I burn. From within, without, all is fire. A sea of flame tosses me on its crests and pulls me into its depths. There is nothing but the heat. I can't cry out, I can't fight it, and I can't succumb. The eternal burning eats away my body, my self, until I am only bone, white and bleached in the heat. I have no weight, I don't exist. Fire mutts worry at me constantly. They turn and tumble my bones, trying to resettle me into a human form, trying to coat me in layers of muscle and flesh. Trying to make my body move like a human's.
Voices echo around me, worried and afraid. I'm not responding well…I'm rejecting grafts…I've given up. Words bounce and tremble in my skull, but find no purchase, I can't find myself a place in the world.
"Please, Peeta." The gentle pull calls through the layers of pain where I float, disembodied and untethered. Reeling away from the broken, burned shell that will soon loose its hold on me.
"Please, Peeta." The pleading insistence calls across the distance to me. Why won't it let me be?
"Katniss needs you."
The tether snaps taut and searing agony boils over me as I'm jolted back into the blistered husk of my body. Mrs. Everdeen whispers and calls to me, dragging me back inside, pinning me into the ruined casing that holds me to this earth.
"Katniss needs you. Please don't leave her. Please, Peeta."
Soundlessly, I scream with the pain of it. I'm burning, burning, burning. And then, a flood of cold, icy relief. I swim in the ocean of morphling, buoyed on the waves of its siren call to let go. Let go of the pain, the grief, the horror. I am nothing and nothing can claim me.
My body begins to respond. Doctors drape me in new skin, exercise new muscles and flush my veins with new blood. My lungs are repaired, my throat, my hands. I even have a new leg, a metal and coil frame covered in a lifelike latex compound. The morphling sea quiets all worries, I am nothing and nothing can claim me.
And eventually I surface. One day I see Mrs. Everdeen, rather than just hear her plead with me to stay for her daughter. She seems to have aged twenty years, her eyes sunken and her skin looking stretched over sharp cheekbones. The depth of grief etched in her face shimmers before my eyes and my hand moves automatically to reach for her. The new muscles scream against the strain and the skin burns as I gasp painfully.
"Oh, be still," she flutters, reaching to push the button dosing more morphling into my veins.
I begin to spin away again, floating on the gentle waves of my own world, untouched by the pain of this one. But I fight it, I fight my mind into a moment of coherence.
"So sad?" I mutter, my throat cracking in disuse and lips stiff with scars.
Tears flood her bright blue eyes, the eyes that so captivated my father all those years ago. Her voice scratches and trembles, but she holds my eyes.
"Prim was there."
A new iciness floods my lungs and I see her again, black cloak billowing around her as she screamed into the crowd before leaping down and running toward the barricade. The frantic white throng of rebel medics rushing in to the shattered cluster of children. The explosion that swept flame across the remaining survivors, soldiers, medics and children alike.
My mind screams with the horror of it, my hands want to claw and rip, my teeth to gnash and grind. But I float silently, trapped inside the grief of it with no way to dispel it. The morphling smothers me in its embrace.
News begins to come. Snow's attack on the children was the final straw and his last supports fled, leaving him to the rebel forces. The Capitol is now in the hands of President Alma Coin. Snow is a war criminal, imprisoned and awaiting trial.
Gale was hidden and tended by Cassius until he could rejoin the rebels and he is back on duty in District Two, cleaning up last pockets of Peacekeeper resistance. Cressida and Pollux are also reassigned, they're in the field reporting on the aftermath of the war, and Coin's efforts to unify the country.
Katniss has been released from the hospital, living in a room in the mansion. She doesn't speak, wrapped in grief for her sister. Her mother works constantly, trying to lose herself there.
As time passes and I grow stronger, I'm allowed visitors. All are warned not to upset me, as if there was any use in that warning. The first to see me is Haymitch, it has always been this way. He marvels at my new leg, jokes about my not missing anything by being denied solid food, tries to avoid my seeing his haunted eyes. I feel nothing but sympathy for him. He has lost everything in trying to stop a horror the only way he knew how.
Annie comes to see me as well. She, too, carries a burden of grief too heavy to speak of. But she also comes with joyful news. We cry together when she tells me she carries Finnick's child, and we spend a happy hour sharing stories and weaving hopes for the new baby.
Delly, Lef, Greasy Sae, Soldier Deen. All sorts of people bring all sorts of news, happy and sad. Some breaks my heart, some tears my new skin with laughter. But none will quiet the growing clamor in my chest. A deep and aching emptiness skims at the edges of my mind, pulls at my thoughts, floods my imagination with unanswerable questions. Why doesn't she come?
I've lost all track of time. I may have been here weeks, maybe years. My body is so new, so little of what's left is what I started with, that I feel like a stranger in my own skin. And my mind startles and jumps at little things. But most different of all, the whisper is a muffled echo in the distance. If I concentrate, I can make it out, but mostly it's a vague sense of dread in the back of my mind. Though, occasionally, it flares up, seemingly for no reason. I grit my teeth and clench my fists, fighting it back with the fierce determination of someone who risks being swallowed alive if he loses the battle.
I stay in the hospital, I can't stomach a room in the mansion, and I'm glad of it. Dr. Aurelius visits occasionally. He's lost his out-of-touch optimism, as have many of the citizens of Thirteen. He also lost his daughter in the war and we help each other with the pain of mourning. One day he arrives with a tall, striking woman who looks like she's seen more battle than peace in her lifetime. She introduces herself as Commander Paylor and then I recognize her, the fierce leader of the rebels from District 8.
She watches me with careful weariness, asking politely after my health and thanking me for my service. I'm not sure how much service I've been to anyone, but I, too, am polite to a fault and for a while the conversation is clipped and short. And then she decides we've made enough small talk.
"I'm sure you're wondering why I'm here," she says briskly. "I have been asked a favor, and I feel I owe it to you to ask before denying it outright."
I'm confused. How does she owe me anything? "Of course," I reply. "If there's anything I can help with, I'm happy to do it."
"You misunderstand," she tells me. Her eyes flick to Aurelius for a moment, but then back to hold my gaze with her steady dark one. "It's not a favor for me. President Snow has been sentenced to death. He wishes to speak to you before his execution."
I brace for the whisper to scream into focus, but instead I see President Coin before my eyes. I pause to consider what this might mean, why I would want to talk to Snow at all. Why he would want to talk to me. To ease his conscience? I doubt it, he doesn't feel he did anything wrong. I think of Coin, so eaten up with hatred and vengeance she's lost sight of her own humanity. I don't want that for myself. I've had enough hatred for several lifetimes.
"I can speak to him," I tell her. Dr. Aurelius looks dismayed, and even Paylor is surprised. I shrug. "What else can he do to me?" I ask.
And that's how my first trip out of the hospital finds me standing in front of the door to his study once again. I look around at the familiar rich furnishings. I don't feel afraid, I only feel loss. Two guards are posted outside and Paylor accompanies me. She looks at me questioningly, gesturing with her head to go in, too. I shake my head no and with a quick knock, I let myself in.
He's sitting in a tall-backed chair before the empty fireplace. His gaze doesn't leave the window as I enter and seat myself in the chair opposite him. He continues to stare blindly and I wait for him to speak. He asked for this, after all.
As I wait, I examine him. He is well-groomed, well-dressed as ever, but wearing cuffs at ankle and wrist, a tracker blinking silently from the manacles. His skin is a terrible, sickly green. He looks to be in the last stages of a horrible withdrawal, shaky and sweating. Clutched in his hand is a handkerchief, snowy white except for where it's stained with his blood.
Finally, he turns his cold, pale gaze to me. He smiles.
"You look awful."
I nod. "It's been a rough year. How about you?"
"Not my best," he admits. "I think I can tell where I went wrong, though."
I snort. "You think so?"
His eyes drift back to the window. "I used to be the Mockingjay, you know," he says, his voice soft and faraway. I watch him carefully, not willing to assume anything from this man.
"I was born on the tenth anniversary of the Hunger Games," he continues, as if telling a story he's told many times. "My mother was ill and the birth was too much for her. My father was unable to forgive me and I was sent to live with an aunt. The Capitol was a chaotic place then, filthy and villainous. The districts had been beaten, but not yet subdued. There were still pockets of resistance that would flare up occasionally. I grew up with the constant fear that suicide bombers would walk into the café where I was eating, or I'd be caught in the crossfire of a street-battle that raged out of nowhere."
He pauses a moment, his eyes distant, reliving this memory. When he continues, his voice is tinged with anger.
"When I was fifteen, it was the year of the first Quarter Quell. Districts were required to remember it was their choices that had brought on the war, and therefor they were to choose, by a vote, the tributes for the Games that year. They refused. They revolted, they fought back. So many more deaths. And the Capitol citizens were horrified, they began to lose faith. I was barely more than a boy myself, but I'd made a friend of the daughter of the President. One night, at dinner, I made my case." His voice grows hard.
"President Silk was a weak man. He had been chosen because he had been too cowardly to fight in the wars, leaving him with a squeaky clean reputation for a nation exhausted by fighting. He won in a landslide, though, of course, it was rigged. These things always are.
But he didn't have the stomach to do what needed to be done. He couldn't bring himself to squash the last of the resistance against him, bring the districts to heel once and for all. And so I stepped in. I advised him, helped him to see that others could do the work for him, and he still take all the credit. I helped him pick a Gamemaker with imagination. Instead of simply a contained arena where children fought to the death, the Games became a spectacle. The audience was fascinated. I introduced the idea of sponsors, allowing them to participate and help favorites. I introduced the cameras. I made it a national holiday."
His voice is rising and he suddenly leans forward, hacking into his handkerchief. When he leans back, he looks worn and drawn. He watches me blearily, pride shining from his eyes.
"From there, it was a series of small steps to turn the Capitol into a place of debauched idiocy. Empty headed, easily controlled cattle. I led from behind the scenes for a while, but when I was ready, I had Silk framed for embezzling and took power myself. I created a web of influence that was practically invincible. I changed the course of history, I was the Mockingjay, leading the people to where they thought they wanted to go because they had no better idea of their own."
I stare at him in numb disbelief. This is not the story we learned in history classes. But somehow, I don't doubt a word.
"You said you knew where you went wrong." I'm not sure I want to hear it.
He nods slowly. "I built my reputation on fearsome, iron rule. No one dared to stand against me for fear of what the retribution would be. There was no limit to what I would do."
I wait. He stares at me with his puffy lips glinting in the fading light and a tiny spark of amusement dancing in the depths of his icy gaze.
"That's why no one would doubt it was me who dropped the bombs on the children."
He waits patiently for it to work its way through. At first I wait too, wait for him to continue his tale. But he only watches me, the barest hint of a sadistic smile pulling at his blood speckled lips when he sees me get hold of it.
"Doubt?" I echo numbly. "Of course it was you. Who else could it –" But the words freeze on my tongue as her face wavers before my eyes once again. Cold and calculating, willing to pay any price for what she thought the world owed her. Her own medics? Her own soldiers? All those children?
Snow laughs softly, ending in a rasping cough. "You've always been the quicker one, the thinker. It took Katniss forever to understand. I had to spell it out for her." He watches me with wicked joy glinting in his pale, snakelike eyes. "That's where I went wrong. I should have killed you after the first Games."
He says it with such nonchalance, it doesn't even register as a threat. He smiles benignly at me with his bloody, puffy lips and crafty eyes.
"Without you, she is nothing. Without your words to make people love her, without your comfort to make her feel secure. Without your ridiculous moral compass she was always measuring herself against. She'd have been hated within six months, dead in seven. And Coin could choke on her pitiful, upstart rebellion." This last is ground out with such violent hatred, I sway backward a little.
He looks at me, fury burning in his glare. "And now she has what she wanted. And now you have her. And the Mockingjay put her there. Congratulations."
He begins to cough, a terrible rasping hack, into his handkerchief. There is a glass of water on the desk but I just stare at it, making no move toward it. I listen to him gag and wheeze but I sit quietly, staring blindly. And then, I stand. I cross to the door and leave the room, closing the door gently behind me, the sounds of his gasping and choking fading as I walk down the hall and out of the mansion.