A/N: Thanks to Teleryn, Appaloosa13, and Guest for reviewing.

Spirit:

I wake up strapped to a bed. I'm no longer wearing my ceremony outfit; just the same white hospital gown that's been my attire for much of the past week. My arms are once again covered with IVs, but I'm not in the operating theater they've been using. Instead I'm in a small, shaking room, and there are people all around me.

"I told you she wasn't ready!" That's Johanna's voice. I crane my neck and finally catch a glimpse of her; she's wedged into a corner behind me and to the left. One of the IV stands is leaning against her shoulder. "You are such idiots! She could have died back there!"

"Jeez, Johanna, give it a rest," someone else says. "I agreed with you, remember? The only person who didn't was that stupid Gamemaker, and he's not here."

"Goddamn Gamemaker," Johanna mutters. "Just couldn't let it drop, could he?"

"Let what drop?" I ask, and I start to sit up. Someone supports my shoulders while they slide a couple pillows behind my head. Finally, I get a good look at my surroundings.

I'm in an ambulance, but it doesn't seem to be moving very fast, and there's a lot of noise coming from outside. War whoops, drunken shouting, the occasional explosion. Inside the ambulance, my bed is taking up most of the space. I blink a couple times and the people crowded around the edges come into focus; Lief, Johanna, Blight, Maia, Elisheba, and both Lief's and my prep teams. There's also a blue-robed Capitol paramedic standing over me.

"What happened?" I ask. There's a foul, sickly sweet taste in my mouth, and something syrupy covering my tongue. My head is pounding. It's what I imagine a hangover would feel like; except I know I didn't drink anything at the party.

"You passed out, loveless," Johanna snaps. Now that I'm awake, she doesn't have to worry any longer, and she can get right on with being irritated. "What is wrong with you? Can't you just stay awake like a normal person?"

The paramedic looks appalled. Clearly, she hasn't spent much time around Johanna. She puts a comforting hand on my shoulder. "Don't worry, Miss Emerson. You had a little fainting spell, but we're bringing you back to the Remake Center. The doctors will take good care of you."

I shake my head. "No. I'm not going back under anesthesia."

The paramedic smiles beatifically. "I'm sure the doctors will take care of everything. Does anything hurt, Miss Emerson?"

"My head."

The paramedic turns around, opening up a cabinet and pulling out a small packet. She turns the packet over, trying to empty it into her palm, but nothing comes out. She turns around and bestows an awful glare on the occupants of the ambulance. "Which one of you took my morphling?"

Everyone in the ambulance, including Johanna, looks at Blight. He doesn't seem any more intoxicated than usual, but maybe he's just hoarding the pills to eat later. The paramedic shoves her way around my bed until she's standing over Blight. She holds out her hand. "Give them back now."

Blight stares defiantly at her for a minute, but then Maia grinds her stiletto heel into his foot and he begins pulling morphling tablets out of all sorts of unlikely places, such as the cuffs of his suit jacket and his nostrils. When he tries to hand the latter pills back to her, the paramedic shakes her head. "No. I can't use those. Do you have any idea how unsanitary -"

Blight shrugs. "Fine. More for me." And he proceeds to gulp them down.

"Missed your chance," Johanna tells the paramedic. "You could have taken them back, and then we all would've gotten to watch him go into withdrawal."

The paramedic looks at Johanna as though she's dropped out of the sky. Then she shakes her head, deciding that she must have misheard, and thumps the side of the ambulance. "Can't this thing go any faster?"

"It's the street parties," someone, presumably the driver, calls back. "They're everywhere, and it's taking forever for them to clear."

The paramedic turns back to me and holds out the pills. "Here. For your head."

"I don't want it." Up north, people talk about morphling the way they talk about the Capitol laboratories; with a mixture of fear and disgust. When it comes to pain, the northerner way is to handle it naturally, with no medicine. If it gets too horrible, someone can always knock you out. We have small supplies of morphling, stolen from dead Peacekeepers, but we never use it. Morphling separates you from reality - and to survive in the north, you have to keep your head in the game.

The paramedic lets out a small, huffy sigh, which must be the Capitol equivalent of telling someone to go to hell, and replaces the pills in their packet. "All right. Try to rest, Miss Emerson. We'll be back to the Remake Center -" here she pauses and shoots a filthy look at the driver "- soon."

Lief edges past the paramedic and sits down beside me. "It's about three in the morning," he tells me, knowing that I want information and I'm not likely to get it out of anyone else. "It was about four hours into the party, and everybody was drunk."

"Everybody?"

"Yeah, they were all acting like Blight," Lief says with a smirk. "So, anyway, I'd lost track of you, but I assumed you were with Cato. But then I found out that he'd gotten separated from you really early on, and we went looking for you. What do you remember?"

I put a hand to my aching head and find a large, swollen lump on my temple. I recall hitting my head on something - my staff, I think - and collapsing in the middle of the dance floor. Somebody carried me off, but they didn't know who I was or what was wrong with me, so they just leaned me up against the wall and told me to take a breather. After that I don't remember anything. "I must have fallen asleep," I say out loud.

"I guess," Lief says, having seen the whole event inside my mind. "When Cato found you, he couldn't get a pulse on either of your arms. You were shutting off. I guess we're going to have to be careful with you from now on."

"Don't bother," I mutter. "I'll throw myself off the roof of the Training Center before I let anyone treat me like a china doll."

Even if you did, you wouldn't be the first District Seven victor to try and off yourself, Lief tells me. Blight and Johanna have both tried.

That doesn't surprise me much. Everyone knows that Johanna and Blight are a couple of messes. In fact, I have a hard time thinking of a victor from any district who hasn't suffered long-term damage as a result of their time in the arena. Except for the victors from District Two. "What happened to Cato?"

"He wanted to come along, but his mentor wouldn't let him, and then they had a big fight on the front lawn," Lief says. "It was kind of scary. But anyway, he wouldn't have been able to even if Brutus had said yes. There wasn't room in the ambulance. Did you want to see him?"

"You know I do."

These past few days have been an anesthesia-induced fog, and the few lucid moments I've had are marked by the shadow of the Capitol. The first time I really woke up, President Snow was there, and every time I've opened my eyes since, there have been Peacekeepers somewhere in the offing. They're keeping a close watch on me. Despite his certainty that I'm no threat, the president must want me contained all the same.

I've wanted to see Cato, and one of the times I was awake, I asked about him. Thinking back, it was the wrong thing to do, because the nurse in charge immediately knocked me out again. Cato was happy to see me at the ceremony, but whatever it is we had in the arena is in doubt now. I'm a mutant. He's from District Two. Even if we really are in love - as Lief, who can read both our minds, insists - I can't see anything working out between us.

So what? You're going to see him and try to let him down gently? Lief says. You know you won't. You're an optimist at heart.

I flip over onto my stomach and bury my face in the pillows. Just kill me now.

It's nearly four in the morning by the time we make it back to the Training Center, and I can barely keep my eyes open. Even so, when the orderlies drag me out of the ambulance and start tapping my arm for a vein to put the IV in, I start to fight. I actually make it off the gurney, but I forgot about my leg, and I get three steps on pure momentum before it gives out and sends me crashing to the tile floor of the lobby.

The orderlies scoop me off the floor and dump me back on the gurney, but I bite one of them and he drops me. This time I crawl toward the elevators, dragging myself on my elbows. They're not going to put me under anesthesia again. I won't let them.

"Spirit, cut it out," Lief says. He kneels down next to me. "This isn't helping."

I flip onto my side. "You don't get it, do you?"

Lief opens his mouth to respond, but before he can get the words out, one of the orderlies picks me up, throws me over his shoulder, and puts me on the gurney, holding me down while the others secure my arms and legs.

Johanna appears over the shoulder of the orderly pinning me. "I'm not kidding, loveless. They have a lot of work to do before your interviews this afternoon. Got to put this big broken mess back together." She gives my injured leg a few jabs with her finger. "Just let them fix you up, okay? I don't want to spend the rest of my life pushing you around in a wheelchair."

I grab her arm as she walks away. "Wake me up before the interviews, okay? I don't want them doing the same thing they did today -"

"Yeah, sure, whatever, loveless," Johanna says impatiently, brushing me off. "I'll make sure you're up. Now go to sleep like a good little lab rat."

Lab rat? But before I can say or do anything, I feel the needle stab into my arm, and everything starts to float. I try to keep my eyes open, but I can't, and then everything is gone. It's a feeling I'm starting to get used to.

The next time I'm lucid, I find myself back in my room on the seventh floor. There are electrodes on my chest and the constant beeping of a heart monitor from behind me. My room's been mostly stripped; all the chairs are gone, replaced with medical supplies, and the closet hangs open. My right leg feels stiff, and when I shift the hospital gown aside, I see that my hip is covered in bandages.

I twist onto my other side and check the clock. Eleven-thirty. The interviews are set to go at one. Johanna, to my surprise, actually kept her promise.

The door cracks open and Elisheba enters. "Hello, Spirit. How are you feeling?"

I sit up. "Like hell."

"That's to be expected." Elisheba sidles past a table covered in sharp metal instruments and sits down at the end of my bed. She's carrying a garment bag. "I brought your interview dress. We have just enough time for you to get ready."

"Where's the prep team?"

"I thought I'd give you a break from them," Elisheba says. "They were a little too excitable last time. It's been years since we had a victor."

I can't remember anything from yesterday's prep. That's probably a good thing.

Apparently, I'm under strict instructions from the doctors not to walk or put any weight on my leg, which is going to present a problem - I have to get into my interview dress, and if I can't stand up, it'll be hard going. Elisheba eyeballs me, then looks at the dress, and decides to work on my makeup and hair first.

"You know," she says, combing my hair out of my face, "everyone was very impressed with your performance in the Games."

"Really?"

"I suppose you haven't had time to watch the coverage," Elisheba says.

I try not to laugh. I've been conscious for a grand total of six hours in the entire past week, so no, I haven't had time to watch the post-op on the Games. "I haven't."

"We've never seen anything like it," Elisheba says. "Close your eyes, Spirit." She brushes something onto my eyelids with a steady hand. "We've never seen anything like you."

I open my eyes. Elisheba is watching me carefully, the way I would watch an ice wolf feeding; not exactly frightened, but definitely wary, and suddenly a lot of things make sense. "Are you guys scared of me?"

Maybe that's why they're keeping me so sedated. And maybe that's why the prep teams aren't here. Mutants are the ultimate nightmare for people in the Capitol, the monster in the dark that's always waiting and watching. It must be a new experience for the Capitol citizens to be afraid of the victor, instead of the other way around.

So why is Elisheba still here?

"You know, I used to be a Peacekeeper," Elisheba tells me. "Stationed on the northern border. I've seen mutants before. I'm not afraid."

Elisheba, a Peacekeeper? I can't see it. But then I think back to her, how she's so different than the other stylists, how the costumes she designs for me always seem dangerous. "How did you become a Peacekeeper?"

"My parents ran my family deep into debt," Elisheba tells me as she slicks my hair back and puts in a clip with white feathers. "By the time I was fifteen, both of them were dead, and they stuck me with the bill. I joined the Peacekeepers to repay it."

"For twenty years?" That's the usual Peacekeeper deployment. I count back, trying to figure out if Elisheba was in service on the border long enough to kill anyone I knew - namely, my father. "How old are you?"

"Spirit," Elisheba chides, "you're not supposed to ask that. I'm fifty-eight."

"You don't look it."

"That would be the surgery," Elisheba says simply. "You'll age much better."

If I age at all. The immediate threats of the arena and radiation sickness are gone, but as last night's episode illustrated rather well, I'm not completely cured. And now there's this business with my hip. Elisheba tries to explain it to me, fails, and then calls a doctor in.

I can tell right away that this doctor is scared. He stays close to the door, ready to bolt at any second, and he calls out a series of exercises for me to do. Extend my leg, lift it up and down, rotate it, and finally, he declares that the joint has been mostly repaired.

"You'll require physical therapy for some time, but we can administer that as outpatient care back in your district," he says, avoiding my eyes. "You'll have a slight limp for the rest of your life, but that can't be helped. Cybernetics are no substitute for flesh and bone."

"Thank you," I say, and he flinches back as though I've taken a swipe at him. I'd better get used to it; few people in the Capitol have Elisheba's courage.

He leaves. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. So that's what they did; implanted a new hip, made out of metal, and wrapped the muscles back around it. I suppose I should consider myself lucky; I could have lost my whole leg, like Peeta Mellark. But at least he'll be able to function normally, walk like a normal person, whereas I'll be crippled for the rest of my life.

"Does everybody know?" I ask Elisheba.

"Yes, they explained it to us this morning, before you woke up. I hope you have a good grasp of how it works; Caesar will definitely ask you about it during your interview."

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out this whole day. It's not enough for me to survive the Hunger Games. I had to face off against President Snow during my first waking moment since getting out of the arena, and then I have to absorb the news that I have a cybernetic hip - and as if that's not enough, now I have to go on live television and carry on my first real conversation with the boy I fell in love with during the Games. It's too much.

Back in the north, while I was training for my infiltration, I always viewed the Games themselves as the biggest obstacle. It's only now that I realize that the Games were the easy part.

Elisheba makes a clucking sound with her tongue. "One thing at a time, Spirit. First, let's get you into this dress."

She goes out into the hall and finds a chair for me to lean against so I can keep the weight off my leg. Then she has me hang on with one hand while she slides the dress over my head, and steadies me while I switch hands to get my other arm through.

"Hold onto me," she says, offering me her arm and helping me hop over to the mirror. "You should at least see what you look like before the rest of Panem does."

No more gray for me; this time, I'm dressed in jet black satin. I'm strapless again, the bandages on the crooks of my arms clearly visible, the scar on my chest displayed for all to see. My skin looks so white against the dark fabric, and the heavy liner on my eyes gives off a frightening impression. The white feathers stand out against my hair. I don't look beautiful, exactly. I look like someone people would think twice about crossing.

Elisheba nods approvingly at my reflection. "Cinna, the stylist from Twelve, is going with the little-girl look for Katniss, and I suppose he has his reasons. But I don't think that's right for you. You need to look like the person you are."

"And that person is?"

"A victor, of course."

Elisheba sits me down on the bed and wraps more black fabric over the bandages on my arms. Then she straps stiletto heels onto my feet. "These are just for appearances," she tells me when I start to object. "You won't be walking in them."

Johanna appears in the doorway, pushing a wheelchair. "Come on, loveless, let's go," she says, looking like she'd rather be anywhere else. "Everyone else is already downstairs."

The interviews are being held in the lobby of the Training Center. Usually, they're held on the victor's floor, but this year, there are three victor districts, and no one could agree on which floor to have the interviews. According to Lief, who listened in on the argument, Johanna, Blight, and the mentor from Twelve joined forces to try and browbeat Cato's mentor into submission. I suppose it worked; they managed to yell him out of his insistence that the interviews be held on the second floor.

Elisheba helps me into the wheelchair and wishes me good luck on my interview. Then Johanna begins pushing the chair, down the hall and into the elevator, the trip going by in aggrieved silence.

When the elevator doors open onto the lobby, the first thing I see is the spray of bright flowers surrounding the couch where we'll sit during the interview. Next I see Lief, back in his medic school outfit, his shaggy hair combed out of his face, talking to Katniss and Peeta. Cato stands slightly off to one side, part of the group but not the conversation.

"Why don't you go see him?" Johanna says. "Oh, right. You can't."

I twist around in the wheelchair and glare at her. "Look, I don't like this any more than you do."

"Yeah, loveless, I know," Johanna says. "Now, if you'll excuse me -" she edges around my wheelchair and out the open doors "- I have an interview to supervise."

She gets five feet away, walking purposefully slow, by the time I swallow my pride. "Can you help me?"

Johanna turns around, hands on her hips and a big smirk on her face. "Say please, loveless."

I grit my teeth. I'd be pushing myself, except every time I make a movement, the crooks of my arms start bleeding again. "Please."

Johanna comes back into the elevator and pushes my wheelchair out into the lobby. "You know, loveless, if I have to push you around all the time, this is going to get old real fast."

"Tell me about it."

At the sound of wheels on the tile floor, Cato looks up, a smile crossing his face as he sees me. He comes over, his smile fading to concern. "Did your leg get hurt last night?"

"No, I just had more surgery. On my hip," I say. "They won't let me walk. Something about 'the connective tissues not being able to bear my weight'."

"Otherwise known as, you take a step, you fall on your ass," Johanna puts in. "Quit whining. I'm as sick of it as you are."

"Yeah, but I have to live with it and you don't, old bag," I hiss out of the side of my mouth at her. Cato's eyebrows are traveling farther and farther up his forehead.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, loveless," Johanna says, rolling her eyes. "Go be charming."

She walks away, leaving my wheelchair ten feet away from the victor's couch, and leans up against the wall, watching me to see what I'll do. I eyeball the distance, wondering if I can get the chair over there. I decide against it; the bandages on my arms are already pretty soaked, and I'll have blood all down my arms if I try. I glance back at Johanna. She's smirking again.

"I'll drag myself there," I threaten.

"By all means, loveless. But you'll ruin your dress, and Elisheba will have your head."

"I've got it," Cato says. He gets behind the wheelchair and pushes it the last few feet to the victors' couch. Then, when he sees that I can't make the transfer between the two, he lifts me out of the chair and sets me down on the couch, sitting beside me. "You're so light. Are you eating anything at all, Spirit?"

"Of course I am." Actually, I'm having a hard time remembering my last meal. I think it was the day before the closing ceremony; the day of, they woke me up too late for me to have time to eat anything. "What about you? Are you all right?"

He shrugs. "I'm fine. I just think this whole interview is stupid. They already know everything about us."

"I know. I wish it would just end already."

Cato awkwardly takes my hand, folding his fingers through mine. "It'll be over soon. Then we can all go home."

Home. By home he means our respective districts, but when I hear the word home, I think of a place far away from Panem. And then I realize that Cato's words, while true for the rest of the victors, are a lie for Lief and I. For the two of us, it isn't over. It won't be over until the Capitol has fallen. And until that happens, we can't go home.

I nod. "I hope so."

Lief comes over and sits down on my other side, recreating our arrangement from the closing ceremony. "Hey, Spirit. Doing okay?"

"Fine."

He squints at my feet. "Would you mind telling me what the point of those shoes is? It's not like you're going to be walking anywhere."

"They're concealed weapons. For stabbing my annoying district partner."

"Ha ha. Funny. No, really. What's with the shoes?"

"According to Elisheba, it's appearances."

"Okay."

"You look good," Cato says. Then, in a lower voice, he adds, "Better than Katniss, anyway."

Lief glances over. "She does look sort of like a giant cupcake."

Cato smirks. "Maybe Lover Boy goes for that kind of thing. He is a baker, after all."

Lief and I both start laughing. Then I calm myself down. Katniss and Peeta are going to be at the forefront of a rebellion in a little less than a year; the last thing they need is us snickering at them from the sidelines.

Katniss and Peeta make their way over to the couch and sit down. Then Caesar sits down across from us, someone counts backwards from ten, and the lights on the surrounding cameras go on. We're live to all of Panem, and up north, I'm sure my people are listening in.

Caesar aims most of his first series of questions at Lief and Peeta, and I can see why; Cato has all the animation of a stone block, Katniss looks like she's about to pass out, and between my mutant nature and the way Elisheba dressed me up, my intimidation factor is way over the edge. Lief and Peeta do pretty well talking about their feelings, and Caesar gets a nice long answer out of Peeta about the moments before the Games began. Then Caesar takes a deep breath, as though he's steeling himself, and turns to me.

"Spirit, you were very dynamic during the bloodbath. What was going through your head during those first couple seconds?"

I focus in on Caesar's face. "It was very intense. I didn't want to get stuck between Thresh and the boy from District Eight, so I just ran. I wasn't really planning much beyond getting out of their way."

"So would you say killing the boy from District Eight was an impulsive move?" Caesar asks. I can see him getting over his nervousness around me, and now he's just hunting for the answer. "But it wasn't your life in danger, was it?"

He wants me to mention Cato in my response, and my brain is too scrambled for me to think of a way around it. "I think it was partly an impulse," I say carefully, trying to pick my way through the minefield of this answer. But than I can't think of anything else to say and I have to leave it at that.

Instead of pressing me for a more thorough answer, Caesar turns to Cato. "And what did you think when you saw that hammer fly past your head?"

"I thought she was trying to kill me," Cato says. "And when I realized what she was really doing, I was surprised, I guess. Spirit is smart. If she had a chance to take me out, I expected her to do it. It was kind of a shock that she didn't."

Caesar moves on, and eventually gets around to asking District Twelve about their love story. "Well, Peeta, we know, from our days in the cave, that it was love at first sight for you from what, age five?"

"From the moment I laid eyes on her," Peeta confirms.

"But, Katniss, what a ride for you," Caesar says, turning toward the girl on fire. "I think the real excitement for the audience was watching you fall for him. When did you realize you were in love with him?"

"Oh, that's a hard one…" Katniss trails off and looks away.

Lief glances back at me. Something is foul in District Twelve, he says.

Not now. It's just occurred to me that I might end up having to field a question like that, and I'm trying to come up with an answer that won't come out tangled.

Caesar walks Katniss through her response - which ends up being pretty convincing, even though I'm fairly sure she's making it up off the top of her head - and goes from there into the various injuries we all received in the arena. He compliments my skill as a medic and asks me about my hip. I gabble out something about cybernetics and physical therapy and "almost as good as new", and he leaves me alone. Katniss has a minor meltdown when she learns that Peeta now has a prosthetic leg, and while she's calming down from that, Caesar turns back to our end of the couch.

"Spirit, Cato, you two were at the center of some of the most dramatic moments I've ever seen in a Hunger Games," Caesar says. "Would either of you care to speak to that?"

Yes, Cato and I spent most of the Games in the middle of the action; the bloodbath, the fire, the tracker jackers, the coyotes, Thresh, the vines, the mutts. But somehow I don't think that's what he's referring to. He means us. Our relationship, such as it is. An intense feeling of disgust for this whole process, for the Capitol, rises up within me. I barely know how I feel about us, and I don't think Cato does, either. We shouldn't have to try and figure it out for all of Panem to see.

I sneak a glance sideways at Cato and find that his expression is stony. "When you say dramatic," he says coldly to Caesar, "what do you mean?"

Caesar seems taken aback. He's supposed to be the one asking the questions. "I mean exciting, of course."

"Well," Cato says. "Then I'd have to say that the most exciting moment of the Games for me was when Spirit fought off the mutts." His fingers tighten around mine. "It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen."

That obviously wasn't the answer Caesar was looking for, but he forges on all the same. "Spirit, would you agree with that?"

"I was looking at it a bit differently," I say, and on my other side, Lief lets out a snort of laughter. I ignore him. "There were lots of things I was impressed with during the Games."

I leave it at that. Caesar looks from me, to Cato, then back again, and he must realize that he's not getting anything more out of us. He gives us one of his ubiquitous smiles, then turns back to Katniss and Peeta. At least he can count on them for answers.

He runs Katniss through the metaphorical gauntlet about her choice to pull out the berries and include all the remaining tributes in a suicide pact. Lief watches her intently as she stumbles through a sentence about her actions. "I don't know, I just…couldn't bear the thought of…being without him…and it wouldn't work unless we all did it."

Lief nods as if in understanding, but really, he's glad that the fabrication he planted in Katniss's head is still in place. I didn't realize until a few days ago that he mind-warped Katniss into using the berries, but the idea must have been in the back of her mind the whole time; mind-warps don't work unless the foundation has already been laid.

Caesar poses a final question to Peeta, letting District Twelve's golden boy wrap up the interview, and then he signs off. Just like that, the interview is over, and in a few short minutes, Lief and I will be going back to District Seven. Suddenly, I'm grateful that I didn't have to do this alone. Living in an unfamiliar place will be hard. At least I'll have Lief with me.

Most of my fellow victors get up and move, Katniss running to her mentor, Peeta trailing after her, Lief stretching and walking away. Cato stays beside me, and we sit hand in hand until all the lights on the cameras go off.