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"Shoot. Go on. I'm dead already."
Her eyes roll in her head and she feels Rue's blood underneath her fingernails and the smooth metal of her arrow as it clams her palm. They have only seconds.
Peeta's flesh bleeds plastic as the mutant with Thresh's eyes tear his leg apart as he hangs onto the edge of the Cornicopia for his life (for her).
Cato wraps his arms around his neck, threatens to snap his neck because he can still do that, he can still do that. One. Last. Kill. His eyes are resolved and his mouth is twisted with malice. His hands wrap tighter around Peeta's neck and his face goes red. He tries to scream, to shake his head at her.
Shoot, Katniss, his expression tells her. She does, but her hands are shaking and she can't breathe and there are spots in her vision her ribs are lead.
PeetaPeetaPeeta.
There's an arrow in Peeta's head, right in the eye, just like her squirrels. He falls down onto the grass, ungraceful and cleanshot. The dogs lose interest the second his body thumps into the ground. The arrow digs itself deeper.
The grass is redbrown with his blood.
PeetaPeetaPeeta.
She's missed. He's gone.
"I always was, right?"
PeetaPeetaPeeta.
She shoots again. The arrow whistles through the air, missing his neck by barely an inch. Cato smiles. He spits, and his lips are red and his teeth are red his hands are red with tribute blood. And he falls, too. Only there is no arrow in his skull. His death has not tainted her hands. But Peeta's had-- it's her fault. It's her fault. It's her arrow in his brain and her name on his lips and her life painted into his smile.
(He knew that she would win, right from the very beginning. He knew, just as his mother knew. He had faith.)
She screamed, clawed at her face. Blood beaded up to the thin scratches lining her face.
Shekilledhimshekilledhimshekilledhim.
She would have to look his family in the eye and she would have to remember him and she would have t--
Seneca Crane's voice thundered around in the empty arena, robotic and pitched and falling only into her own ears.
She had won, he did not. They did not win together, they did not live. She entered the Hunger Games as a willing volunteer, as the Girl On Fire. As a girl who had not, ever in her life, killed another human being.
(She's killed four, all in seventeen days. Tracker Jackers that gave her dreams of her father and poison that was sweet in her mouth and steel that was ice in her hand.)
She understood why Haymitch drank so much. To forget. To not feel guilt or loss or pain. But she would never forget, could never forget. She would try, dear God would she try. But then she thinks of Peeta, of the way he waved at the capitol that first day with wonder in his eyes, of cave and soup and his whispered reverence as he thought back to sweeter times. Times where she sang like a bird and her father was alive and she did not yet know the pain of death, of starvation, of desperation.
("Everyday, Katniss," he whispers to her in the dark. "Everyday.")
The helicopter buzzed above her head, loud and demanding.
She was going home.