Chapter 4: Interviews

I am backstage, watching a small monitor as the interviewing of the Victors begins. It's a better distraction than staring at myself in the mirror while Cinna, Effie and my prep team make the finishing touches on…. my wedding dress.

That's right. One would think I was going to get hitched all over again instead of going to be interviewed before then going to my death. I wonder if they'll make this ghastly thing my shroud when they bury me. At this point, I wouldn't mind being cremated while wearing the gown – then they could set it on fire as the garment properly deserves!

For what it's worth, Cinna had given me a deeply apologetic look when my ensemble for tonight's interview had been revealed. "I wasn't given much choice, but I did make a few alterations where I could."

If Cinna did make some changes, I unfortunately can't see them. The entire outfit feels like a slap in the face.

More than that: a warning shot.

The Capitol is a master at subliminal messaging, especially when it comes to the Games. This has Snow written all over it, and he's essentially saying: Fuck you for getting married your way, without my permission!

Gale and I had held an impromptu Toasting – our district's marriage custom – in our little cave during the arena last year. At the time, we had talked about perhaps holding a bigger party for at least our families as witnesses, should the Capitol be merciful enough to let us both go home, but it had ultimately never happened. In the end, I think we were wise not to have some kind of vow renewal and call that our wedding – the Capitol would have ruined it, inserting itself when it wasn't wanted. Thrown a big extravaganza that would not have been us.

I am quite certain this is a healthily long list of things Snow is angry at Gale and me for, but I didn't think refusing an opportunity for the Capitol to marry us would be one of them. Fuck you for getting married without my permission, indeed!

Interestingly, tonight's subliminal messaging from the Victors – who can sing that song as well as any Capitolite – appears to be shaping up as: Fuck you for going back on your word!

The law in the Treaty of Treason, the Charter of the Games, is clear: Victors are supposed to be exempt from the Reaping for life. That's the deal if you win. And now, my husband and I along with twenty-two others are being returned to a contained combat zone all to tell the nation that even that hope was an illusion.

I don't really want to watch the TV right now, but considering the alternative is staring at myself looking like a white peacock in the mirror, this is all the entertainment I have. It's not even that good, the entertainment – more like tragic.

In an unusual move, Caesar has decided to interview the brother and sister Delacroix together, as a unit. I wonder if he will do the same with Gale and me, now Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne. Certainly, it would serve as a nice bookend to mirror District 1.

Though I won't be emulating what Cashmere is doing. At the moment, she is smudging her eyeliner while wiping away crocodile tears, weepily expressing how "she can't stop crying" because she's going to lose…. her fans. You're also going to lose your life, sweetie, but it's your fans you're worried about? I internally sneer. …. All right, then.

Gloss shares the kindness shown to him and his sister, something about how "You are our family. I don't see how anyone can love us better!" It's so sappy and over-the-top that I scoff.

"Gods, does anyone actually believe this?!"

Haymitch leans into me, a flute of champagne already clutched in his fingers. "Apparently, everybody." He points. Effie, Venia and Flavius have all abandoned acting as my warped bridesmaids to gawp and blubber at the District 1 Victors onscreen. Effie is even dabbing at her eyes.

"She is very good!"

"These Victors are angry, Katniss," Haymitch murmurs low. "They'll say anything to try and stop the Games. I suggest you and HotHead do the same."

As if he needed to tell me. You'd have to be…. well, a Capitolite not to see how the Victors are taking their displeasure, their sense of betrayal and beating the audience over the head with it. Yet, most of them are clever, oh so clever about how they play it. Mags seems to take literally the subliminal messaging metaphor I've just described and physically will it into being: she keeps whacking Caesar over the head with her cane, making a bit out of it while she garbles something that sounds like 'Young man!' Finnick saunters on and reads a poem – from the structure, it sounds like a haiku - supposedly dedicated to his one true love…. and about a hundred women, along with some fifty men, faint dead away because they're sure he is speaking to them and only them. Beetee questions the legality of the Quell itself, and I wonder if he turned to the law as his Victor talent: he keeps using jargon and large phrases like 'unprecedented' and 'unconstitutional' and 'the destruction of norms' – as if the Capitol had any norms worthy to aspire to!

Then the interviews veer from being simmeringly passive-aggressive to downright sad.

There are a series of lessons in substance abuse, as Haymitch's drunk buddy throws up his stomach contents onto the first three rows after careening through a slurring rant against me that my Merchant drunk uncle, Mama's brother, might scream at me in the streets after watching late-night, right-wing TV. The Morphlings from Six are stoned to the rafters and I wonder if they were injected on purpose; they keep babbling on about the color wheel and free love and how they can feel everyone's auras – your auras are too good to want to kill us, right?

The train gets back on its tracks, sort of, with District 7. Johanna Mason makes the Victors' resentment explicitly, cussing the audience out until there are more BLEEPs than actual words. Blight Gavin, her district partner, claims responsibility for the smutty poetry Finnick delivered earlier in the evening. Cecelia sobs for three minutes straight and waves Polaroid photographs of her three babies in the air, prompting Capitol mothers in the house to take out photographs of their kids and wave them in the air too, until the whole assembly has the feeling of a closing ballad at a rock concert.

Woof abruptly wanders off the stage in the middle of his interview and just….. doesn't come back. Caesar has to cover by making a lot of really rude, ageist jokes against old people, including making fun of an addled Capitol congressman whom he nicknames 'Paulzheimer Gosar.'

Districts 9 and 10 appear to give Caesar a bit of a break, as their tributes are mostly old throw-backs and has-beens, like Brutus and Enobaria, who are just here for another Games. Seeder wrests back control of the night's theme by claiming that, in her homeland, President Snow is viewed as all-powerful. Well, if he's all-powerful, why doesn't he change the Quell? Chaff is right on her heels by psychoanalyzing the President, claiming that Snow could change the Quell if he really wanted to, but the man must figure it does not matter to anyone.

Ouch.

Effie ushers me to the wings as Chaff is beginning to wrap up. Noticing Johanna nearby, clearly decompressing from swearing at the audience like a coal miner on leave, I tense. Nothing doing – she notices me anyway and drifts over, scoffing.

"Really? A wedding dress?"

"Snow made me wear it."

She actually looks sympathetic towards me, and even stops to straighten the collar of lace just above my bodice. Her lips are thin and quirking up into something wicked, something bitter. "Make him pay for it!"

For once, I decide to listen to her.

By the time I am called up to speak, the audience is an absolute wreck. People have been weeping and collapsing and calling for change. The sight of me in a bridal gown practically causes a riot. No more me, no more Coal Dust Lovers living happily ever after, no more….. anything. Certainly not a wedding.

"Katniss!... Quite a statement! What…. what made you settle on this design? I thought you and your handsome hubby were already married."

Absorbing Caesar's first question, I think fast on my feet. "Well, you see, Caesar…. Gale and I did have our Toasting, in the arena, do you all remember?" The audience cheers, though this is mixed in with inconsolable wails. "It's meant to be simple, as a ceremony, but there are other traditions as well." I think of how, when I got married, I was covered in dirt and blood that wasn't mine and adorned in nothing but an arena jumpsuit with overalls. "In Twelve, many of the Merchants – the richer people in Town – own wedding dresses. They are seen as a rite of passage, handed down from mother to daughter. Now, I am Seam, born and raised, and in the Seam, you have to rent a used dress. But, I'm also half-Merchant on my mama's side and when she married my daddy…. She took her family wedding dress with her. This is supposed to invoke what my mama's wedding dress looks like."

That last little part isn't true of course – this monstrosity looks nothing like Mother's wedding dress! – but Caesar and the audience seem captivated anyway, letting out a collective Awwww that sounds like a leaky balloon.

At any rate, my answer sounds a lot better than saying 'Snow made me wear this.' I wonder if I should have just told the truth, and in doing so, sound more rebellious. Glancing up to the balcony, however, I instinctively realize that the truth was probably exactly what Snow was hoping for and I didn't give it to him. Fuck you for sending me to my death without my permission.

Caesar finishes with some questions about my family, and how married life has been for the past year. When it is Gale's turn up to bat, this line of questioning largely continues. I recall how Gale had revealed to everyone how he loved me and would have proposed to be the night of the Reaping had we not been chosen.

"Well, you did still get your proposal!" Caesar chortles. "And even a bit of a married life. Surely, some time is better than no time, wouldn't you say, Gale?"

"Catnip and I…. we've been luckier than most. And I wouldn't have any regrets at all, I might be inclined to agree with you, Caesar, if…" Gale's voice chokes off. "If it weren't for…." He can't finish.

Caesar leans in, searching Gale's eyes. I can't see my husband face's from where I'm seated back here, at the rear of the stage, but I know him well enough to know that it takes a lot to get him emotional; he doesn't get that way very often. But just listening to his voice, I can almost believe he is in tears or near them, and I want to run to him, hold him.

"What? If it weren't for what?" Caesar presses.

"….. if it weren't for the baby!"

What?!

Gasps and cries of shock go up from the studio audience.

"Baby?!"

"Stop the Games! Stop the motherfucking Games!"

I barely hear this, from how my head is spinning. Did Gale plan this, likely in cahoots with Haymitch? A last-ditch, pro-life gamble (the Capitol, pro-life. Like fun!) to save all our hides? Even when he knows I've made my position clear: I don't want to have children! I've never wanted children! And where we are stands as reason enough why.

Yet apparently that decision, unlike my decision to take a husband, is out of my hands.

No one bothered to tell me, but it would appear I am pregnant.

The sound of the Capitol is cranked all the way up, reverberating through the floorboards. Caesar is shrieking to make himself heard but from the way his lips are moving like a goldfish, he might as well be a mime. Gale reaches me, and I am barely lifting my head to him before he is yanking me out of my seat and kissing me so passionately that my head whirs all the more.

I feel Chaff bumping something into the small of my back, and Gale and I sensuously break apart, our arms still around each other. Glancing over my shoulder at Haymitch's friend and his outstretched stump, I don't have to think about it before taking it and holding fast.

Then the most amazing thing happens.

Up and down the line, all of the Victors are joining hands, until we are holding them aloft in one, unbroken chain. Caesar glances back, his face a moonlit white, and he's making a slashing motion across his throat, all but begging that someone cut it! Cut the feed!

But it's too late, even as the stage is plunged into darkness and the audience's terrified screams split the air:

All of Panem has seen.

"Errrr….. Hurrrrrr… Uhhhhh... Uhhhhh….. Huhhhhhhh… Erm….. Hmmmmm…Mmmmm….. Ohhhhhhh…. OHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

I ride Gale's cock with furious abandon in our bed that night until the moment my back seizes up and my toes curl and I cum with a sigh of pleasure. Rolling gracefully off of where I've been straddling him, I snuggle into where my husband tucks me into his chest, stroking my chestnut bangs.

"There's no way they'll cancel. They can't," I state dully. We've been listening to the screams and cries of the Capitolites loping like wounded animals through the streets far below, people calling for help. Gale and I mostly made love to try and drown out the noise.

I hear the deadbolt click and the door to our room start to open, outside light spilling in. Gale moves quickly to cover my nakedness with the bedclothes and I stir against him as he shifts up. Haymitch is now backlit by the hallway lights outside but doesn't move to cross the threshold, clearly seeing my partner and I have been…. involved.

"Baby bomb was a stroke of genius. Unfortunately, the Games are still on. This is goodbye…. For now."

Gale nods curtly. "Thank you, Haymitch. For everything." Gale isn't actually the huggy-touchy-feely type, unless of course he's touching me, but I think that were we both not naked, he'd actually get out of bed and give the old drunk a hug.

Haymitch nods back, then softly closes the door behind him to give us our last chance to be alone.

Settling against Gale's chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart, I finally ping out into the darkness:

"I don't want to be with anyone else in there. Just my husband. Just you."

I push off his chest to gaze down at him. Gale stares back with complete and utter devotion.

"If that's what you want."

Bending to kiss his lips tenderly, I nod solemnly. "That's what I want."