We were expert marksmen and markswomen firing at point-blank range, so the eight holes in Snow's shirt were nearly indistinguishable. As expected by any remotely plausible common sense, Finnick found no pulse, announcing "He's dead, Jo".

"About time," she answered, and we all agreed.

Cressida had a request to pass along to Lyme to mark the occasion. "Maybe we should save the bullets?" I overheard.

"Spent cartridge cases, you mean," Lyme crisply answered. I had a feeling this would be far from our first postwar encounter with technically clueless civilians.

Cressida dug out a clear box, probably intended as a display case for trinkets of some sort. "Clear your chambers into that," Lyme ordered, extracting hers first. It bounced against the sides of the box with a high-pitched ring. The rest of us filed past to unload in the same order we'd loaded in, filling the box with objects that had become very familiar – cylinders with one closed end, a dent in the center from where the firing pin had struck the primer, and a slightly ragged open end blackened with powder dust. That brass was extremely well-policed, yet no different from millions of its fellows lying all over the country.

While waiting for my surviving comrades to regroup, I triumphantly lifted my rifle into the air. This was right in the line of sight of one of the cameramen – I didn't notice which one, but I did notice that the image he captured seemed particularly well-suited to the moment. I had my finger off the trigger. We'd heard reports of lesser soldiers blowing off ammunition, but a bullet fired in a seemingly harmless direction had to land somewhere or in someone. Actual skirmishes with Peacekeeper units remaining in the city had quickly calmed down.

There were some units hunkered down elsewhere in the country, near the edges of the district borders or even beyond them. That would account for exactly this contingency, the 'fall' of the Capitol itself. Such would be our next battle, but right now, we needed to focus on cleaning up the aftermath of this one.

Medics and wounded of whatever variety were gathering in the Capitol's hospitals. We found out that Casualty Aide 42, Prim's unit, was in Building A of the Capitol Medical Academy's on-campus facility. So we knew where we were headed. The sight of the hero soldiers moving through the streets inspired the rank-and-file still about. Not only could our media crew keep up, they lead the way. They'd obviously know their own city well, and Messalla recalled documenting graduation ceremonies and other big events there.

Casualty Aide 7 was assigned to the same ward. So Ingrid was here with her badly wounded youngest daughter. It was not a pretty sight. The back of Prim's shirt was in tatters, Little Duck's ducktail gone. The skin underneath it looked dry and especially pale, and the girl's braids were incinerated. "Catnip?" she squeaked out upon recognizing her big sister. I don't think she intended to use the nickname, but she said 'Katniss' so softly it sounded like that, much like what had happened in the woods four years ago. "You really got Snow?"

"Sure did, Little Duck," Katniss said, glad to inject some positivity into these macabre proceedings.

"No more Games?" Prim realized.

"No more Games," Katniss answered, and much of the ward erupted in cheers.

Her mother was joined by her commanding officer Sarah Morgan at the bedside. "Soldier Hawthorne, thank you for keeping that bombing from becoming even worse," Lieutenant Morgan said.

"I knew what to do because they were rebel weapons," I explained. That I helped create only to find misused – I knew that nuance wouldn't go over well right now. "They should have been pointed at the enemy. I couldn't abide the murder of civilians - after all, it's the same thing I just helped execute Snow for. Or military personnel that are my wife's sister and my brother's girlfriend."

"What the hell was Coin thinking?" Sarah wondered, a question on everyone's minds.

"I don't know, but we will find out. Is the little angel as bad as she looks?" I responded.

"She'll make it," Sarah assessed. "Her momma's a helluva burn medic, I suppose she'd have to be with those infernal mines in your district."

"You got that right," I said flatly.

"Even I couldn't do it with the equipment or lack thereof back home," Ingrid said, speaking up for the first time. "The sterile rooms and array of medicines and dressings here is amazing. I'm mad that they denied that to the districts, but right now I have to focus on fixing up my little girl."

"How'd Prim get out here?" I asked Sarah.

"She was eager to do something. I knew she was young, but her file gave a birthdate of May 17th 60."

"It's actually May 17th 62" I pointed out.

"I obviously wouldn't have known. We went ahead, it was too late to turn back, and she proved as fearless and skilled as anyone else in my squad. We were with the vanguard, and Glimmer's sister is another helluva young soldier."

"Miss Shinesmith made it?" I said hopefully.

"Yeah. Raspberry Mackey, Rock Clayton and Shine Goldman also survived," she answered. "I understand that those families have suffered more than enough."

"Like most in this country in their own ways," I solemnly agreed.

After another shot of morphling, Prim stopped writhing long enough to speak clearly. "Maybe Coin was trying to blame it on Snow. Although pretty much everybody knew how bad he was, maybe she thought it would've finished the war quicker."

"It was pretty much over anyway, Little Duck," Katniss responded.

"She was trying to replace Snow, rather than free us from him. She was trying to kill people who were too smart to let her get away with that, and those Capitol kids were in the way – poor babies, they're not so rich now."

The cameras got all of it. Nothing could be better testimony against Coin.

Rebel forces, with the aid of compliant Capitolites, kept finding more wounded. By now, even the expansive Capitol medical facilities were getting overloaded. Only Thirteen and some of the Career districts had comparable infrastructure. Prim was deemed stabilized enough to move, "though we still need to clear out some of the burned skin and arrange grafts," as Sarah Morgan put it.

Sarah Morgan was from District Eight, so she didn't have much of a home to return to. There was a lot of rebuilding to do all over Panem, but we weren't sure about how to recover from the District Eight devastation. Yet by sacrificing himself to cover our retreat, Alexander Weaver had kept that devastation from being even worse.

Casualty Aide 7 and Casualty Aide 42 would be assigned to the same hovercraft as 451 for the flight back to District Thirteen. The hospital grounds had a small airport precisely for moving certain patients in and out quickly.

Ingrid looked at Catnip and I to tell us "You two working together can do so much and survive anything."

She had summed it up. "Don't we know it," I replied.

She then turned to Cato. "Soldier Adams, your arm looks pretty beat up," she said. His scrapes, however severe, had escaped notice with the bombing and other chaos.

Katniss interrupted to say, "Mother, I already tried that."

It would be somewhat complicated to unload Prim and the other wounded, so Cato and Finnick would be the first off the transport. As expected, Glimmer and Annie provided some of the loudest cheers. Cato literally swept Glim off her feet, appropriate for the strong man in the horny young couple. Finnick and Annie almost sounded like two kids in their joy. I suppose we still were just kids, even in our late teens and early twenties and with all the shit we've been through.

A/N

So this story comes to an end. I have ideas for a sequel, but I won't start it until I finish some of my other stories.