It is heavy-skied and grey in the Victor's Village, and Katniss is cold. She draws her arms about herself, the wool of her dress sticky with blood, and she tries to process what is happening. This is difficult, because every layer of maggoty rot peeled back conceals another. Gale is dead. District 13 lives — but not for long. Hundreds of thousands may die in the Capitol tonight. Snow has decided that they are in a relationship — whatever that means. But he just threw her out of the house for telling him she wants to fuck him.

This most recent blow to her psyche is the easiest to confront. It's really two things happening at once. The first is that she must contend with the knowledge that she is broken and disgusting, and so irrevocably damaged that even President Snow's smiling evil will not countenance her presence. The second is that she is a girl who has, for the first time in her life, confessed her sexual feelings to a man. And in response she has been thrown out onto the street.

Well, what did she expect was going to happen?

She pictures Snow's face set in gentle compassion. 'Oh Katniss,' his dream-self tells her. 'I'm so sorry. It's alright. It's completely understandable. There's nothing wrong with you at all. These things happen. It will pass. Come. I have hot chocolate for you.'

She wants to punch herself in the mouth.

Snow is not her boyfriend, nor her lover, nor her friend. He is her husband in legal terms only, and anything else she imagines is delusion and indulgence. He is incapable of real compassion, only the husk of it he shrugs on when it's convenient to him. He will only care for her insofar as it is useful to do so. If she is functioning and upright and has all her vital signs, he could not care less about her. What charity did she expect from him? She is alone, as she always has been.

But where is she supposed to go now?

Katniss looks down the street. At the end of is the hovercraft, blocking the exit, guarding them and preventing her from leaving. Just a few hundred yards away is her family's house. They would take her in. They would be delighted to have her, and her mother could make her pancakes in the morning.

Katniss stares at the house, shifting in her suede pumps to keep warm, and she feels the thick, disgusting slide of her underwear against her cunt, as well as the wet cling of the bloody dress to her skin. No, she does not want to go home. She is too sick to be in that house, to be near her sister. She might infect her.

So where? Peeta's? Haymitch's? There is a light still on in Peeta's house, though Haymitch's is dark. Peeta would take care of her. She could tell Peeta everything — Peeta, who has seen her murder people — and he might forgive her.

And then Snow might have him shot in the head.

No, Katniss knows where she wants to go. Somewhere that she might be able to recover a little piece of herself. Somewhere that Katniss Everdeen might be found.

She takes a few steps down the street, her heels clacking ridiculously, then she pauses and pulls them off. They are such lovely soft shoes, and Snow chose them especially for her.

She tosses them into a bush.

Katniss walks silent and barefoot down the cold road, heading deeper into the Village, away from the hovercraft. She shivers as the wind gets beneath the wool of her dress. One of the many ways you know the Victors' Village is the nice part of town is how pretty little shrubberies and neat leylandii conceal the electric fence. The flora is barren in winter, so Katniss breaks her way through easily. It is silent among the thicket of twigs, which is excellent. The electric fence is off.

She dug a hole beneath long ago, to save her the trip into town to the gap in the fence, and no Peacekeeper has ever noticed. Who would bother to inspect the outskirts of the nigh-abandoned Victors' Village? She shifts the branches that conceal the hole, then shimmies her way into the grave. Fortunately, she has lost so much weight that it's trivial to crawl through to the other side.

And then she is in the forest. It takes her a moment for it to sink in. A little life seeps back into her veins. The forest — her forest. Hers and Gale's, and her father's. No stupid cultivated fruit trees, no artificial pond. Just the silent wild, and her, and the animals.

Invisible pathways she knows better than the inside of her rotting mind take her to a distinctive log, and there she paws inside its hollow cavity. There it all is, just as she left it. Relief and delight pour inside her as her fingers close on her old leather boots. Her father's jacket. Her game bag. Her bow. Her quiver. It's all here, all perfect, if a little dirty. Katniss holds the jacket to her face and breathes it in like she's dying, and she pulls it on over her dress. Her feet slide perfectly into her old boots. If she only had a pair of pants, she would be the old Katniss.

And then she is running. She is running through the forest like a hart, and she is laughing and she is crying, and she is Katniss Everdeen again. She is pine tar and sparrow wings, she is the bark of the trees and the dogs. She is an animal and a killer of them.

I am Katniss Everdeen. I am from District 12. I am a hunter. I am real. I am alive.

Her flight brings her past the blackberry bush where she and Gale liked to sit. There are no berries, of course; it's winter. Snow's garden might grow at his whim, but in the forest the seasons still rule. She runs on, interweaving trees she has known all her life, following dips and valleys that feel like a part of her own body. Even with her weight loss and her sickness, the hours she has spent running laps around Snow's gardens have significantly increased her endurance. She crosses the forest to the house by the lake in so little time, though she's dizzy and nauseous when she arrives.

It is, by now, very dark. The rebarbative concrete shell looks like a living creature in this strange new light. Katniss quests inside, cautious as though something might have somehow taken up residence in this familiar place, the way Snow has nestled himself into her own mind. But it is just as she remembers: leaf-strewn, mud-wrecked, bare, cold. Home in a way that Snow's house will never be. A pile of firewood logs keeps sentry in a corner. One of them, right at the bottom, is conspicuously older than all the others. That was one her father collected, so many years ago. She never had the heart to burn it.

One thing is out of place. Her eyes go to the fireplace. There is something stashed in the grate she does not immediately recognize. She never left her hunting gear here, and it startles her to know that someone else has been in her sanctuary. She crouches by the fire and reaches for the object, but the moment her fingers close on it, she knows what it is.

Gale's game bag.

He must have been out here a lot, keeping out of the way, living beyond prying eyes. Did the rebellion ever meet here? Did Gale sleep out here? She wishes she could ask him.

The bag has a few paltry offerings: a mostly empty canteen, a shriveled collection of walnuts, one can of fish, one of beans. Pretty dismal emergency rations. Is that because he had so little to work with, or was this only an absolute last resort? She will never know, now.

Katniss removes the cans and the nuts and lays them out gently around the empty fire, like they're gathered to watch. Twelve nuts, all in a line. They look like a little family.

She lifts the game bag to her face and smells it. It mostly smells of must and leather and old meat, but she thinks that there is a wisp of Gale in there, too. Perhaps she is imagining it. But imagining Gale is the best she can do now, so she'll take what she can get.

Katniss goes back outside the house, game bag in hand. Dusk is losing its weak grasp on the sky but in the dim light she is able to find a smooth pebble, and with it she digs a hole in the dirt. The pebble makes a poor tool, so it isn't long before she's sat in the earth, scraping out the loose, thick soil with her fingers. She's already lost one of her appliques somehow in the woods, and she loses four more by the time the hole is dug. All that black soil will get into her raw fingernails. Good. Let its poisons drive out the Snow filling her veins.

Once the hole is a foot deep, she lifts the game bag again and tucks its strap inside like she might tuck Gale's hair behind his ear, if ever he let it get too long. She lowers it inside. The only part of him she is allowed to bury.

She ought to say a few words. She has none.

After the ache in her chest rises and falls a few times, then stabilizes into a sotto voce sting, she refills the hole. The soil covers the leather, covering her last piece of Gale, and when the dirt is all piled on top she pats it down lovingly with her palms.

'Goodbye, Gale,' she says, and then she kisses the top of the earth.

Katniss goes down to the lake, which is glaucous with ice, and she washes Snow's blood from her face and the earth from her hands with a little freezing water. In the near-pitch dark, she returns to the house. And she cries. She picks out firewood logs and tinder and dry leaves, and she positions them in the fireplace, and the whole time she weeps. She cries without purpose, mourning everyone and everything, and it takes her some time to light the fire. She scrapes the flint along the steel, but whenever it sparks she drops it. She is so frightened of fire, now. And water, and guns, and hands on her body. She doesn't feel the fear consciously in her head, but she knows it's inside her, weighing her down. She is water-logged with trauma.

But no one can hurt her here.

When the dry leaves and twigs finally catch, Katniss pokes the fire into better shape and then sits cross-legged, staring into it, chewing a walnut, and she finally feels safe. She will be warm for the night, and she has food. She has weapons to hunt the next day, and though her clothing is a little poor, she will not freeze to death if she keeps moving during the day and builds fires at night. Unlike the arena, the woods outside District 12 are vast and impassable, and even a hovercraft would strain to find a wisp of smoke among the mountains.

She stares at the fire for a long time. At first, no thoughts come into her head except to lift the old walnuts to her mouth and chew. She has been emptied by exhaustion and trauma. But in time, from the darkness, a single thought crystallizes into a perfect, sharp diamond.

Katniss decides that she is going to run away.

She will need to take Prim with her, of course, and she will try to take her mother. Can she take Peeta? Perhaps. Snow will kill him if she doesn't. He might kill Peeta's family in retribution, and maybe a few dozen or hundred or thousand other people, depending on his mood, but she cannot worry about that. There simply isn't space inside her head anymore. She will care for herself and Prim, and her mother and Peeta if she can. Maybe they can drag Haymitch with them. They will get away from Snow.

Katniss scrapes some of the dry leaves into a little pile, then sets down her game bag as a pillow. Half of her is warmed by the fire, but the backs of her bare legs shiver. That's okay. She prefers the cold of the January dark to the warmth of Snow's body.

Sleep comes to her in black bursts, and in between drowsing she tries to plan an escape. Getting her family out of District 12 without anyone noticing is going to be extremely difficult, and Prim will want to bring that stupid cat. But she could find a way. They can live in the woods. Just like Gale suggested once, a long time ago, in a better life. They could be safe out here. If they go far enough, President Snow will never find them. They would be birds on the horizon, disappearing specks, uncatchable… She sleeps and she dreams of the starlings, rising and pulsing like clouds of smoke, and she veers among them and she laughs…

'Mrs Snow?'

Katniss hears these words and she freezes. Those are not words that belong in the forest. Those words have followed her.

She has her bow out and an arrow nocked in seconds. She will kill the words. Then they can't follow her further. It's no longer black outside; the coming dawn has eased the sky, and there is a flashlight approaching.

'Mrs Snow?' The voice is familiar. It's Sulla. He sounds tired more than anything.

Katniss does not lower her arrow. She can kill him. She is an excellent shot.

Sulla's footsteps approach, and then a figure appears in the doorway. She squints as the light hits her face, then Sulla lowers the flashlight. He looks at Katniss with a strange mix of feelings: pity, discomfort, embarrassment. A pacifying smile lightens his lined, taut face and he raises his hands in the air, his eyes on the bow.

'Hi there, ma'am.'

'How did you find me?' she says.

'We were tracking you.'

'No you weren't,' says Katniss, her bow still drawn. 'No one followed me. I came out here alone. I would know if someone followed me. I know these woods better than anyone.'

'I didn't follow you.' Sulla's face is full of uncomfortable misery. It takes him a moment to get the words out. 'There's a tracker implanted in you,' he says.

Katniss stares. She has not been implanted with anything. They put a tracker in her for the Games, a metal lump, but she has no new scars — at least not counting those from the assassin, or the lovely wound she and Snow gave her thigh.

'Where is it?'

Sulla looks extremely unhappy to be having this conversation. 'It was implanted in your uterus.'

Katniss' mouth falls open. She lowers her bow.

She is going to kill Snow.

'That doctor.' She remembers the sharp sensation against her cervix during her examination. She laughs and puts a hand to her forehead. Her voice comes in a hysterical whisper. 'Well, I could hardly be expected to find it there, could I?'

'The President thought it would be the safest place for it,' Sulla explains with apology and shame. 'It was for your own safety. In case you were kidnapped, or…'

'In case I went crazy and ran away to live in the forest,' completes Katniss.

Sulla nods awkwardly. 'Yes.' He looks at her in her bloodstained dress, half-curled in her leafy nest, and he looks like this is the worst thing he has ever had to do. 'He would like you to come back now.'

'He threw me out,' says Katniss. 'I thought he was done with me.'

Sulla's dark brow creases heavily. 'I think he… wanted some space.'

Katniss can already feel her madness returning. She widens boiled-egg eyes at Sulla. 'Were you eavesdropping on everything we talked about?'

'Not personally,' he says carefully. 'But we have a team listening in. Someone is always listening. I know the footnotes to what happened.'

'You know he licked my face and then we had a fight and then he got an erection and then I told him I wanted him to fuck me and he kicked me out?' she says in an insane meander.

Sulla isn't having a good day. 'Pretty much. He called me the moment you left and told me to keep an eye on your whereabouts. He's back in the Capitol.'

Katniss takes a breath. The Capitol. She looks through the glassless windows of her little home at the blueberry sky. Dawn is stretching itself awake. The bombing of District 13 has already concluded. Thousands new dead bodies plug the earth. Was there a counter-strike?

'District 13?' she asks.

Sulla nods. 'Gone. They didn't fire back. It's safe. The rebellion is over.' He says this as though it is reassuring. An entire District obliterated, but the Capitol spared. No more soldiers. No more bombs. Just a few starving, terrified people graffitiing whore on houses. Snow victorious, once again. All of this information slides off her like oil. Thousands dead, and the air still smells of pine trees. 'I'm supposed to take you back to him now.'

Katniss shakes her head. The leaves rustle around her. 'What happens if I refuse to come back with you?'

'I would immobilize you with my stun gun,' says Sulla, glancing at one of the several weapons in his holster, 'and then carry you back.'

'And what if I shot you?'

'Then Snow would send more people after you. And if you shot all of them, he would send more.' Sulla gives her a sad smile. 'You know he would never just let you go.'

'But why?' she says. She drops her bow to the floor, exhausted. She doesn't understand any of it. 'Why does he like me so much?'

Sulla looks like he does not want to be having this conversation. 'I don't know, ma'am.'

'Have there been others like me? Other girls?'

Sulla shakes his head. He hesitates, unused to these sorts of questions. 'I started working for the President over twenty years ago, when his wife was still alive. After her… no. There was no one else, ma'am.'

'Did he love her? His wife?'

Sulla shifts uncomfortably. 'I don't think it's my place to answer that, ma'am. I'm sure the President had great respect for his wife.'

'So that's a "no".' She picks up a twig and tosses it into the dying fire. 'Just me. What makes me so special?'

'I can't say, ma'am. But…' Sulla looks like he is choosing his words very carefully. 'I can say that the President is very fond of you. Very, very fond of you.' He adds this clarification with ominous threat.

'He's a fucking lunatic,' she mutters. 'I don't want to go back there. I don't want to go back to him.'

'I know, ma'am,' says Sulla quietly. 'But you have to.' He takes a moment to consider before speaking. 'He is never going to let you go. He…' His face creases. 'He wants to keep you.'

Katniss pulls her lips back from her gums in something so far from a smile it's pathetic. 'But I don't want to be kept. I want to stay here.'

'You can't. I'm sorry, ma'am.' For all the apology in Sulla's voice, there is obviously no compromise to be had. 'I have to bring you back.'

'No you don't,' Katniss whispers. She reaches for her hunting knife and a moment later Sulla's gun is trained on her. 'Look, if you know where this tracker is, you can cut it out of me. Just… I mean, if they got it in there, it must be possible to get it out, right?' She offers him the knife, and Sulla looks at her as though she's insane.

She is insane. Katniss looks at the blade, which is the width of her wrist, and briefly considers the logistics of sticking it into her vagina and just giving it a good waggle. See if anything falls out.

It's hardly her best plan ever.

Katniss closes her eyes and gives herself a moment to mourn Katniss Everdeen. How sweet it was to resurrect her. But Katniss Everdeen has to go back into the ground, now. She opens her eyes and gently, ritualistically puts the knife back in the game bag. She carefully removes her boots, one at a time, and folds them next to the fireplace. She stashes the game bag, then her bow, then her arrows, and then her jacket. Katniss Everdeen will be safe there, inside this old house that she and Gale ate and laughed in so many times, and she and her father before that. Then she presents herself to Sulla: just Katniss Snow once again, in her bloody dress and her bare, filthy feet, and he looks at her with real heartbreak.

'Come on, ma'am,' he says. 'We'll get you home safe and sound.'

'Good and safe,' says Katniss, and then she laughs at the reference he doesn't get. She'll never be safe again. She'll never be good again.

Katniss sleeps on the flight home, and she dreams. In her dream, she is holding Gale's warm corpse and trying to stop his brains from falling out. It's so hard, however, because there seem to be so much of them and they are so slippery. They gush over her fingers and slide all over the place. This is so untidy. If she can only keep the brains safe, then perhaps Gale will be alright. But in her dream she is wearing only that stupid slip, and she has no pockets, and when she scoops up the brains like wet strawberries she cannot think where to put them. There is only one safe place in her body to conceal something so precious, and so she inserts Gale's brains with dreamy ease into her cunt. More brains… more insertions… and she is sure that if she can just get them all inside her for safe-keeping then Gale will wake up…

Katniss wakes with a hollow, sucked-in gasp, and she shakes and sweats in with absolute, primal terror until the logic of the dream falls away from her.

She is in her chambers, in her bed, in just her slip and underwear. How did she get here? Did someone carry her to bed? Did she walk here herself? Has she lost time? Her arm is in agony; she must have been sleeping on it. And her cunt is aching, and her underwear is slick.

She looks around. Someone has cleaned the room immaculately. Not a trace of Gale's blood remains on the carpet or the walls, yet still it splatters the inside of her skull. How could they possibly bring her back here? Are they that stupid, or is this deliberate? Is someone trying to drive her insane?

Intolerable.

She cannot do this anymore. How could anyone do this?

She peels off the underwear, which are disgusting, and does not bother replacing them. She's lost her jacket and her boots already today; why not take more away from her?

She pads out into the hall, past the guards that always stand outside her chambers. She looks at them both, and one makes uneasy eye contact.

Katniss, wearing only her slip, a milky ghost, eyes huge in her sunken face, lifts a finger to her lips and makes a shushing noise.

Then she walks, almost naked, her skin on fire, and follows the familiar route to Snow's chambers. There are two guards here, too, and when she reaches for the door one puts out an arm to block her.

'Ma'am, the President is sleeping.'

Katniss listens. Her hunter's ears can hear the faint noise of a shower running.

'Sounds like he's still awake to me.' Snow always stays up late. 'Let me in.'

The guard does not move his arm, but his expression is uncertain. It flicks down Katniss' body, and she follows the gaze. Sweat stains her slip, beneath her arms and between her legs.

'I want to see my husband. Let me in. You can search me for weapons, if you like.' She draws her arms wide and turns around for them, showing off her wasting body, advertising the horrible intimacy of her ruination.

The guards glance at one another with discomfited embarrassment, and they relent. Katniss is admitted.

Here is the lounge, where she and Snow took breakfast after Gale was shot. On the table is a plate with a half-finished biscuit, and there is a pile of Capitol newspapers. She examines the top edition and sees a photograph of her own face looking back, that bruise on her arm, Snow at her side, addressing the nation. Katniss cannot read her own expression. She might as well be looking at a corpse with its face fallen in.

The sound of the shower draws her slowly and uncertainly toward the bedroom. There is only one conclusion to this journey. She is a little moon about to fall into something huge and black, and she won't be able to climb out again.

Snow's bed is disturbed, the sheets pulled back. On the nightstand there is a very old book with a pair of reading glasses resting upon it. She did not know Snow used reading glasses. She still has so much to learn about him.

She tilts her head to read the title. It must be an ancestral book, one of the texts forbidden to the common people. The Leopard. She wonders if leopards still exist. She has only seen pictures. She could be a leopard herself, of course. Or perhaps Snow is the leopard, padding around her skull.

The shower stops. Katniss lowers herself onto the bed. She dimly notes that she will smear some little bit of her arousal on Snow's sheets by doing this, as she did before. Oh well. Surely they are past such niceties.

She waits for some long minutes before the bathroom door opens. Snow doesn't see her immediately. He is wearing a loose robe, toweling his hair one-handedly, and Katniss notes this is the first time she has seen his bare legs. She hates the sight of him: the varicose veins, the flat shape of his feet, and she hates what she can see of his ageing arms as the robe falls back at the wrist.

He is genuinely startled when he sees her.

'Katniss,' he says, with an almost childish tone of anger. 'What are you doing in my bedroom?'

'Do you think I'm disgusting?'

'What?' It takes Snow a moment to comprehend the situation. Caught off guard, his composure is not the perfect shield it usually is. He quickly tightens the rope of his robe, covering himself the best he can. 'What are you talking about?'

'You kicked me out,' she says, and is satisfied with the strength of her voice, despite its rasp. 'I told you how I feel, and you kicked me out. That was rude. Is it because you think I'm disgusting?'

Snow's face, old and exhausted, is even heavier with grief. 'No, Katniss. I would never think that. I was merely… concerned.'

'Concerned that we might fuck?' she spits back.

It is impossible not to be aware of their situation. Snow is usually carefully concealed in the finest, most perfect suits that betray no trace of humanity beneath. Now she can see the loose skin of his neck, the bared V of his chest and its white hair, the blue-lined skin of his legs. He, too, can see how her hipbones and nipples emboss her sweat-soaked slip, and he can see her sweat-shimmering legs, and he can see the mental illness in her eyes.

'Yes, I was concerned about that,' he says, very carefully. 'It was an intense day. This is an intense night. I think we ought to discuss this in the morning.'

'I don't,' she snaps. 'You think you can just send me away when you want and summon me again when I'm of interest to you? Oh, I guess you can, on account of you putting a tracker in my fucking uterus.'

His expression offers nothing. 'Sulla told you? Hm.' His head tilts very slightly. 'I must speak with him about that. I didn't want you to know.'

'You violated my body.' Her voice is the drag of a dead coyote over gravel.

Snow frowns deeply. 'No. I was merely keeping you safe. If you had been abducted—'

He is cut off by Katniss' hand striking his face. It's a hard, heavy slap, and he staggers.

'You let that doctor stick that metal rod inside me. It's a fucking rape.'

When Snow's eyes meet hers again, they are wide and staring with anger or fear or both. 'No, Katniss. The exam was necessary. I merely thought it prudent to kill two birds with one stone. You needed a uterine exam regardless, so it seemed expedient to combine —'

She hits him again, sending spikes of pain through her knuckles as her fist collides with his temple. He stumbles and grasps the wall behind him for support.

'Katniss—'

'It hurt.' She says this with savage simplicity. 'You hurt me. You hurt my insides. Oh, I forgot — you like hurting me. You must love the idea that he got so deep inside and scratched me up.'

There is a long silence. Snow recovers himself and Katniss allows this, and he seems to need some difficult moments to collect his explanation.

'Sometimes,' Snow says at last, 'I become aware of how poorly I understand you.' The side of his mouth gives the tiniest quirk of a smile. 'I understand so perfectly how to damage you. Yet I am so very bad at taking care of you. I wish that wasn't the case.'

'Well, here are some tips,' she shouts. 'Don't put things in my uterus and hide it from me. Don't psychologically torture me. Don't make me accuse my dead friend of rape. Don't rub your hard-on against my leg.'

It is really only the last of these that seems to wound him. He gives a slow nod, his whole body ancient with weariness.

'That was unforgivable,' he says.

She scoffs. 'As if I could ever forgive the thousands of other horrific things you've done.'

He is barely listening to her. 'I gave you my word,' he murmurs. 'I promised that this would not be a sexual arrangement.'

'And yet you wanted to fuck me the entire time.'

He shakes his head. 'No, Katniss.' No human being has ever wanted to have a conversation less than this. 'I felt nothing for you when we married. And then I developed feelings for you. You are…' His smile is sad and open. 'You are superb. I didn't anticipate your splendor… Your beautiful fire, your exquisite savagery…' His voice hardens. 'But whatever feelings I might have for you, those are my own to deal with. You need not burden yourself with them.' Pain mutates his expression. 'You are nineteen years old. One could hardly describe this marriage as one of great consent on your part. I would never try to…' He shakes his head and swallows, and he looks furious about something. 'I want our relationship to remain as it is.'

Katniss laughs like a crow, and there are tears on her face. 'You like to sell sixteen-year-olds into sex slavery! As if you care about my consent!' Her laugh cascades again down her throat. 'Or is that how it works for you? As long as you don't rape anybody yourself, it's all okay? As long as you hold yourself to a higher standard, you can do whatever you want for political reasons?'

'I have my ethics,' says Snow, and his voice is harder. 'You may not agree with them, but they are consistent and I hold to them. I have tried to treat you with respect. I have not abused you. Surely you understand that?'

'Not abused me?' She is incredulity and rage. 'You have been an abusive presence in my life since I was born. Your face in the news, your voice in recordings… All those reapings… All those dead children… It's all you. You have been abusing me my entire life. So don't talk to me about your fucking ethics.'

'Then what about your ethics, Katniss?' He looks over her body: sweating, salt-rich, her slip damp, her hair a catastrophe. 'How would you feel if I came to your bedroom in the middle of the night in this state of undress? Do you find it acceptable to behave however you wish toward me, and still hold the moral high ground?' His mouth contorts with something that could be anger or hunger. 'You force yourself on me, again and again. You kiss me, you touch me, you invade me… I tell you to stop and you refuse. Is that ethical?'

Katniss' lips spread in a canyon smile, and all of her teeth glitter. 'You are responsible for every evil thing that has ever happened in my life!' She is whispering, she is screaming. 'There is nothing I can do to you that you do not deserve. You deserve to die. You deserve to be cut open. You deserve to be eaten.'

Snow's breath comes warmer on her face. 'And what do you deserve, Katniss?'

'Me?' She laughs again, feebly this time. 'I think I deserve to die. I should have never come here, never married you… I should have fought. Joined the rebellion. Perhaps things would have been different… But I…' Her mad smile falls from her face and her eyes reflect nothing. 'I'm nothing, now. I'm nothing good.'

She reaches out for him as though she means to plunge her hands into his skin like the surface of a lake, and her fingers manage to find his neck. One moment she is choking him, weakly but with purpose, and the next moment he has torn her hand free. His whole body is then against her, forcing her back, first against the bedpost, then against the floor, trying to stop her from hurting him or herself. One of his hands holds her wrist, the other her shoulder.

'Katniss, Katniss…' He is saying her name over and over and over again, trying to calm her…

'I don't have a name! You took my name! Now I'm Snow, now I'm nothing, now I'm like you…'

She struggles beneath him on the floor, a pinned butterfly, and he holds her with all the weight of his body atop her. She is utterly trapped but she knows, somehow, that he is not trying to hurt her. He holds her down, and they pant together, and they look at one another. They are so close. Katniss can feel that familiar wretched ache between her legs, the rot he put inside her, scrabbling to escape.

One of her hands is free.

Some things are the simplest in the world. Reaching out for Snow's body requires so little coordination. She feels the fabric of Snow's robe and at first he doesn't know what she's doing, but it takes such a short moment to navigate her fingers inside.

Her fingertips find his cock. Her reality shifts. It is, as she expected, keenly erect from the smell and the proximity of her. He can't help it. He needs her.

His voice bites into her: 'Katniss, stop.' He requires both his hands to restrain her, one on her hand and the other against her shoulder, so she is free to do as she likes. Perhaps he could stop her. Perhaps he doesn't want to.

She has never touched someone's cock before, and she notes its smoothness, its warmth, and the strange, putrid dampness of its tip. She feels a minute earthquake of shame and physical pleasure go through Snow's body, holding her down, as her fingers explore the strange shape of his erection.

'Please, Katniss. Please. Stop.' There is devastation in his voice.

'Why?' Her voice is a high, faraway wind. 'You want this. You're disgusting. You're just like everybody else. Why don't you just fuck me?'

'Because you don't want this,' he says, with some madness. 'Whatever you think you want, it's not this.'

'Didn't you want to traumatize me?' she whispers. 'Isn't this what you wanted? Don't you like what you've done to me?'

Katniss lets her fingers drop from his erection and Snow immediately sighs in relief, but she is moving her fingers between her own legs. She knows what she will find there.

Then Katniss lifts her hand and wipes her cunt-wet fingers across his mouth.

A sound of horror and shame and desire, guttural and delightful to her, spills from Snow's mouth. His lips shimmer with her arousal.

'See?' she whispers. 'You see how wet I am for you?'

His eyes — black ice, and incredulity, and arousal — find hers. 'But why?'

'There's something wrong with me. You poisoned me.' She presses her mouth to his ear and lets him absorb every syllable of her hate. 'Come on. I want it. Show me what you are. Show me.' She touches his face and his hair very briefly, as though comforting him, then returns her hand between her thighs. It is a process of straightforward geometry to open her legs, to nudge her vulva to his erection, to raise her hips so that his cock is resting raw against her labia.

'Please don't.' Snow begs. 'Please.'

'Did you ever stop?' she murmurs. She feels no pity; she left her pity in the ground, long ago. 'When someone begged you to please stop, did you ever show mercy?'

She shifts back and forth, trying to comprehend this new sensation, and when his cock scalds her clitoris her body spasms with golden pleasure. This is the best thing she has felt since she signed away her life to him. So why not? Why not feel something good?

Snow dips his head and presses his forehead against hers, and she can almost taste his anguish. 'Please, Katniss,' he says, one final time.

The head of his cock rests against her bare, slick cunt, and in the end it is Snow, not Katniss, who pushes his hips that infinitesimal degree closer to transgress her. She tenses, then relaxes. Her thin breath aches. Snow turns his face away from her and then, with a sigh of despair and relief, sinks his erection fully inside her.

He holds himself within her cunt, perfectly still, entombed. The room is silent save the tides of his breath and hers, each full with pleasure and disbelief. Katniss can hear the saliva in her mouth.

And then Snow starts to fuck her. It is abhorrent and it is sensational. Katniss cries out and gasps and kicks and bucks from the strange pain and the impossible, frantic pleasure. She shivers uncontrollably as real, physical joy fills her, empties her, then fills her again.

She is vindicated. She has won.

'You're disgusting,' she whispers. She presses her mouth against his ear so she can ensure every word slides into him the way he is sliding into her. 'You're a creep. You're a dirty old man.'

'Be quiet,' comes Snow's voice, malformed with desire for her.

'You're evil. You're a murderer,' she breathes, but the fire inside her is rising in waves. 'I want… I want to see your throat cut…'

He pushes so deep into her that her words break into a gasp, and her back arches, and the remnants of her fingernails claw at the carpet. Her hands find his hips, holding him inside her, and she touches parts of his skin that are unknown to her. They are so distinct: she is taut and dark, he is pale and soft, but his erection is like a delicious knife inside her, and it is exactly the shape of her loathing.

Snow's voice, torn at the edges, sounds in her ear. 'Am I hurting you?'

'Shut up,' she breathes. 'Just fuck me.'

And he does.

They do not kiss. They do not look at each other. He fucks her, palms down on the carpet on either side of her head, and she wraps her legs around him and holds him and throws back her head with hysteria. Yes, it hurts, and she likes that. He is usually so careful with her, but now there is a carnal indifference in his need to fuck her and feel her excruciating tightness. He is so unheeding of the absolute, white ecstasy that is starting to build inside her.

She has never felt like this before. She has never been fucked before. This is not how she imagined it: this is not gentle, this is not love-making. This is a man four times her age pressing his hot, strange body against her own without regard for her interiority, and he is stretching out her fresh cunt in ways that paralyze and disorient her. She wants to be reshaped by him; she wants to be ruined. She feels the smooth, raw skin of him rub against her insides, and she feels the singular sensation of his cock pressing uncomfortably against the walls of her vagina and against her tender, unknown depths.

She opens her mouth against his ear and makes a gift to him of tiny gasps that say, Yes, I like this, don't stop. Look what you've done to me. Look at what you've done.

This is the man who is responsible for every evil she has ever encountered. This is evil and death fucking her open.

She shivers at the thought, then her horror and disgust crest into a new peak of arousal, and she bites down on the ball of her wrist. Her climax is rising in deep ripples. Her breath comes erratic, and Snow starts to allow small, low moans escape his lips. She feels the urgency of him, his tight breath, the way he fills her like corpses in a mass grave, and she is on the edge of something awful and silver that cuts into her like bone…

Snow tenses and releases a low, groaning breath into her ear, and Katniss feels panic spike in her chest as the exceptional sensation of ejaculation pulses between her legs, like there is a living insect inside her, running deep over her insides. She lies there, revolted and scorching, as Snow pours semen into her, and then she feels her own orgasm in her throat before she feels it anywhere else. She is impossibly loud. She wants to fill his ears with the knowledge of the damage he has done to her and the pleasure she now feels. She is ecstatic: clawing at him, convulsing, shivering, and then groaning with shock and disgust and abyssal, blackout pleasure that pushes through her again and again and again…

It takes a long time for either of them to move after they come. Snow does first, withdrawing from her, and Katniss makes a pathetic sound in the back of her throat as she is emptied once more. He collapses a few feet from her, sitting on the floor, resting against a chair. He fixes his robe, but not before Katniss sees his cock for the first time, shiny with her arousal. How strange it looks, and how strange it is to feel so… to feel so…

Satiated.

Katniss does nothing to cover herself. Her nightdress is hiked around her hips and her legs are goosepimpling in the cold.

From the depths of her mind the most useless, sad thought drifts: I should have done it with Gale. That should have been my first time.

But it wasn't. And now Gale is dead. And Katniss can feel a little of Snow's semen leaking out of her.

It takes considerable difficulty to stand, but once she's on her feet she feels better, more normal. Indeed, she feels saner than she has since she signed that wedding certificate.

She feels like they have murdered someone. But whom, however, she cannot say.

She says nothing to Snow. She leaves him there: slumped, ashen, in quiet agony. She has had her triumph.

Katniss leaves the way she came in, and she says nothing to the security guards who must, surely, know what just transpired.

She walks through her bedroom and pauses, briefly, at the spot where Gale died. She places a hand against her chest. She will carry him with her, safe inside, along with Rue and with her father. She is a haunted house, sheltering so many ghosts.

By the time she reaches her shower, Snow's ejaculate has slid down her thigh. The way it clings intrigues her: the viscosity of it, the way it is drying at the edges. She turns on the shower, but it is some time before she actually steps inside. She first examines her cum-stained thigh, then smears her fingers over it and raises them to her nose. At least it doesn't smell like roses, but Katniss thinks there is some blood in there. Her own, perhaps.

In the lovely embrace of the shower, she examines her feelings. She feels remarkably centered and calm. She feels soothed. The arousal and anxiety are gone, not just withdrawn but properly banished, for the first time in so long, and in their place she feels a wonderful glow of pleasure and fulfilment. So, she has learned something new: being fucked feels good.

She examines, too, her feelings for Snow. The hatred remains, unabating, not quite so hard-edged but still inextricable from the flesh of her; more a grinding molar than an incisor. There is no love, no attraction, no schoolgirl crush. Only her dull hate, and the weird tangle of arousal and comfort that he has woven in her. Quite by accident, of course. The travesty she has become was not knowingly of his making.

She cleans her thigh first, watching little white bits of semen slide down the drain. She does not know exactly how to do this, but she reaches her fingers inside her vagina and cleans herself as best she can. She has never put her fingers inside herself before. It is curious to think of there being an absence, a hollow between her legs. She never thought of it like that before, but Snow's cock has opened her and stretched her, and now there is a space where once there was only fused flesh.

She washes out the semen until she is sure none remains, and she rubs it between her forefinger and thumb. She is not a complete stranger to the substance — she has had Prim's goat bred on plenty of occasions — but it is quite something else to feel it spit out of her vagina.

If she gets it all out, does that mean she can't get pregnant? Can Snow even get her pregnant? Surely he is too old? She knows so little about this. School taught them nothing about sex, and her mother barely had the presence of mind to teach her about menstruation. Should she ask someone? Snow? Sulla? She has so few people to talk to. Perhaps Snow's library has a nice little book to explain such things.

Well, she has lots of new things to learn.

Because this will not be the last time she fucks him.

Oh, no. This will happen again, she will make sure of it. She will not allow him to make his excuses and hide from her and make pretenses of propriety. She has sunk her cunt-teeth into him now, and she will not let him go. She feels better than she has in months, and she is not about to relinquish that. She has had her victory — and she will remain victorious, day after day, using him and breaking him as he has so used and broken her. And he will like it.

Katniss considers her hate as trails of sexual pleasure still meander around her body. She feels a little less like killing him. But fucking him? Oh, yes: that is a crime she will gladly repeat.