Home Fanfics Go Back
Johanna is home with the girls when the siren rings. "What is that?" she asks. Camellia and Ophelia were doing homework at the table, and Antonia was still at work.
Ophelia looks up, a little stiff but not panicked. She is still in her perfectly ironed school uniform. "That's the shelter alarm," she says. "We're supposed to get underground."
Johanna can't make herself move for a minute. She understands the words, but there was a difference between being near a war zone, and actually being near a bombing.
"It's probably just another drill," Ophelia continues. She leaves her homework where it lies and goes to get the backpacks both girls had pre-packed for this occasion. "We do a drill at school every couple weeks."
Camellia slips her shoes on, and the fact that a ten-year-old is getting ready to leave is what finally prompts Johanna to move. She grabs her own rucksack, shoves in her few things: Blight's pipe, her change of clothes, and runs to Antonia's room to get the morphling. She quickly laces up her combat boots, and when she stands again, she feels the familiar wave of dizziness. It's fine, though, really. She has gotten good at doing what she needs to do, despite the discomfort. "Where are we going?" she asks the girls.
Camellia opens her mouth to answer, but at that moment, something shakes the building like an earthquake. The glasses of tea the girls were drinking crash off the table, shattering glass, and the door seems to rattle on its hinges. "Was that a bomb?" Ophelia asks, quietly, once the shaking stops. Camellia begins crying, silent tears that were perhaps more from shock than fear.
"Where's mommy?" she asks, her voice cracking.
"Your mom is at work. If that siren is to get to a shelter, you know she's doing it. She's always telling you to stay ready, to listen to the alarms. She would do that too." Truthfully, Johanna wonders about this. Ophelia and Camellia were Antonia's whole life, and if there were truly bombs in the city, she imagines Antonia rushing back to be with her daughters.
The three of them make their way into the hallway, Camellia sniffling, and Ophelia looking nervous but trying to keep herself together. The hallway is dusty with soot, and Johanna is certain that there was either some terrible natural disaster or a bombing to make the air so thick. She dashes back into the apartment and grabs masks — not the nice respirator kind she got in the Capitol, but at least something to keep the biggest particles from their lungs. It's when she exits again that she hears it: one of the neighbors saying there was a bombing.
"Do you know where we're going?" she asks the girls.
Ophelia nods, making her way to the stairs. "It's just in the alley a block away." She grabs her sister's hand and Johanna follows them, her head thrumming with pain. But that was how it was the whole walk across the desert, so she tries to push it to the back of her focus. If she could get through that walk, she could get through this. She thinks of the morphling in her bag, something she could use once they were all safe.
Another explosion rocks the neighborhood just as they get to ground level, and she pushes the girls back behind the door they were just exiting from. She doesn't have enough time to get back in herself, and she feels sharp pieces of silt scraping up her exposed skin. It's hot, the air horribly hot, and she feels like she's standing before an open oven. She opens the door again to let the girls come out and she can't hear what Camellia says, the ringing in her ears too strong.
"Hurry," she says to them, pushing them along. She wonders what this is. Was this the rebels, come to bomb civilians in District 2? Or was this the Capitol, trying to get District 2 to fall in line like they did when they bombed District 12? Or perhaps it was District 2 itself, trying to sow confusion.
Ophelia leads them down the street, and they press against the edge of the building. There are others out, dashing here and there, but many of them are running into the market, probably to find family members. She imagines at least a couple are opportunists, trying to loot something in the chaos.
She sees an arm in a pile of rubble, one of the balconies having broken off of a neighboring building and crashing to the ground. She looks away quickly. She has seen countless corpses, she doesn't think one more will affect her, really, but she doesn't dare look close in case she recognizes Antonia, and she doesn't want the girls to look back and follow her gaze.
The thinks of her siblings, inexplicably, as they move, of her younger sister and brother, killed years ago when she wouldn't behave the way Snow wanted. Would they have grown up to be rebels, or would they resent her? She finds she can't even picture their faces properly anymore.
Finally, Ophelia points to a door that looks like the safe of a bank, and Johanna pulls a large lever to open it. It's basic, just a hatch with a ladder down underground, some benches, a dim emergency light, and some sort of vent that she suspects brings in fresh air, or as fresh as was possible in war conditions. She ushers the girls down the ladder, Camellia peering around with one last, worried "mommy?" before she descends.
Johanna knows she needs to go down, too, that the shelter was only safe as long as it was closed to the outside, but it feels too much like the prison, a small dank room, thick, insulated walls and doors, stuck underground. She had refused to go back underground in the District 13 base camp, but she doesn't have another choice now. She descends the ladder, pulling the door shut behind her, just as another bomb explodes and she slips the last few feet down the ladder onto the packed dirt floor.
She sits up slowly, her vision blacking out for a moment. Ophelia is beside her, pulling off her pack. Camellia is sitting on the bench, knees to her chest, crying softly. Johanna wonders again what is happening: she hadn't seen any hovercraft overhead, nothing that seemed to be dropping the bombs.
She stands, climbing the ladder again, wanting to peer out the door to see what happened. They're alone in the shelter, but she imagines others would be coming soon, eager to get out of the path of explosions. But she finds the door above barred, stuck shut. She wonders if there's a special mechanism to opening it, but she sees the diagram and follows it perfectly, and the door still won't budge. She thinks fearfully that there was something on top of them, detritus or a vehicle or something keeping them trapped. The panic is almost immediate, and she scrambles back down the ladder as she feels her blood pressure drop and nausea set in.
She was trapped here, stuck underground in what was essentially a prison cell. She was going to die trying to save herself. And worst of all, she was supposed to protect the girls, to help allay their fears, and instead they would die here too, without any comfort because she couldn't give it. She wasn't Enobaria or Antonia, good at staying calm, at reassurance, at having a plan. She was Johanna Mason, her breathing too fast just at the idea of being trapped again, unable to keep her own siblings alive, let alone these two girls who were relying on her now.
It's Camellia who hugs her, in the end. She just presses herself to Johanna's middle, her arms clinging on tightly. Johanna thinks it's less of an attempt to comfort Johanna and more of a mechanism to help herself, but it seems to work. Both of them are quiet, Johanna's breathing slowing marginally. And then Ophelia is there, her arms around them both. Johanna wonders if it will hurt to die, if starving or running out of air will be painful, or if they will just slip away.
"What is this?" Enobaria is close to panicking, pacing too quickly in the small space in the back of the hovercraft. "What the hell was that?"
They had seen the bombs, felt the distant aftershocks of the explosions that rocked District 2. She was supposed to follow the insurgents who were there to take out the District 2 military leaders, to help with extraction. But no one had planned for bombs.
Part of her thinks that perhaps they had, that this was just something not shared with her. She knows that the bombing of the Capitol was covered up, wouldn't put it past Coin to do something similar. Maybe she even took inspiration from that case. But no one on the hovercraft with her seemed to expect this, all of them frightened as the plumes of smoke rose from the city. It could also have been District 2, she supposes: the military or loyalist citizens, trying to frame the rebels, trying to scare the citizens into supporting them. Look at the dangerous rebels, we will keep order in District 2.
But all of those thoughts are secondary to her worries, the fact that Antonia and Camellia and Ophelia and Johanna were all there, in the residential area of District 2, the place where black smoke was now rising. She can see the rubble from the hovercraft window and it turns her stomach.
"We won't know until we're down there," Haymitch says. She sees him biting his lip, probably thinking both of Johanna and the fact that this could ruin everything, this could lose the rebels the war.
"Target 5 neutralized." The staticky comm through the radio lets them all take a breath, albeit a shaky one. There were 5 targets to take out, and now all had been killed. She had thought they would escape in the chaos of the bombs, or if the bombs were District 2, perhaps they would even kill the rebels after them, but they had succeeded in the end.
Coin's voice comes through the radio next. "Good. Let's get our men out. Those on standby, proceed into the city, we need to ensure the citizens know that this was their own men, that we are here to help."
Enobaria wonders about this, even as the hovercraft approaches and descends, but it doesn't matter at the moment. She would be let out into the city soon, and she could see the extent of the damage for herself. She cringes a little at the rebel uniform that she was forced to wear, complete with an embroidered name patch, but understands the need for protection in a war zone.
She wants to talk to Lyme, to reassure herself somewhat, but Lyme was one of the 10 that went into District 2 to kill or capture the 5 leaders. Katniss and Dom had gone too. She now only sees Peeta and Haymitch as familiar faces, and of those two, she chooses Peeta.
"I'm going to the residential district," she tells him. "I have to see what the damage is, see if my family is alright."
He nods, but his gaze is far away. "I'll find them," he says. "Katniss and Lyme and Dom and the others. I'll make sure they all get out of there."
Both of their eyes drift towards the Nut. The hovercraft is low now, close to landing, and she can't see any visible change in the imposing mountain. She wonders if Peeta will be alright in the maze-like hallways, without any windows. "Good luck," she tells him.
He nods. "You too. Let's end this."
When Enobaria gets down on the street, it's eerily silent. She knows that there are bomb shelters built into every area of the city, she had grown up performing drills where they'd have to retreat into them, but the closest they got to ever needing the protection was during a great storm. No, knowing that the entire city aside from those in the Nut were down underground in little burrows was more than a little disconcerting.
She thinks of those that maybe didn't make it: the men down in the quarries, or the slow-moving elderly. She tries to clear them from her mind as she moves closer to Antonia's apartment. It's hard to orient herself, even in the district she grew up in, because of the damage. One of the markets was completely collapsed, a pile of rubble interlaced with fruits and the colorful fabrics that worked as shade cloths. Another building where a childhood friend had grown up had a large chunk blasted out of the side, and she wonders if it's at risk of collapsing completely.
Finally, she gets to Antonia's building, and though it still stands, there's a fire in the lobby, the smoke drifting up and out the windows. She can't tell if something caught during the bombings and all the quick escapes, or if this was arson, someone opportunistic. She has a District 13 rifle strapped to her back, but she fingers the knife at her belt instead. Strangely, like a dream, she remembers the last time she held a knife, cutting out Johanna's tracker, or the time before that, holding it to Johanna's ribs at the end of the Quarter Quell.
She knows which shelter Antonia and the girls would have run to, and she goes that way. But if she found the emptiness and silence eerie before, she finds this path worse, strewn with corpses and the injured, crying out. She wants to look away from the dead, to pass right by, but she finds herself inspecting every body, just in case she recognized them. She directs the injured back towards the hovercraft, where a medic should be standing by.
She finds Antonia just before the entrance to the shelter, her eyes barely open, her arm… she was missing the lower half of her right arm. The blood was too much, bright red and still flowing.
"Baria!" her voice is hoarse, but she lights up a bit at the familiar face. "Baria, have you seen my girls?"
Enobaria shakes her head, quickly trying to wrap Antonia's arm in the scarf she had been using to breathe through the soot. "You're the first one I found."
"This shelter is blocked," she says, her voice growing faint. "An explosion blocked the entrance. I came here from work to meet the girls, but I couldn't get in. No one can get in."
That explained the bodies. Enobaria shudders to think that these people were just a few yards from a shelter but still died because it was blocked, and they couldn't get in. She knows she checked every corpse but her eyes wander back to them, looking for children, for Johanna.
"Where's the next closest?" she asks. "The one behind the market?"
Antonia nods. "It was where I was supposed to shelter, but I had to get back to the girls."
Enobaria looks at the door to the shelter. It was covered in rubble, a massive dent on the metal door from the largest boulder. She would not bother trying to move it if it was empty, but she had to check. She knocks on the door, hard, with the butt of her knife.
It's quiet for a moment, and then a knock resounds back. Faint, as if only done with a fist. Someone was inside. She has no idea if it was the girls or Johanna, but she can feel her adrenaline surge. She finds a piece of rebar to use like a crowbar, and slowly starts moving the massive boulder aside. She is straining, using all her effort, but she'd grown weaker since the Quarter Quell, and the rock doesn't budge.
Suddenly Antonia is beside her, leaning back against the rock, trying to walk backwards to shove it off the hatch. Enobaria wants to tell Antonia to sit, that she could well bleed out straining herself like this, but she knows Antonia would gladly bleed out to save her daughters so she saves her breath. The two of them slowly manage to roll away the rock, which she sees isn't a random boulder but a roundish chunk of stone from a nearby building, and then she moves aside all the other heavy stones atop the door as well. She pulls open the door, which strains as if the weight on it had messed up the way it sat in its hinges, and peers down into the shelter.
It's Ophelia she sees first, her desperate, frightened eyes staring up the ladder. She climbs down, and then she sees Johanna and Camellia, sitting in the back, together. Camellia's eyes look bright from crying, and Enobaria could see the pain on Johanna's features. "Your mom is just up there," she tells the girls. "Careful, she's hurt."
Once they hug her and dash up the ladder, she walks over to Johanna. "You alright?"
She nods. "Fine," she says, but her voice is stiff, her eyes unfocused. "Couldn't take any morphling while I was watching those two." She says it with a hint of annoyance, like she was tasked with children she didn't ask for, but she can hear the affection beneath, the way Johanna watches the girls scramble up the ladder.
"Thank you," Enobaria says. "For making sure they were alright."
Johanna cracks a half smile, then winces as she stands up. "It was them taking care of me, I think," she says.
She's slow up the ladder, even with Enobaria taking her bag, and then they're all up above ground. Johanna didn't say anything about the prison-like feel of the shelter, but Enobaria was sure it affected her. She had been down there only a couple minutes and felt close to panicking. She directs them back to the hovercraft, insistent that Antonia lean on her.
Camellia has a hand in her mother's remaining hand, but Ophelia puts an arm around Johanna, as if afraid she might have trouble walking along the uneven street. Enobaria half expects Johanna to shove her away, to insist she was fine on her own, but she stays beside Ophelia, whispering something in her ear that makes Ophelia beam with pride.
"Annie?"
Annie nearly startles out of her seat at the sound of Finnick's voice. She hadn't been sleepy, but she could feel herself drifting off into the dissociative state that had taken her for the past few days, the calm of nothingness where her confusion and guilt and fear couldn't touch her, at least for a while. But Finnick's voice snaps her back into the present the same as if someone had touched her, and with that surfacing, all of her queasy anxiety returns.
"Finnick!" she turns to him, amazed that someone who had been so unresponsive for days and days was now halfway to sitting up. She puts her hands on his shoulders to press him back to the bed, fearful that he could impede his healing somehow with sudden movements. Or maybe she was just afraid of such a rapid change, and wanted him to slow down. She glances around nervously, suddenly afraid. The medics were all on the hovercrafts, helping with the mission in District 2. Hadn't they left anyone behind for those here? "Help!" she calls, desperate, a fear gripping her that if no one was here to help, Finnick might yet die.
It's Primrose Everdeen, the little sister, who appears, far too small to be a real Healer, but Annie is desperate, so she grabs onto Primrose's white uniform. "Help him!" she says. "He's awake, he needs help!"
Primrose nods, her face calm and reassuring, and she moves swiftly, but doesn't look hurried. She checks the vitals displayed on a monitor over the bed, and then she pulls off all sorts of cords and lines from Finnick, detaching him from the life support system. She leaves for a moment and returns with a pill and a pitcher of water with two cups, and pours the first for Annie, handing her the pill. "Take it," she says. "It's just chamomile and lavender. I need you to calm down a bit to help me."
The statement that Primrose needed Annie to help her seems to snap her back into focus. She downs the pill without a thought, and drinks the rest of the water beside. She sits up, straight-backed, at attention for more instructions.
But Primrose is no longer looking at her, but at Finnick. "Can you tell me your full name? The year? Where we are located?"
Finnick answers all of the questions correctly, and Primrose moves on to checking his pupils with a penlight. She hands him the cup of water and helps him sit up to drink it. "I think he'll want a change of clothes," Primrose says to Annie. "There are some spare sets over there."
Annie rushes up to comply, picking through the options for something in Finnick's size. She hears Primrose speaking to Finnick as she searches, her hand frozen in the pile, listening. "We were able to take you off breathing support a while ago, but there was still some swelling close to your brain from where you hit your head, so we needed to keep you sedated. It seems that you healed quickly, and even broke through that sedation. It's a shame I'm the only one here today."
"What happened?" Finnick's question cuts like a knife, and Annie can see the fear in his eyes, recognizes it from when Peeta bore the same expression. He was missing time, unsure of his own memories or what had happened while he was out, and desperate to fill in the gaps.
"The reason you're here is from a bombing in this camp a few weeks ago." Primrose says. "The full medics are out today on a mission to District 2. They say the war should end today or very soon."
"I- is- is everyone alright?"
Annie can see Primrose pause at this question, the loss of her mother likely still fresh in her mind. Annie wonders if she was resentful that she was nursing Finnick back to health when her mother had died instantly, but thinks that Primrose isn't that type of person. "Five people died in that bombing," Annie says bringing a standard issue t shirt and shorts over for Finnick. "Several more were injured."
"Is-" Finnick stops what he's saying, seeming to question himself. Annie wonders if he had been about to ask about Johanna before realizing she left the camp before the bombing. "Who died?"
Primrose dismisses herself to get some medications for Finnick's pain, and Annie sits back in the chair beside the bed. "Mrs. Everdeen died," she says. "Four soldiers died as well: Wolf, Reed, Rierden, and Leegs."
Finnick sighs. He reaches for the clothes and pulls off his hospital gown, and Annie has the sudden realization he means to get up and walk around, to jump right back into action.
"You should take a shower," she says, mostly to stall him. She has no idea if that was allowed, if he should even be up that much, but he reluctantly nods in agreement. Primrose returns and hands him the pills, and he takes them without complaint.
He locates the bathroom in the corner of the infirmary and stands to go to it, ruffling Primrose's hair as he passes her. Primrose blushes and looks stunned for a moment, and then rushes to bring him a towel and toothbrush. "Use the bench!" she calls to him. "So you don't pass out from standing after so long!"
Annie goes upstairs to wait for Finnick to shower and change. Part of her wanted to be beside him every moment, that now he was awake she wanted to not let him out of her sight again, but the other part of her found the underground infirmary just a little too tight, almost claustrophobic. She sits on a bench outside the entrance, the desert sun less offensive now in the late afternoon, and looks out, beyond the camp.
She sees the plume of smoke rising from where she imagined District 2 proper was, and feels a new, different anxiety. Enobaria had gone there, Johanna was still there, Peeta had gone. She has to hold her breath for 8 counts to calm herself down from the rush of fear and guilt that worrying about him brought. What was wrong with her, that she had Finnick and Peeta tangled in her mind, that she just got Finnick back and is now worrying over Peeta? But she can't help it: he had helped her at possibly her most desperate moment. He was the only one who supported her keeping the baby.
She knows now that she will marry Finnick, that they are meant to be together just as she always suspected, but there's a part of her that still longs for the trust she has in Peeta, unmarred by infidelity and secrets, both of them sharing the same sort of jealousy and fears.
She feels a twinge, thinks maybe all of her worrying is manifesting in her guts, but then it comes back again softly, like a flutter. She looks down, her pregnant belly visible to herself, but she imagines there's not enough of a change for others to notice yet. Was that her baby, kicking, moving inside of her?
Finnick appears at the entrance of the infirmary, dressed in the clothes she picked out, squinting a bit against the sun. He looks weak, she realizes, and she moves down on the bench to allow him to sit beside her. "I can feel him moving," she says. "Our baby."
Finnick's eyebrows raise, and he puts a hand against her stomach. She wills the movement to happen again, so he could share in her wonder. Finally it does, and she sees him almost jump back. "I believed you," he says, "But it didn't feel real before."
She knows what he means, but it's probably doubly true for him. He had no part in the conception of this child and yet still, she now thought of him fully as the child's father. The guard was dead, for one, and she had practiced not thinking of him. She pictured the times she's been able to sleep with Finnick, stolen moments when he was home from the Games, and superimposed that over the reality. "I'm so happy you're alive," she says, the words coming out as half a sob.
"Me too," he says. "I… it happened so suddenly I couldn't really think. But there was that panic, I thought I was going to die, and I felt regret that we were apart. Not that I wanted you to be hurt, I just… at the time I thought everyone would die." He reddens a bit at his awkward speech, at the expectoration of feelings he probably didn’t anticipate revealing.
She nods. She knows what he means, plagued as she was that they had been apart at that moment. "I want to have our baby in the ocean, in District 4."
He nods back. "Is it true what Primrose said? That the war is ending today? Let's go back home."
She is about to answer, to explain the plan for that day's infiltration of District 2, but she's cut off by the hovercrafts coming over the horizon. They watch, silently, as they land, one of them coming right in front of the infirmary. Dozens of people exit, people she realizes are District 2 civilians. They look terrible, covered in silt and missing limbs, moaning in pain. They are led alongside the medics into the infirmary, and then the hovercraft takes off again. One of the other two hovercrafts lands a little ways off, and she sees that hatch open too, with more familiar faces. Peeta is there, his arm around Katniss, and Enobaria steps off with Johanna and two little girls.
"Is it over?" Finnick asks, spotting Haymitch beside the others.
"It's over," Haymitch says, his face lighting up to see Finnick.
The war was over, or at least, the fighting had stopped. They moved back to the Capitol after the armistice to plan the new government, Peeta unsure of what his role in all this was, exactly. He wanted to go home, or maybe he didn't. He was afraid to see District 12 decimated, to see the place where his family lost their lives, but there was nowhere else he wanted to be more. He felt like maybe if he went to District 12, he could hide from the happenings outside of it, could just turn away from 'new governments' and 'restructuring' and 'rebuilding' and whatever other machinations he had been dragged into.
It's not that he thinks it's a bad thing. He had volunteered as a rebel during the Quarter Quell. He had fought for the rebels during the war. It's just that… he was a baker. He liked making things with his hands, feeding people, having a comfortable home. He would act when he had to: of course he wanted an end to the Games and an end to Snow, but now he was tired. He was grieving and tired and couldn't go more than an hour before thinking about how he was tortured, still, and coming back to the Capitol does nothing to help.
The nothingness is still there. There's just flattened, ugly land where the center of government used to be, and although he tries to look away, he's drawn to the sight. He tries to imagine what would have happened had Gale just completed the mission as ordered, if he was rescued that day, if Snow was left alive, but it's an impossible thing to imagine, since it hadn't happened that way. He doesn't think he would have been ready to face Katniss then, plagued as he was with paranoia and the toxins he was given, but would that be an acceptable trade for the number of lives that were lost?
He knows his role is largely symbolic at this point. Coin wants to officially abolish the Games, and therefore wants all the living Victors present. She wants to start a democracy, and at least give the impression that the people have a say in how they are governed. But he feels like he's also there for a more specific purpose: as Katniss's keeper.
It's hard to describe why he gets this impression, exactly. No one had told him to stay near Katniss, nor had she expressed the desire to do anything other than finish out her role as the Mockingjay. But he can feel the tension on her still, a sort of thrumming that refused to dissipate even after the armistice. He knows she's grieving her mother, and more than once she'd complained to him about the lies, about the cover-up that was the bombing of the Capitol. So perhaps he shouldn't be surprised when, the night before the announcement of Coin taking over Panem, she wakes him up in the middle of the night.
"I need your help," she says.
“What?”
“You can get into the computer terminal, right? I need to check something.”
They walk up to the roof of the Training Center, where the hovercraft they arrived on was parked. He likes it up there, at least as much as he can like anything in the Capitol, so long as he looks east and not west at the desolation. Or down, at the nets to stop people from plunging to their deaths. But Katniss doesn't want to stand at the railing and look at the view. She leads him over to the hovercraft.
They pass a bench, and Katniss almost jumps in surprise. Johanna was sitting on it, smoking a cigarette, her knees pulled up to her chest, and Enobaria was standing beside her, cloaked in shadow, drinking wine right from the bottle. "Happy armistice," she slurs sarcastically. Johanna rolls her eyes and shakes her head with dull amusement, as if the two of them were sharing a secret joke.
Katniss moves past them, seemingly back on task now that she knows they weren't anyone who was going to oppose her, but they follow along, curious. "What are you doing?" Johanna asks.
She has a mischievous tone, almost playful, and it's so removed from the Johanna he became familiar with that Peeta unwittingly remembers the first time he met her, when she stripped down in front of him and Haymitch and Katniss in one of the elevators in this building. It feels like that was a different person. "I need to see something," Katniss says, her voice distant, as if she was just answering to get them off her back.
"About the bombing in District 2?" Enobaria asks.
Finally, Katniss pauses, her foot on the first step to the entrance of the hovercraft, and she nods, a jerk of her head. "Before this all ends, for real, I need to know the truth."
Peeta finds himself seated before the on-board computer terminal, the three women surrounding him. He types in the password he saw Beetee once use, amazed again that it works, and they scroll through the confusing file names. Finally, Enobaria realizes the numbers at the end are an odd date format, and they find the one from the final day of fighting, titled: Waking Sleeping Dogs.
He's nervous to read the file, still rocked by the life-altering truth revealed last time he read confidential files. The fact that he was left because of a split-second decision, the fact that this group was more concerned with the narrative than with actual lives, those things he'd slowly come to understand as true, but not really accept. So he supposes he's less shocked than he could have been when he reads that the bombs that went off in District 2 were from the rebels, that the reason there were 10 sent to kill 5 targets is because only 5 were actually doing the killing. The other five were sent armed with the best explosive technology from District 13, instructed to plant them near markets, near apartments, near schools, to make the rebels look the heroes as they came in to help after.
"I'm going to fucking kill her before I let her rule Panem," Katniss mutters. He feels used, he feels deceived, so he can't even imagine how Katniss feels. To serve as the symbol of the rebellion, to do everything Coin had asked of her, only to find out at the end that Coin was no better than those she was replacing?
He turns around at the sound of a noise, afraid someone had caught them hacking into the computer terminal, but it was just Enobaria shifting, disgust on her features. He knows she was never really a rebel, not during the Quarter Quell and not following, and yet it was her district to suffer this offense at the end of the war. "Should have fucking known it," she mutters.
"We can do it," Johanna says. "We can kill her."
He doesn't mean to look at Johanna like she's crazy, it was just that… there was a sort of dichotomy. There were times when violence was alright, encouraged even, like in the Games and during the war, and there were times it seemed overwhelmingly taboo, namely the rest of the time. He knows Johanna had murdered people, seen her do it, even, but to voice such a suggestion during the armistice, in the Capitol, it felt wrong. He supposed Katniss had said the same thing, more or less, but it had felt more like a complaint and less of a promise.
But Katniss turns to Johanna, determination on her features. "She's mine," she says, grief and anger shining in her eyes.
They go back inside, back to their respective rooms, and Peeta intentionally does not make any reaction when Johanna gets off the elevator on the same floor as Enobaria. He also gets off on the same floor as Katniss, into the cursed apartment they shared with Haymitch.
The apartment was wrong now, even more than before. Someone in Price's wartime government had occupied it since he had visited after breaking out of the prison, and even when Peeta was here for the one mission, he hadn't quite perceived the changes to the building. But he tries to shove that away, to remember that this was his last night in the Capitol, that after they stand on the stage tomorrow, he can go back to 12.
He intentionally does not think of what Katniss said, but it keeps floating through his thoughts nonetheless. He feels plagued by an impossible choice: does he let Katniss murder Coin and doom her future, or does he hold her back and make her hate him for the rest of his life?
Part of him wants to talk to Annie: she always seemed to understand him well, and perhaps she could help him sort through this impasse. But she was with Finnick now, reunited with her love, eager to go back to 4 away from the rest of them. No, he would have to do this alone.
When he wakes in the morning, it’s a rush to get ready for the event. He gets dressed in the nicest outfit they find for him to wear, his hair styled like he was going on Caesar Flickerman's program. Katniss follows him into the stylist's room a bit later, sleepy, but not overly nervous or angry. He sees the others as they move towards the stage: Johanna, her hair still short, an angry expression on her face, Enobaria over her shoulder, changed back into her Victor persona. Annie and Finnick are there, his arm around her, and Haymitch and Beetee deep in conversation. Haymitch looks hungover, and even Beetee looks a little rough. Lyme is there, the tallest of them all, biting her lip. She had never come back to mentor, he heard, so he assumes this is her first time back in the Capitol since her Games.
And they wait, and they wait, the sun beating down on them, making Peeta sweat. He sees Plutarch Heavensbee rushing somewhere off stage, then sees him a moment later heading back into the Training Center. There is murmuring in the gathered crowd at the delay. Annie sits down on the edge of the stage, obviously struggling with the heat and her pregnancy. Finnick gets her some water.
Finally, Plutarch does come onto the stage, and Peeta can see he is sweating badly. "Good morning, everyone," he says, nervously. Peeta has never seen him so off-kilter. "We are proud to announce the end of the war in Panem and the beginning of a new era. Tragically, the rebel leader and President of District 13, Alma Coin has passed away in her sleep over night, just before she could welcome in the dawn of democracy in Panem. She was going to serve as our interim president, but in her absence, we will be organizing an election in the coming days."
It takes everything in Peeta's power not to look at Katniss. Questions like 'how?' and 'when?' circle in his head, competing with the most important: 'had it really been her?'. Coin was healthy, he thinks, and she wouldn't just die in her sleep. He can't fathom this twist, and truthfully, he doesn't care to consider it much. He had wished that he could just go home and look away from everything, wasn’t this his wish being granted?
He goes to the train platform with the others. Their duties were complete; they were seen on television. They did not need to stay until the election, and even if they were wanted, who would force them? Coin was dead, Plutarch was overwhelmed, the whole Capitol was a mess.
The train going to 1, 4, and 7 comes first, and Annie and Finnick rise to board it. "Thanks for saving Annie that night," Finnick says, shaking his hand.
"Goodbye, Peeta. Come visit us sometime," Annie says, kissing him on the cheek. Something stirs in him, a nostalgia or a desire he never quite explored enough to articulate. And then they're gone, rushing away from the Capitol.
The train to Districts 2 and 10 comes next, and Enobaria, Johanna, and Lyme rise to take it. He hadn't realized Johanna wasn't going to 7 until she stands to board this train. "Good luck," Enobaria tells him. He's not sure what she's referring to, exactly, maybe it's for facing the death and destruction that surely awaits him when he gets home.
"Bye, Peeta," Johanna says. "I'll always remember being your roommate." He realizes she's referring to the time in the prison, when only a wall divided them and he could hear her screams as well as she could hear his, and he shudders at the lightness with which she talks about it. But that was how she always was, he thought, too frivolous when talking about the horrors, too brusque when it didn't matter.
Lyme shakes his hand, commending his work for the rebels, and then all three are gone as well. Dimly, he wonders if it was them, if those women were the ones who killed Coin. His hand shakes as he wonders if he really knows them at all.
Finally, it's just himself, Katniss, and Haymitch. Primrose had gone home ahead, eager to try to gather some of her mother's possessions as keepsakes or to continue her legacy as a Healer. Peeta sits with them and waits, finally daring to look at Katniss. There's someone he can't parse in her expression, like she was far too deep in twisting thoughts for her to ever convey to him what, exactly, she was worried about. He wants to know if she killed Coin; knows he doesn't have the courage to ask.
The train ride home feels like a bookend, the end of a long, long journey that started with their first reaping. Haymitch is drunk, Katniss is standoffish, and he's afraid, though the source of the fear is unknowable, something slipping through his fingers. He aches with nostalgia, for family, for his whole life before the reaping, all the bad parts softened with the glaze of memory. The fact that he himself is a different person now, stripped of his innocence, makes the past feel more distant, more painful to recall.
“When we get back, I never want to leave again,” Katniss says, and he has hope for the first time, that maybe they do still understand each other.
“Me too,” he agrees.