Chapter 8: It Is You

It would have been the year of the 100th Hunger Games. Peeta Mellark and I have been happily married for 20 years. By now, we have two children of our own - a daughter and a son. And Peeta raised Demelza as though she was his. She's a young woman now, with beautiful red hair like her father, and married to a profitable candy Merchant in Town.

I am out in the woods one morning, going on a hunt, when I encounter someone I thought I would never see again. A red-haired, handsome man with his clothes in tatters stumbles into my path.

I clap a hand over my mouth as I stare in stunned amazement. For the man is Darius, my first husband whom I thought I lost years ago.

It doesn't even occur to me that I am now technically married to two men, for more pressing is how Darius seems unable to speak. Motioning in signs, he demonstrates how he was turned into an Avox after being captured from the arena. His tongue has been cut out.

Worse still, he is a shadow of himself, skinny and weak. He has been traveling intermittently on foot throughout Panem since the war ended, working various jobs to raise enough money to get back to Twelve, and to me.

Darius sinks to his knees on the forest floor and I cradle him in my arms, despite the fact that I have another husband waiting for me at home. Darius looks close to death, and seems to be fading away. My eyes fill with tears. "Please don't leave me!" I beg. "I still love you."

But Darius is already gone. Or so I think. It begins to rain.

And then the rain begins to shimmer with magic. As I look on in astonishment, Darius is lifted off the ground and bright yellow light flashes across his face before he is lowered back to Earth. When he turns to face me, all healthy and whole again, he speaks. He can talk again!

"Katniss, it's me."

I am overjoyed. "It is you!"

The forest around us is bursting into full bloom, and as Darius and I embrace and kiss, it does not even occur to me that I am kissing a man who is not Peeta, my current husband. For Darius was once my husband too.

Peeta is flabbergasted to see Darius alive again. And Darius is just as surprised to learn that I remarried the Baker's son and had two children by him. Since my marriage with Darius was never dissolved and I only moved on due to the presumption of his death, Darius offers to annul our marriage and let me live out the rest of my days with Peeta, the other man I love.

But I can't bring myself to do it. So I decide to let both marriages stand. I enter a polygamous marriage with both Peeta and Darius, sleeping with each of them in turn and doting on our children. Demelza is over the moon to see her father again.

And that is how, I - a Victor - went from once vowing to never take a husband to being married twice over.