(Just because I'm best at updating 'complete' stuff. If everything goes wrong there will be one more.)

(We wear our ruin well…

…please run away with me to hell)

That place will be empty forever.

I'd sat with Finnick for hours, my fingers raw from twisting a piece of rope into a noose again and again, a broken voice singing in my head.

Are you are you coming to the tree…

Peeta had warned us, called for us to flee, his blood splattering the camera lens for his trouble.

I could see nothing but them for the three days we spent deep in an underground bunker as bombs rained on the already ravaged surface of Thirteen.

I could see them again on the white rose petals that came after, to wait for me in the ruins as a last message.

Then I understood, and the string holding my mockingjay wings together broke apart.

Coin and Plutarch finally agreed on a rescue mission, then. Haymitch told me Gale was the first to volunteer only after he was gone.

I was left to tie strings, to distract and to wait, seconds whispering in my brain and hope slowly bleeding out.

I though I'd lost it when the due time for their arrival came and passed, and time dragged on.

I lost it entirely when they returned after all, mechanical clocks beeping midnight.

Against all odds, I got Peeta back. Only for his hands to wrap like a noose around my throat.

The last thing I could see before I blacked out was my own reflection is his dilated pupils.

Warped, twisted, red eyes and gaping mouth.

Mutt.

That's what he growled at me then, and may have been finally right.

.

He was back but hijacked away, and I had to run away from the constant reminder of who I've lost.

As soon as I could get out of bed, I asked to be relocated, as far away as possible.

.

Peeta is locked in the hospital deep in Thirteen, and now that I am gone, Prim and Delly and a whole team of doctors can reassure him that he's finally safe. I can hope they'll help him enough to heal his body and piece his mind back together, that he'll be strong enough to live on. At least with himself, if not with me.

I took the pearl along on my journey, but keep it shrouded and hidden, reluctant to touch it with dirty mutt fingers.

.

I took Gale along too, he'd offered to accompany me straight away, and I couldn't bring myself to resist. I knew I'd be tearing him away from his family, but he was torn enough as it was, and getting him out of Special Weaponry could only be for good.

I don't care about him making weapons to counter Snow's latest gambit. He might as well make war to me, make me explode. I can punish him for being a bad boy and thinking up horrible things, scratch and bite at him until I collapse into his arms.

His body may be marred and mind clouded with desire to avenge everything that's been done to us, but he can still recognize me, accept me as I am, hold me like I'm somehow precious. He kisses the bruises on my neck with soft warm lips and empty whispers, but however deep inside me I let him, he can't reach the bruise my heart has become, dark with poisoned blood.

.

The woods in Two are sparse with thorny undergrowth, some hills ending suddenly with sheer cliffs of long exhausted quarries.

Gale roams them with me when we get there in between fighting and my failed attempts at getting more of the district on our side. For what the others should know, I take him along on hunting trips as my bodyguard, but more often than not, we are each other's main prey.

Off cameras, he's all mine. Like always.

There's a new wound on Gale's body too, not yet a scar, from a bullet buried under the wing of his shoulderblade. Perhaps he took it for Peeta, I'll never know, I won't ask. He flinches in pain when my heel brushes against the bandage as he lifts my leg over his good shoulder, kneeling before me as if asking some sort of absolution.

I have none to give, neither to him nor to myself, but I caress his hair as he makes me come against the tree, calloused hands cradling my hips, tongue drawing letters I don't allow him to say.

.

Even the trees are different here, tall pillars with stone-smooth gray bark, alive but bare and cold in the late autumn. Sometimes, I close my eyes as we fuck against them, imagine them to be the marble of Snow's tomb, and the blood from my bitten lip tastes like the salted earth of his empire laid waste.

I can scream freely when we are far enough for nobody to hear us, and I do, mind reeling with terror even as my body spasms in pleasure.

Some of the dread fades when I hold Gale's face in my palms after, thumbs brushing swollen, glistening lips. There's still warmth in his eyes, a fire tamed just for me.

Enough to sustain me and keep me sane, not enough to save me.

But I crave more of him, still.

.

Weeks later, we are in the shadow of the Capitol's main mountain fortress, isolated but still hiding a force of men and machines that could spill forth whenever the siege let up, and conquer back everything the rebels have so dearly won.

In a few hours, a council should decide what to do with it. Gale was invited and so was the Mockingjay.

Neither of us could sleep and we cling together in the dying night, partly bared bodies shivering with pre-dawn chill. I'm pressed against Gale's back, my lips brushing the now-healed wound from the rescue mission, palms spread over his chest.

He turns in my arms moments later, hands firm but gentle on my hips. Kisses me with odd sweetness, the way he could have on cold mornings when we used to meet before daybreak to hunt, as if we were whole and innocent and as young as we are supposed to be.

I can almost imagine the taste of blackberries between our lips.

Tears sting in the corners of my eyes as I try to return the affection, my hands moving all over his body, seeking a place to rest that isn't a scar.

Finding none, push him away and to the ground instead.

When he lays down, I straddle him, legs bare with boots shoved haphazardly back on cold feet, the gray wings of my open shirt hanging from my shoulders. Settling like a blanket of ashes over both of us as Gale pulls me down, our chests pressed together, his heart hammering against my ribcage, begging entrance, perhaps.

I bury my face in the crook of his neck, breathing him in along with the strange forest, with the rotting earth.

Gale cradles the back of my head with one hand; my braid wrapped around his palm, and touches me with the other, skilled fingers winding me up and letting me go.

Again and again as I press my teeth into his neck, trapped in his embrace but so lightheaded that for a moment, I feel free.

Kissing my way up his jaw, I press gratitude into his skin, and sink down onto him. Our bodies join in liquid fire, I'm so ready I don't even feel myself stretch to accommodate him. So I just sigh into his mouth as we effortlessly melt together, finding bliss we can't possibly deserve.

Our thin dark fingers entwined between dead leaves and my knees pressed painfully into the hard earth remind me where we belong.

.

After, we sit huddled together like we used to in the closets of Thirteen, Gale leaning back against a tree and me curled in his lap. Our clothes are back on, but I'm still shivering, with the hot aftershocks of what we've done and the cold air pressing in wherever Gale's not touching me.

We are silent, breathing as freely as we can bring ourselves to.

Time is creeping towards the morning, but no sun breaks through the clouds, the night just slowly fades to gray.

Even that suddenly makes me feel too exposed; I find myself wanting to run again and disappear, to fly away on my own terms rather than have to wear my uniform again.

I'm afraid, I don't even know of what exactly, but so much I hardly dare to admit it. Even if we were to win, everything would be in shambles, and I realize I'm more afraid of trying to make a new life in the crumbs of Panem than of dying to ensure the possibility for others. I'm afraid of what I'll have to do before I finally lay my own life down.

I want to run away from it all.

I clutch Gale's hand with stiff fingers and he automatically returns the pressure.

Would he still go with me? Could we still do it?

Would Coin and Snow compete in a Mockingjay-hunt until they dig us from wherever we may hide? Or could we fade to obscurity, live a little, and then let the wilderness devour us in turn?

"I want to run away," I say, the soft, broken words squeezing past my lips so that at least they could be free.

Gale buries his face in my hair, I can feel his soundless sigh. Something in him would still want that, I'm sure. A pure trace of my boy from my woods.

"Me too. Still. Sometimes, all I want is to take your hand and leave this mess behind and never look back. But you know we can't, Catnip," he whispers. "Not any more than we could have before."

I do.

I think of Peeta, tortured and driven mad with hatred of me. I can't help him now, not when I've become the thing he fears most, but I could still fight for a better world where he could live free of my shadow. Where his children would be safe. Where Prim and Gale's siblings and our mothers would be safe. They are waiting in Thirteen, hoping for our return, victorious or at least alive, and I can't help but think of them as some sort of hostages.

We have too many people looking to us. Too many enemies, obvious or hidden.

I lay my head back against Gale's shoulder, looking straight up at the slate sky. "I know. Let's go back."

"Okay."

Gale squeezes me in his arms once more, untangles the knot of our limbs and rises, eyes fixing on a particular peak on the horizon.

That's where the hovercrafts came from. I know he's thinking that because I catch myself thinking the same. A different fire starts simmering in his eyes again, the kind that turns his heart into a burial ground.

The kind that won't let him run, that will draw him back to the fray, a moth to his own flame.

The one I should be backing away from, but I'm too jaded to try.

Come what may.

Whatever will be left when the war is through with us, we'll deal with that later.

When he offers me his hand, I take it and let him pull me to my feet, to lead me back where 'duty' calls us.

There's still something left to crush.