Epilogue: a broken bone, once mended ...

History is not always kinder than the present, but it does try.

President Paylor allows the anti-Career rhetoric to spin into a wildfire, lets the districts talk of payment and retribution and restitution, lets them slaver and snarl like a pack of rabid muttations at the inner districts' heels. Drunk with their newfound freedom of speech, the districts flood themselves with editorials, with rallies, with petitions, and after a few months as the entitlement feeds and grows, when the flames are at their heights, President Paylor stands up in front of a camera and sends a broadcast to the entire nation.

How does it feel, she asks them, to know that the only thing keeping them from becoming the Capitol was the Capitol itself? How much blood will it take to raise the dead? How does it feel to know that with the least bit of freedom they turned into the wild, vindictive, reckless monsters the Capitol told them they'd become?

How does it feel, she demands, looking into the camera with eyes that freeze and burn at once, to become a self-fulfilling prophesy?

Across Panem, the people watch in silence, then, one by one, each would-be caster opens his fist and lets fall his stone. With a few words, the President douses every fire with icy scorn and disappointment, and the people realize that this is the leader they have been waiting for.

Slowly, slowly, the people of Panem trade walls for bridges, hatred and envy for forgiveness, tentative though it may be. The Personal Growth and Athletics Centre in District Two, the Fitness and Wellness Academy in District One - both are ripped down and rebuilt and rebranded and opened to all of Panem. The weapons rooms are stripped bare, the swords and knives and maces melted down, and in their place are wooden floors where sneakers squeak as the children throw large rubber balls into hoops nailed high to the wall. A boy from District Four shouts a complaint that a girl from District Five cheated, that she carried the ball for more than two steps and the point should be disallowed; she makes a face at him, he chases after her, and they tussle and laugh until the trainer sends them back into the game.

A team of engineers from District Three and builders from District Two are sent to the rebuilt Twelve to study the abandoned mines, and within a year of operation the worker fatalities have been slashed from pre-Rebellion numbers by eighty percent. Doctors are dispatched to the furthest districts, and the healer's stocks of herbs are traded for rows upon rows of medicine jars, pills and syrups and salves. Young Brutus Payne and his new wife found an inter-district library on the borders of Nine and Ten, and in the years with him as director literacy rates in both districts rise as children abandon the fields and the crack of the lash for the smell of ink and paper. His father, when they interview him the year the numbers hit an all-time high, says he could not be more proud.

It takes years, of course, for change to stick; years that are not linear because nothing in life is linear, though the history books are supercilious and self-congratulating and tend to make it so. The years pass, reduced on paper to a progression of tolerance and cooperation growing out from an anarchic, tumultuous time into the hard-won acceptance of tomorrow. The hatred and forgiveness ebb and flow like the tides and the moon, and there are stretches of calm and flare-ups of anger both, but slowly, slowly, the sea settles and a new sun rises, strong and warm and solid.

There will always be questions.

Who is it who dealt the death blow to President Snow that day in the square - did he choke on his own blood as he laughed at the spectacle, the sores in his mouth bursting from the lack of antidote in his veins; did the press of the crowd suffocate him, trample him, crush him to nothing in the panic; or did someone take advantage of the chaos, slip in and commit that final act of retribution themselves? And if the latter, does it bring them any peace?

(Enobaria knows the answer to all those questions, and her answer to the important final one is yes, yes it did; but not as much as when she stood in the crowd as Roark, who would have been in the Arena instead of Brutus the second time, and Brooke, the girl intended to go the year after him, swore to love and honour and stand by each other until their last heartbeat. A few years later, that same boy-now-man hands her a red-faced infant and asks her, without a hint of fear or irony, if she'd be his godmother. It makes no sense to the girl who made her mark with her teeth and a young boy's throat, but as it turns out, even someone like Enobaria can find honour outside the clash of swords and the smell of blood.)

Who is the mystery soldier who fired on Katniss Everdeen that day at Granite Pass, the man who was not moved by her words that day, the words that brought so many to her cause; the man so loyal to his masters that even when his brothers turned to follow the Mockingjay he used his last moments to bring her down? What hatred drove him so far as to try to cause her death when it would have done nothing to change the final outcome? And did it give him comfort in his final moments when the rebels shot him down, to think he had accomplished at least this small triumph?

(This one, only a handful of people know, and not one of them is talking. Not Brim and Rook and Ryland, who didn't turn yet manage to escape the aftermath, who bring the body home and save it from an unceremonious traitor's burial; not Mary who cries over him as they tell her the last great thing her husband ever tried to do. Not Shalene, two years old and confused and clinging to her mother's skirts. Years later, the Mockingjay says in an interview that her one regret from her Games was not killing Cato sooner, because she couldn't save Rue either way but she could at least have stopped his suffering, and Mary learns that a decade-long grudge giving way feels like a dislocated shoulder cracking back into place.)

Eventually historians and sociologists write that District Two was as much a victim of the Capitol and the Hunger Games as the rest of the districts, and their being too blind and brainwashed to see their own enslavement does not change this fact. The people of Two roll their eyes and don't try to argue, accepting the condescension with a nod and smile. The people of Two are rock and stone, tall trees growing firm out the sides of mountains. They are not victims, they are survivors. They merely pledged their loyalty to one who did not deserve it. Now, they're just giving Paylor's government the same opportunity - to use them as they're meant to be used.

District Two was the bedrock of the old regime, and gradually it is woven by Paylor's skillful hand into the fabric of the new one until it would be impossible to pick them apart. The people of Two find their place in this new world the way they always have, by choosing a rock, taking up a chisel, and making their mark.

Finally, the people of Two use those same chisels to carve away the last of the chips on their collective shoulders. The citizens of Panem build themselves a nation forged, not with blood and smoke but trust and cooperation, founded not on the bodies of their children but thousands of joined hands, and in the end, they do have peace.