Chapter Text
"Alright, remember Katniss, you're mourning your first love." Effie reminded her as Cinna made a few last adjustments. "You're onstage, you're onscreen, you must be on."
She shoved the girl forward before Katniss could even try to understand that phrase, and suddenly every eye was on her.
Katniss stood solemnly before the mic, her eyes blank. A stray cough carried through the still air, the shuffling sea of people betraying the tension thick enough to throttle you with. She could feel Haymitch and Effie's eyes trained on the screen version of herself, both saying variations of the same prayer: please don't screw this up. Rue's large, distorted face stared at her through time behind a flock of small, dark, doomed birds; Thresh loomed with power behind the distant shadows of his grandmother and sister. Katniss looked away from them and barely registered the black marks on the thick card in her hand.
Right. The speech. Those marks and squiggles were words.
"Honored citizens of Eleven," Christ Effie, what a way to start a speech, "It is both an honor and a burden to stand in front of you today." That was one way to put it, "I appreciate..." the words stuck in her throat with nasty edges, "I appreciate... the sacrifice... of your children, and the... roles they played in my being here today. I would not be here if it weren't for Thresh and..."
Rue.
The full force of that hit her just then.
"I'm sorry." Katniss was ready to leave the stage, but then the littlest girl in front of Rue's face stared at her with anger in her too young eyes. Katniss paused.
That girl had lost her sister, the one that Katniss had known and held and sang to in her last moments. That girl hadn't gotten to say goodbye, and now Katniss wouldn't even say her name. Rue. Rue. Say it. Say her name. Acknowledge the fact that beautiful little girl had existed. Say that one name and get over this because Snow was watching and-
"I never knew Thresh."
She blurted that out. Katniss winced. But that didn't do anything to stop the flood of words.
"I only ever spoke to him once. But I always respected him, for his power, for the way he respected himself so much that he refused to play the Games on anyone's terms but his own." Katniss saw Thresh's grandmother for a moment, reflect the pride that Katniss had once seen in the way Thresh carried his shoulders. Katniss bowed her head and turned to Rue's family, and once again lost her nerve. Small, pretty, fragile birds.
"But Rue... I felt like I knew her. At least a little." Katniss said, barely whispering. All of a sudden, the ghost echoes of mockingjay song were all too real. "I see her in the flowers that grow in the meadow near my house, and I hear her in mockingjay song, I find her in the way my little sister Prim stands. I know for a fact that if it weren't for Thresh and Ruse, I really wouldn't be standing here. So thank you, for your children. Really. Thank you."
A shuffle in the crowd. Katniss tried to ignore it. But she couldn't when a whistle played out among the somber heads of the crowd, and an old man raised his hand in Twelve's three-fingered salute.
A silence. Then, the eerie whistles echoed throughout the empty space. The wind was the encore as Katniss walked offstage. Mockingjays, humans. It didn't matter anymore, because though it was the people of Eleven now, she felt like she was back on the Reaping stage, waiting to be sent to her death.
And suddenly she remembered Peeta.
If the boy with the bread had been here, it wouldn't have felt like a death sentence.
If she had just killed Cato, killed him on sight, Peeta might have been where she stood instead.
And he would have been good, and the country would be celebrating.
Because Peeta had been so good with the cameras.
But Peeta Mellark wasn't on the stage.
Peeta Mellark was dead.
And maybe, not for the last time, Katniss wished that she hadn't been the one to win the Games.