XXIII
…
Silent.
Silence.
That's what it was.
Like the days spent during my private training sessions. Like the time spent waiting for my name to be called for an examination and scoring. Like the line I stood in alongside the other tributes waiting turn for our interviews with Caesar. Like the night before the Games where I didn't sleep and saw Peeta perched on the windowsill looking out on the Capitol, but didn't go sit beside him. Like those few seconds before being transported into the arena. Like those few live reordered moment following Ramsey's last breaths. Like the moments after waking up. Like the ride from the crowning to the interview. Like the train ride back to 12. Like the moment after Gale breaking the news of Prim's death.
It was silent.
Pure silence.
And it was yet to change.
Since I stepped foot on that Capitol hovercraft it was silent. An eerie sort of silent to be specific. The Peacekeepers did not speak to me nor look at me or even in my direct nor do anything thing of the sort to make me feel like I was even visibly alive. I complied to the silence, embracing it in a way, sitting in one of the numerous benches along the wall of the craft is dead silence myself. I was part of the silence.
The silence did not end with the hovercraft, but continued.
Following our landing on the outskirts of the Capitol where the buildings weren't as shinny one might say I was directed, of the sorts, without words or motions into an automobile. Then when the door was closed behind me I was driven into the city. It did not stop, the automobile, but kept going till it came up along to the outside to the President's Mansion, a place that I was at less than two days, forty-eight hours, two thousand eight hundred and eighty minutes, one hundred seventy-two thousand and eight hundred seconds ago.
The silence continued, an endless stillness I didn't expect it to end.
The door of the automobile was opened and I stepped out. The automobile did not move and I made my way up the stone path to the front door of the mansion. It opened neither before I was even within a foot of the door nor before I could even knock nevertheless. Again, like my actions before I went in without being given the word to do so or being motioned to do so. I just did as I thought, complying with the silence… playing my role as the Girl on Fire in a way.
The silence seemed to be never ending and in fact it was.
The Peacekeepers did not speak to me nor look at me nor do anything thing of the sort to make me feel like I was even visibly alive, but I knew they were, paying attention to me. They were everywhere. Lining the walls, perched at the windows, and standing guard at the doors. They were the best of the best nonetheless with their newly white uniforms, polished helmets, and locked and loaded weapons which rested upon their hips. I was the reason there was so many of them here. I was their concentration. I was the threat. I was the fire, the Girl on Fire, that would burn and scold them all till they were nothing left, but ash and embers.
The silence was the most present with the more of them around, the Peacekeepers.
Time passed and movements happened and I ended up a floor higher than the one I entered on and down a hall and into a solidary room that consisted of nothing more than white barren walls, a barred window as if I was being imprisoned, and two wooden chairs seated in front an old brick fireplace that was filled with ash. It was dull and solitary and silent. The moment I stepped foot into the food the door was locked and keyed behind me. It was my own personal jail, solitary confinement.
That was what brought me to now, hours later was the silence.
The silence was still there. It crawled upon every inch of the room. You could sense, hear its presence. If I didn't know any better, I wouldn't think of this, the silence, as anything really. But I did know better and I did know it meant something. It was a torture treatment to say the least, a build up to the moment when he walked into the room and told me, enlightened me that my freedom was no more and that I was his.
His.
…
I was at the window when the door was opened. I didn't look to see who was entering. I knew. I wouldn't be in this position if I didn't know who I was up against. You could smell it, the roses, the scent of blood. It was him, the president, Snow.
The door shut and he walked toward the fireplace, the old wooden floors giving him away.
"Come sit, Ms. Everdeen."
And I do, after taking one last breath I turn away from the window toward the fireplace and seat myself in one of the two wooden chairs.
He gives me a smile that makes my stomach curl in an unpleasant manner. "How are you?"
"Just peachy, Mr. President. Yourself?"
He looks to the fireplace. "I have been better Ms. Everdeen."
I sit in silence, waiting for him two continue, waiting for him to tell me what role I am to place or who he had taken or what horrible acts of treason I have committed.
"I have recently been faced with some issues that you are the main source of, though, Ms. Everdeen."
"I'm sorry my actions have affected you." I tell him with the least about in sincerity in my voice.
He turns his attention away from the fireplace and to me. "Let's not lie, Ms. Everdeen, it would make our time together shorter and our situations as well as their outcomes go much smoother."
I nod my head. I'm not sorry.
"You've caused me some problems, problems that have kept me up nights and away from my granddaughter."
I look to him suspiciously. "I don't see how. I never broke any rules."
"I thought we agreed not to lie, Ms. Everdeen." He tells.
And at that moment I know what he is talking about, what lie I am telling. Prim. The illegal hunting. The whipping post. Prim. That was the one rule I ever broke, stepping beyond my district's boundaries. There was no specific title for the rule; Darius always poked fun at me saying I was trespassing. It was a rule none the less and it was punishable. Yet, in my mind, it never seemed like that. That, like the Games, was survival. It was me taking one step further to death to fight for those living.
"You already resolved those problems. A punishment for that, sir, had already been given." I tell him, the truth. "I don't see how they are still relevant. Since then I haven't taken one step out of line. I have done nothing to… betray you."
He smiles that wicked way he does that makes my spine shake and my stomach curl. "And that is the problem, Ms. Everdeen, as even without doing anything you have caused me problems."
"What problems?"
"You're not like other like the rest, Ms. Everdeen, and so people don't look at you like they have the rest of your fellow victors. You did not come out of the Arena in a body bag or turn out to be the Career I hoped you'd be, even with your mentor's efforts. You turned into a cause for them."
I look to him confused. "Them?"
"Those of the districts, Ms. Everdeen."
Still confused, I ask. "What cause though?"
"Freedom." He tells me. "You have been a cause for freedom. You have been shaped and transformed into what they are, one without freedom. Prisoners to our government. And from you, they view themselves as they truly are, as people without freedom, as confined and restrained. You are the perfect depiction of them."
I let out a soft laugh of sorts. "I never had freedom to begin with, sir, none of us ever had."
"On the contrary, Ms. Everdeen." He pauses, walking to the window before continuing. "You may have never had any freedom, but now, you have even less than you had before. You have the guilt and anguish of fourteen deaths on your hands. The boy, the perfect boy whom professed his love for you was killed right before your eyes. Your Mother and sister abandoned you. and to them, the smart ones, you are a slave to the Capitol, to me for the enjoyment of the public."
Even now, in the privacy of his own home he speaks the Capital version of their deaths instead of staking what he and I both know, lying.
"Everything you once had or had the chance of having is gone. You created the perfect model of themselves, powerless and without freedom. Something now they realize as they did seventy-four years ago that they want to change, that they want the ability to choose. You have been the turned into a cause for them to break loose of the confined life the people of Panem's districts have been living for so long. You have become a saint, a martyr for them."
"Is that why I am here, for you to tell me I played my role to the key."
He shakes his head. "You are here to fix what you have created. You are here to make them think otherwise. You are here to cease a rebellion before it even begins."
"Why not kill me instead, it'd be much simpler."
"It would be, but at the same time, it would be much more complicated. It would spark this 'rebellion' within the people even quicker and fuel their flames even more so," he tells me;" And thus that is why you are here to fix what you have created, to make them rethink their chooses and realize what they think is wrong so we can stop this rebellion before it even begins, saving our nation the time, supplies, and people."
"What if I refused?"
He turns away from the window to me. "It'd be a shame if there was another mine explosion."
Gale. I think. He'd kill Gale and that would result in the death of Posy and Vick and Hazel and Rory. He'd take everything I have left.
"You understand, Ms. Everdeen?"
I nod, gritting my feet. "What do I have to do?"
He smiles, pleased, satisfied. "You have two choices."