Chapter Text
"Don't leave me here alone... Don't go where I can't follow!" - Sam Gamgee
- The Two Towers
J.R.R. Tolkien
New Appalachia
Summer
50 AHG (After the Hunger Games)
I am sixty-seven now, and I am dreaming, as I still so often do, of when I was young and dying.
That’s the type of purposefully melodramatic statement Peeta makes these days whenever he wakes from his own version of my annoyingly undying nightmares. His way with words - that way with words that helped save all of our lives - has become a running joke among the surviving Victors of the Hunger Games: delicate, gently purple frosting, Johanna Mason would say, that mutes the burnt edges of the reassuring smiles that we pull out of the ovens of our chronically overheated memories and serve up to our fortunately oblivious descendants.
Johanna has become very fond of the melodramatic over-descriptives in her old age. She and Peeta make a game of it together, spraying them about like she used to spray curse words, at least when there are children present. After five full decades Jo’s finally got the knack of controlling the flow, but not before she drove Annie Cresta-Odair to threats of active defenestration and/or drowning to protect little Finny’s precious, unsullied ears. Little Finny’s ears are nearing fifty themselves now, and, along with the rest of him, are the proud fathers of seven bronzed, sea-eyed, titian-haired gods and goddesses, but as his blithely doting mother says, it’s the thought that counts.
Jo usually just tells her to stick a spile in it. Sometimes a trident. Sometimes, Jo being Jo, she offers to save her the trouble and chop herself off at the collar with her own axe.
That’s usually the point where I pull out my bow and arrows and shoot something close to her. Very close to her. The last time it happened, she and Annie and Effie had been sitting on my front steps with a glass of hard lemonade apiece. I put my own glass down, made an excuse to go inside, grabbed the necessary from the wall, and sank my steel-tipped arrow straight through the loose fabric of her jacket collar and six inches deep into the wood of the porch post behind her.
Jo has not improved with age. My skill with a bow though, hasn't suffered one bit for my advancing years, and time has definitely been good to Annie's psyche. She’d literally peed herself laughing. Effie, of course, being ever and eternally and unchangingly Effie, had insisted on attributing that to the spilled lemonade.
The memories weave around my dreams, blending now with the intruding sharp, pungent smell of pine and the pre-dawn mist. I force my eyes open on that semi-pleasant note before things can degenerate to the charred and bloody again, and roll over. Peeta is sleeping beside me. I prop myself up on one elbow and kiss his sleep-creased cheek softly before slipping out of bed. I pull on rough trousers, an old flannel shirt and my father’s ancient hunting jacket… My dark hair is almost completely silver now, but I still wear it in a braid most days. I bundle it up under my cap and stuff my feet into my socks and shoes. We have company coming in later tonight - all of the company. The fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Games is going to be celebrated in style, not in the Capitol, but in the place where it properly ended. And to properly celebrate...
We need meat.
At least that’s what I tell myself. We're not exactly short on food these days here in the former District Twelve, never mind that I’ve already been hunting for a full month in anticipation. The pantries and cooling hut are crammed full. In actuality, I’ve never quite graduated beyond the unease of what would have been Reaping Day, and it’s become a ritual of mine to take to the woods in the cooler hours of dawn on the anniversary and thoroughly, thoroughly kill something. It doesn’t have to be big. Last year, I brought down a weasel. I named it Alma, and, as unpalatable as it was, fed it to Buttercup’s descendants. The year before that, it was a wild turkey. I named it Thread, and Peeta roasted it and made a huge batch of hash. I made no comment when he packed it all up carefully in a cooling box and sent it off to Gale on the train. There was no thank you note - we’re not hostile or even neutral any longer, but such things, to Gale, will always be Capitol. Johanna told us he appreciated it though, and polished it off with a lovely blood-red wine from the appropriate year.
There are worse games we play.
I retrieve a cheese bun from the bottomless box on the counter, my bow and arrows and game bag from their place of honor by the front door, and step out into the damp mist. Buttercup’s latest descendant patriarch, ruler of all of the generations of his nasty-faced, nastier-tempered spawn, snarls and claws at me as I pass. His name is Violet. I consider shooting him, or at least poking him firmly with an arrow, but as always, the planters of soft yellow primroses on the windowsill where he’s perching stop me.
At least that’s what I tell myself. Better that than admit that the notoriously and perpetually socially maladjusted Katniss Everdeen-Mellark is going soft in her old age. “Go suck a rat,” I tell him instead, and head out toward the fence.
*
There is a gate there now. I press my thumb to the auto-lock. It swings open. I step beyond and it swings shut, clicking and humming. There is a second lock box before me, set into a tree. Offering it my thumbprint will allow me back into the enclosed, protected area. We don’t really have problems with human intruders these days, but the woods surrounding our thriving mini-metropolis are as full of dangerous wild animals as they’ve ever been. The thumbprint isn’t so much person-specific as human-specific again, though there is a registry of locals that it refers to upon scanning. If you’re traveling or visiting, you’re rerouted to a compu-ranger on look-out duty who inquires amiably of your identity and intent before buzzing you through. It will also suggest that you stop by City Hall to pick up a map of the actual roads in the area to further your future traveling convenience.
The compu-ranger has Peeta’s recorded voice. I may be, now and always, the Mockingjay, but he’s a lot more soothing when it comes right down to it. It’s not much of a reach, as the unfortunate squirrel currently adorning the end of my first arrow could tell you… I examine it closely. There are no signs of wounds or disease, so I prep it quickly and drop it in my game bag.
“Sorry,” I tell it as I head off again. “But it’s the fiftieth, you know? I think the occasion calls for a bit of a grander sacrificial totem.”
I wipe my arrow, replace it in my quiver, and head off, tearing bits off of my cheese bun. Twenty minutes in, I stop in my tracks and cock my head. I had a couple of vertebrae in my lower back and my left knee replaced ten years ago after a rather embarrassing incident where Violet had ambushed me in the tall grass of the meadow and I’d tripped and fallen over my own bootlace - Peeta had teased me mercilessly over copping out on the whole leg - but even now, my hearing, especially in my left ear, the one that was repaired after the 74th Games - is as sharp as it ever was.
Capitol technology today, Capitol technology tomorrow, Capitol technology forever.
I listen carefully. There is definitely someone out there, someone human, and not far away either. They’re treading just as carefully as I’m listening - but my instincts tell me that the noises are of someone trying to mask their footsteps from other people, not just to tread quietly after their non-human prey. As far as I’m aware, I’m the only person out here, which means that they’re trying to hide from me. I draw an arrow and nock it, and crouch, barely breathing. Even as I do, a tall figure steps into full view.
I nearly drop my bow in my shock. The sight before me is literally, literally the last thing I ever expected to ever see again.
“Katniss Everdeen?’ the man in the antique Peacekeeper’s uniform says. His voice is muffled, but definitely masculine behind the abomination of a helmet and visor. I just stare dumbly. He waits.
“Um,” I say, too stunned to process outrage at the monstrosity before me, stepped out, it seems, of time and nightmare again. “Everdeen-Mellark, actually. Katniss Everdeen-Mellark. What…”
“I’m very sorry,” he says. “Do it.”
“Do... What?" I manage, confused. Barely is the last word out of my mouth when my head explodes in vicious pain. I barely feel the sting in my arm as I fall: lightly, lightly as unheard sound, to the forest floor. A second pair of arms catches me, and the world goes black and charred.