnels was a row of cells, holding Effie and some other Capitol citizens that were too strategic to kill right away. Snow would have killed her eventually. For show. But we lucked out that we took the Capitol before he could. Come on, let's go." He takes off running again, panting and heaving until we get to a car that hurries us back to the hospital. We are all familiar with the layout now, have memorized where the floors and units are. We fly into Intensive Care and Haymitch bellows, "WHERE IS SHE?"
"You don't have to scream, Mr. Abernathy. Manners!" We hear a weak voice chastise him from our left. We look over to see a frail woman lying in a bed. She is tiny, hooked up to IVs and machines, beeping and wheezing as they pump fluids and medicines into her demure body. She's unrecognizable without her wigs and make-up. I'm not sure I would have known it was her, had she not clicked, "Tisk tisk, children, staring is quite rude!"
I collapse and throw myself on top of her feet. They are cold and I start rubbing them, crying. It's like seeing a ghost. I was sure Effie was dead. I was sure of it. That's when I hear Haymitch sobbing. Haymitch never cries. He's never once broken down in front of me - not during the Games, not during the Tour, not when we lost Peeta, not during the War. He may be drunk and angry, but he is stalwart with his tears. He is kissing her face all over, her cheeks, her forehead, her ears, her mouth. Her mouth! Peeta and I look at each other in shock. How did we miss this? Effie is crying too, and the two start whispering intimacies between kisses. Peeta and I slowly step out of the room and close the door. Our eyes meet, and for the first time since the end of the war, laughter erupts. We aren't teasing - the laughter is joyous. I'm happy. We are happy. I forgot that I could feel this. Tears pour from our eyes as rolls of laughter overtake our weak bodies. We drop to the floor and earn some sideways glances from the medical team, but we don't care. Effie is alive. And it appears, so too is Haymitch.