EPILOGUE

Once the game ended, I suppose things got better for the human race. My job and their callous behavior were not finished, and they never will be, but twenty-three young faces no longer lit the sky each year for nationwide entertainment.

Out of the seven surviving victors, I culled two before Haymitch.

Enobaria Castro was attacked, overpowered, and killed somewhere in District Five. The culprits were said to be manic gloaters from the rebellion. When I carried her away, we followed the wind. It whipped our hair in our faces. She got a mouthful as she laughed.

Beetee Ma died several days after an assassination attempt by some sore losers. He sighed, cleaned his eyeglass lenses on his shirt, pushed them back up his nose, and stepped out of his body himself. For the most part, he welcomed me and I welcomed him, considering the circumstances.

Humans were still humans after revolutions, as much as I hate to summarize their demises in such a dismissive way. Humans will be humans. That was how things were since as long as I can remember.

I had collected a drunkard on the same day Haymitch died. She was riddled with lice and disease, her skin tattered yellow parchment. Earlier, a freckled toddler who strayed too far from the backyard.

The former soul shook, the latter mewled.

I found Haymitch Abernathy doing both, except he was no longer a drunkard nor an infant.

There were a lot of labels for the cause of his death, but make no mistake about it, it was a death by memories. It had not been peaceful.

I arrived to collect him but the old man still lived. Withdrawal from alcohol for an unspecified reason and amount of time had wilted him.

Peeta Mellark sat nearby in the bedroom and clasped his creased hand. Sympathetic and hopeless, he watched as the Second Quarter Quell victor and significant rebellion member writhed, crying upsettingly loud.

Downstairs, a blanched, tearless Katniss Mellark sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the whistle of the kettle as well as the end of her dear friend and guardian. In another house, her and Peeta's children pretended to sleep, too young to witness the deterioration of a relic from a time they did not understand yet.

Intense shivers racked Haymitch's old body, tearing the sutures of old and older scars. The sharp, cold stitch across his middle had frozen over the entire body. He protested the pain in grunts, delirious bellows, and convulsive gasps, and begged Peeta, or anyone, maybe unseen others, to help him, please, just help him.

The damn nightmares as well as the rimy guilt were smothering him, no matter how many blankets were piled atop him. He suffocated.

Then, all of a sudden, the repaired telephone downstairs in the study rang out, and its incessant chime became a knell.

The fallen chessman arose.

He had been sitting up, arms crossed impatiently, when I crossed the room to reach him. His Seam eyes shone silver, lit with life that he never lost despite his hardships.

I cannot describe the look Haymitch Abernathy gave me.

Holding him, we watched his memories: that long queue of stored up skies and what happened under them.

* * * A COMMENT * * *

If a human's life flashes before them

and they die bored,

that is, in its own way, significant.

Like the other victors, he would draw in a rattling breath or mutter something in remembrance.

Sometimes a memory was familiar to me as well.

Meanwhile, a younger living man lost hold of his mettle. It fell to the carpet with his knees. The bed lurched a little when Peeta fell against its side. He cupped his own face and exhaled once, twice, then sobbed without shame.

Everything he or anyone else had ever done was ignored - at that instant, he was another human mourning a friend, the elderly corpse buried under quilts in the bed. Both mere men who knew each other, one alive, one not alive.

It was that thought that somehow led him downstairs, not to his wife, who quietly ordered her daughter on the other line to go back to bed, but into the dimly lit study.

Seated in the desk chair, an empty sheet of paper laid in front of him and a pen trembled in his hand. Peeta glared at the pen as he set it down. Inky almost-words rejected him, permeating the pen tip yet failing to scratch against the parchment.

Holding his head, flaxen hair hanging limp at his temples, "You bastard." Who was he addressing: himself or the soul with me upstairs? "You stupid, grumpy, arrogant, cynical bastard." Oh, never mind.

Katniss hovered outside the door. She heard the man mutter to himself, "How's the world going to remember you? They don't... they don't know like I do."

"He doesn't care about the world, so long as we remember ourselves."

Peeta faced Katniss, and she smiled through her tears, both of them hurting in a raw, honest way. Already, they were beginning to heal.

When we left the Victors' Village, Haymitch finally said, "You ain't as scary as I thought you'd be."

"I'm not the reason for pain and suffering before a person expires," I replied wearily. "I am simply what takes them afterward."

"Well, I never thought actually dying would be agonizing, as much as I dreaded it before-"

"Or desired it," I pointed out.

He frowned. "Yeah, I guess there were times I wanted to die. But..."

I had to look at him. "You didn't want me when you finally did."

Nodding, Haymitch admitted, "It kind of crept up on me. Is that how it is for everyone else?"

"Most of them accept it by the very last millisecond, but almost all of them are surprised, even those who expect me or even ask for me."

He was very quiet for a moment. Overhead was a canvas, blank white yet grainy in texture, filled with possibilities and big cloud tubes of paint. "The - all the tributes, how were they?"

"Young and afraid. I always tried to comfort them."

Haymitch shuddered but he was no longer tortured by the psychosomatic ice. "Cory, my younger brother?"

"He was cold as sorbet, Haymitch," I answered, starting to smile, "and when I told him that he asked what it was and if he could have some." My cold plastic heart melted once again, that time at his laughter.

* * * A DIFFERENT TYPE OF QUESTION * * *

The hellbringers, their names once

harshly cursed in between drams,

trickled out of him like melted snow.

"I met all of them, yes." He waited. "They accepted me with grace, and they forgave you."

It's possible for the dead to cry for the dead.

Haymitch Abernathy cried, relieved, so relieved - finally relieved - and my hand hugged his shoulder. "You might see them again soon."

"Will I?" He sounded so childishly doubtful, the old soul.

"I am not certain, but here is where I must leave you."

Noticing his surroundings, Haymitch asked, "Wait! I need to know. You heard them, too. Did you understand?"

An hour after my answer, as I collected my thoughts along with eclipsing humans and colors, I found myself in his study.

A thought struck me: no one had ever read in that room. I could destroy the unread books since no one needed the old Capitol philosophies - bookcases already cracking and splintering in my mind - but the memory of the book thief kept that only a musing. I glared at the titles of the published works of organized human cruelty until the solution slipped into my possession.

Before it did, I had screamed obscenities at myself, Haymitch, the rest of his species known by all as humans, by me as callous, mortal bastards, even Peeta for not finishing what he had tried starting.

Well, if I wanted something done right.

Instead of resorting to one human-like behavior, I chose the other. I made something beautiful out of something wretched.

I sat at the desk like Peeta, yet unlike him I took a single book from the shelf. Contemplating what I said to Haymitch, I turned the clean yet yellowed pages of an unread book and tore them out. I didn't read a word. I had my own to write.

I had heard the callers from the coffin through their recipient himself. But they were as haunting as they were unreal.

They tormented Haymitch like humans torment me: at intervals, which was worse than relentless misery.

Of course, I cannot tear humans out of the wall. Not unless they are dead, that is.

I picked up the pen. The study expanded. Behind me, the bookcase and the telephone looked over my shoulder at a blank page, the first of many.

Where to start?

I looked around and decided.

Wiping off the title, I replaced it with an event that resulted from some of the most unfortunate human experiences.

Refilling the spine with paper from the desk, I imagined Peeta's handwriting scrawled across the sheet instead of mine, using different words to tell the same story, just from a different perspective.

Maybe I am more of a philosopher than I am a slueth or scythe-bearer, because that could very well be the definition of life.

My answer to Haymitch Abernathy was a summary of my own perspective. I said it to the recipient of the callers from the coffin, I wrote it last in his story that I carry with six others, and I say it to you now.

* * * A LAST NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR * * *

I witness everything about humans,

the best and the worst and whatever is in between,

like the sky.

AN: And that's the end! Thanks to ALL OF YOU for your support and feedback. I hope you enjoyed!