Disclaimer: Everything you recognize from The Hunger Games belongs to Suzanne Collins. Title & all quoted lyrics, including those in the summary: High Hopes by Pink Floyd. All the blame goes to the song, in fact.
Prologue - Gale.
High Hopes
0.
Encumbered forever by desire and ambition
There's a hunger still unsatisfied
Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon
Though down this road we've been so many times
I've always been too damn stubborn to accept defeat.
Not a good trait in a world where you are born defeated, and reminded of it every day, every year.
After dreaming about a rebellion all my life, there was nothing I wouldn't do when the dream finally came true. I had no idea how easily it can be turned into a nighmare for those who play by the enemy's rules, and don't even recognize all their enemies in the first place.
The victory's been achieved, but at what cost?
Instead of a celebration, there was only a huge mess for us to take care of, and I felt more or less responsible for a large part of it.
Volunteering to fix it was the only decent option I had left, and I keep telling myself that I didn't start from the easier and less painful end.
Even though the fucking mountain fortress had to be disabled, Katniss was right - it did look a whole lot like a crumbled mine from the inside. Bad enough even after the ceilings are no longer in danger of caving in, though I don't find it all that hard to imagine how it felt to be stuck there as everything collapsed.
Shouldn't have been worse than the bombing of Twelve.
But the fact that it was my idea to do it somehow makes it worse.
We've found many things there, bad and worse, but not blueprints for exploding parachutes. Which wouldn't prove anything. Even if the Capitol had accomplished the idea first, I did it too, and unknowingly gave a perfect weapon to an even more insidious adversary.
And a proof wouldn't really matter anyway.
Not for me, I'm still up for a lifetime of trying to make amends for what I thought needed to be done.
Not for Katniss.
The haunted grief I saw in her eyes when I'd handed her the last arrow she ended up using to kill the person that hurt her even more than President Snow had told me as much.
And told who might have hurt her the most.
There was neither time nor place for reconciliation then, not before she'd carried out her own sentence over Alma Coin, and had been surrounded by guards and whisked away before I could get to her through the crowd and free her like she was begging me to. It would have been like shooting an arrow through my own heart, but I would have done as much for her, even if I were to receive the same fate moments later.
But I couldn't.
All could do to help her was testifying at her trial, digging out painful truths about Coin and telling lies about Katniss she'd kick me for if she were there to hear them, fighting to free her another way when I'd failed the one she so obviously preferred. I couldn't leave her at the mercy of anyone else.
In the end she'd been cleared of all charges and expressly carted off back to Twelve, to left at her own devices to pick through the ashes of her mind.
I'd left for Two to do my own gravedigging job, without a chance to say goodbye. Telling myself I've done at least something to assure she'll get a chance at a better life that still might be in store for her, and selfishly holding onto the chance that I might see her again.
Someday.
/
She never answered her phone or a letter… and to be honest, I couldn't imagine her actually reading mine anyway. All I had left of her were snippets of secondhand information, echoes of her numb suffering to haunt me in case the images of collapses and firebombs ever gave me a break.
Those still hurt the most.
Because nothing that happened changed anything about the fact that I love her, and can't live with what remained of us, with how we'd parted.
Not like I deserved to.
I've never been the first in something that's never been a contest, and now I'm disqualified anyway, but I need to see her, at least once more. Just one more time, just to meet her somewhere where we can be ourselves, just to try if we see something else than two war-torn and war-divided strangers, to have a shot at some better memory to carry on with for the rest of our lives.
Perhaps the best thing for her would be if I let her go entirely and left her alone, but I tell myself I can't know for sure. Too much had remained unsaid.
/
I make the trip to Twelve as soon as I'm cleared to do so.
If nothing else, then just to say a meaningless little sorry that remained stuck in my chest ever since the day we last parted, and grew heavier every day, crushing the life out of me. Heavy like the dead weight of a little girl, heavy like a shattered mountain, heavy like our brave new fucking unthinkable world.
/
I'm halfway through the meadow that is being dug up and turned into a mass grave when I realize that Katniss probably won't even be in the forest at all.
Perhaps she has no reason to be, not anymore. Perhaps she has no strength to come there.
But it's still the first place where I'd go looking for her, and even though hoping to find her there would be hoping too high, I can't bring myself to turn back and go looking for her in a more probable place. Like the mockery of her life that is the Victors' Village where she'd been confined. No.
/
I'm a good distance beyond the now useless fence when the air stops smelling of ashes. But the crisp, cool breeze fails to disperse the blackness stuck inside me.
Even if the forest is the same, I'm not, and I don't know if I could still belong here.
Maybe I'll just corrupt it.
Katniss would probably think so.
This is the place where we used to meet again and again, this is the place where we'd shared our happiest times, but now I can't take for granted we'll meet here again, or that we'll ever walk the same path together.
But I'm too stubborn for that.
The future we might have had is in ashes, but I still find myself looking to the green horizon for some hope.
/
I find it right on the ground - still muddy with the spring thaw, in the form of the familiar footprints of a wingless mockingjay.
Who else would come here but her?
(Or whoever remained of her after everything that happened, I remind myself, but press on.)
After following the traces of hope down a path I could walk (and have so often walked!) entirely blind, I find her on our rock, so small and fragile in a place where we would be sitting together if anything was right in the world.
She's sitting there with her head bowed, palm covering her eyes and lips moving very slowly, soundlessly chanting something I can't quite catch.
With sudden and jarring clarity, I'm reminded of a different time when I'd seen her like this, after the first Games, after she'd won.
Winning that was bad enough, that victory has come close enough to destroying what she'd been before.
What now?
Now she's lost, she'd lost everything she fought for, and deliberately or not, the last haunting memory of her broken gaze holds me at least partly responsible.
At least as much as I hold myself.
There's no reason for it to have changed.
I almost turn to leave her alone, never to taint her world again.
But I don't - because I realize she's counting, slowly counting to ten with her eyes covered, like she used to so many times before. she used to do it for fun, mostly when we were younger. When she was waiting for me to appear and to join her.
She's doing it now, like before, like always. Because we belong here together.
There might still be a way.
If she still thinks she's waiting here for me, there is still hope.
Before I can move, her eyes open and fasten on me, full of old ashes and misery, and an even older ghost of a habit that died hard.