Stage Three: Her Vision
As Katniss' fire blazed, the tiny candles that Renata sent out caught tinder and illuminated.
Auntie Gwendolyn, after Renata's death, took up a calligraphy pen and in every book remaining that her niece had transcribed, she wrote: Ex Libris Renata Scrivener
It's the only memorial her red-haired adoptive daughter will ever receive. Gwen keeps the books safe through the revolution. But those who ever received a Scrivener book also wrote her name in the first leaf, irregardless of whether she copied it out. Some even wrote out the strange things she quoted during her Games. These books also survive the revolution. And like everything else in Panem, they have their price. Soon Renata Scrivener books are appearing in auction houses, fetching higher and higher prices.
It's only later, after money is exchanged, that people go home and open the pages…
A decade of peace passes. The television broadcasts are still going, but losing a little steam. News and public service announcements are all well and good, but they're becoming a little repetitive.
Then, a few people in what was once District Five decide to put on a play.
It's an authentic Renata Scrivener, donated from Gwendolyn herself. It's about violence and love and war and death that somehow transcends death, and it has a few good comic moments, and since that's everything that Panem knows, it's a good place to start.
Juliet's actress is a girl with olive skin, grey eyes, and a black wig in a long braid. Shy and earnest Romeo is taller, burlier, with curling blonde hair. The costumes are all over the place, because no one really knows what someone from "Verona" should dress like.
Someone a little sharper could notice that the Nurse acts quite a bit like the infamous Haymitch Abernathy, and that the teasing Mercutio has the same mannerisms as Finnick Odair once had. The Prince in black and white is played by a woman, a small woman with a commanding, melodious voice and bright red hair.
Then, to finish, to remind them of what was lost, the almost-lost footage of the 74th Hunger Games is played, showing the foxlike girl chanting "The morning comes, the night decays," with a prophetic light in her eyes.
The broadcast is an enormous success. Soon the television network coordinators are overwhelmed with requests to broadcast their amateur productions of the plays and novels and even poems that they've found. Better yet, some people are writing out stories of their own.
Watching Romeo and Juliet at home, Gwendolyn Scrivener smiles. Renata, she knows, would have much rather been Mercutio.
A week after the first broadcast of The Merchant of Venice, acted with more enthusiasm than refinement by the oceanside citizens, Gwendolyn packs up a few of the books that Renata copied out and mails them out.
Nine days after that, Katniss Everdeen heads out to hunt, only to find a large box on her doorstep.
She hunts no more that day, but sits in a sunbeam, reading slowly, and in every book she finds the girl she called Foxface, reaching out to Katniss at long last across time and space. Renata will live forever.