Fifth Intermission: Hungry For Victory - Shaylinne - Hunger Games Series (2024)

Chapter 1: It's Celeste!

Chapter Text

So, it’s been a while, huh?

Been a whole long while since you’ve heard from the most important part of this story: Celeste motherf*cking Berry. That’s annoying—personally, I think that I’m one of the most interesting people around here. I’m certainly the one who makes the best choices, even if I both ended up failing biology and not getting married to Finnick Odair. But that was when I was fourteen. I’ve done a whole lot since then.

People say that you should make your passions work for you, and then you’ll never work a day in your life. To be completely honest, I didn’t get that for a long time: but that was mostly because I didn’t actually see the point in working. Working is for people who don’t come from rich families and complete and total idiots like Catalina Cain and Seneca Crane. And my sister. And look how well that turned out for them. (Spoiler: not all that great.)

Talking about my sister makes me want to throw up, so we’ll put that one on the shelf for a moment. Let’s talk about me and what I did for Panem.

I got a f*cking internship at Caesar Flickerman’s production company, yes, that one—I know, I know, it’s years later and I’m still losing my sh*t. But obviously, he could see something in me because I was the only intern that actually got paid. We’ll get into that later. I ended up having my own show, you know. On the network!

Oh, and Catia’s in jail! In the tune of my teenage self: SQUEE!

Chapter 2: Mysterious Woman

Chapter Text

There’s a woman who’s lying about who she is in District Seven.

She’s checked in at three guesthouses under three different names, but she’s wearing the same clothes and she’s not even bothering with wigs. She’s wearing red jeans, a tar-black motorcycle jacket and a white tank top that shows off that whatever she does, it’s had consequences. Scars and hard-won muscle ripples as she moves; the sunlight streaking across sharp collar- and cheekbones that look ready to cut through the pale skin pulled taut over them.

She doesn’t bother anyone, so Lyssa doesn’t say anything when she checks into her guesthouse, shiny rubber duffel bag thrown over her shoulder. She pays with a balled-up wad of cash, and when Lyssa asks her if she’s staying a while, she shrugs.

“This’ll pay for two months in our best room,” Lyssa tells her, gesturing to the money between them. The woman is calling herself Kitty Irshad in Lyssa’s books, but when she’d been staying further down the mountain, she’d been calling herself Natalie Sallow. She doesn’t look one bit like a Kitty Irshad or a Natalie Sallow. “That’s what you want to book?”

The mysterious woman that everyone’s talking about because she’s a woman, because she’s unaccompanied by a man, because she’s slowly hiking through Seven and that’s not something you do when you’re a pretty war victim like she so obviously is, how she can split a log like she grew up in Seven even though her accent is wrong but impossible to place as one specific District.

The prevailing theory is that she’s either a government agent who’s well-paid enough to not give a sh*t about everyone knowing that she’s a government agent, or that she’s running away from the smouldering remains of her marriage. The latter comes from that she’s not adverse to drinking the locals under the tale, and someone decided to risk their life and ask her questions about herself instead of just how she liked the alcohol and scenery.

“I’d hope not to,” the mysterious woman says, flippantly gesturing to the money on the table, her sunglasses falling low on her nose, showing off the fact that she’s got big, brown eyes. They’re the most soulful part of her. Her voice is as cold and unforgiving as the winter, but with an unforgettable quality to it. It’s not quite like something that Lyssa’s ever heard except on TV and the radio. “But it’s probably good to have, in case I do stay that long. I’m looking to meet someone. I think I’ve moved too fast and beaten them here.”

Lyssa’s guesthouse is the second-last up the mountain and Lyssa thinks the mysterious woman knows this. That she’s running out of places.

“I can always refund you?” Lyssa suggests.

“That won’t be necessary,” the mysterious woman answers, and Lyssa adds another point to the theory of her being some kind of government something. “And I don’t want your best room, just a solo room.”

Everyone knows that there are Snow loyalists in Panem. Everyone knows that they’re organising, because it was, for some reason, announced on live TV, alongside high, high bounties on people who don’t seem to be military leaders. Blight’s sister had joked about how Catalina Cain’s paying out boons for her own selfish reasons, and Johanna Mason had made a face. And then all of Despard had been talking about the face Johanna Mason had made.

There’s things that you don’t talk about with Johanna Mason.

Why she’s bald, Finnick Odair, and apparently—Catalina Cain’s one of those things. The only time Lyssa’s seen Catalina Cain is when she’d kissed Plutarch Heavensbee on TV, when he’d dipped her and she’d thrown up a leg, giggling. She’d had bright blue hair and had been wearing very revealing clothes.

The mysterious woman might be hunting Catalina Cain’s bounty, because Seven’s as good a place as any for a loyalist to melt into the trees and stash weapons. Lyssa tries not to be terrified at the images that her head’s conjuring up. She doesn’t have children or a husband since the Games and the TB outbreak. She doesn’t have someone she needs to protect, is what she’s saying. But it’s wired in her blood.

Lyssa might not have seen a lot of Catalina Cain’s face, but she’d always looked out for her on broadcasts, even though she’s from the depths of Seven and the connection’s terrible enough that she gets out of getting in sh*t for not watching all the pre-Hunger Games bullsh*t. Johanna Mason told her that she had a friend who’d made sure that Lyssa’s son was ripped apart by the Careers. He’d died the night before the Hunger Games, and with how Johanna stiffens at the mention of Catalina’s name, the girl Death spat out again, Lyssa thinks it’d been her.

Lyssa prides herself on making her guests feel like family.

The mysterious woman is getting yelled at over the phone.

She’s sitting cross-legged on the couch in the common room, in front of the old TV that she hasn’t turned on so Lyssa walks in and immediately knows that the yelling is coming from the very expensive and new phone in front of her. The mysterious woman has her head in her hands and is schooling her breathing. She doesn’t notice Lyssa stepping into the room.

“Maybe one of us should switch careers,” the mysterious woman says as Lyssa hangs back, concealed by the shadows, waiting to see what she’ll do, “Because if these walls could talk, they’d tell both of us to get f*cked and that it’s enough and that we’re done.”

Lyssa turns on her heel and decides that it’s not her conversation to listen in on. She walks herself into the kitchen and makes a drink for herself and the mysterious woman, adds another point to the side of the divorcée.

When she comes back in, someone’s hung up and the mysterious woman has thrown her expensive phone across the room. She’s not wearing a hat and her hair’s tied back. In the soft light of the early morning, her beauty is striking and walking across a tightrope strung between the pillars of Capitol and District. Lyssa feels like she’s seen her before, but she can’t place her.

“Sorry about that,” the mysterious woman says as she gratefully accepts the drink, wrapping long, slender yet crooked fingers around it and not asking what it is. She just brings it to her lips, tips her head back and downs it after a quick sniff. “I didn’t mean to inflict my personal problems on your common room. I would have taken the call outside if I didn’t think it was early enough that I’d be the only one awake.”

The mysterious woman leaves early and comes back late. It’s what everyone’s said about her. She leaves early, no one knows where she goes, and she comes back late and sometimes she’ll take a drink at a bar, but she won’t stay until closing.

“It’s no harm,” Lyssa assures her, “I got up to chop wood for the fire. It’s summer, but it’s still chilly in the evenings, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I’ve got a bit of a shoulder injury, too, so I can’t do it fast and it’s better to start early when it’s not aching from the day.”

“Yeah,” the mysterious woman snorts, “Fortunately, even though it might be my first time in Seven, I had decent knowledge of the weather. I didn’t show up in sundresses, I mean.”

Lyssa laughs. “Probably good,” she agrees. “You already get looked at strangely for being a woman here, unfortunately. Best not to embrace it, even though I love a good yellow sundress.”

The mysterious woman slumps against the couch.

“It’s not a big change for me,” she admits, “Where I’m from… well, if you’re a girl, you’re not allowed to just be good at things like the boys are. You have to be the best, and that’s barely enough to justify your inclusion because before you’re competent, you’re always just a piece of a meat and a future housewife.”

One of the reasons that Lyssa had loved her husband is that he’d been bigger and stronger than her, a barrel-chested man who spent most of his life at the sawmills—and yet, he’d never even dared to assume that she couldn’t do the work she wanted to do because she was a woman. She stayed home and took care of their son, but he’d often expressed to her that the work she was doing, and yes, the motherly duties had never been duties in his eyes—they’d been work—was just as important as him earning money. And he always offered to take her place, if she wanted to try her hand at being the breadwinner.

Their life hadn’t panned out how Lyssa had wanted it to, but she didn’t regret a damn thing. And she hopes he knew that.

The mysterious woman sits back up again, back stiff.

“You said you had a shoulder injury?”

Her stare is the kind of intense where she’s probably not asking, but looking for confirmation.

“… yes?”

The mysterious woman pushes herself off the couch.

“If you don’t mind,” she offers, “I’d love to help you chop the wood. I have some aggressions that’d be real good to work out with an axe. And I promise you,” she winks, “I’m good with one.”

Lyssa already knows this, because she’d been warned to lock up her axes. Not because the mysterious woman had ever bothered someone—generally, she was a polite guest that acted more like a ghost in the halls than anything actually threatening, but she was lying about who she was and moving quickly up the mountain like she was either chasing, or she was the one running.

“Oh,” Lyssa tries, “You don’t have to do that, I’m more than—”

The mysterious woman rests a hand against her hip. “It’s fine if you don’t want my help because you want to handle it alone,” she says, “But I’d like to give it, if you’ll have me.”

If Lyssa’s being honest, she woke up feeling like her should had frozen and refused to be useful, so she didn’t say no to the mysterious woman because that would be pure stupidity. Lyssa watches the woman finish the pile in a third of the time it would have taken her to do it. About halfway through, she throws off her leather jacket, her back an angry red rippling constellation of gnarled scar tissue against the pristine white of her tank top. Lyssa doesn’t ask about it.

When she’s done, Lyssa asks her if she’s a smoker. The sun is rising behind the guesthouse, and the porch is a good spot to watch it from, she adds.

“I smoke socially,” the mysterious woman answers. “I swore to my brother that I’d quit, but I’m a lying bastard.”

“Do you want to be social now, then? And disappoint your brother?”

She laughs. “I think I’m already on his sh*t list for coming here first,” she says, “So, why the f*ck not?”

“I don’t know you,” Lyssa says, opening the pack and letting the woman take her pick first. “But I want you to know that it’s not okay for people to yell at you like that. That’s not what love is supposed to be.”

“Don’t worry,” she assures Lyssa, “I know. It’s all a mess.”

“I had a voice that I only used with him,” she says, tipping her head back against the wall, whistling a melancholy tune as she accepts Lyssa’s lighter, cigarette dangling from smudged red lips, “The kind of voice where you can hear a smile in it. It wasn’t something I did on purpose. He made me feel light. Like I could get away with it all. He could at least have had the decency to make me not to want to burn it all down in the aftermath, when I still know all of his favourite melodies and want to dance with his ghost in the living room.”

Lyssa can’t imagine the mysterious woman’s voice ever sounding light.

“Someday back when we were young, I guess something just went wrong. The two of us were hung from the same rope.”

“Sometimes the only way forward is through closing the door and nailing it shut.”

“I think we were just born under a bad sun.”

Lyssa wakes up to a scream answered by an inhuman screech.

She surges out of bed, oil lamp in her hand, wielded like a sword as she runs.

She brakes hard and fast when she realises what’s in her lobby.

Three technicolour flamingos as tall as a man and with jagged teeth making it unable for them to close their beaks are circling the mysterious woman, who’s armed with a golden spear and surrounded by the crumpled bodies of six of the mutts’ number.

The mysterious woman spins the golden spear around her body with the grace of someone holding fine silk instead of solid metal slicked with dripping green blood.

The mysterious woman is very mysterious.

Her eyes meet Lyssa’s.

“Get back,” she orders, deadpan, “I have this handled.”

And she proves it by spearing one that goes for her throat through the base of its jaw, her spear sticking out through the top of its head. She tips her spear and lets it slump off.

“They have a weak spot,” she explains, repeating the motion as she ducks under another furious, squawking beak, “Between their jaw, because it’s split. It’s just cartilage in the middle.”

The door’s thrown open right when her spear meets the last one, and Johanna Mason’s standing there, axe poised and ready.

The mysterious woman tears the collar off the mutt before removing her spear with a sickening squelch.

“Catalina,” Johanna hisses. “What are you doing here?”

She rests a hand against her hip. “Usually,” she snarls, “I’d say that it’s none of your damn business, but someone decided to send me a…” she gestures to the crumpled pink, “… message this morning. And I’ve been meaning to find you, Jo. I need to tell you something and you’ve obviously thrown away the phone I gave you or you’ve even blocked Haymitch’s number.”

Chapter 3: Nepo Baby

Chapter Text

Catalina Cain really, really doesn’t like Caesar Flickerman.

She thinks that his voice is annoying. So f*cking annoying.

She thinks that he’s a bad journalist even though it doesn’t matter because there’s no good journalists in the Capitol and the ones that spring up in the Districts die in strange ways. She thinks that he’s obnoxious and he called her esoteric last year and she’s still trying to figure out what the f*ck he meant with that. He lets people get on his show and talk about Finnick’s ass even though Finnick isn’t legal.

Catalina Cain sighs.

Catalina Cain can’t believe she’s about to do this. And Aurelia hasn’t even asked her to do it. She’s doing this exclusively out of the goodness of her own f*cking heart. She sighs again and wrenches open the door, throwing her arms out and grinning so widely she feels her cheeks creaking.

“Caesar!” she announces.

“Catalina!” he reciprocates, pushing away the poor Avox over-powdering his face and rising to his feet, inviting her in for the kind of hug that friends of your parents do. In front of him, she spies three photos and attached written applications.

She’s happy to recognise Celeste’s grinning face.

She grits her teeth and gets going.

It’s not the worst thing she’s done—but if she’s asked to rank them, it’ll end up shockingly high on the list. So high that people would quirk their brows, pull their friends close and ask, “For real, is this chick still on drugs? Damn.”

“I have a friend,” Catalina says, gesturing to the photos, clicking her twenty-four-carat-gold-tipped nails together to make sure that she’s got his attention.

Caesar gestures to the seat next to his, and Catalina folds herself into his arms, letting him hug her even though she’d like to punch his veneers out one-by-one. The hug is agonisingly long, and Catalina is the first one to extract herself. But she sits down instead of leaving immediately.

Caesar mirrors her, raising his hand and snapping his fingers to dismiss the Avox, who hurries out the door Catalina came in through, proverbial tail tucked between her legs.

“You always come to me when you want something,” he bemoans and she resists the urge to roll her eyes. Plutarch spent a whole week insisting that Caesar wasn’t as annoying as she painted him out to be, but she’d chipped away at him and gotten the dipsh*t to finally admit that yeah, it was the voice. It was so annoying. It made you forget everything else that could be possibly redeemable about him and focus on that annoyingly fake f*cking exaggerated accent. Plutarch had laughed and told her that he would always remember her pure hatred for Caesar Flickerman’s exaggerated accent, and she’d smacked his shoulder and told him that he’d better put it in her eulogy.

“I’m sorry about that,” Catalina lies, “It’s hard for me to seek out my mother’s friends without her. It’s weird, you know. I’m like, why would they want me around? They just remember me being underfoot when they were trying to talk to my mother.”

Caesar laughs. “You were very independent even as a child, Catalina. I wouldn’t ever say that you were underfoot.”

She winks. “I have my verified sources.”

For some reason, Caesar scrunches up his face like he’s bitten into a f*cking lemon.

“Cassandra isn’t always a reliable source on how you were as a child,” he tells her, “She had… issues getting attached to you at first. Especially when you were a baby.” And he almost sounds like he’s sorry about it. Wow, at least it’s obvious that someone had good parents or parent-like figures in his life.

Catalina crosses her arms. “Tell me about your future intern,” she says instead of anything else she’s thinking about.

“I thought you said you were here because you had a friend who wanted to be it,” Caesar counters, grinning. “I was expecting you to pull out your chequebook and ask me how much it’ll cost.”

“That’s my dad’s thing,” Catalina laughs, “I’m curious.”

Caesar clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth, flicks a strand of half-gelled hair behind his ear where it waggles awkwardly because it can’t quite settle naturally. “You’re lying. Let’s hear your speech and then I’ll give you mine.”

Catalina sighs. “It’s Celeste Berry,” she says, “And I can personally vouch for that she’ll be the most dedicated intern you’ve ever seen, who’ll grow into a future employee that’ll—”

“I don’t really care about what she’ll do for my company,” Caesar interrupts, “I care about why you’re willing to sit here and talk her up.”

“Like I said,” Catalina repeats, “She’s fully committed to the task at hand and I think that it’s that kind of moxie and passion that deserves to be recognised—”

“And it wouldn’t have anything to do with that her family has been at the centre of a recent scandal and you’d be worried about that reflecting negatively on Celeste’s chances?”

Catalina bites her lip. “… it’s not why I’m speaking for her, but it might have been the nail in the coffin for this to be a meeting instead of an email.”

“Thank you,” Caesar tells her, “Now, tell me what you’d planned to say in the email.”

“I grew up with Celeste’s older sister, Aurelia, I’m sure you know. We’re the same age. For a long time, I thought that Celeste was just an annoying little sh*t who didn’t take anything seriously. Because she didn’t. But then I started to read some of the things that she wrote about other people, and you know how I don’t really care for your profession and I won’t pretend that any of that’s changed just to bag Celeste a job, because then you’ll be on my ass about some bullsh*t next week and nah, Celeste’s good enough that she doesn’t need me to do that crap.

“She’s good enough that her photo’s already right there, next to two others before I even stepped through the door. And so, I’m actually not going to spend a second telling you about all her skills, because she’s written them all down and you’ve read them. And you obviously liked what you saw. But I’ll tell you this: when you hire her and she revolutionises your network, I don’t want you telling her that you hired her because of me, because she deserves this victory all on her own.”

“I will not be the girl who’s asked how it feels to be trotting along at the genius man’s heels like a dog and she shouldn’t either. And she deserves to see proof of that in action, because that’s the only thing that’ll stop her from marrying a rich dipsh*t because she thinks that’s what she’s supposed to do when you’re young and beautiful.”

Catalina, even though she’s seated, rests her left arm behind her back, bent at the elbow, taut, mirrors it with her right against her abs, and bows in her chair. “Thank you for your consideration.”

Chapter 4: Concerning Your Grandmother

Chapter Text

“We’re calling about your grandmother.”

Catalina buries her head in her hands. “Oh God,” she groans, “What’s the damage?”

She’s already pulling out her chequebook.

Catalina doesn’t want to say that she put her grandmother in a home because she didn’t want to deal with her, but she is saying that Plutarch had put her in a home while Catalina was still f*cking off from her responsibilities and living in the good parts of being legally dead and she hasn’t really surged out to change that status quo. Sue her.

Katarzyna Birkenfeld doesn’t even remember who she is most days, and because Catalina doesn’t really look like her mother except for when she opens her mouth, Katarzyna doesn’t want to associate with her. Until she opens her mouth. The last time Catalina visited, guitar slung over her shoulder and the pierogis Katarzyna had taught her how to make balanced against her hip, Katarzyna flung herself at her as soon as she opened the door and her mouth.

“Cassie!” she’d squealed, her accent crackling at the edges like a well-worn smile, “You came back! They told me you were dead and I felt horrible! I felt like I’d killed you all those years ago!” And all Catalina could do was slowly snake her arms across her grandmother’s thin back, feeling the ridges of her spine, and tuck her under her chin.

“You got taller,” Katarzyna began to sob, “You got taller and stronger. You can fight back now. You came back to fight. You came back to fight, didn’t you? I missed you so much, Cassie. I missed you every day. I never forgave myself for what I did even though you lived. You didn’t really live. I couldn’t recognise you. And a mother should always recognise her daughter.”

Catalina had ended up sitting on the edge of her grandmother’s bed after her legs had bottomed out under her and Catalina had to practically carry her back to it, playing the songs about the hangmen. She lost her mettle through the first one, she one that she wrote, so she switched to the one that she’d been taught.

Slack your rope hangman, slack it far and wide.
I think I see my father comin’, ridin’ many a mile.
Father, have you brought me hope?”
Or have you paid my fee?
Or have you come to see me hanging?
“I have not brought you hope, I have not paid your fee,
Yes, I have come to see you hanging— from the gallows tree.”

Catalina used to visit her grandmother a lot, her maternal one: Aja Cain wanted absolutely nothing to do with her before telling her the truth, and she didn’t change her tune in the last weeks of her life when she’d decided to get some sh*t off her chest. She’d said what she needed to die, and then, well, it was Catalina’s problem. And Aja Cain didn’t want to look at her, even though she’d taught her how to sing old songs and didn’t let her leave until she’d memorised them perfectly.

Catalina learned a lot from Aja Cain. She learned how to sing folk, and she learned about the 10^th Annual Hunger Games, and she learned how to crack open floorboards and she learned that Lucius Shapka was a hom*osexual and that Aja Cain blamed both Sejanus Plinth and Aloysius Cain for the death of Averard Cain. Aja Cain’s husband had died from a preventable cause—an STD he’d picked up from the pool boy, because Aja couldn’t and wouldn’t let him go to the hospital for it.

Because it was known to be a gay man’s disease and her sons were making it big. And the knowing would be worse than the dying. And Lucius Shapka had agreed with her, like when she’d told him that she was never taking his surname but their children’s could be hyphenated.

Aja Cain euthanised her own husband and she insisted, in the one show of emotion Catalina ever wrestled out of her, while she’d been on the fourth practice of one of Lucy Gray’s songs, stomping her boot and learning that there was apparently a wrong way to stomp your boot even when you’re perfectly on beat, that she hadn’t always been this person. She’d looked at Catalina with big, teary blue eyes and said that she didn’t know where it went wrong, but it did—and Catalina didn’t know what else to do than throw her head back and get the song perfectly right on the fifth go.

Slack your rope hangman, slack it far and wide.
I think I see my mother comin’, ridin’ many a mile.
Mother, have you brought me hope?”
Or have you paid my fee?
Or have you come to see me hanging?
“I have not brought you hope, I have not paid your fee,
Yes, I have come to see you hanging— from the gallows tree.”

Catalina Cain doesn’t like fudge. Catalina Cain doesn’t like a lot of sweet things.

When she was a kid, like all kids, she did.

She wasn’t always this person. She didn’t come out of the womb asking for a tall black, hold the sugar but yes please, she’d like it iced. She used to love sweet liquorice coated with white chocolate and dusted with raspberry dust. Stil loves salty liquorice, even though she feels guilty when she eats the kind that’s covered in dark chocolate, even though she likes that, too. It feels too much like childhood, and she’s still expecting her mother to swat it out of her hands, hissing about how she should learn to eat properly, because then she won’t need to waste her time on the diet pills.

How the diet pills were bad, because it meant that people were losing their discipline and forgetting what it meant to be thin.

Cassandra Cain didn’t speak to Katarzyna Birkenfeld except for when she’d drop Catalina off on her stoop, hissing about how “my bitch of a mother deserves to know that I didn’t fail her” and leaving before the door clicked open. Or before Catalina was even allowed to ring on the doorbell. Catalina was the one who told her about the dementia, and it’d been tense, like everything between them was at the end, until the words had spilled from her lips, thready and unsure.

She expected her mother to force her to hold the eye contact, excepted her to hiss about why she’d wasted her time letting Catalina in if she was just going to stare at her feet. And not even because she was wearing nice shoes! Catalina had sprinted over in her work boots. In a split second, Catalina went from wanting to punch out all her mother’s stupid veneers and call her a bitch before slamming the door and never coming back—to wanting to curl up against her mother’s chest just this once, have her stroke her shaking hands through her hair and undo the stress knots.

Catalina told her father that she wanted him to forget every time he saw her at her best, because he didn’t deserve to see what he didn’t respect. Catalina sat down in front of her mother, sitting on each their side of the wide part of the long table, and her mother held a bowl of raspberry-dusted, white-chocolate-coated sweet liquorice out to her.

Catalina slowly plucked one from the porcelain with the tips of her nails and wondered if this is how Seneca felt when he ate the nightlock, as she brought it to her teeth, resting it there briefly, feeling the saliva well—and then she bit down and with a sickening crack, bitter gave way to sweet.

Slack your rope hangman, slack it far and wide.
I think I see my brother comin’, ridin’ many a mile.
Brother, have you brought me hope?”
Or have you paid my fee?
Or have you come to see me hanging?
“I have not brought you hope, I have not paid your fee,
Yes, I have come to see you hanging— from the gallows tree.”

“Doctor Cain!” someone snaps and Catalina yelps, falling out of her chair. “Did you listen to anything I said?”

… something about her grandmother, right?

Katarzyna Birkenfeld, in a home because of her rapidly advancing dementia and not at all because her granddaughter’s a bitch, right?

“… could you possibly repeat it?” Catalina grits out, “The connection was bad and I’ve just managed to reset it.”

“… sure. I mean, of course. Of course, Doctor Cain—”

“Catalina is fine,” she interrupts, “I’m sure that you’ve heard unsavoury things about me from my dear grandmother, so there’s no need to be sticklers for pretty titles around here.”

“Your grandmother is… combative.”

Catalina thinks about the time she’d opened the bathroom door because Katarzyna was taking too long using it and she was afraid that her centenarian grandmother had fallen only to find her in front of the toilet, legs splayed, announcing in her mother’s tongue that Catalina had come right in time to watch her “crop-dust the devil with piss!”

It was especially disconcerting because as soon as she’d said the word crop, Catalina thought about the war stories she’d drank down as a little girl—she thought about her grandmother throwing herself into the depths of a cornfield to hide from an air raid, tucking the blossoming stalks around her, giving herself a thousand little cuts, but living through the night and even managing to fall asleep ensconced in the earth’s hands. She woke from the wind on her face and screamed loud enough in glee to wake the dead because she’d survived. And when she’d shut her eyes, she’d clenched them tightly through her tears and repeated, front to back, that she’d rather die in her sleep because then she wouldn’t know when it coming. But it was terrifying for a teenage girl to close her eyes, knowing that she might never open them. It was terrifying not to drink in another sliver of the night air, cool against her skin, even as the sky burned above and the smoke burned her lungs.

Slack your rope hangman, slack it far and wide.
I think I see my true love comin’, ridin’ many a mile.
True love, have you brought me hope?”
Or have you paid my fee?
Or have you come to see me hanging?
“Yes, I have brought you hope. Yes, I have paid your fee.
For I’ve not come to see you hanging—from the gallows tree.”

Chapter 5: Try-Out

Chapter Text

“Cat,” Celeste, fifteen, groans, “C’mon. Help a sister out here. You know him personally. You must be able to tell me what to expect, at least!”

Catalina rolls her eyes and flips another pancake, Aurelia ogling her back muscles, visible through the tight white tank top. She’s always been so famously unhelpful when it’s actually mattered, but she’s always taken girlish glee in teaching Celeste how to do boring sh*t like understanding genetic algorithms and traditional ways to calculate with a logarithmic model. Like, she’s whipped out the paper and the f*cked-up-looking rulers.

“I know Caesar in the way that you know your parents’ friends, because that’s what he is. He’s my mother’s friend, and like, he came to my birthday parties as a kid. I don’t know jacksh*t about what he wants in his interns.” Catalina flips the pancake onto the plate, turns around and slides it towards Celeste first instead of Aurelia. Aurelia’s eyes do that thing where they’re practically twinkling. It’s so funny to watch because Aurelia denies it every time Celeste presses her on that it’s absolutely a thing that she does.

“You’ve been interviewed by him!” Celeste argues, squealing a little because even though she slags Catalina, it’s still endlessly exciting that Catalina, someone Celeste knows embarrassing details about and has seen sneaking through a window drunk, was up on that stage. It makes Celeste think that she could be next. She’s definitely going up there before Aurelia, that’s for sure. That’s just the rule of being sisters: the rivalry.

She deadpans: “We don’t talk backstage about what he wants in his interns, either.”

“Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!”

“Maybe stop calling Catalina Cat,” Aurelia butts in, “She’s made her stance on it clear. And you might actually get a better answer if you call people what they’d like to be called. That’s a good thing for a journalist to remember.”

Catalina snorts, and so, Celeste does it too.

“It’s fine,” Catalina adds, flipping another pancake, then striding over to mess a hand through Celeste’s hair as she grumbles, “You call me Cat because I remember when you were a little sh*t who couldn’t pronounce Catalina, but you still wanted to bother me because I was that cool to you.” She sighs exaggeratedly. “God, where did I go wrong? Take me back to those days before I was just a vessel for good pancakes and Caesar Flickerman survival tips.”

Celeste pouts. “I don’t need survival tips,” she explains, “I’m not weird like you. I like Caesar Flickerman. I would love to be his intern.”

Catalina smiles softly. “Well,” she decides, “I think that’s all you’ve gotta say. Just be yourself, and just be genuine.”

Celeste rolls her eyes. “That’s not really helping me. It’s tomorrow.”

She doesn’t know it now, but that interview is going to change her life. It was one of those things you did because someone goaded you into it. She never actually thought that she’d be picked to go to an interview, yet alone would land the job. But she did. And it would change her life. And she would spend the rest of her life chasing that golden moment that she didn’t even know was golden. She would spend the rest of her life cursing Catalina Cain for being good at making pancakes and willing to do it whenever for no good damn reason.

For now, Catalina finishes up the breakfast, sits down in front of them and takes Celeste’s hands in hers, smiling softly.

“I know what you feel like,” she assures, “I felt like that when I wanted to finish the Academy early and get into business. And I wanted to do that because I wanted to actually do something with my hands and brain. And you’re like me, like that. You don’t want to do the same stuff as me, we all know I scraped you through passing biology, but everything feels a little like you’re a sitting duck waiting for when your life actually gets exciting, right?” Her brown eyes twinkle. “And this? Doing anything that makes you feel like you’re burning up inside in the best and worst way? That’ll make you feel alive. And it’ll make your life exciting.”

And it’s so horrible, because even years later, Celeste remembers this. She remembers how, somehow, Catalina’s hands were calloused and Aurelia was laughing low in her throat at Catalina’s motivational speech. How she smacked the hard line of Catalina’s toned back and said something about her really just being a big sap and Catalina rolled her eyes with affection and exaggeration.

Chapter 6: I Can Handle My sh*t

Chapter Text

Catalina’s gotten really good at counting the water stains at her therapist’s office.

As part of her pardon, she’s got to show up. They say that it’s because she’s a war victim, but Catalina thinks Plutarch’s got a personal vendetta against her productivity. She’s not allowed to pick her own therapist, because Paylor thinks she’ll pick someone she went to school with so she can get out of it quicker. She wouldn’t. She’d pick someone that she thought would be able to handle her, because she’s already gone through five therapists. And she’s not allowed to pick Aurelius, because they work together.

Pity. Peeta says that he’s good.

But Peeta’s a very different therapy-goer than Catalina is.

She usually doesn’t say a lot at therapy. Peeta shares everything—even what he ate the previous day. Aurelius butters him up and tells him that he’s brave.

Last week, Catalina told her therapist that she’d stab her if she kept asking how she felt at work. It’s the only thing Catalina doesn’t ignore. When she asks her how she’s doing at work, Catalina says that she’s fine and that she’s worked through worse. She even adds that she’s happy she has the option to use her brain and body for something other than catastrophising on her couch with a bottle of cheap-ass screw-top booze. She’s doing fine enough to actually show up for therapy and she’s only lied about being sick once to get out of it. It’d been Finnick’s birthday, and she just wasn’t leaving her apartment that day.

Deleon shouted at her outside her window for an hour before she cracked it open just enough to show off her middle finger.

“Do you regret anything?” Doctor Kimya questions.

Catalina’s hands are folded against her abdomen, she’s actually laying on the couch like she’s straight out of a soap opera, and she’s counting the water stains that streak across the ceiling like tiger stripes for the third time. She could probably draw them from memory, now. The last time she went to therapy, the whole session was spent in silence and she ended up figuring out how to solve her vaccine distribution issue.

“Yeah,” she decides to say, mostly because Kimya probably deserves it after she inadvertently inspired Catalina to solve her problems and now she’s got a delivery date for the first doses of her new, significantly-more-stable-than-her-father’s-version multi-infectious disease oral vaccine to her partners in Seven. “I should have punched Plutarch in the face when people wouldn’t have called me a bad person for it and I should have been more honest.”

Kimya practically lights up at Catalina’s answer, probably getting ready to write on her little pad that they’ve made a “significant breakthrough” because Catalina’s actually talking. Ha. Catalina’s saying that one thing because quid pro quo.

“Would you say that any of those regrets tie into the trauma that got you sent to my office?”

One of the things that Catalina likes about Doctor Kimya is that she doesn’t try to pretend that Catalina’s here of her own volition because she woke up one day and realised that she needed therapy to be a whole person, or whatever reason people who choose to go to therapy choose to go to therapy. Doctor Kimya will just stare her down and remind her that she’s stuck here until someone says she’s not. And even though Catalina’s worked through half of the Capitol’s population of eligible therapists at this point, Kimya’s insistent on being her last. Catalina kind of admires the moxie, but she’s also taking it as a challenge even though she’s not a sixteen-year-old f*ckhead punk anymore.

Catalina watched her partner’s sister commit suicide in front of her and she didn’t do anything to stop it because she completely understood why Nicole wanted to die. Catalina pulled her mother out of the bathtub and a mental breakdown, surrounding by rotting turkeys. Catalina stripped Finnick naked more times than anyone else, but she just sat him on her toilet and scrubbed him clean instead of having sex.

Catalina knows exactly when she managed to break Peeta Mellark because she watched it happen.

It was right after his first interview with Caesar when it started to crack. She remembers the whole thing. She watched it from the wings, a tranquiliser dart in her hand and knowledge that felt like the cold, smooth kiss of a gun at the nape of her neck.

“All right. It just looks suspicious,” said Caesar after Peeta went and defended Katniss’ honour, because of course he did, “As if she was part of the rebels’ plan all along.”

Peeta flew to his feet, leaning into Caesar’s face, hands locked on the arms of Caesar’s chair. “Really?” he’d practically screamed, “And was it part of her plan for Johanna to nearly kill her? For that electric shock to paralyse her? To trigger the bombing? She didn’t know, Caesar! Neither of us knew anything except that we were trying to keep each other safe!”

And it’d been really, really f*cking hard for Catalina to stay on her feet.

Catalina stares at the ceiling and doesn’t say anything.

Chapter 7: Hi Pyrena Tress!

Chapter Text

Pyrena Tress has a childish, but very real, to her, beef with Catalina Cain.

Even though Celeste doesn’t like Catalina, she knows that Catalina has done nothing to stoke this. Pyrena doesn’t like Catalina because her ex-husband who’s not even alive was honest about how Pyrena would always be second-best to Catalina Cain. Celeste doesn’t have a f*cking clue what Tiberius saw in Catalina, not because she’s so stupid and full of hatred to not admit that Catalina is a beautiful woman, but because that Catalina would never have been the kind of wife Tiberius wanted out of the arrangement.

Catalina bought her own drinks and paid her own bills. And she was proud of it. And she never had any interest in letting a man buy her a neat whiskey or a new summer property. If she wanted it, she’d buy it for herself and she’d talked about it a lot with Celeste. Tiberius wanted a wife who’d spend his money on purses, sugary co*cktails and plastic surgery. Maybe he liked Catalina Cain because he thought he could be the one to break her.

Maybe he liked Catalina Cain because he never liked Seneca Crane, never got why Seneca Crane could work his way up to Head Gamemaker and when Tiberius asked his grandfather for the role, he didn’t just get it with the snap of his privileged fingers. It doesn’t matter, because Tiberius Snow is dead and from all of Celeste’s digging, it never seems like Catalina Cain ever returned his advances. It seems like every time he tried to touch her, she reminded him that he had a wife at home and he’d have a kid coming soon, if he was keeping up with high society traditions.

Pyrena doesn’t know that Celeste knows about the abortions.

Pyrena doesn’t know that without Catalina Cain, she wouldn’t have been able to get those abortions. Celeste might hate Catalina, but she doesn’t let her hatred twist her memories of the past. Because it’s much more interesting to say that Catalina Cain used to be good, and then she wasn’t and no one’s ready for that conversation, because she’s spending her eternity with a narcissistic piece of sh*t who she lets walk all over her.

Tiberius Snow was never going to be able to gag Catalina Cain, but she let Plutarch Heavensbee make her his attack dog. Celeste just wishes that Catalina could have left her sister out of it or would at least admit that it’d been her fault, because Aurelia wouldn’t have done that sh*t on her own.

Pyrena Tress smiles widely when she mentions that they both hate Catalina Cain, and that’s why she’s invited her to this ball. It’s the twenty-sixth one that she’s held in the six months since the rebels taking power. Pyrena leans in and whispers that she’s pretty sure Celeste’s going to agree that it’s the place to be, and that she hopes Celeste will see the old Capitol glimmering through.

Celeste’s been in prison next to Catalina Cain, on the traitor’s benches, because they didn’t know what her and Caesar had been doing.

Celeste had decided that if she was going to go down with the ship, she was going to go down screaming. And then she’d been pardoned and someone had bought her an apartment because her old one had been bombed into oblivion. Celeste doesn’t say to Pyrena that she’s not really interested in the “glimmers of the old Capitol” if it means that she’s risking going back to prison. It’d been damp there, and she’d heard what the guards did to Catalina, because they thought she’d done worse things than Celeste. And yes, she had. So, Celeste doesn’t want to do those things.

If Celeste didn’t hate Plutarch Heavensbee almost as much as she hates his ex-wife for what she’s done, she’d even have considered taking a legal job at his newly-formed Ministry of Communications. She thinks it sounds a lot like the Flickerman Network.

Pyrena flags down Rainier Blair, who’s probably in a weird spot in his life because of the recent revelation, on the live-broadcasted trial of Catalina Cain, that his wife Lucinda actually didn’t kill herself. Instead, Catalina decided she had to die because of some apparently violent sex that she’d had with Finnick Odair. Rainier Blair never remarried, even though it’d almost been a decade ago by now.

Rainier Blair grins and says: “First time?” as he offers Celeste his sweaty hand. Slowly, Celeste places hers in his.

“First time?” she questions, “You’re making this sound like it’s not just a ball?”

He grins.

“It’s the best one you’ll go to in this…” he spits out the last three words, “… new world order.”

Chapter 8: Things That Made Peeta Say He Needed To Go Lay Down This Week, An Itemised List

Chapter Text

1. Haymitch Abernathy saying that he wasn’t very different from Plutarch Heavensbee because they were “both making heart eyes at the local blood-covered huntress on the daily”.
2. Catalina Cain is currently developing a gas that shows you your worst fears. Why she’s doing it: “Revenge reasons, Haymitch. I stopped believing in karma getting people and started being proactive about it.” (Haymitch’s response: “When in your life have you not been proactive?”)
3. The horrors.
4. Catalina Cain doing an intense workout without any music or conversation to distract her. Beetee says that the only people who do it like that are people training to avenge someone’s death or restore their family’s honour.
5. The general conceptual theory of Finnick Odair, brought up in therapy.
6. Haymitch demonstrating the “only correct way to eat a burrito”.
7. Catalina opening her mouth to yell at Plutarch, then taking a deep, steadying breath instead and grabbing him by the collar, dragging him protesting into a soundproofed conference room. Peeta knows it’s soundproofed because of the massive windows showing Catalina throwing her arms up in exasperation and shoving her face in Plutarch’s, their noses almost touching, as she very obviously yells.
8. The fact that Plutarch wants to replace the Hunger Games with a singing competition and Deleon wants to actually enter it. And that he conspiratorially told Peeta, during PT, that he was going to try to get Catalina Cain to do it with him. Apparently, Catalina is one of her generation’s best singers and Deleon thinks she’s wasting it.
9. The fact that Catalina and Plutarch can briefly get along if they need to kill something together.
10. Expanding on the previous, Catalina and Plutarch tag-teaming it to kill some candy-pink flamingo mutts with huge teeth inside of their massive skewer-like beaks. Apparently, they’re holdovers that they made for, but didn’t use during, the Quell. And Catalina doesn’t say it, but Beetee, who shows Peeta the video because it’s “iconic” and “terrifying” and “hilarious because those two say that they’re never going to work together again, but just look at this: they’re made for each other” admits that they’re culling them because there’s Snow loyalists that have been stealing mutts for personal protection and intimidation.

    Catalina spins around a sharp spear, hooking it between the birds’ ribs, bobbing throats and wings. She’s back-to-back with Plutarch, and briefly, she leans her head against Plutarch’s shoulder, tipped back, eyes closed.

Chapter 9: The First Day

Chapter Text

Celeste had such a crisis about what to wear for her first day that after consulting Aurelia and deciding that Aurelia was full of sh*t, she texted Catalina about it. Because Catalina, despite the fact that she owns and wears oil-stained boilersuits when she’s going out in public, is considered a business style icon. She’s all over the papers when she shows up in custom-tailored gowns and mean-mugs the paparazzi on the red carpet. She’s a good poser, too.

Catalina texts her back that Celeste should know that she only wears Cinna Irshad nowadays, and she intends to wear Cinna Irshad for as long as he’s designing. If it was anyone else, Celeste would call Catalina a sap. But Cinna’s actually good, and not just because he’s Catalina’s friend. He’s really good, and his creative relationship with Catalina Cain has elevated both of their positions on the fashion scene. Cinna, because Catalina is Catalina Cain, and Catalina because it’s always inherently interesting when people like Catalina Cain are that loyal to one designer. It usually gives them a little bit of creative freedom when it comes to what they’re wearing on the red carpet instead of just getting whoever the moment’s hottest designer to send them something.

Catalina’s famous for being rich enough that she doesn’t need to wear sponsored or loaned gowns. She chooses her own clothes, and she buys them, paid in full when she walks out of the store. Celeste huffs and answers back that she doesn’t have any Cinna Irshad, and maybe the first day at a job isn’t the time to whip out a ballgown, anyways.

Catalina calls her, laughing.

“You sound like me,” she says, “I never thought I’d hear you say that there wasn’t a right excuse for a ballgown on any ol’ day of the week.”

“I want to seem professional,” Celeste protests, “Because I don’t feel professional at all.”

“You’re alright,” Catalina assures her, “Caesar picked you out of all the other poor bastards and bitches. That’s got to count for something. You’ve done the hardest thing—proving you’ve got the moxie to do the job. Now, you actually get to do the job.”

“Catia,” Celeste finds herself laughing, “Have you ever considered a side hustle as a motivational speaker?”

She’s sure Catalina’s rolling her eyes on the other end of the line. “Tell me what your options are for clothes,” Catalina says instead of a cutting, career-ending insult, “And we’ll work it out together.”

Catalina gets Celeste talked into wearing a red suit with a sheer, peach-pink organza blouse underneath. She says it’s the right blend of flamboyance and “I could probably shovel mutt sh*t in this” that you need for a government job. Celeste had snorted, recoiled when she realised that she sounded like Catalina, then laughed, and chided Catalina, saying that she was pretty sure that not everyone was stupid enough to get a government job where shovelling mutt sh*t was a genuine worry.

Catalina had agreed and chuckled at her bad choices. Because her boss makes her shovel mutt sh*t. And Catalina was stupid enough to stay working at that job even though she could make more money as a fully-fledged heiress with a rich husband. She insisted that she’d end up making more money than every boy who ever tried to shove a ring on her finger in the end.

Celeste was wide-eyed and running a little late through the door, so distracted at trying to make it on time that she didn’t realise she’d barrelled right into the worst possible person she could barrel into once she’d done it, staggering back, clutching her spilled coffee and hot-pink briefcase.

“Good morning, Miss Berry,” Caesar Flickerman grinned to himself, and Celeste felt all of her blood run cold. She wondered if Catalina would kick her ass if she sprinted into the bathroom and hid there, calling Catalina and begging her to come and pick her up. And let her hide in her basem*nt forever, because Celeste can’t ever face the public again.

Before she could think about what she’d do during her newfound and lifelong solitude, Caesar was handing her a royal blue handkerchief with a grimace. “I don’t think you hit me,” he’d said, lip quirking upwards, eyes crinkling at the edges, “But you did a right number of yourself. Try to wipe as much off and we’ll see if we’ve got something your size backstage for you to borrow?”

Celeste blinks. “What?”

Chapter 10: Celeste's Finnlina Observations

Chapter Text

Celeste obviously doesn’t ship Finnlina.

She knows Catalina well enough to know that she’s absolutely not f*cking Finnick, even though she absolutely could and probably should. Finnick would bend over backwards for her, and she would choke out the sun itself for him. And they both kind of just dance around it, and Catalina has other boyfriends and leaves hickeys on Celeste’s big sister and Celeste tries to ignore that specifically. And not just because it’s gross to think about who your sister is hooking up with, but because it’s wretched and it’s wrong, but Aurelia and Catalina aren’t wretched and wrong people. And it f*cks with her. So, she ignores it.

And Celeste doesn’t ship Catalina and Finnick, because they’re Catalina and Finnick and it would be weird. Generally, it’s weird to ship Catalina with anyone. When Celeste thinks about Catalina, she thinks about the girl who’s flipped pancakes for Celeste throughout her whole life, rolled her eyes with affection when Celeste asked for them because the Avoxes don’t make them like Catalina does, but she’s always ended up making them anyways. Catalina’s the person who sneaks Celeste into clubs as long as Celeste promises to stay by her side all night.

She’s never said that she’d do that, even if Catalina didn’t ask her to. Clubs are kind of intimidating, and it feels good to be right next to someone who know, and who’s someone like Catalina. Fierce and fast and reliable.

Here’s what Celeste knows about Finnlina:

Augustus Knave is a terrible boss, and Catalina spends most of her time talking about how much she hates him and can’t wait to usurp him because he makes her shovel mutt sh*t instead of attending sponsor dinners for the 68^th like Seneca and Plutarch get to.

“I’ll f*cking shovel mutt sh*t all over his lawn one day,” she hisses, kneading dough. Finnick’s got his head pillowed on his arms on the table and looks like he’s halfway to sleep. Catalina, either because she doesn’t notice in her Augustus Knave-induced rage or because she simply doesn’t care, keeps ranting as Finnick’s eyelids droop. “I’ll put a f*ckin’ shovel through his f*ckin’ skull and light my way home by all the bridges I’m burning.”

Catalina’s touchy about a lot of things. And usually weird things, too. She flips the dough in the air spinning it on her fingers as it stretches out, then she tosses it into the bowl resting against her hip. When she moves close to Finnick, he lunges at her and wraps his arms around her waist, hanging off her like a koala. Briefly, she stiffens. Then, she softens and uses her free hand to play with his hair.

Here’s what Celeste knows about Finnlina:

Finnick Odair never texted her to tell her that he loved her more than he loved anyone else and because he wanted to tell her that she had beautiful hair and wrote beautiful things about beautiful people, but he did text her to ask her if Catalina was allergic to shellfish because he wanted to smuggle up some “proper f*cking oysters” for her nineteenth birthday.

Here’s what Celeste knows about Finnlina:

Catalina writes the best songs. Whether you like her or not, it doesn’t matter. You’d be an idiot to say that she doesn’t write good songs. Because she writes the best f*cking songs that Celeste’s ever heard.

Even though Celeste thinks that Catalina Cain is an asshole, when she heard that Finnick had died a matter of days after Catalina, all Celeste could think about was the night she’d walked out and seen Catalina playing the grand piano with Finnick’s head in her lap.

Celeste hates to admit it, but she remembers the whole damn song. Sue her. It’d been good, and the moonlight had sauntered across Catalina as she softly sung, not really singing so much as slowly confessing, her voice barely above a whisper and still silencing everything in the vast, gold-covered ballroom.

Celeste had walked in, having snatched the spare key that Catalina still kept under the tomato plants, and she’d been insistent on finally confronting her in a space she couldn’t run away from, at a time where she couldn’t use the excuse of having a meeting. It’d been a little past two, and she’d let herself in because she’d seen the lights on in the kitchen. She’d gone in through the back, but Catalina hadn’t been in the kitchen. And Celeste had never known her to keep Avoxes or boyfriends who’d stay over and have midnight snacks. She slowly toed through the house, until she was in a hallway with a door ajar and music slipping through the crack. She followed it, and opened the door enough to see.

And then Catalina had been singing, a cup of hot chocolate resting on the floor, half-drunk. Finnick was asleep in her lap, a quilt thrown over him, and next to the hot chocolate was a steaming cup of coffee. Finnick’s feet stuck out from under the quilt, and he was wearing mismatched fluffy socks, red and purple. Next to the door were a pair of slippers that looked to be hastily kicked off, flanked by a pair of mud-speckled combat boots with fraying red laces.

“Where do I begin?”

Catalina isn’t arching her voice, she’s not making Celeste think about a little girl standing on the tips of her toes to grasp at her mother’s greatness and somehow making it work. She doesn’t remind Celeste of how all the air had rushed out of the opera when Catalina had bounded onto the stage in that electric blue dress, in the opening high note that would define Juno Harper’s character and Catalina’s reputation as someone who was fully committed to the task at hand. But even though she’s not showing off, it’s still beautiful. So, even though Celeste wants to barge in and shout at her, she doesn’t. And she listens to Catalina’s confessional lullaby.

“I’m braver when I’m far away and speaking on a whim.”

Catalina’s eyes are closed, and even though she’s always been a guitarist before she was a pianist, her fingers know the keys by heart.

“You told you me that you’d kill him if he touched me once again—”

“—but you’re just as bad as him.”

“For every finger he lifted, I have memories that you twisted.”

“And recitals that you missed.”

“And broken knees you never kissed.”

“And I told my best friend—”

Her eyes are wide open, but they’re not welling with tears. Her voice doesn’t swell with anger, and Celeste isn’t sure that it’s because of her not wanting to wake Finnick. It sounds like it’s the kind of old hurt where you don’t want to throw your sword in the bushes and rush back into their arms, but you’re terrifying yourself every time you think about it because you can’t really remember exactly how it felt when the blade sunk into your side anymore.

“And he said that there’s still a little girl in me that you’re holding by the wrist. And she and I can’t coexist. Or I’ll be spending my eternity with lots of narcissists.”

“This town ain’t big enough for both of us and I don’t have the strength to take control of us.”

“I bite my tongue so hard I start to swallow it.”

“And I forgive you, but I still remember all of it.”

She breathes in. Dives deep.

“I wonder if you’d like me, if things were different.”

“If I wasn’t who I am and insignificant.”

“I only wish you could have left her out of it.”

“She’s never done a thing without the doubt of it.”

“And she needs me more than anything. She still has both her wedding rings.”

“This town ain’t big enough for both of us and I don’t have the strength to take control of us.”

Catalina tips her head back, glistening.

“If you ask me what this song’s about, I’ll lie.”

“… ‘cause I don’t have the strength to not deny.”

“And I still want you to love me, deep inside.”

“And I still need your approval, though I try.”

Nothing is on fire, and the Capitol is blanketed in snow—but Celeste can still smell lazy smoke drifting through the desert winds.

“This town ain’t big enough for both of us and I don’t have the strength to take control of us.”

“I bite my tongue so hard I start to swallow it.”

“But I forgive you, and I still remember all of it.”

“I still remember all of it.”

“I had a vision and I watched it come alive.”

“And now I’m wishing that I had a bit more time.”

“I have an aching in my bones at night, loud conversations with my bloodshot eyes.”

“Hard to focus when the pressure makes you blind.”

“All I wanted was to make some art, talk some sh*t. ‘Never really cared about getting rich.”

Catalina exhales.

“Celeste,” she says, back stiff, voice small and soft, like a gentle summer breeze or running your hand across a fur, “I know you’re there.”

Celeste grits her teeth.

“I want to talk to you.”

Catalina sighs.

“I know you do. Wait for me.”

Celeste’s about to ask her what the f*ck that means, when Catalina’s nimble, straight fingers cup Finnick’s head and she expertly extracts herself from underneath him, dropping onto the floor on silent, arched feet.

Catalina slips her arm under Finnick’s back and knees.

Groggily, he blinks up at her. “Catia?”

Catalina crouches down and strokes her hand through Finnick’s messy hair.

“You should sleep in a bed,” she says, “You’ll end up bitching about it in the morning.”

“Not ancient like you,” he mumbles, leaning into her touch. Catalina scoffs.

“Hate to tell ya, life catches you fast. Before you know it, you’ll at the ancient age of twenty-three.”

Finnick frowns. “You said you’d play all night.”

“I know,” she laughs, “But something came up.”

Finnick blinks. And he doesn’t say: you always say that. How can something always come up? I don’t think I matter to you. I think your job matters more than anyone ever could. Except for your prestige. That’s the closest thing you have to a lover. Instead, his hand seizes her wrist and he rubs a circle against the inside of it.

“I’ll stay with you?”

She shakes her head. “It’s fine,” she says, “You’re tired. It’s just a software thing, someone’s pushing it real close to deadline and realised that they f*cked up. And that I’m an insomniac.”

“You were about to carry me like you did when I was a kid.”

“Hate to tell ya,” and Celeste doesn’t have to be looking at her to hear the sh*t-eating grin, “But that ain’t that long ago. And you’ll always be a little sh*t.”

Chapter 11: Sober Intentions

Chapter Text

Despite his best intentions and all of Effie’s stubbornness, Haymitch Abernathy relapses.

And for better or worse, Effie isn’t the first call. Haymitch, after gagging on the first sip but necking it anyways, staggers in front of Catalina Cain’s office and hammers his fist against the door, splintering it. Pinprick splatters of blood dot the white door and his knuckles when Catalina, red-rimmed eyes and shaky hands, wrenches it open.

The fight melts out of her as her intelligent eyes drink him in, instantly putting two and two together. Haymitch isn’t some complicated equation. She’s not even looking at fractions.

She opens the door wide enough for him to walk in on unsteady feet and she pushes an orthopaedic desk chair in front of him.

“Sit down,” she orders.

“Catia,” he pleads.

“Sit down first,” she repeats, then sighs: “I’m not going to yell. That would make me a bitch.”

She sits down across from him, on her desk. She pushes a stack of papers to the side, and they topple. “I’ll get those later,” she assures him, “They’re not important.”

“Didn’t you say that everything on your desk was important? I think you said that last week.”

She scoffs. “My priorities have shifted in that week.”

“Fair enough.”

He meets her big brown eyes.

“I don’t know why I did it, Catia,” he tells her, “I know I shouldn’t have done it. Now I want to get drunk. But I don’t. I don’t want to get drunk. I thought I could be proud of myself—”

“Haymitch,” she interrupts, “Effie would punch me in the face if she heard me say this, so please don’t snitch on me, but I don’t think that you could have done anything other than drink tonight. And you have plenty to be proud of.”

“Catia—”

“No,” she continues, “Shut up. I have a thought.”

Catalina steeples her hands and stares at the wall.

“I killed Tiberius Snow with a toilet seat lid,” she says after a beat of silence, “Would it make you feel better if I told you about the time I killed Tiberius Snow with a toilet seat lid?”

“… you’re such a weird person, Catia.”

Catalina huffs. “I didn’t ask you for an analysis, Haymitch. I asked you if it’d distract you from your own problems to hear about someone f*cking around and finding out.”

“Okay.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Tell me about the time that you killed Tiberius Snow with a toilet seat lid.”

Catalina bites her lip. Breathes in. “I didn’t mean to do it,” she says, “I didn’t mean to do it in the way where you don’t mean to end up bad, or unwell. You walk the border between Heaven and Hell, and you end up sauntering vaguely downwards. I didn’t wake up that morning and thought that I’d kill Tiberius Snow, and certainly not that I would do it with a toilet seat lid. I don’t even remember all of it, because I’d just gotten drunk and killed Magnus Abel. And piked his head. Which kind of f*cked with my head for a bunch of reasons.”

Catalina tips her head up to bask in the morning sunlight slowly announcing itself, the silver of her inner earpiece glimmering as she shifts. Haymitch still thinks it looks like she poured liquid metal straight into her ear and waited for it to solidify. “He tried to cheat on his wife with me,” Catalina continues, “They never finalised the divorce, and I never wanted him. And I was a traitor, who’d be killed by both sides, but he still wanted to f*ck me.”

Catalina Cain is turning thirty next year. If the Capitol she was born into still stood, she would have been getting married exclusively so people would stop calling her a crone or a hag or making up rumours about why she couldn’t find someone to marry. She’d probably have married Seneca Crane, but she wouldn’t have taken his surname. Or she’d at least have hyphenated them, and Seneca would be Seneca Crane-Cain, too. And he would probably have been happy about it, knowing him as briefly and falsely as Haymitch did.

Part of Haymitch wishes that he could have known Seneca Crane, long-term partner of Catalina Cain instead of Seneca Crane, Head Gamemaker. Catalina’s got a wobbly, homegrown S tattooed on the finger that Seneca should have been thrusting up, his wrapped around her wrist, to show off her glimmering engagement ring as he grinned about her finally saying yes. Cinna had a matching one. Tiberius never had a chance.

Haymitch tells Catalina this, because he thinks she deserves to know.

“Everyone who mattered knew that Tiberius didn’t stand a chance,” he says, “That you never wanted to touch him.”

She snorts.

“I’m not insecure about that,” she explains, “I hated his guts. I thought he was a slimebag. I just think that he’s such a f*cking asshole. He had a wife, and I never reciprocated any of his advances for fifteen years. As soon as he has a chance, when his divorce isn’t even finalised, he’s down to f*ck me even though it’ll look horrible for his own case, because no matter who wins, I’m a traitor. But I’m not, am I? Traitors get hung in public. I’m down bad, crying at the gym but still doing those one-armed push-ups and eating horrible protein yogurt or overnight oats for breakfast, smelling my neighbour frying eggs and sausages and silently thinking about setting him on fire for minding his own business and enjoying his life.”

“Catalina?”

“I think I’d have completely fallen off the wagon if you’d actually died.”

“What? Shut the f*ck up. You shouldn’t have come to my office, I’m avoiding rehab like it’s the f*ckin’ plague even though my court-mandated therapist for my court-mandated talk therapy is always on my ass about it, because she thinks I’m developing an unhealthy relationship to substances. The only reason I think she hasn’t clocked that it ain’t a new thing is because I waste everyone’s time and money and don’t talk in therapy. I’m not a good influence.”

“Do you remember when you told me that you didn’t think there was such a thing as bad thoughts?”

She rakes a hand through her hair, fingers twitching like she’s aching for the neck of a bottle. Haymitch is sure that she’s got one in a desk drawer or nailed under the floorboards if Deleon was serious about confiscating the bottles in her office. She’d actually been the one to ask him to do it, because “Deleon, darling, I’m going to cuss you out, but I can’t let myself get sloshed”. And knowing Deleon, Deleon probably did what she asked him to do.

“I remember the broad strokes,” she finally says, and it sounds a lot like she remembers it all, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. But she didn’t say those words, so Haymitch continues:

“You told me that you didn’t really believe that words or thoughts mattered as much as people said they did, because you’d seen a whole lot of people who were full of a whole lot of sh*t, saying a whole lot of lovely words and plans that they never saw through. You said that the only thing that properly spoke for people were their actions.”

She glares at him. “Where are you going with this? Weren’t I the person who was supposed to comfort you?”

Haymitch shrugs. “I’m not saying anything, I’m not going anywhere.”

“You better not be trying to imply that I’m f*cking up enough at my job that my therapist doesn’t need me to talk to figure out that I have a minor substance abuse problem, of multiple substances. Because you know that’s bullsh*t. That’s not why I use. And it’s not where I use. I’m good at working. It’s all the other sh*t.”

“Nah,” Haymitch laughs, “I’m an engaged man who’d like to live to see my wedding. And you’d knife me in the throat if I said sh*t like that about you and it wasn’t in jest. I wouldn’t have to haunt you. Effie would come at you with the kitchen cleaver screeching something along the lines of goddammit Catalina! Why don’t you have a middle name so I can truly express my fury at your actions!!!”

Catalina leans back on her palm, laughing.

“I can see it,” she says through gasps, “I can totally see it. I’ve got to get on that.”

“On what?”

“On getting a middle name, of course. Can’t rob Effie of the simple pleasure of yelling my full legal name so everyone knows I’m getting a verbal ass-beating.”

Haymitch snorts. “It’s the right thing to do. You’re such a good, courteous person, Catia. Like how you drag Plutarch into the meeting rooms to yell at him now instead of doing it in front of God and employees.”

Catalina rests her elbows against her knees and sits with her head in her hands.

“Catalina?”

“Yeah?”

“The only reason I brush my teeth is so my therapist won’t know that I’m struggling with simple tasks.”

“Weird flex. Do continue.”

“Weird kid. Continuing. It’s one of those simple, clockwork kinds of tasks that good, earthly citizens do. And it’s strange thinking of myself as someone who cares about that stuff. Someone who wants to be in that crowd. But I do. And it’s not just so Effie doesn’t complain when I try to kiss her, because I eat so much garlic that she complains anyways, even if I’m brushing my teeth twice a day and not chasing every thought with liquor.”

Catalina’s lip quirks upwards. “Classy.”

“You know why I came here?”

“Because I’m an insomniac with nothing better to do than remind you that your life could be worse and you could be a bigger asshole?”

“Catalina, you better be joking.”

“Kind of.”

He reaches over to pull her hand to him, clutching it with both of his.

“I care about you, you know that, right? You act like a f*cking idiot most of the time, trying to pretend that you can’t see that people care about and want you in their life, but I do. I want both of those things. I want to care about you, and I want you in my life. For many reasons. But one of them is that there’s things I can only talk about with you. And maybe that’s not fair to you, but I try not to think about it.”

Catalina shrugs. “Eh,” she offers, “My parents beat you to the punch. There’s not really something that you do that I consider too much for me, because then I’d just walk away. They didn’t really give a sh*t about what was fair for me, so I’ve gotten good at holding other people’s problems. It’s an art.” She winks.

He rubs a circle against her jutting knuckles. “One of the things I like about you is that you don’t pity me.”

“Why would I?”

He rolls his eyes. “Because everyone does. You took me seriously, back then, too. For years, when very few other people did. And vanishingly few of them were of your calibre, in the glittering prime of their lives and all that other bullsh*t the tabloids wrote next to those pictures of your camera-ready smile that always kind of creeped me out because you don’t actually smile like that.”

“I thought I could tell you that I f*cked up tonight and you wouldn’t laugh or say that it was inevitable and pat me on the back in the way people do when an animal with a hole blown through it still tries to drink. And you didn’t do any of those things.”

Deleon sticks his head in.

“Catalina,” he says, “I hate to interrupt or step on your moment, but I have updates.”

Catalina quirks her brow. “You shouldn’t,” she answers, “If they’re good updates, that is. And if they’re bad, I would know already.”

Deleon sucks in a breath.

“… about the portable toilet situation.”

Catalina pinches the bridge of her nose, one hand still in Haymitch’s grip.

“Deleon,” she grits out, “I gave you complete control of the portable toilet situation because you’re the person who cares most deeply about not sh*tting in the rented portable toilets and we here at the Cain Institute believe that you should be able to work with what you’re passionate about—”

“Don’t you dare make me sound like I have a passion for that. I have a passion for us actually getting plumbing in the building that isn’t one hundred years old and useless.”

“We have plumbing.”

“Do we have plumbing anywhere but the surgical areas and tiny ICU?”

“No, we do not. You have a point there. That’s why we got the rented toilets, so we could have time to set up the plumbing.”

“You didn’t make it better by skimping out and getting the cheap ones.”

“I’m not sure there’s a massive quality jump between rentable portable toilet companies, Deleon.”

Chapter 12: Roots

Chapter Text

Celeste’s first three months working under Caesar Flickerman were both exciting and utterly unremarkable. She didn’t think up a revolutionary TV concept and become the youngest person to ever successfully pitch it, nor did she stumble into riches or a scandalous story that she could sell—and she certainly, absolutely did not, fall in love with one of her coworkers. Which was probably good, because people had started calling that doing a Catalina Cain after she’d been spotting laughing, swinging a beer around over her head and swaying her hips to the music of her own boots, singing one of her songs as she pulled a transfixed Seneca Crane by the collar—into her inescapable orbit.

And it would be cool to be compared to Catalina, because that meant that she was occupying the same front pages claimed as basically Catalina’s front lawn by now, but she’d like to do her own things. And anyways, Catalina would just laugh and cut it out so she could keep it as blackmail for Celeste’s wedding.

Celeste just clocked in, did her job, did the jobs that everyone else tossed on her, went home. Sometimes she’d buy herself a pint of ice cream instead of dinner because she deserved it, and the calories would probably even out, anyways. The Avoxes would always leave dinner out for her, but they wouldn’t comment if it was left untouched. Of course. Sometimes, Aurelia would be leaning against her window, grinning when she saw Celeste’s Flickerman-sponsored taxi (because Caesar didn’t think that she should rely on the bus) pull up. But she’d started spending a lot of time with her boyfriend, because he was working his way up to being her fiancé.

And Catalina had her own apartment, too. Which meant that she wasn’t driving home down the same street anymore. Catalina lived in the city, and Celeste hadn’t seen her come back for any other reason than picking up Celeste for their shared commute or Aurelia for a night on the town. And she refused to drive up to the house. They’d have to meet her at the end of the block.

When Celeste had pressed her on it, her knuckles had been white against the steering wheel and she’d ended up gritting out that it wasn’t her whole story to tell, but she was trying not to speak to her parents outside of strictly necessary business dealings.

“You know I’m always here for you, right? Catia?” Celeste had said.

Catalina had shook her head, chuckling low in her throat. “Yeah, yeah,” she’d assured Celeste, “I know. But it ain’t a big deal. It’s something we’ll iron out eventually, but we’re all stubborn people.” And then she’d kept driving. And she’d kept offering to pick Celeste up, despite it all. As long as Celeste found her own way back from the city, because Catalina worked late and didn’t think it was fair for Celeste to wait for her because Catalina’s hours were cruel and unpredictable.

Celeste hadn’t been successful in learning why Catalina worked such late and weird hours.

On the first day of her fourth month, Caesar asked her to meet him in his office and not tell anyone about it. Catalina told her that if any man asked to see her alone without telling anyone, Celeste should text her. Instinctively, and because she’s Catalina, so she knows all Celeste’s secrets and it doesn’t matter, because she’s Catalina—Celeste texts her.

Catalina answered: I’m glad you’re telling me. Thanks. I’ll take my lunch break to go and walk over to you. Meet you in an hour?

They worked close, but not close enough that Catalina regularly bothered to make the journey. But Celeste hadn’t really been making friends like she expected—everyone was a couple of years older than her at least, and they all had their own interesting projects going. Celeste just picked up the slack and things that everyone else dropped. They probably didn’t think that she was interesting yet and they’d be right. Because she wasn’t doing any projects of her own yet.

Sure, she’d shot back, that’d be great! You know I always love getting lunch with you.

Catalina sends her back a gif of a black cat giving a thumbs up and Celeste walks into Caesar’s office. Catalina told her to always text her, and never, ever her mother or Aurelia.

Finnick Odair is stretched out on an arsenic-green velvet couch in front of Caesar’s mahogany desk, carved legs depicting his rise to TV royalty. Celeste tries to hide her surprise. Caesar walks out of the attached bathroom; cerulean blue shimmering snakeskin boots silent against the purple carpet. He’s holding two amber crystal-cut glasses of water. He crouches down in front of Finnick and offers him one.

“Darling Celeste,” he says, wrapping Finnick’s fingers around the glass with a grimace, “Do you have Catalina Cain’s number?”

“… yeah, why would that be—”

Caesar interrupts her. “Could you call her? She usually ignores mine. Tell her that I’d really appreciate if she could take off as early as possible and pick up Finnick. Don’t scare her—it’s not an emergency, but I just know that Augustus has her doing things way beyond the scope of her paygrade and Finnick isn’t going to be on the show tonight.”

Celeste has a lot of questions about all of that, but she takes out her phone and dials Catalina’s number instead of plucking it out of her contacts or call logs. Last night, they’d been talking until late while Catalina did something with hydraulics and Celeste added to the Catalina Cain-created spreadsheet for Aurelia’s nineteenth birthday surprise.

Catalina picks up on the first ring.

“Celeste!” she practically shouts. “Are you alright?!?”

Celeste relays what Caesar told her and Catalina hisses something under her breath that’s probably, knowing Catalina, at least one cuss.

“Put me on speaker,” she demands. “I won’t say something that gets you fired, and if I do, I’ll make him regret it when I buy out his whole f*cking studio and demote him to shovelling mutt sh*t at my current job.”

“Catalina.”

“Please, Celeste.” She’s never heard Catalina sound like that before. It almost sounds like she’s pleading.

Celeste puts her on speaker.

“Caesar,” Catalina growls.

“Catalina!” Celeste protests. Finnick keeps staring at the ceiling.

“Catalina,” Caesar greets.

“I thought you told me that you’d taken out the trash,” Catalina says.

“Actually,” Caesar answers, “Hate to tell you this—but it’s your trash.”

Catalina groans. “You’re sh*tting me.”

“Despite your language that I won’t repeat, I’m not.”

“Sorry,” Catalina says instead of anything that would help Celeste figure out what the f*ck’s going on and why the f*ck she’s talking to Caesar Flickerman like they’re friends or at least united for a common cause even though they barely work in the same industry, “Thanks for handling it. I’ll go when I have my lunch break and then I just won’t come back.”

“You can do that without having to explain where you went?” Caesar probes.

“Maybe,” Catalina replies, clattering in the background like she’s gathering her things, “But I haven’t taken any days off and even Augustus f*ckin’ Knave is starting to be bitchy about it, probably because he’s figured out that it means I’m determined to overtake him someday. I’ll just tell him to go f*ck himself. He can’t fire me because I’m the only person who can fly the new hovercrafts without hitting a tree or frying myself and my cargo on the new forcefields.”

Chapter 13: Back On The Beat

Chapter Text

They’re plotting and it almost feels nostalgic. They’re on hour thirty-two and they’re trying to keep each other awake.

“If you took a shot for every bad decision you’ve ever made,” Beetee suggests, “And I mean really bad. Not just jaywalking or some sh*t like that—how drunk would you be? I’d be a bit tipsy. And remember, it’s bad, bad decisions.”

Haymitch answers:

“Wasted.”

Plutarch supplies:

“Drunk. But comfortably drunk. Maybe dancing-a-little-badly-drunk.”

“Dead.” (Catalina, whiteboard marker between her teeth, absolutely no hesitation. She uncaps the marker, flips it in her hand as she closes the distance between her and the board, then sketches over Plutarch’s very unscientifically founded gameplan.)

“Catalina,” Haymitch levels, “How long do I have to stick it out with you guys?”

Catalina circles something that Plutarch’s written in those annoyingly illegible swooping, curling cursive letters of his. “I didn’t ever say that you had to stay up with me,” Catalina answers, “You can go to bed whenever you want, old man.”

Haymitch mimics her famous huff. “That’s just you challenging me.”

She rests a hand against her hip, rolls her eyes at Haymitch before turning her attention back to Plutarch’s plan and how she’s going to shoot so many holes in it that it sinks in glorious fashion. She glares at it for a second, then seems to settle on a strategy.

“This isn’t medically founded,” Catalina states, “We should make a noncommittal statement if someone catches on, but there’s no reason that you should be shooting yourself in the foot. You’re just banking on the fact that I’m right about everything I want to be right about and wrong about everything I want to be wrong about. That’s a horribly stupid way to go about things, and it’s rather uncharacteristic for you.”

Plutarch’s tongue darts out to wet his lips and he leans back against his chair. “Maybe I just have faith in you. Maybe I think that you’re going to be right about everything you want to be right and curb-stomp everything you don’t deem acceptable because you’re Catalina Cain—”

“You can drop the flattery,” she interrupts, “Flattery isn’t what won you the revolution and your cushy spot or hot secretary. It ain’t going to win you my favour either.”

Beetee thinks about the time that he’d caught Catalina and Plutarch laughing while smoking the same cigarette, how Plutarch had squawked indignantly about Catalina hogging it when she’d been twirling it between her fingers. They’d been at a party, three years before the world blew up. She’d been swaying her hips to the music bumping from inside, and she’d snatched the cigarette right from Plutarch’s teeth with a grin when he’d, seconds previously, stolen it from her in the exact same way.

Plutarch pulls out the big guns.

“Have you told Peeta?”

Catalina glares at him.

“Nah,” she says, hand twitching against her hip, playing with the carabiner where her folded spear dangles, “I have not. I would rather watch two seagulls eat each other.”

“It’s directly impacting him,” Plutarch shoots back. Catalina rolls her eyes, scoffing.

“And when did you ever give a sh*t?”

“Some of us are trying to be better people, Catia.”

Catalina snorts.

A week ago, Beetee would probably worry about Plutarch getting stabbed, and he’d have to reason if he cared enough about Plutarch to stop Catalina from stabbing him. Now, they’re not exactly shooting the sh*t like they used to before the Quell, but they’re riling each other up for the sake of it instead of to try and win something. They used to keep each other up all night debating abstract political topics. They were both very well-read on them, even though that kind of knowledge was illegal, even for people like Catalina Cain and Plutarch Heavensbee. If Snow had been smart, he’d make it especially illegal for people like Plutarch Heavensbee and Catalina Cain.

It’s strange, but Beetee’s started looking for snippets of the Catalina he used to know in the Catalina that stands in front of him now.

Like the time that Catalina caught Haymitch eating the remains of Peeta’s weird salad after he’d fallen asleep. Catalina had leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed and rolling her eyes. She’d gestured to the bowl and asked Haymitch if he remembered that she was the one paying for the food, and that she made eight figures a year off her salary and contracts alone. And the inflation really wasn’t soaring high enough to make a dent in that. So, he had no need to eat disgusting leftovers.

He'd countered with that she chose to eat overnight oats, which was basically gruel. She’d bitched something about regaining her muscle and figure, and Beetee had thought about all the times that he’d watched her do those terrifying one-armed push-ups in the gym like she’s plotting to kill more people. Beetee doesn’t know if she has her lawyer on speed dial, and what kinds of things she might call said lawyer about. He’s pretty sure that she has a lawyer, though. She’d successfully sued Plutarch into silence and enough fear that he chose to settle the case out of court, and now Catalina Cain’s Finnick’s legal power of attorney in literally anything that she could think of instead of Annie. Which yes, is wrong in one way and thank f*cking god in many other ways.

Catalina’s good at being rich and terrifying. And a lot of people want to do a whole lot of things with Finnick Odair’s image, especially because he’s dead and can’t go out and tell them to go f*ck themselves, thanks for the money, I’m going to tell everyone that your product is sh*t because I called my rich friend and she read the contract and told me that it was the stupidest thing she’d ever seen and that you’re dipsh*ts and I can tell everyone your product is made of dead babies if I want to and still keep your money (the Haymitch Method).

Part of him thinks it’s wrong to see her as a Catalina Now and a Catalina Then, because he wouldn’t want her to see him as a Beetee Now and a Beetee Then, but he can’t help it.

Catalina Then would have snatched her guitar out of the other room and tested a couple of half-finished songs on them.

“I think one of the old Flickerman paparazzo got Peeta this morning,” says Effie, because she’s hopped up on caffeine and not afraid of a fight. Catalina sits down, straddling the office chair and rests her chin on her folded arm against the backrest. She tilts her head, catching Effie’s gaze.

“Alright, what’s it going to be?”

“What?”

“You’ve got six options, take your pick.”

Catalina stretches out her arms, counting off her fingers.

“Ditch digging, river dumping, feeding to animals, fire, acid or concrete.”

“You’re not killing a guy because he was mean to Peeta!”

“Concrete,” Effie interrupts, chuckling low in her throat, “Less messy than the other ones.” Haymitch smacks her.

“You know,” Beetee probes, “Isn’t it more important to agree on the murder method than how you’re getting rid of the body?”

“Eh,” Catalina shrugs her shoulders, “It’s shocking just how many household objects you can use to kill someone. To be honest, I kind of feel like I wasted a lot of my twenties training with various weapons when there’s sh*t like lamps just lying around, free to take and blunt force with.”

“Fair enough,” Beetee reasons, “You still have four working limbs and good lung capacity.”

Catalina answers him with a sh*t-eating grin. “You better never forget it.” She winks.

“Do you still have the old paparazzi diversion tactic?” Plutarch questions, butting his head in metaphorically and literally as he stretches across the table to test if there’s any coffee left in the pot. Beetee knows there’s not.

Catalina asks for clarification. “I had a couple,” she says, “You talking about the hose or Johanna Mason or the anti-flash fabric or the—”

“Hose.”

“Yeah, I kept the hose. I have too many good memories with that hose to throw it out.”

Catalina spins around in the chair, throwing her long legs over the side, turning her head to finger-gun at Effie. They’re all somewhere between twenty and thirty hours without sleep, and too many coffees deep. Catalina hasn’t called for someone to get more coffee, and now they’re all just trying to survive. Some better than others. Beetee’s not blessed with the same energy that he had before the Quell, and unfortunately, Catalina seems to have gone the opposite way. The spinal injury made everything feel like slogging through waist-deep, muddy water. Catalina's riding high on being able to kiss girls in public and most of the people she dislikes being dead. Understandable that they'd have different energy levels. And because Catalina's like sixteen years younger than him. He had to remind himself of that when he caught her dancing around the lab yesterday, practically bouncing as she sang along to an upbeat pop song about love making someone lethal.

“Wanna hear a song I wrote when Finnick first started seeing Annie? Mags liked it.”

“Do I? Do I really? Do I really want to hear something you wrote that Mags approved of?” (Haymitch. Having a point.)

“Hush little baby, don’t you cry,” Catalina begins to sing, her nails tapping out the melody against the tabletop and making Beetee think about how she’d have gotten District Twelve to stomp the house down with their boots in a different life, “Your sister’s got a twelve-gauge held up high.”

She grins a little to herself, her eyes slipping closed as her voice skilfully climbs through the air. “If that girl every breaks your heart, I’ll send her where the moon meets and kisses the stars.” She counts off her fingers, first four, then one. “I’ll count my blessings, count these shells—it’ll only take one to bring her down to me.”

Beetee thinks about how he knows that in Catalina’s pre-war penthouse apartment, the one that she can’t sell but doesn’t live in or rent out either, is a whole drawer of Finnick’s, and only Finnick’s, bedclothes.

Haymitch, awake for twenty-seven hours straight, had lauded Catalina as his “responsible child” and “the child I’d ask to pick me up from a colonoscopy” when she’d gone out to readjust her terrifying earpiece and order more coffee. Catalina goes to a membership-only grocery wholesaler and knows the employees at the Home Depot by name. She knows how to fix a sink and cuss out weird people following her in public. Unfortunately, she probably is the responsible child even though Beetee knows she’s eaten forcefield-fried rat and wants to try fried catfish.

Chapter 14: Reasons Why Plutarch And Catalina Would Both Be Dead And Not Just Comfortably Drunk Enough To Dance Badly, Selected Examples, Not Complete

Chapter Text

No matter what beautiful elegies Plutarch makes up in the years afterwards, the real reason for the failure of the 75^th Hunger Games was a plate of oysters served to Catalina Cain after the final Tribute interviews and the fact that she was wearing a turtleneck to hide the string of hickeys that Cressida Sallow had trailed down her throat.

And maybe the fact that as she’s skulking out of her fancy satellite office in the Training Centre, Plutarch stops her, asks her why the f*ck she’s stealing a plate of oysters. She throws up her hand and says that they’re splitting ‘em, and he gets what she means. And they both get to work. And she’s certainly not the only one who should be blamed.

1. Johanna Mason

“Catalina,” Johanna groans, “What the f*ck are you doing here? I thought that you and I agreed that we would avoid each other like the plague unless our mutual friendship with Finnick Odair forced us into social interaction?”

“sh*t, I guess I missed that memo,” Catalina says, clicking her tongue, resting the plate against her hip, “Guess I’m just going to stay the psycho bitch that no one can quite figure out how to get rid of.” She’s quoting Johanna’s own drunken vitriol, and she’s honestly not sure whether Johanna remembers it. Or remembers how she hung of Catalina’s shoulders as they staggered back to her place, and how she hadn’t known how to do anything other than vomit and apologise for every mean thing she’d said.

Catalina doesn’t care. If she did, she’d probably f*ck up and say something reckless. More reckless than straight up confessing to wanting to topple the genocidal, rapist bastard of a totalitarian dictator.

Johanna, sharp as ever, cuts to the bone. “The f*ck do you want?”

(The aforementioned.)

(But she can’t say that. Not yet.)

“I thought that you might want to catch up over some oysters.”

She offers Johanna her hand. Johanna takes it, pulls Catalina close and whispers, “You’re full of sh*t, but at least you’re honest about it. And pretty.” Oh, sh*t. Catalina can smell the alcohol off Johanna’s breath, hot against the shell of her ear. Feel the heat of Johanna’s stomach against hers. sh*t.

She can feel the muscles of Johanna’s thigh against her own, how their bodies sing together. Double sh*t.

Hey, at least hooking up with a chick wouldn’t be the worst way that she’s roped someone into rebellion. They could literally say that they consummated their agreement. Pfft. At least Catalina finds her own jokes funny. And it’s Johanna. So, it’s not like she’s a virgin. And Catalina’s not talking about sex. Johanna knows that they’re going to do something; they can’t let Katniss die in the Arena, and Snow won’t let her win a second time. Johanna just doesn’t know that they’re not just going to pull a little bait and switch, a little flick of the wrist, an oops here and there.

“We could go to mine and discuss,” she says, breathy. Breathless. Foolishly. Sometimes, she looks at Johanna and wonders if she’d have fallen in love with her in a different life. Usually, it’s right after Finnick tries to furiously remind her how similar they are, so she won’t kick Johanna in the eye. It’s not something she likes to think about, because it’s not something that she can ever have.

And she likes results. Seeing ‘em.

She’s technically got an appointment with Finnick later, so her neighbours are going to think that she’s really getting lucky tonight. Little Kitty-Cat Cain’s showing up to be a real charmer.

While she eats out Johanna, she’s called a narcissistic bitch and a hypocrite. She doesn’t get off on being demeaned but she lets Johanna, because they have unfinished business and that’s one of the reasons that they’re f*cking in the first place. They’d f*cked before, but then they’d both sworn off it because it was getting too involved. But now Johanna’s going to die, and Catalina would be a fool to deny that they look at each other like that. Thanks, Blight.

Blight’s fun. He can’t decide whether he’s trying to treat Johanna like his daughter or like a feral, mangy cat that he’s pulling out of a dumpster and trying not to get bit by. He gives her lectures about romance and what’s a good one, like it’s never occurred to him that Johanna, maybe just maybe, could be the problem. Maybe Johanna just liked charged, furious women with stitched-up foreheads and terrifying aspirations.

So, she lets Johanna tug her hair as she wishes that it was two weeks ago and all she was doing related to Johanna was writing songs.

“You’re a liar and a bitch,” Johanna gasps, close to climax. Catalina dives deeper, digging her nails into Johanna’s spread thighs. “The oysters were f*cking stupid and f*cking delicious.”

Catalina doesn’t refute this.

Why? It’s time to burn the witch. Catalina stays in position as Johanna breaks apart under her, as she eats her out, stroking her nimble fingers up and down the insides of Johanna’s thighs. Only when Johanna is breathless and slack beneath her does she rise.

“I hate you,” Johanna says as Catalina’s climbing on top of her, their noses almost touching, their harried breaths fogging up the air between them, “I hate you because I’ve ever liked f*cking men as much as I’ve liked f*cking you.”

Catalina grins, despite the tension. She’s always preened under compliments.

“I thought I liked both. I don’t. I don’t like both.” She’s bordering on hysterics.

“I like both,” she lies, and she hates herself for it. She wants to say: I know. It’s worse like this, isn’t it? It makes it real. It makes it real that the issue is with you, not him.

“I don’t love you,” Johanna says as Catalina walks her lips across Johanna’s clavicle, as Johanna grips Catalina’s ass. “I’m not in love with you, just so you know.”

“Of course, not,” Catalina agrees, “This is just fulfilling a carnal desire. You might die. And it’s not like you’re going to f*ck Cashmere, mm?”

Catalina’s practically purring. She wonders if this is how Finnick does it. She wonders if Finnick would find it funny, that Cat’s purring for Johanna Mason. That Johanna Mason’s tamed Cat. Big, bad, terrifying Cat.

“Do you want me to give you another org*sm?” she asks, even though she knows the answer. That’s another thing a man could and would never do for Johanna Mason.

Johanna nods, speech burned out of her.

“Okay,” Catalina smiles, all teeth, “Wrap your legs around me, then. I’ll make you see colours you’ll never see with someone who’s not me.”

2. Gloss Aureus

“Don’t you want to protect your sister?”

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying.”

3. Joseph “Woof” van Joof

“My name is Catalina,” she starts, standing in front of the second-oldest Tribute dragged to the Capitol, a half-deaf, completely-senile man, who’s barely able to maintain her eye contact even when she makes it easy for him by seeking it out. She decides that she’s not interested in holding it herself; after all, she’s not at a board meeting where she has to prove her worth and fierceness every second.

“I’m crazy.”

She laughs.

“You’re no crazier than me,” Catalina chuckles, right as she sits down next to Woof, their hips clinking together like the champagne glasses of her double life. She’s sure that she’d have gotten a sneer from Seneca if he’d caught her “fraternising with batsh*t”, but Seneca’s dead and the dead are just good for melancholia and lingering. He doesn’t get to make choices anymore; he doesn’t get to bitch at her for what she’s done in his absence.

Plutarch told her that Woof was a toss-up, but Catalina’s always liked betting on losing dogs. And she understands the importance of bodies. Bodies tell stories, yes, but bodies are also the only thing that can stop a spear before it hits you. She’s not going to go as hardball as Plutarch is.

She’s not going to encourage someone to kill themselves for a seventeen-year-old girl if they think they have something to live and fight for. That ain’t fair. But here’s the thing: this year, there’s not a lot of people who are willing to go through the meat grinder and come out the other end.

If you’re going to die, your death might as well serve a dual purpose. One: piss of the Districts and the socialites because from the moment that you won the Games, you didn’t belong to yourself anymore. You’re public property, and if you’re likable—you’re public property that people are invested in. And those people have money and influence.

Not a lot of people are invested in a senile old man.

Woof takes her hand in his, and she lets him. He flips it, so her palm’s upwards, and looks down into it with a strange kind of focus. Again, she lets him. He cups her hand in his, studies the lines running across it like they’re an ancient manuscript, and gently runs the sharp of his nail down her lifeline.

“Do you see anything?” she asks, genuinely curious. She’s sure that everyone who only knows one side of her would have expected her to pull her hand away in disgust, but he’s not a threat to her, and she can feel his pulse thrumming through him. It’s not going to continue like that for long.

Most Victors don’t have kids, but she’s sure that he’s had a hand in mentoring countless of Eight’s finest. And she’s sure that they care for him. He reminds her of her grandmother, and how she’d diligently do Catalina’s hair while teaching her how to flash the best you’re on camera, Catia smiles. Sometimes, if she closes her eyes, she still feels her hand on her shoulder, playfully poking her when she misses her cue.

He hums, utters something in a language she thinks only he understands, but he pats her palm, before resting her hand back down against her knee. “You can hold it if you’d like,” she insists, wondering if she’s pulling on the right thread, “I’m not offended by it.”

Woof picks up her hand again.

“I didn’t ask you to be cruel,” she continues, “I meant it. I’m curious what you’re looking at. I know that people believe in stuff like that in the Districts, but I never learned it. I barely know the right words.”

Woof continues to examine her hand, flipping it over, studying between the webbing of her fingers.

“Your lifeline is long,” he finally says, “It means that you will live.”

She chuckles awkwardly. “Thanks.”

“You’re strong,” he says, sounding like he’s repeating himself, “You’re young.”

She chuckles again. “I’m not sure I feel all that young.”

He pokes—rather forcibly, he’d have unbalanced her if she didn’t see his shaky finger coming—her breast. “You have a fire,” he asserts, “And bruises of honour.”

She laughs. “Yeah, duh,” she answers playfully, “You just gave me one.”

Woof fiddles with her ring.

She pulls her hand back.

4. Finnick Odair

Finnick’s head is on her chest, and she’s trying to memorise all the little hitches of his breath when he decides to ruin it by interrogating her.

“What’s your role in all of this?”

She breathes out. Wills him to do the same.

“Focus on your own, I’ve got me.”

He doesn’t.

“Catalina.”

“Okay, okay. sh*t. Don’t look at me like that.”

“I kind of have to, because I think that you’re going to be stupid.”

“C’mon, Finn. I’m Catalina Cain. I don’t know how to be stupid.”

“So, if you don’t know how to be stupid, tell me what you, one of the people with the best positions possible, are doing in Plutarch’s f*cking suicide plot.”

“Don’t be mean to Plutarch, he’s actually kind of thought this through.”

“Catalina.”

“I even helped.”

“Catalina!”

“Fine. I’m going to be the one who steals the hovercraft—”

“What!?”

“—Listen, listen to me for a minute. I’m the only one who knows how to actually fly it. So, here’s the plan: I sneak into the bay, liquidate one of our mid-ranges, just good enough to get to Thirteen, bad and old enough that it doesn’t have a hundred security measures I need to disarm first or a f*cking embedded geotag—”

Finnick’s wide eyes meet hers.

“And then, I just saunter down to Command, initiate a timed maintenance shutdown of our airspace warning system, of course, that’s not really my job but hey! I have the keys. And then I run back. Because I’m the only one who can fly that thing without hitting a tree. So, I’ll see you.”

“Cat—”

“I swear, I’m not f*cking with you. I wouldn’t trust Plutarch to fly all the way to Thirteen. C’mon, man. You’ve seen how he drives. No f*cking way.”

He reaches for her hand. She lets him.

“You know that I love you, right? I don’t want a revolution if it’s without you.”

It’s the kind of thing that someone tells you and you feel all warm inside, or at least vindicated in your necessary actions. That’s not how she feels. Something inside of her curls up and dies.

“I know.”

She squeezes his hand.

“I don’t know how to live without you.”

He squeezes back.

“You do.”

“Cat—”

“Please.”

A moment passes.

Finnick makes himself comfortable against her chest, grips her hand tightly like he’s never going to let her go. Like they’re going to have to drag him from her arms.

“Catia?”

“Yes?”

“I think that the world was made so we could find each other in it.”

Catalina blinks back tears, and through them, she says: “Don’t say sh*t like that, Finn. It makes it sound like what happened was okay.”

“Maybe it was. I still have you. You still have me. We’ll get through the new world, too, if we stick together.”

Catalina grits her teeth. Lies straight through them as she squeezes his hand in kind.

“You’re right,” she laughs to herself, “Of course, of course. You’re right. You’re so right. You’re always right. We’ll be just fine, because all we gotta do is stick together. We go together like a bow and a fiddle.”

She tilts her head to bury her chin in his hair, breathing him in—and for a moment, she imagines it clearly: the worst thing. She imagines herself, sitting straight-backed in a stiff chair, where Finnick’s going to hear that she’s died: but it’s not her, it’s him. And she’s alone, even with Cinna’s hand steady against her shoulder. She feels terrible for being grateful that he’s going to be the one left behind, but she knows that he’ll climb out with much more grace than she could ever dream of.

And for now, she’s still alive, and he’s still with her, so she lets her eyes slip closed.

5. Gloss Aureus (Reprise)

He should be proud: not a lot of people can say that they’ve made Catalina Cain jump. But Gloss did. And now he’s standing behind her, looking like he’s walked to his own execution and not into her office at the middle of the night. She quirks her brow, rests a hand against her hip.

“Why are you visiting me in the middle of the night, Gloss?”

Despite the character he plays on TV and his years of experience, he flounders under her gaze. She’d like to think of it as a compliment towards something of hers. She doesn’t know if she wants to be proud of scaring people anymore, but she knows that it’s one of her most useful qualities. After all, her parents always tried to cut the rebellion out of her while leaving the iciness intact.

“I didn’t expect you’d actually be here,” he tries. She rolls her eyes. She hasn’t really spoken to him since she was barely eighteen, and there’s a reason that she hadn’t fought Plutarch that hard over his insistence that he’d do Gloss. He’s a bully and he’s brainwashed, even though Catalina feels bad for him.

“But you still came down here, so you had to have a reason even if you’re chickensh*t at me actually being here. I have my reasons to take up insomnia, and I’m sure you do, too.” She clicks her nails, breathes out like she’s taking a drag of a cigarette (and she really, really f*cking wants a cigarette, but she could still realistically be caught by Finnick and would have to admit that she hadn’t fully kicked the habit.) “Let’s do each other a favour and leave it at that.”

She leans against her desk, lets out a tired but frigid sigh. “So, what can I do for you, Gloss?”

She remembers how she’d told him that she planned to marry Seneca, and she remembered how he’d glanced at her last year, when Seneca’s death was hastily swept under the rug and Caesar Flickerman spent more time talking about Katniss Everdeen’s dress than why Catalina Cain was standing alone during the Victory Parade.

“I want to repeat the double victory of last year with Cashmere,” he says, stiff as a board, “And Plutarch tried to bribe me into some bullsh*t scheme, but I don’t trust him. I don’t trust any of you—”

(Briefly, she wonders if Gloss is going to snitch on Plutarch. Briefly, she wonders why she feels a pang in her chest at the thought, at how she’s quickly considering whether she could take the fall for Plutarch. She feels like she should be wearing red and she should be one year in the past.

But of course, Gloss is a Career. He’s not going to anger the people holding his life in the balance. He knows how to market himself, even with, as Catalina notices when she looks at him properly, red-rimmed eyes and ever-so-slightly smudged makeup.)

“—But if I die, I have a large estate, Catalina. A very large estate. I’ve worked for it. Cashmere won’t need all of that money.” He narrows his eyes as his voice takes on a guarded, dangerous quality as he meets her. “I’ve saved, you know. All of the work I’ve done hasn’t been for nothing.”

She nods. She knows where he’s going. She manages to hide her disgust at his obvious misunderstanding of her because it’s what she does every f*cking day, and there’s things she’s going to miss about this life, but her persona isn’t one of them even though there’s safety in the shield it provides.

“I know that all people like you care about is money—”

(Ouch, Gloss. Ouch.)

“—make sure Cashmere wins if I can’t, and she won’t care if you take what you want. I don’t trust Plutarch, but I trust you more than anyone else here—”

(And she’s never going to forget what he said next nor the conviction in his voice as he did.)

“—because you’ve never lied to me.”

(And she’ll never forgive herself for what she says next, either.)

She reaches her hand out, offers it to him. Lies through her f*cking teeth. “You have a deal.”

6. Seneca Crane

“I’m sorry for what I did,” she says, sinking into the dirt by the tree where she’d carved his initials the same night that she’d tattooed them on the finger he was supposed to slip a wedding band onto. She slips the ring off her finger, really properly looks at them for the first time in a long time. S. Not S.C.

Catalina Cain, forever the property of a dead man. Look! She’s even branded.

She rests her forehead against the bark, breathes in.

“And I don’t just mean for this. I’m sorry you never knew. I’m sorry I never had the balls to learn whether you would despise me for rebelling.”

“I’m sorry for wanting to destroy what you spent your life building from the moment you began,” she continues, eyes burning with tears threatening her with their fall, “I should have told you back when I’d just turned eighteen. I should have told you then. But I was afraid.”

She strokes her hand across the base of the tree, imagining his hand against her shoulder, imagining leaning into him when she’s stumbling home drunk, imagining sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor ten years ago and finally telling him about what she’d seen and why she couldn’t stay still anymore.

No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark, he’d told her once. She’d been drinking herself into a stupor because she’d been twenty-three and everyone she knew was going home for the holidays, had gotten gold-embossed invites to their parents’ house and all she had to speak for the fact that she still had two living parents was that their butler had called her to ask if she planned to use a f*cking parking spot. On her twenty-sixth birthday, she’d called Seneca her home.

(No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.)

When she was a girl, she had the foolish dream that she’d run across the border and find more survivors. She’d throw herself at them, begging them to take her into their arms. She’d try to sell herself as someone worthy of salvation, she’d say I matter enough that I cannot return, I ran as soon as I could, I ran at the first sign of you. I saw the smoke and I came. Please.

She never did it as a girl, even though she couldn’t see herself growing old in Panem. She couldn’t even see herself turning sixteen in Panem. Or eighteen. Or twenty-two. Or twenty-eight.

Once, she’d been thirteen and chewing on the flame.

Now, she’s twenty-seven and her birthday’s still four weeks after the Hunger Games are reaped. And she’s been carrying the national anthem between her teeth for so long that there’s no space anymore. No space for another song, no space for another tongue (there’s barely space for her own) and especially no space for another language. The shame that surrounds her threatens to engulf herself every time she climbs up something tall and looks out at the flickering lights of Panem, and consuming darkness beyond it.

If she could, she would take the first plane out of there. If she could, she would tear up and eat her passport until she’s bloated with a language she can’t afford not to forget. But she can’t just swallow up her shame, she can’t forget that she’s from Panem. She thinks, if she could run, she would be climbing up something tall, someplace else, and she would be looking towards Panem. And she would be thinking about the fact that even in another land, her birthday would still be four weeks after the Hunger Games were reaped.

7. Pyrena Tress

Tigris told her that she hadn’t always been a mansion on fire, but she’d always been full of light. Constellations are named after either wild, all-consuming heroes or wild, all-consuming griefs. It feels fitting, because she feels that the outpour of emotions within her is ancient, bronze-tipped and earth-changing. Sometimes, she tips her head back and watches the sky. Two weeks ago, a surge of solar energy f*cked with the earth’s magnetic field and she could see the aurora borealis from her office window. She’d climbed onto the roof and goaded Deleon into joining her, even though he’s afraid of heights.

He'd clutched the railing, staggering across as Catalina ran on light feet.

“Catalina!” he’d shouted. “Wait for me!”

Catalina grinned, giggling, and thought about when she’d still been underage and snuck into a club with Seneca and Aurelia. She’d co*cked her hip, rested a hand against it and used the other one to pull Seneca by the collar, laughing that, “Dudes, we did not go through the hassle of getting these damn-good fake IDs to not dance to this crappy old jukebox.”

Tigris told her that when she met Finnick, she missed the bus. Catalina had tilted her head and asked her what the f*ck that was supposed to mean. Tigris had explained that from that moment, Catalina’s twenties weren’t regular. And it wasn’t that she threw away her carefree twenties, but she didn’t live them either. Catalina had scoffed and called Tigris a dipsh*t, because she loved her twenties. She’d been twenty-one, and everyone had still been alive. Including herself.

It'd been when she’d told Aurelia that she knew ten different ways to say sunset, and Aurelia had gripped her cheeks in her hungry hands and said that Catalina’s face was wearing all of them.

Two years ago, she’d met up with Magnus Abel at a disgusting bar because she didn’t know what to do with herself and she hated it, but he’d probably be able to tell her something of at least medium value. She’d sat on the table and he’d sat on one of the stools like a good citizen. When she walked in, he lit a cigarette and yelled across the bar that the only difference between smoking and kissing someone who smokes is the way mouths collide before death sits in your lungs like an abandoned city. Everyone laughed for some reason and Catalina strode across, snatching the cigarette from his greasy hands and taking a long drag, blowing out the smoke right in his face.

Catalina wiped someone else’s lip-gloss from her cheek as she sat down. And Magnus had looked at her like he’d known damn well. It’d been the end of another summer where she’d slept on her couch for days only allowing another body to interrupt for long enough so their limbs would tangle up like the weeds growing up through the cracks in the concrete, or between the wooden boards of the porch that she’d never pluck out until she was selling the house and punishing herself.

She’s engraved a C.I. on the tree, too. She sits in front of it more than she should, especially since she doesn’t really like visiting that place anymore. She sits cross-legged in front of it and rests her forehead against the bark and tries to imagine that she’s anyone but herself.

Deleon raps his knuckle against the door, hard and insistent. Catalina looks at the clock. It’s a little past nine, and he shouldn’t be optimistic enough to try and get her to leave yet. She’s got an actual legitimate reason to be in the office late in the evening tonight.

“Come in,” she says, instead of f*ck off.

“I caught an Avox stealing antibiotics from the dumpster,” Deleon says, “I didn’t know what to do.”

“Leave ‘em alone,” Catalina groans, “That’s why we put the unexpired, but about at their limit, antibiotics into that dumpster and don’t lock it. A whole lot of people have choice opinions about accepting things from me, but they’ll root through my trash and think that they’re f*cking me over or something, but if that’s what it takes for someone not to die of a completely preventable cause, well, that’s fine. I don’t give a sh*t if they see me as some vapid dipsh*t that throws out perfectly good stuff—”

“That’s not the issue,” Deleon interrupts, “The issue is that I’m dead sure they’re one of Pyrena’s. And I’m dead sure they’re still one of Pyrena’s.”

Catalina narrows her gaze. “Pyrena is supposed to, like everyone else, be phasing out her Avoxes.”

“I overheard her yelling at them on the phone.”

“They’re an Avox,” Catalina says, “They couldn’t even answer her.”

“It was very obvious that she’s not putting any of her “former” Avoxes into any of the programmes that she claims to have signed them up for.”

“Did she sign them up for any of the Cain Institute’s offerings?” Catalina questions, “We could cross-reference attendance logs. Are you sure it was Pyrena?”

“I’d recognise that annoying voice anywhere. And I went to a couple of her benefits before the Fall of the Capitol, just because I’d been invited and it was polite, you know. And I’d recognise her Avoxes, too.”

“Why the f*ck is Pyrena sending her Avoxes to dig through my garbage? It had to be for a purpose. Was it the actual dumpsters or the false dumpsters where there’s no actual dangerous medical waste?”

In her stomach, where a sinking pit has quickly settled, she knows exactly what Deleon’s going to answer. “The false ones,” he agrees, “I waited to see if they’d go for the other ones, but they didn’t. It’s like they knew exactly what they were looking for. And they did, because Pyrena was yelling at them about exactly what she wanted.”

Catalina says what they’re both thinking. “Pyrena’s never forgiven me for her ex-husband wanting me, even though I never reciprocated any of his advances and repeatedly told him to f*ck off into the sun—”

“—why the f*ck would she be getting her Avoxes to root through my garbage?”

Chapter 15: Osseointegration Preface

Chapter Text

Catalina doesn’t waste any time when Haymitch clicks the door open.

“Sit your ass down here,” she half-orders, gesturing to something that looks more like a padded bench than appropriate furniture for a hospital. He knows that she’s been bitching about the lack of wholesalers willing to sell her furniture that can handle regular bleaching-within-an-inch-of-its-life.

Haymitch has been dragged to Catalina’s office by Peeta under the pretences of Catalina still kind of scaring the sh*t out of him—which, Haymitch at first completely supports and agrees with because Catalina has kind of scared the sh*t out of him for the better part of ten years but as soon as Catalina’s kneeling in front of Peeta and measuring his stump, even though Peeta doesn’t look to like Catalina’s icy hands on him, he’s grabbing for the manila folder of sketched-out concepts for prosthetics that she practically flung at him.

Haymitch thinks that Peeta just wanted company, which would be fine if they weren’t in Catalina’s office. Haymitch likes Catalina. He really does. But she’s terrifying in her office. Catalina’s great. When she’s not on the clock and trying to use it to outrun her personal problems.

“This one looks like the one I had in the Capitol,” Peeta says as Catalina frowns at something on the holo attached to her wrist—Haymitch’s gotten proficient at parsing Catalina’s displeasure, so he knows it’s nothing serious. It’s probably a material shortage that she can easily solve by being scary, Plutarch generally just existing or a slight miscalculation that irks her because she’s a terrifying perfectionist.

If it was something serious, she wouldn’t be freaking out because she’s a brick wall who considers emotions to be a moral failing, but she’d at least let out a low, breathy “f*ck” before rolling up her sleeves and going to deal with it. So, Haymitch doesn’t worry about it. Catalina considered a bomb threat a minor nuisance because “that type of bomb isn’t possible to make so it looks like the one on the photo, either he’s full of sh*t or it’s an intentional dummy. And I’ve made small talk with this man. He’s not that smart and I could beat him into a coma or death on a Monday with a mop bucket if he actually shows up in the lobby”.

“That’s true,” Catalina answers instead, “I don’t think that it’s very practical for the kind of life that you want to live, but it’s an option and so it should be included on the list, if you want it for whatever reason. You have every option that I could think up at your fingertips.”

“You’d be right,” Peeta quickly agrees, “But now I’m curious about it. It looks more like a real leg under clothes than the others ever will, right?”

Catalina clicks her tongue, pulls herself off the ground, seemingly satisfied with whatever amount of data she’s gathered after fondling what remains of Peeta’s leg for an awkward five minutes. He knows she’s going to go to the basem*nt and be able to produce a leg that’ll fit from pure memory, which is another terrifying thing about Catalina Cain.

“That’s correct,” she states, no inflection in her voice, “But it’ll still stick out like a sore thumb to anyone who knows what they’re looking for because while it’s pretty when standing, it’s not designed for anything other than looking pretty. I’m sure you realised yourself how sh*tty it is to walk with one. It’s not much better than a peg leg, which annoys me because that made you think that was the best thing that the Capitol—and therefore me—could do. It’s insulting to my skills and I appreciate that you’re giving me a chance to rectify that.” She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and it’s obvious that it’s in smug satisfaction.

Haymitch is pretty sure that Catalina knew Peeta shouldn’t ever have survived. Chaff confessed on the night of the Quell that he’d talked to Catalina about it and she’d been touchy, but honest about the fact that “yes, there’d been personal consequences. Yes, I would do it again.”

She rests a hand against her hip, shifts her weight like she’s been challenged and she’s considering taking someone to the floor. “The truth of the matter is that Snow didn’t see it as worth the investment for me to actually show off my skills in creating functional design, so I’m very happy that you’re giving me a second chance to prove myself, again.”

“I mean, you’re kind of the only option, aren’t you?”

Catalina barks out a startled laugh. “Absolutely.”

“So,” she continues, shifting the topic back to the manila file that Peeta’s gripping, “I think the most important part of any development process is figuring what the goals for the aid is, so—” she bites her lip, “—what do you want to do with your life?” She winks, and Peeta sputters.

“Of course,” she adds, “I don’t mean anything deep like your life’s purpose or some sh*t, I’m not even sure that I’ve found that and I’ve had so many drunken epiphanies, you know. So, I mean stuff like whether you want to be really active or if you want to paint landscapes all day so you need more stability standing than you really need to be able to run fast. You can also have a leg where you can change the attachments, but some of them require surgery.”

“Surgery?” Haymitch butts in, “How could you do surgery on a prosthetic—”

“Osseointegration,” Catalina interrupts, biting the cap off a whiteboard marker, “I don’t think you want me to explain it to you, but I really want to explain it to you.”

Peeta, seemingly excited by Catalina’s abject snarkiness and lack of considerable bedside manner (which is strange: Haymitch remembers her being decent, but he supposes that was before she’d been captured and tortured by her employers, that’s bound to make anyone a little icy), questions her further: “Could you make it waterproof?”

Catalina, writing something down on an honest-to-god real notepad with a real pencil instead of something holographic, hums in what Haymitch assumes is affirmation or approval. Chaff used to communicate almost exclusively in grunts: Haymitch’s gotten good at parsing socially inept scary people.

“Really? Thirteen said—”

“Thirteen, for all of their efforts, are incompetent when it comes to rehabilitation of any kind because they’re surprised when their soldiers survive.” Catalina’s tone is biting, like when she whisper-hisses at Plutarch because she’s trying not to yell in the hallways and Haymitch wonders if she’s got “beef” (thanks for the slang, Johanna) with someone else in Thirteen. Or just the medical field. He knows she’s gone on the record to say that she’ll bash Doctor Aurelius’ brains in with a stapler if he keeps telling her she should do more therapy than she currently is.

He feels like Catalina and Aurelius would either get absolutely wasted together or would regularly engage in knife fights. He doesn’t know why he thinks this: it just makes sense.

“It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s absolutely possible. And it’s just a pain in the ass because of engineering and material acquisition, and because I’m Catalina Cain, that’s not an issue.”

Her phone rings—a sharp, blaring medley of irritating horns that sound nothing like the national anthem (Haymitch is grateful—he knows that Catalina’s got notoriously black humour, but it’d be the worst time for them to learn that she assigns Panem’s former glory to people she doesn’t like) and Catalina rolls her eyes but makes no move to take it.

“Your phone is ringing,” Peeta says, “I wouldn’t mind if you take it.”

“It’s Plutarch,” Catalina answers simply, “And I don’t want to scare you when I inevitably lose my composure. Because all I do recently is yell increasingly creative insults and threats at him.”

“I can handle it,” Peeta insists, looking a little put-upon, “In fact, I’d love some tips on how to hand Plutarch his ass on a silver platter.”

“Alright,” Catalina shrugs, “It’s your funeral. Watch and learn, boy.”

She grins as she clicks onto the call, resting her phone against the shell of her ear. “Plutarch,” she purrs but there’s absolutely no seduction intended in her tone, “I want to know what you think is so important that you want to interrupt my work. Did you finally drop dead?” Catalina sounds like the visual of a beast silently approaching you from behind.

“Don’t call me Catia,” she snarls, leaning against her desk, “Thank you, now get to singing. You have one minute to plead your case before I hang up exclusively because that I respect the fact that your position may in fact produce something of importance to me and I would like to assume that Paylor wouldn’t give that aforementioned important position to someone who doesn’t know just how much my time costs. And Deleon tells me I should be nicer.”

Haymitch shares a look with Peeta.

Haymitch nods when Peeta whispers whether Catalina’s always been such an asshole. She has, just in different ways. Finnick insists that Catalina’s a sweetheart, and Haymitch has to admit that she has her likeable moments—but this is still a woman who finds great pleasure in watching fires that she’s set consume houses that she doesn’t like.

“Hm,” she agrees, “I’ll f*ck that man up and wear him like a sweater if that’s the only issue standing in the way of my funding. Thank you for informing me of the jammed cog in the machine that I have to hammer smooth. I don’t give a sh*t about what Pyrena Tress is doing if it’s not choking. And I don’t know why you’re asking me if I’d be angry if you went to one of her things. They’re obnoxious charity and her trying to both remind the world that she’s Tiberius Snow’s ex-wife and desperately trying to run away from it so she doesn’t get lynched. Or like, brag about it? I can’t figure it out. But it’s one of those look at me, I’m Tib’s ex-wife, or maybe I’m still his wife if you’d prefer that, because our divorce never got finalised because Catalina Cain beat him to death. I’m whatever will get me a leg up, baby.”

“Oh,” she laughs, all danger, “This isn’t me appreciating your existence, you dickless coward. This is me telling you that I’m not going to punish you for calling me or charge your boss for my time.”

Catalina hangs up.

Rolls her eyes, stretches her back until it cracks and groans audibly as she rakes her hands through her gelled hair. And then she goes back to her notepad with a small huff.

“I thought you did this stuff for free,” Peeta says as Catalina sketches. Haymitch isn’t sure about the inflection in his voice until he remembers that Catalina had been the one who’d synthesised the drugs used to hijack Peeta, and he might be sore about the thought that she’s making a lot of money in the aftermath. Catalina doesn’t look up from her diagrams, but she acknowledges him with a hum and a quirk of her lip.

“It’s not a propagandist lie that I treat people for free,” she admits, “But I’m salaried and I charge for my time if you’re going to waste it like Plutarch’s fond of doing. I don’t make any money off my patents that actually help humanity, because I give them free to anyone who proves to me that they can produce the material and that they’re not going to profit insanely off it. I’ve kept the stupid sh*t, like cosmetics, and I use that money to fund what we do here that the government doesn’t deem essential.”

“So, you’re not going to bill the state for any of what we’re doing but you’re going to demand money for a six-minute phone call with Plutarch?”

Catalina nods. “Yep. Pretty much. I’m hoping it eventually either works as a lesson or simply just a deterrence.”

Chapter 16: It's Celeste! (Reprise)

Chapter Text

I didn’t really expect to end up in the neighbouring cell to Catalina Cain’s. I mean, I didn’t make bombs or horrifying wolves or blow up sisters or anything like that. But I did. And Catalina—I don’t know if they fried her brain or something—but she’s so f*cking pathetic that it almost, very briefly, made me forget who she actually is and what she’s done. She’s probably doing it on purpose. The rebels have a lot of issues with her, and I think they’re right for it.

I don’t support the rebels and I’m honest about it—but I accept that they won, that President Snow and the Capitol that I grew up in fell. Even if I don’t politically agree with them, I have to live in their system because that’s what won. The people of Panem, and more Capitol folks than I thought would, made a decision and we have to work with it. I’m good at that—working through other people’s terrible choices and the consequences of them.

Catalina spends most of her time in prison terrifying the guards through either being the kind of psychopath who spits her own blood at people, or telling them her war stories. She describes torture in details, that’s for sure. And old habits die hard, so I spend most of my time shouting at her to shut the f*ck up, because listen—it’s one thing being in prison, but it’s a whole other punishment being in prison next to the person you hate more than anyone else. She faked her death like three times. Couldn’t one of those times have actually been for real?

If she’d died, I wouldn’t even have told anyone what she’d done to my sister. I’d have let her be a martyr. Or, I would have, as long as they didn’t make any annoying statues of her that I’d have to look at when I was jogging. Because yeah, she was a bitch, but people f*cked up and cared about the bitch. And I’m not like her. I get that people matter to people, and it’s important to respect that. It’s one of the things that Caesar taught me, and I want to keep him alive. It’s all we’ve got.

Chapter 17: Black Lung

Chapter Text

Gale Hawthorne never apologises to Catalina Cain for giving her two black eyes, but he does show up unannounced in her office when he hears that she’s not opposed to Peeta Mellark going back to Twelve. Catalina Cain has always told the truth, unless she’s had a good reason not to. This does not change through torture, starvation, loss, and the kind of mild insanity you’re often stuck with when you’re staggering back from a burning house of love with a match and the faint slick of gasoline in the webbing between your fingers.

“Cain,” Gale growls, and she rolls her eyes. She’s not sorry that he had to see what she’d done to people, because he got her back for it and he got her good. He’s got a lethal right hook, and she told him so, head spinning on the floor, black spots doing the salsa in the corners of her flickering vision. The rebels didn’t set her back on fire and pour ice salt into it, so they’ve got that going for them. They didn’t shoot out her knee, either. If she was angry at someone for any of her physical injuries, it wouldn’t be the rebels. Most of them were kids thrown into a meat grinder and hoping that the idealism would keep them burning long enough to die in useful ways.

“Commander Hawthorne,” she greets.

“You’re really going to let that ticking time bomb near Katniss?” Gale blurts out.

Catalina laughs. “I see that Plutarch snitches,” she observes, gesturing to the empty chair in front of her desk and the decanter of lemonade atop the heavy mahogany, custom from District Seven, the lemonade a recipe from Four that she’d picked up a decade prior. She’d taught it to Deleon and trained him on her tastes when she’d been too ill to cook what she’d eat and drink, before she fired him in the lead-up to the Quell so he’d live to call her an asshole for everything.

She’d also trained him in her preferences for jewellery; exactly which carats she prefers, how she wants them cut—because Catalina Cain couldn’t be caught looking sloppy, even if she felt like microwaved sh*t.

“I’m not sitting down,” Gale answers.

“Oh, cut the dramatics,” she chides, “If you’re going to barge into my office and ask questions that I really shouldn’t be answering, you should at least try to make me want to speak to you. Didn’t Coin teach you anything about how grace is a virtue as a spy?”

“I wasn’t ever a spy,” Gale counters, “I was a soldier.”

“Bullsh*t,” Catalina says, “Soldiers like you are always spies. Sit down, I’ll call for lunch. I’m assuming you don’t have any allergies?”

“I don’t want your diamonds and rubies, Doctor Cain. I know what you’re like.”

“It’s not diamonds and rubies. It’s a turkey sandwich. You can take a turkey sandwich without assuming I’ll show up at your door needing a favour in six months when I’ve caught another case. Sit down.”

Gale sits down.

“I’m not doing this because you told me to,” he says, “You’re not my superior.”

“Correct.” She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “But I make more money than you do. And not from my patents or inheritance, but my government salary.”

“And you’re bragging about it.”

“I’m informing you of it.”

“If you’re ordering that turkey sandwich, hold the mayonnaise. That’s disgusting and Capitol.”

“I agree,” Catalina answers, “There’s infinitely better condiments. Have you tasted pesto, yet?”

“I haven’t made it a point to engage with luxuries when the Districts are still suffering.”

She winks. “You’ll like pesto. I’ll order us two matching sandwiches and you can have the pick of whatever one you want, so there’s no way that I could poison it.”

And because Catalina Cain is a woman of her word, she quickly taps out a message to Deleon, apologising for not taking her lunch alongside him and thanking him for going through the trouble of bringing hers to her office. She’s usually not a fan of turkey these days, but she’s trying to incorporate more protein into her diet even when she doesn’t want to eat it. She’s got to get back to the body she lost during the collapse. Or whatever they’re calling it now. She hopes Plutarch isn’t the one who gets to name it. He’ll probably pick something stupidly corny or dramatic. Or both. Something like collapse.

“Haymitch said that you think you’ve fixed Peeta by giving him horse drugs.”

She steeples her hands.

Takes a deep breath. A very deep breath.

“That’s a very simplistic way of explaining ketamine, you know.”

“Are they horse drugs?”

“They started out as horse drugs, yes. But horses are different than people and horse drugs have very different effects when they become people drugs.” Maybe she sounds like she’s thinking about getting up from her desk, slamming the chair back and smashing her head against the back floor-to-ceiling until she falls to the ground and starts twitching with a growing pool of blood underneath her. That’s because in some ways, that is a more appealing option than what she’s currently doing.

Instead of committing gruesome suicide and forcing Deleon to mop up her blood because he’s weird and probably wouldn’t let someone else do it, she stares straight ahead, focusing on the bin to the left of Gale’s head.

“I know that you Capitol people have burned out your brains if you ever had any at all,” Gale says, “But that’s really one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. You know, when I first heard that it was you who’d be… “treating” him, I actually felt very safe about it.” He lets it hang in the air, like she doesn’t know what he’s going to follow it up with. Like she hasn’t had it shoved in her face every time she’s arguing with Plutarch about his stupid film crew. You feel guilty, don’t you, Catalina? That’s why you’re doing this. And you don’t just feel guilty about the hijacking. It’s not that simple. You’re not that simple. “Because you should know exactly why he shouldn’t be alone with Katniss.”

“I didn’t say that he should be alone with Katniss,” Catalina answers, “Haymitch asked me to answer his questions honestly, and I agreed. And then he asked me if I ever thought that Peeta could go back to Twelve, and all that Twelve entailed, and I said yes.”

Gale opens his mouth to speak, but Catalina cuts him off.

“I wasn’t done,” she says, “And I said yes, I said that, because of exactly what you just said. Because I did it. And so, I’m completely sure that he can get better. Not fixed, because I don’t think there’s anything to fix completely. That’s not how these kinds of stories end. But I know that he can recover to a point where he can feel mostly okay and lucid about being in Twelve, exactly because I was the one who did the hijacking. And if I thought he was beyond help, I would have bashed his brains in with whatever the heaviest object in the room was before you ever broke in to rescue him.”

That’s how you let fridge horror hang in the air, Gale.

She continues:

“It’s not my fault that Haymitch took what I said and ran with it. Because I told him the truth. Because I promised him that I would. Unfortunately, he didn’t promise me that he wouldn’t see the best possible scenario for that truth. I can’t control what he goes and excitedly tells everyone. I wouldn’t like to step on that moment, either. Not unless it becomes strictly necessary.”

“Do you think that this makes you a good person?”

She tilts her head. “Why would I?”

“You, telling the truth about everything you did. Because it doesn’t make you sound like a good person. It makes you sound shameless.”

She chuckles low in her throat. “I have a lot of shame, Gale. I think that talking about it means that I can acknowledge all of the wrong that I did, and that talking about it won’t ever make it go away or make it so I didn’t do it, and wouldn’t do it if I could rewind time, because it either felt like the option in the moment or was simply an urge I gave into with what I knew then. I think being honest is the least I can do. You’ll realise that when you do wretched things, the worst part is actually how someone you loved is standing in the ashes and asking you how you could possibly have done that and how they could ever look at you the same afterwards. Why you did it, knowing that it would change you.”

Gale blinks, and Catalina doesn’t want him staggering away swearing that he’ll never darken her door again, but she does raise her hand when she notices hers creaking open, signalling to Deleon that she’d like the cart left outside, and knowing that he’ll know exactly what she’s asking. The door clicks shut, and she tries to remember to up Deleon’s salary even though she already did once, and the tax man’s probably going to think that she’s fudging things.

“You’re not what I expected,” Gale finally says. Catalina rises from her seat.

“The food is outside,” she explains.

“How—”

She laughs. “You’d be a terrible spy, Mr. Hawthorne.”

She crosses the room in lengthy, confident strides. Opens the door. Grins when there’s a golden tray with two turkey sandwiches with “lots of pesto, no mayo” written on the paper in blocky black letters, a black coffee and every other beverage the cafeteria offers.

Catalina snorts to herself.

“Deleon apparently decided that you should have the liberty of experiencing our glorious beverage supply contract,” she announces, wheeling the trays over.

“Who’s Deleon?” Gale questions, “Your assistant?”

“Deleon has many functions.”

Catalina wasn’t going to say that Deleon solved problems, like she’d explained his role to Peeta when he’d asked. Because mere days after Peeta got that answer, Deleon called Catalina screaming because a rat had gotten into the offices. When she arrived, brandishing a broom like a noble sword, Deleon, in his barrel-chested, six-foot-something bulk, was standing on the coffee table, frantically pointing towards a skittering, tiny, tiny rat. So, Deleon did not always solve problems. Sometimes he created problems. It was one of his many functions.

Catalina waits for Gale to pick his sandwich, and glare at the offered beverages. She unwraps hers and takes a sip of her coffee, perfectly to her liking. Yes, Deleon did indeed have many functions. He remembered how she liked her coffee even when she’d fired him before the Quell without giving him a proper reason because she couldn’t think of one that wouldn’t have her blurting out the truth, so she just decided not to face him after she fired him and ignore all of his calls because she’d been stupid enough to give him her personal cell number, but didn’t have the spine to do the proper, permanent thing and block him—and he ran the physical therapy yoga class so she didn’t have to. And she didn’t even have to bribe him with a pay increase! For some reason, Deleon likes the yoga class.

“I’m not trying to change your opinion on the Capitol or even make you like me or feel bad for me or whatever,” she says between bites when Gale’s finally settled on orange juice instead of the iced coffee that he’d been eyeing. She doesn’t blame him. Deleon made it, so it’s probably how he likes it. And him and Finnick agreed on coffee. “But I think you should know that unfortunately, things weren’t as black and white as you’re painting them.”

“What do you mean?” Gale questions her, mouth full of turkey sandwich.

Catalina swallows the bite she took after speaking before she does so again. “We weren’t all vapid bitches with perfect lives,” she answers. “I had reasons to rebel that weren’t idealistic or pretentious.”

Before Gale can corner her, she continues:

“My mother was basically auctioned off to the highest bidder, who happened to be a man who remembered her birth in detail and who was cruel. I’m the product of a marriage that should never have happened, and my mother never let me forget it. It wasn’t unusual for people to call me broken because I was close to thirty and I hadn’t married even once. I knew what happened to Finnick because I watched it happen in my own bed when I wasn’t even a legal adult. It was my mother, because breaking the wheel is almost impossible, even for victims. Because very few people are the perfect, pretty victims that are easy to root and feel for. When I was twenty-three, I watched what happened to women when their husbands had to have the last laugh. I’m not trying to make you feel bad for me or even understand me. I just think you deserve to know.”

“I don’t know what’ll kill us first, Gale. The class war or what we’ve done to the Earth. I don’t spend a lot of my time stashing weapons for either kind of conflict, not because I’m a radical optimist, but because I can’t win, but Snow can lose. And that matters. I’m not the scheming person you think I am. I’m not waiting for all of this to fall apart. I’m not throwing Peeta at Katniss because I don’t give a sh*t if he snaps her neck.”

“I’m not in the business of lying to people unless I have a good reason for it, Gale.”

Gale uncaps the orange juice.

“Finnick said that you’d promised that you’d always be together. You lied about that. You knew you were going to die or change into a person that he didn’t recognise.”

“I had a good reason,” Catalina grits out, biting down the urge to tell Gale to go choke on a barbed-wire dild*. He’d punch her if she said it, but she recognises a lot of herself in him. Especially herself at his age. There’s this burning idealism that the war hasn’t snuffed out of him, but it’s changed its nature. Gale will do whatever he has to do, if it means that the rebels will win.

In some way, Catalina wishes that she could be like that. But at the core of Gale, and at the core of Catalina, beats something softer and sweeter. Each of them have reasons for rebelling, and it’s not just for revenge. Otherwise, Gale would have run into the woods and never looked back. Catalina would have done so, too. She’d have learned if you really got shot as soon as you crossed the border, and if you’d really get shot for crossing the border if you’re Catalina Cain. Maybe it’s easier to just let Catalina Cain die in the wilderness. Maybe that’s why she’s saying all of this, instead of telling him to get out before security gets there.

Catalina doesn’t use the security for herself. She got the security because she thought it would make the paparazzi less ballsy. It partly worked. She took care of the drone that they sent over the fence with a one-ounce slug from a window as Deleon whooped and Haymitch watched in half-assed horror like he didn’t know that she’d put in her hours at the range. The paparazzi haven’t attempted a repeat of that method.

“Finnick came to the Capitol so you could be together again,” Gale counters, “Doesn’t that kill you inside? How can you be this functional, when you know that?

“Katniss won’t speak to you because of what you did. How can you still be standing here, pretending you know what’s good for her when you can’t even go back to Twelve because of the guilt and the loss, Gale?”

“That’s not a fair thing to—”

“—ask,” Catalina interrupts, “I know. That’s why I did it. Because that’s what you’re doing to me. And yes, it’s chipping away at me. And it means that I can’t win, but Snow can lose. So, my feet hit the floor every morning. And maybe in a million miles, on a highway through the skies, I would have kept my promises or I would have never lied, but I think you know what I mean when I say that if I went back in time, knowing what I knew at the time, I wouldn’t ever have made a difference choice.”

Gale swallows tightly.

“I have one last question, then I’ll leave.”

“Shoot.”

“I don’t know if you’re a betting woman,” he says, “But something tells me that you are. Um… how much money would you put on Finnick forgiving you for changing if he’d lived to see it?”

Catalina tilts her head, knowing exactly what he’s actually asking. “I wouldn’t put money on it,” she starts, “Not because you’re wrong and I’m not a betting woman. You’re worryingly right. I have a bet going on right now with Beetee about Haymitch, and Haymitch about Beetee. But because it’s hard to quantify that kind of bet. Because it takes two. It’s not just a question of what Finnick would do. It’s a question of what I’d be willing to do to remind Finnick of who I used to be. If I even would try to remind him of the people we used to be. I don’t know.”

“If you tried. What would you say your chances would be?”

“If I tried?”

“If you tried everything you could think of,” Gale clarifies, “What would you say your chances were?”

“For him to forgive me, forget everything I did or want to get to know the new me?”

“… all of those?”

Catalina shrugs.

“It’s not my place to decide if he could forgive me, because he’s dead. I like to think that… well, we have a shared history. A lot of the stuff I did, I did for him, even if a lot of it served my own desires, too. Those desires were there because I could never forgive the world for what it did to Finnick. I was angry and I was taking that anger out on anything that’d make me feel like I could breathe for a second. He knew I was angry. He… he could live with it, when he didn’t know the whole story. Maybe he’d look at all our history instead of what I did at the altar of it. Maybe he wouldn’t. Fifty dollars. Forget everything I did? I wouldn’t like a Finnick who’d forget everything I did. Because it matters. Even though it’s horrible and wretched. Zero dollars. Know the new me? I would do anything to know Finnick after the war. I like to think that he’d reciprocate. One thousand dollars, if I did everything I could think of. And maybe he’d agree with you. Maybe he’d take my honesty as shamelessness, but I can afford to lose even an expensive bet. Betting is all about the principle and the theory. What you’re willing to give. Betting’s about putting a number to how hard you’re willing to beg, pray or work for something.”

Chapter 18: Now Presenting: Celeste Berry!

Chapter Text

Caesar Flickerman does not survive the revolution.

Caesar Flickerman is found dead in the hallway of the Training Centre. His death is briefly blamed on the mysterious serial killer who seemed to be going for a strange mix of socialites, financiers, and cabinet members. The serial killer, one which the rebels refused to acknowledge until she turned herself in because Coin thought it looked like they were already failing at keeping the peace, would turn out to be Catalina Cain. And she would admit to every death except for Caesar Flickerman’s, even though he was found near Magnus Abel’s piked head.

She would say that he’d been beaten to death by Peacekeepers in the cell across from hers, and she’d dragged his body out because she didn’t want him rotting in a cell.

But this isn’t the story of Caesar Flickerman’s death. Catalina’s pretty sure that if you asked him in the great perhaps, he’d laugh, flick his bright pink hair behind one ear and say that there wasn’t anything special about it. Much more cinematic deaths had happened in that building. This is the story of how Celeste Berry ended up mourning him.

When Caesar Flickerman hired Celeste Berry as his newest intern on the year of her fifteenth birthday, it wasn’t because Catalina Cain told him to. Catalina Cain had been nothing but a heiress with a side gig as a Remake tech less than a year prior, and while it was impressive how she’d climbed into the lap of the Gamemaker’s technological department quicker than any of her male colleagues, she wasn’t the kind of something that could sway the opinion of someone like Caesar Flickerman yet.

But that didn’t mean that Caesar didn’t listen to Catalina’s speech. After all, she was good at writing and delivering speeches. He could see how she’d be good at wrangling her father’s boardroom in the future, even though his more dramatic side imagined her standing in front of an army—and not the kind of false army that’d been in front of her when she’d belted out the lines of the lead heroine in Plutarch Heavensbee’s stage play—but something plucked out of the Dark Days, burning with the gilded garnish of flaming youth and ideology. Red fanning behind her, the wind picking up her hair during all the emotional parts she spoke. The parts where you clutch your chest and feel your whole being pulled towards the battlefield.

So, yes, he listened to her speech. And it was good for Celeste that she was favoured by Cassandra’s fierce daughter, but it wasn’t what did it. Celeste’s application was simply the best, because Caesar hadn’t seen anything like it yet. You had to write a boring page where you typed out all the formalities about yourself, but what actually got you the job was the creative segment. Which could be anything at all, but everyone sent in videos. Celeste had read through all the fine print, and seen that you could deliver this application in person. So, she said that she’d like to do that. And she became the first person to do that in twenty years.

Caesar sat on the front row of his empty studio on a Thursday afternoon, not quite sure what to expect of Celeste Berry.

Celeste Berry burst onto the stage in a blond wig and scuffed-up flannel jacket at least three sizes too big for her and falling off her shoulders with every step she took. She launched into a monologue that Caesar quickly picked up was Haymitch Abernathy, opening a talk show that he was hosting instead of reluctantly guesting after being forced by Effie Trinket, by talking about why teenage girls wanted to f*ck him. Celeste followed it up with four other skits of famous, but off-the-radar Victors that left Caesar clutching his stomach from laughing.

Chapter 19: Lotan Update

Chapter Text

Lotan’s kind of scared sh*tless of his father-in-law.

But if you’d met Mr. Donner, you’d agree. Because Mr. Donner is f*cking terrifying. But Mr. Donner is an engaged grandfather who loves watching his grandchildren when Penelope’s either firebombing the supply trucks during the war, or now, during the weird tentative peace, forcing her poor husband on a date night at the annual speed-fish-gutting championships, where her cousin (fourteen) is competing. Penelope’s not allowed to compete in the adults’ division any longer because she, at age fifteen, out of the youth division because of her skills, fist-fought the judge in the parking lot because he told her that she was really good… for a girl.

Lotan’s pretty sure that Mr. Donner makes it his life’s mission to scare him whenever he drops off the kids, because the way Penelope talks about her father—they absolutely cannot be telling stories about the same dad. Penelope makes him sound like a dorky, and dare Lotan even say this: decently emotionally intelligent man. Lotan hasn’t seen this side of him.

Lotan has seen the side of him that knocks his steel-toed boots against Lotan’s sneakers and calls him a bitch for it. And says sh*t like this:

“Oh, you’re going to the festival? It won’t be a good show this year. That judge doesn’t look like he can fight.”

Mr. Donner judges people by whether he thinks he could beat them in a fight. Mr. Donner’s favourite people are people he thinks would kick his ass. Mr. Donner thinks he could fight Lotan and win. Lotan would agree. Wholeheartedly. Lotan does not want to fight Mr. Donner. That sounds like a quick way to get on a first-name basis with everyone at the hospital. But Mr. Donner had still given his blessing when Lotan had asked for it. And the only nice thing that Mr. Donner has ever said to Lotan, unprompted by Penelope, is that he’s a good husband.

“Oh, you just take all the time you want out of the house, Lotan. The little ones can sleep here tonight. We got their room all done up and everything.”

“Tomas!” Sadie shouts, already running off, “The dead possum by the creek is about to pop! Let’s go kick it and poke it with sticks!”

Lotan sucks his teeth. “Please wash them,” he says.

Mr. Donner slaps his stomach and laughs.

“You believe me a heathen, Odair. I know the stories your father told about you and your brothers. They don’t just get that from my daughter, even though they take more after her than you personally.”

Lotan winces.

Mr. Donner doesn’t apologise, but he does gesture to the road. He doesn’t say that Lotan should probably get going, but he doesn’t say that Mrs. Donner would beat his ass if Lotan wasn’t invited in for tea while he kids apparently poked a dead possum that’d been there since at least the last time they’d visited their grandparents because Sadie had known about it. Even though Mrs. Donner would beat his ass. Mrs. Donner is the kind of scary where she bakes pies if she knows that Lotan’s coming over. Penelope laughs about it, and says that her mother sure f*cking wouldn’t bake a pie for her only daughter, but she’ll do it for said daughter’s husband. There’s no malice in Penelope’s statement, and there’s even something behind her eyes that Lotan’s afraid of poking at.

Not because he doesn’t love all of Penelope, but because it reminds him of the fact that Sadie made before she poked her finger into a rotten apple and then poked Tomas in the eye, giving her brother pink-eye that terrorised the household for three weeks. Sadie was the only one who didn’t get pink-eye. Sadie had grinned and said that she was proud of herself because she’d tried farting on her brother’s pillow, which was supposed to give him pink-eye, apparently, but it hadn’t. And so, she’d stuck her thumb in a disgusting rotten apple she’d found smeared across the road.

“I’m happy to see you out and about,” Mr. Donner says.

“I came out here for one thing,” Lotan answers, “To pawn off my kids so they don’t burn down my house out of boredom. And that thing is going to grow into two when my wife forces me to go watch other people’s kids gutting fish in a competition she’s permanently banned from herself, and from entering her own kids in.”

(Which is probably for the best. At least with Sadie.)

Chapter 20: The Moon Will Sing For Me

Chapter Text

When Catalina’s car has screeched in and out of Caesar’s parking lot, Finnick bundled in the passenger seat and Catalina glaring at everyone like she’s willing them all to melt into the floor of pure shame, when she’s stomped through the offices until she found Caesar’s and slammed open the door, like every search result that Caesar had frantically pulled up hadn’t said that you should be quiet and gentle. Catalina comes in like a hurricane hellbent on tearing up the town—when all that sh*t has happened, that’s when Celeste, sitting on the couch that Finnick had been slung across, looked up at Caesar with wide, blue, blue eyes and said: “Caesar, sorry for my language, but what the f*ck just happened?”

Caesar took a moment to compose himself by sending Catalina an apologetic text that she would ignore because she’d blocked him on everything, even that app you used to send money to your friends, because he’d been sending a dollar to write her a message in the caption. He wrote that he didn’t know what’d triggered Finnick, but that he was sorry and that he’d be willing to vouch for the family emergency that she’d told her boss she had to go handle if Augustus gave her sh*t for missing work. Caesar doesn’t think that Augustus Knave is stupid enough to complain about one of his rising stars, but you never know.

Sometimes, people forget that Catalina Cain was Catalina Cain and just thought that she was another lady heiress instead of a ruthless queen of beasts who’d sniff out your fear. He breathed in, forced it to be measured.

“I don’t know if that’s my story to tell,” Caesar tries.

Celeste crosses her arms. “It’s not like I’d sell it to the tabloids, Caesar. I wouldn’t even tell my friends if you told me not to.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” Caesar assures her, and really, yeah, he does, “But it still doesn’t mean that it’s my story to tell. Maybe it’s Finnick’s to tell and Finnick’s alone.”

Last week, Caesar had gotten coffee with Cassandra Cain and talked about what’d happen if she told everyone what her husband did to her. If she got up on his stage and said that she’d been raped and beaten, and that’s why she was marching out of that door.

Cassandra had taken a deep, aching breath and said, after a beat of a butterfly’s wings and Caesar’s fluttering heart: “Me and my husband are doing better. It’s always been just him and me together, and it will remain so. I don’t intend to leave him, Caesar.” She clenched her teeth. “We’re sticking together,” she’d repeated.

“Finnick shouldn’t have won the Games at fourteen,” Caesar decides to tell Celeste, “It’s not good for your brain to do something like winning the Hunger Games at fourteen, eleven years before it’s fully developed. Sometimes, he just shuts down like that.”

“And Catalina picks him up?” Celeste questions, biting, “That’s why she’s in his life?”

“You make it sound like Snow told her to.”

“Did he?”

There’s something concealed in Celeste’s throat, caught in the brambles of it, and Caesar can’t exactly pick out what its flavour is. In the moment, he thinks it’s because he doesn’t know Celeste well enough yet. But years later, he still couldn’t have told you. If he had to bet money on it, he would call it a cousin of guilt and fear.

Caesar offers Celeste one complete truth. “No,” he says, “Snow absolutely did not tell her to. She chose to.”

“She’s a nice person,” Celeste says, “A lot of people say that she’s cruel and doesn’t have a heart, but she does. And her problem is actually that it’s too big. Thank you for answering. Does it happen often? Is it just Finnick?”

“I don’t know,” Caesar tells her, and it’s the truth, “It’s not the kind of thing that people make polite conversation about.” He hesitates a moment. “And yes, it’s just Finnick. It’s because he was too young, Celeste. No one knew what to do with a Victor so young. We learned through Finnick. He didn’t have a lot of peers.”

“But we did learn?”

“Yes,” Caesar assures her, “All of us professionals, whether we’re people like Catalina Cain, or we’re like you and I, took notes. And he’ll get better, because we know what to do for him now.”

Catalina shocks him by actually answering his text.

It’s three hours later, and Celeste’s reading the sponsorship proposals aloud for the upcoming season of his talk show when his phone buzzes. Celeste picks it up and announces out loud that Catalina Cain texted him back, but that she’s not going to peep the actual message she wrote. And Caesar’s brow flies up.

“Catalina Cain?”

Celeste clicks her tongue. “That’s what I just said.”

“Hold the reading,” Caesar asks, “I’ll just answer that. Toss me my phone.”

His last intern would have refused. She would have gotten out of her chair and delivered his phone to him with an open palm. Celeste picks up his phone and throws it right at his face. He chuckles as he plucks it from the air and starts tapping away before he really reads Catalina’s text.

It’s simple, but not as clipped as it usually is when she’s initiating the contact. She tells him that she appreciates that he called her, and it means a lot to her. That Finnick’s fine, but she hopes that he had time to cobble together another guest.

He answers her that he’d already booked someone else when Finnick had stopped blinking and his hands shook in the green room. Catalina sent him back a gif of a goat giving a thumbs up and left him on read when he tried to reciprocate with a matching one because he didn’t know what else to do.

“Should I—”

“Nah,” Caesar decides, split-second, “We’ll go over those tomorrow. You can call in early, I’ll go grab dinner from the catering—”

“If you don’t mind,” Celeste interrupts, “I haven’t actually tried anything but their sandwiches. I’ve already booked my taxi for today, and it’s not going before I’m supposed to leave.”

Chapter 21: The Last Time Catalina Cain Sang In Public

Chapter Text

The last time Catalina Cain was documented singing in public before the war was an encore of sorts. And it wasn’t even at her own show. She’d been twenty-six and attending the party celebrating what would become Plutarch Heavensbee’s short-lived retirement from the Hunger Games. Instead of writing a speech about how Plutarch was such a great son and wonderful friend, a speech which they would have heard sixteen of by the time that they got to hers, she decided to write a song.

Even though she asked for a guitar, a massive golden piano sat on the stage through all the sixteen speeches. Catalina trudged up with her guitar case slung over her shoulder, Plutarch grinning from the plush red velvet armchair next to the piano, where he’d been drinking in everyone’s praise with the kind of well-practiced smile that you use when coworkers who’d never become more than coworkers sang your praises when you knew that you wouldn’t ever see them after tonight.

And that you wouldn’t be particularly sorry about that.

Catalina, on the other hand, wasn’t just a coworker. She sat atop the piano, her boots on top of the ocean-blue silk-upholstered bench with gold, jewel-encrusted legs.

She liberated her guitar from the scratched leather case covered in faded stickers and painted flowers, drumming her nails against the body as she tested the strings and announced. “I’m not going to sing a requiem, tonight. If you’d like to hear the high notes I hit when I’m pretending to be sad, you should go look up some of the plays that this asshole goaded me into sullying my icy-bitch image with.” The hall chuckled, as predicted and planned. “And why aren’t I doing that? Because not a single part of me will miss Plutarch stealing my sandwiches. So, I’m not going to sing about how my professional world’s gone dark without your light.”

She turned her attention to Plutarch, laughing with his head titled back, throat exposed, posture slack. She crossed one leg over the other, balancing her guitar. And then she began to play an upbeat, old country beat, tapping her foot against the disused, grandiose, and bloated piano. Briefly, she thrust an arm towards Plutarch, wriggling her fingers at the distance separating them, willing him to surge up and grasp her waiting hand. He stayed put, and Catalina began to sing:

“We go back like convertible seats.”

“If I got an aisle with a mess I gotta clean up—”

She winked.

“—I know you’d be showing up with bleach, hmm.”

“All those names that we don’t ever speak of,” she continued, a small smile growing in the corner of her lip, “Got a couple nights that have slipped my mind…”

She let out a low laugh between the lyrics, caught in the tinny of the microphone she’d set up in front of her. She’d refused to have one hooked around her ears and curly hair.

“Proof and photographs have been deleted.”

“If you ever needed an alibi…”

Her eyes met Plutarch’s, grinning.

“… ‘cause dirt on you is dirt on me, and we both know our hands ain’t clean.”

“If it all blows up and we end up on the news—”

“—if you go down, I’m going down, too.”

Seneca Crane, as Head Gamemaker, had written a ten-minute speech about the contributions of his esteemed coworker, and how he was excited to see the art that Plutarch would produce after his time in the Games’ bullpen. Perhaps, as head of biological and environmental design, Catalina Cain would be expected to produce of the same volume. But even though she was saying infinitely less than Seneca if you were going strictly by word count, not a single bobbing head in the crowd doubted that she was saying more of what actually mattered.

She didn’t look out at the crowd, or prompt them into finding her interesting. She had eyes for one person—and that person was rapidly turning the shade of a tomato as she continued to string along, giggling and grinning, not like she’d had too much champagne, but that she was exactly where she’d like to be.

“It’s a good thing we’re each other’s kind of crazy,” she dropped her voice an octave, into something that wasn’t quite conspiratorial or confession, but gracefully straddled the line between them both, “Ain’t no judgement or keeping scores.” Her eyes slipped closed, and she allowed her voice to climb again, tilting her chin upwards, catching Plutarch’s gaze in the fray, as if there was ever a life where he couldn’t look at her. Underneath the stage lights, she shimmered in a slick, black lamé tuxedo. Her tie, which had been present and accounted for on the red carpet, had slipped off, leaving her collar open, showing off hand-beaded, sea glass necklace and Catalina’s killer collarbones.

“If you rob a bank, I’m your getaway baby.”

She whistled.

“God knows that’s what friends are for.”

The rhythmic tapping of her foot against the piano’s body picked up the pace, and the crowd started dancing instead of bobbing their heads in casual, stiff-lipped approval.

“… ‘cause dirt on you is dirt on me, and we both know our hands ain’t clean. If this all blows up and we end up on the news: if you go down, I’m going down, too.”

Some people who watched Catalina Cain throw her hands up in exasperation with everything Plutarch Heavensbee was saying after the world they were born into blew up might say that the fact that she locked eyes with him as she sung about them going down was a warning not to f*ck up—well, those people weren’t there that night. And if they’d watched the video that went ridiculously viral after that night, well, they didn’t. Because the only thing you could say about Catalina Cain’s eyes that night were that they twinkled with all of the stars in the sky, cloaked beneath the fog and lights of the bustling city. Gold washed through the room, and when she grew silent, it felt like you’d watched someone confessing their love in the rain and being kissed back instead of left on their knees. Nothing was unreciprocated.

It felt like how May comes around and wraps you in the confidence of the fresh summer, and you can’t forget why you were so down in March. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. The song isn’t over yet. And we haven’t even gotten to the encore. So, Catalina Cain continued to sing, and Plutarch continued to watch her like she’d hung all the stars she’d captured in her eyes.

“If you go down, I’m going down, too.”

She huffed a little, smiling to herself, like she was about to tell an inside joke.

“Yeah.”

“I keep all your secrets by the dozen, you know where my skeletons sleep.”

“Hypothetically, if I ever kill my husband,” she winked again, smirking. Plutarch rolled his eyes with affection like he would have playfully smacked her leg if they were close enough. “You’d be coming right on over, lying through your teeth.”

“… cause dirt on you is dirt on me, and we both know our hands ain’t clean.”

“We both know our hands ain’t clean.”

“Our bodies are buried and they’re in the same ditch,” she tipped her body back, hair falling, “So even if I wanted to, I can’t snitch.”

“And I don’t!”

“Thirty-to-life would go quicker with you, yeah. So, if you go down, I’m going down, too.”

“If you go down, I’m going down, too. If you go down, I’m going down, too.”

And then her hands were in the air instead of the guitar strung around her, and the crowd erupted.

“Encore! Encore! Encore! Encore!”

Catalina eyes were closed, basking in the light, beaming and glowing and burning under the praise, laughing. Plutarch joined in, his voice carrying across the stage: “Encore, encore, encore!”

Catalina hopped off the piano, taking her guitar with her, letting it dangle from her body as she dangled the question in the air.

“I promised I’d only play one song,” she told the crowd, dragging out her words like she was holding a chocolate bar mere inches above the maximum range of a child’s grabby hands, “But…”

She smiled conspiratorially.

“… I’m pretty sure that they thought I’d do a couple ballads, with how they left me that piano. And we all know even one of my mother’s ballads is much, much longer than what I just did…”

“… now, I don’t really like ballads, anymore. Yeah, they’re fun, belting them. But I really feel like there’s a better way to tell a story. And that’s by tearing up the floor and everyone’s fancy shoes.”

She didn’t start stringing, but she did start singing.

“We ain’t got a whole lot, but we got a whole lotta little.”

Her feet followed, stomping against the stage as she spun. On the first twirl, she was stringing an upbeat, distinctly District tune meant for dancing instead of clapping politely. And she lead the band, eyes closed and crinkling at the edges, spinning around the stage, hair flying everywhere, blazer thrown off with one hand and landing behind her.

“And a little suits me just fine!”

She called out from the stage, singling out Seneca Crane and Cinna Irshad, holding glasses of champagne that were quickly snatched by hands on each side of them as others pushed them towards the stage. Fingers flying across the neck of the guitar, she used her other hand to pull them up on the stage.

“We go together like a bow and a fiddle and we live a little simple life!”

Catalina tapped her boots, clinking her heels together like champagne glasses in the drunk tank, the crowd moving like the uncontrolled, yet staggeringly beautiful waves of the true sea, hands meeting hands, bodies meeting bodies, spinning partners and necking drinks for more freedom and dresses flying, suit jackets being discarded, wigs tilting to the wrong side. Seneca and Cinna, grinning from ear to ear after glancing out at the crowd, mirrored and met Catalina at the altar.

“We got a little house, on the edge of town—got a funny-looking dog running around!”

Catalina didn’t show off her impressive multiple-octave vocal range, but she was fast-spitting, shouting over the clatter of feet and plates, her voice carrying without a microphone. Seneca grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her into Cinna’s orbit. She mock-bowed, never missing a single chord as they banged out the beat of her song, backing her up with their dress shoes.

“Got a little porch big enough to hold a swing for all of us!”

She thrust her legs forward, jerking her hips as Cinna spun in his flowy, three-different-kinds-of-chiffon-layered-into-one skirt, novelty jabberjay buttons undone as Seneca caught him. Seneca and Cinna circled her, grinning challengingly. Catalina returned it with glee and sparkling eyes.

“And our little suits me just fine!”

She threw her head back, Cinna and Seneca matching her as they dipped themselves, knees cracking as they tipped their heads back. Catalina jumped back on her feet, skipping and goading Seneca and Cinna into following her lead until they spinning in a circle, feet slamming against the wooden stage, shaking it.

“We go together like a bow and a fiddle, and we live our little simple life!”

“If money was love, all of us would be rolling like royalty—”

“Hey!”

She jumped, clicking her heels against each other. “Everyone together!”

And the crowd, rumbling and echoing and all-consuming, obliged.

“You and me, we got a whole lotta little, and a little’s more than alright by me!”

Catalina tapped her boots against Cinna and Seneca’s dress shoes, Cinna holding up his skirt as they hopped around the stage, grinning.

“Know a lotta folks, pretty well-to-do, too, but they’d give anything—”

“—to be in our shoes!”

Catalina breathed in. Voice small:

“If we ever hit it big, I hope we’ll still be same little ol’ you, same little ‘ol me.”

She exhaled, loud and roaring:

“… ‘cause a little’s alright by me, ‘long as it’s you and me!”

Chapter 22: Oyster

Chapter Text

Caesar Flickerman did not have biological children.

It wasn’t for a lack of trying, if you’re nosy enough to want to know those kinds of things. In fact, if you’re really nosy—you’re going to feel like an asshole in a second. Caesar Flickerman wanted children, married twice, and ended his life as a divorcé of twelve years, because his sperm sample as so sh*t that Aloysius Cain said that he’d have expected that Caesar had a vasectomy in his youth.

But he hadn’t.

And he was the kind of supremely infertile where not even Aloysius Cain could fix him.

While Aloysius Cain did not blab, Caesar was foolish and decided to go see another doctor. Even though if Aloysius Cain couldn’t fix you, you just started digging your grave. Caesar went to every doctor who wasn’t Aloysius Cain, and who didn’t have Aloysius Cain’s spine. They all said they could fix him for the right price, or that they’d at least do their best with experimental treatment after experimental treatment. None of it worked and they all blabbed and that was that. The Capitol learned that Caesar Flickerman couldn’t have kids, and then Haymitch Abernathy fell off the stage and gave himself such a violent concussion that Catalina Cain hoisted him up in full view of the public. And people kept talking about Caesar Flickerman’s useless dick.

And people stopped talking about Caesar Flickerman’s useless dick, because Catalina Cain broke Aloysius Cain’s leg and conspiracy theories said that she did it on purpose.

Cassandra Cain didn’t think he missed out on anything but not having kids. But of course, she’d said, swirling her glass of amber liquor, having kids was very different for women than men. And same was having no kids. And she didn’t say anything else until Caesar refilled the glass that she’d emptied between her words.

It’s not that Caesar didn’t love his ex-wives. It’s that they wanted kids. And they didn’t want to adopt. They wanted to be stay-at-home mothers, and Caesar’s flock of technicolour-dyed Pomeranians didn’t count. Usually, the man could contest the divorce if he wished, and the wife would have to provide good grounds for it to proceed. Depending on the judge, Caesar could put his marriages on legal life support. Caesar never contested any of his divorces, and they all stuck to the prenups.

Celeste Berry bites the ends of her pens when she concentrates. Celeste Berry concentrates on everything she does, seemingly. Celeste Berry has one stubborn strawberry-blonde cowlick that likes worming its way out of her wig caps on long nights spent schmoozing at galas. She’d practically exploded the first time that Caesar asked her if she’d like to accompany him to the Hunger Games’ opening, even though she had to know that it was a common requirement of his interns. He didn’t tell her, but he’d already been considering what department he could put her in when her internship had run its course. And that was even before she’d brought in a lemonade that’d been so good he’d almost cried.

And then she’d kept bringing it and leaving it in his personal fridge.

Celeste grins every day when she bites into her sandwich—one of her three favourites from the canteen, that Caesar now makes sure that they do at least one of a day (he does not tell this to Celeste, and she still raves about her good luck)—and it’s not like he’s signing adoption papers, but you all know how this story ends.

And you know that Caesar Flickerman dies at the end. Or the beginning, if you’re the kind of reckless optimist that stays around after the world blows up. If you’re a co*ckroach, basically.

For now, let’s talk about oysters.

Caesar Flickerman isn’t particularly fond of oysters, but they’re all the rage for five f*cking years after Finnick Odair wins, and then they steeply fall off, because people don’t really want to talk about Four in the Capitol, because of what Annie Cresta did to Catalina Cain in the middle of the ball they’d known to celebrate her damn victory. It’s not really that it was super scandalous—it’s that people are sh*t-scared of offending or even worse: downright pissing off Catalina Cain.

Before Catalina Cain was Catalina Cain, she taught Celeste Berry how to like oysters and make lemonade while humming old songs about old towns. Celeste Berry f*cking loves oysters.

Finnick Odair comes back on Caesar’s show, but Catalina’s sitting next to him on the couch, their shoulders touching as she tips her head back and laughs when the camera pans towards her. She’s got a dainty hand in front of her mouth, but she’s not smudging her red lipstick. Finnick’s wearing a white fisherman’s sweater which he explains is his father’s. And Catalina is matching him in a cream cardigan, with blood-red buttons. It hangs loose over her slacks and off her shoulders, showing the straps of her tank top as she explains that everything that she’s wearing is Cinna Irshad, from the new elevated basics line. It’s two months later, and Caesar sent a brief of what they’d talk about to Catalina Cain without her even asking.

She folds one leg over the other and fields most of the questions aimed at both of them. She smiles slyly when she talks about her boyfriend, who buys her flowers for her office every week since she got it. Caesar asks her what kind of flowers he gets her. She tells him that she gets a bouquet of daffodils, dandelions, daisies, red roses, and hyacinths.

“That’s a strange combination,” he says, “Which florist would make a bouquet out of those—”

“He makes them for me,” she answers, “No florist required.”

Caesar and Celeste have oysters after the interview, because there were oysters in the green room that neither Catalina nor Finnick touched. Celeste scooped them out with her hand and slurped them like she was some sticky creature he’d dragged out of the dumpsters. He laughed and threw himself against the couch, arm over the back of it as he listened to Catalina’s car screech out of the parking lot.

He exhaled loudly when it stormed off to inflict itself on the highway instead of their eardrums.

“You know,” he chuckled, “She still scares me.”

“Who?” Celeste laughed between hearty bites, “Catalina? She’s a dork. She makes science puns.”

Caesar shrugged. “I think we know two different Catalinas, then.”

Celeste clicked her tongue. “Probably,” she agreed, “Catalina’s one of those people where she puts you on a trial period until she figures out whether she likes you or not. And whether you’re worthy of knowing her.”

“Sounds like her mother.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Celeste told him, “Cassandra always avoided Aurelia and I like the plague the rare time that we came over to Catalina’s house. She usually came to ours.”

Chapter 23: Why Deleon Polaris Came Back

Chapter Text

Catalina Cain fired Deleon Polaris mere days before the Quarter Quell and she didn’t even have the balls to give a good reason why.

Deleon had sworn up and down that he was only working for Catalina Cain because he had to pay off his gambling debt, and because he owed Seneca a favour. And then Seneca killed himself. And Catalina Cain paid off his debt, because she didn’t want him to feel forced to stay. And Deleon worked there for a year, even without his debt. Deleon went home, clutching his kitschy desk décor in a cardboard box against his chest, dropped it on the floor of the apartment he’d continue to be able to afford for at least two years with his ridiculously generous severance package, and curled up on his couch.

His mother called, then dropped by with a pie that was mostly fish and cream cheese that Deleon threw out before it went bad because he knew he wasn’t going to eat it. He stalked Catalina Cain on social media. Watched her kiss Plutarch Heavensbee on the opening night. Watched Plutarch Heavensbee dip her, and Catalina kick her leg back as if she either trusted him completely—or wanted to fall. He watched recaps of Catalina meeting Finnick on the train with someone’s horrible, crackly voiceover explaining why Finnick’s poem was about Catalina.

And then the Arena blew up.

And Deleon was gone before the Peacekeepers knocked on his door.

He’d been wandering the streets, having seen them from his window and snuck out the back. A hand was on his back, acrylics digging into his shoulder, and it was Tigris pulling him to the side and to safety. He spent a week in her basem*nt, before being assured that no one was even looking for him on the surface. The Peacekeepers hadn’t come for him. They’d come for his neighbour, Celeste Berry. And she’d been released after questioning, without any visible bruises.

Deleon spent the first night back in his apartment obsessively watching the news for any mention of Catalina Cain, who’d been branded a traitor days prior. But no one was talking about her. Just like no one was talking about Seneca.

Three months prior, Catalina had insisted that it was too late for him to drive home, so he should stay. She had a guest bedroom, she’d said. Finnick might come over, but he could sleep in her bed if he did. And she’d sleep on the couch. They’d stayed up late drinking pre-mixed co*cktails and watching b-horrors, and he’d tried to argue that he should at least take the couch. She didn’t let him, and he’d ended up staring at the ceiling of her guest room.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but he’s woken by a small voice and a whirring.

He pads into the kitchen on silent, socked feet and finds Catalina Cain sitting on her kitchen counter, surrounded by broken plates, head tipped towards her buzzing ceiling fan, eyes closed, harmonising with it. The sun is about to rise, and the birds are singing outside her windows.

The first time he saw Catalina Cain after the Arena, she was sitting across from Caesar and announcing the “successful ongoing interrogations of Johanna Mason and Peeta Mellark”. She was being swallowed by blue velvet fabric, and her dark curls had been straightened and bleached platinum blonde.

Catalina Cain appeared on TV three weeks into the proper war, with bright orange hair, fish swimming in the sharp edges of her collarbones, wearing a tight white latex dress.

And then she was announced dead, first by Snow, then confirmed by the rebels. There was no funeral, but Plutarch Heavensbee floated the thought of a statue outside of the institution that would bear her name. The Catalina Cain Institute of Reconstructive Medicine. Deleon thought that Catalina would probably have laughed at it and called it too long and wordy of a title. But she’d have been happy that she was dead, because she’d told him, while sneaking a smoke on her balcony at three in the morning, that she didn’t think you were a good person if you lived to see your likeness set in stone.

One evening, Catalina had gripped his wrist and dragged him out of the office to make the discount bread. A grocery store down the road sold all their bread half-off in the half hour before closing, and Catalina wanted cheap croissants. Deleon laughed, flicked his finger off the back of her head and asked her why a billionaire would ever give a sh*t about half-off plain croissants from the grocery store. She’d whipped around, crossing her arms and scowled dramatically as she explained that she wanted to fill the stale croissants with mozzarella in the morning, and Deleon would come and stay over so he could experience the glory of a cheese-stuffed croissant for breakfast.

And why didn’t she just buy them earlier in the day when she could be sure that the store would have them, if she didn’t care about them being stale because she’d cook them in the oven to melt the cheese? Because if they were sold out, it was a sign from the universe. And she wouldn’t risk her figure. And if they were there, well, she’d gotten a sign to do it.

They’d had three, and he’d never seen Catalina bag something quicker. She bought a family-size of mozzarella and asked Deleon what kind of beer he’d like for the movie night he had no way of wriggling out of. Deleon picked some pre-mixed co*cktails instead and Catalina wrinkled her nose at them.

Two days after her death had been confirmed on national TV, despite the war, despite the destruction of half of the Capitol, Deleon passed a bakery that was open. And it was announcing that a half hour before close, everything was half-off. He checked his watch, and they had eleven minutes to go before closing. He walked in, and three croissants blinked up at him.

In Catalina’s aromatic kitchen, Finnick pestered her with the crossword that she easily rattled off the answers to, like she’d already done it but hadn’t filled it in as she gutted and stuffed the stale grocery store croissants.

Deleon forgot to buy mozzarella, so he did his with a mix of shredded parmesan and brie. He took out three plates and scooped a croissant onto each one.

“You know,” he said to the empty chair with the croissant that was mostly brie, because she always talked sh*t about Deleon’s love for shredded cheese, “I cared about you, bitch. You didn’t think that I’d miss you? You didn’t think that we were friends? Well, f*ck you. I miss you even though you were a dick. Because you weren’t being a dick, were you? It was your f*cked-up way of protecting me.”

Plutarch hadn’t told all the details. He’d said that some things weren’t his story to tell. But Catalina had been a rebel. Catalina had been a rebel for as long as he’d known her through Seneca. He didn’t know if Seneca had ever known. And Catalina had died to protect Finnick. There was no doubt about it in Deleon’s mind.

“Was it worth it, Catalina?”

The silence answered him, breezy and airy, harmonising with the whirring ceiling fan and chirping birds.

Finnick Odair had died, too. And it was horrible, but Deleon thought that it was good in one way: Finnick wouldn’t have to watch people argue whether Catalina should have found forgiveness in death or not. Deleon never started a bar fight about it or anything, but he thought about glassing people and yelling at them that they never knew her, so how the f*ck could they talk about her like that? But that’s not how the world works. Most things can’t get solved by violence in the pouring rain. And people talked about her like that exactly because they didn’t know her.

Because they knew her from the TV and not her kitchen.

But that’s not how the story ends.

Catalina Cain comes back to life, tries to OD, and ends up in prison and on trial for crimes against humanity—facing down the gallows with a notebook clutched tightly in her hands. Deleon tried to visit her, first in the hospital, then in her cell. Each time he begged; he was denied. Plutarch called him personally to tell him to stop showing up, because they wouldn’t let him in.

“Is she not allowed to have visitors?” Deleon had countered, “I’m her friend.”

“No,” Plutarch had answered, “She’s not allowed to have visitors. She’s not stable enough for visitors. She wouldn’t be the person you remembered.”

f*ck that, he’d thought. The person he remembered had been murdered and mourned.

Deleon was never a rebel, but that’s because he didn’t get the option to. When the rebels took their first steps into the city, Deleon had coordinated with Tigris and was handing out supplies. Because Deleon wasn’t an idiot. She’d come to his apartment because she’d had the kind of assumptions that good Capitol citizens aren’t supposed to have.

Deleon doesn’t go to prison.

Deleon tells himself that he’s not going to watch, listen to, or read anything about Catalina Cain’s trial, even though it’s the trial of the century. He does anyways. He watches, he listens and he reads. He does all of the things. And all he can see is a girl standing in the shattered shards of a mirror that she’d built herself, her hands covered in scrapes and bruises, bleeding onto the pages of history as she waits to burst into flames and leave nothing but dust.

Catalina Cain is acquitted and goes back to work.

And with his satchel tucked stubbornly against his chest, so does Deleon.

Chapter 24: Catalina Cain's Ex-Husband

Chapter Text

Celeste will be completely honest.

She didn’t expect to see Plutarch Heavensbee at this party exclusively because he’s Catalina Cain’s ex-husband and Pyrena Tress hates Catalina Cain’s guts. And even though they’re the most divorced people ever, Celeste watched Plutarch jump to defend Catalina in rooms that she wasn’t in more than once. Plutarch waves at her, flagging her down.

Celeste really, really doesn’t want to talk to her sister’s killer’s ex-husband.

“Celeste!” he greets. Loudly. Firmly. Annoyingly Plutarchy. And strangely, Celeste appreciates it. It reminds her of before everything exploded, and she wonders if he’s here because of that reason—if he’s looking for something that reminds him of home, if he regrets anything that he’s done. If he’s more honest about his regrets than most other people. He’s wearing a gold lamé cloak on top of a heavily embroidered purple shirt, gold flowers curling around his stomach. His trousers are boring but match the shirt. Celeste tugs at her brown skirt, feeling ridiculously boring.

“You look good,” Plutarch says, gesturing to her shimmery brown bodice with no interesting embroidery because she couldn’t afford it, like he can read her mind. She shrugs.

“I tried to stay on theme,” she explains, “And I didn’t have a whole lot of botanical things. So, might as well go for earth or whatever.”

Plutarch hums in agreement.

“This is an old Cinna Irshad,” he says, “I planned to wear it from the last Games’ commencement, but we both know that didn’t happen. And if it did, I would have matched with Catalina’s blue hair anyways.” Celeste wants to know how he can just talk about her like that. Like she’s a good person, like she didn’t abandon him, too. But Plutarch and Catalina have always been a weird relationship, and he was probably some kind of replacement for Seneca and whatever Seneca was to Catalina other than a fake boyfriend for at least three years of public relationship.

“How are you doing, Celeste?” Plutarch questions, and Celeste isn’t sure what he said before.

“Uh,” she answers, “Good. Got out of prison.”

“I know,” Plutarch sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose, “Listen, I’m sorry about all that sh*t. If I could have stopped them, I would.”

“What?” Celeste raises her brow, “The rebels dragging me into a nasty and damp cell next to a crazy bitch as I watched them move the president because the crazy bitch might break out of her cell and rip his throat out with her teeth? It was a nice sunny vacation, Plutarch. And no hard feelings. I’m sure you had much more important things to do.”

Plutarch winces. “Yes,” he grits out, “That… and other things.”

If she was younger, Celeste would give a sh*t about Plutarch liking her because she’d need to get a job in his new ministry. But she doesn’t give a sh*t about him liking her because she’d never work for him. She’s fine with freelancing forever if the other option is Plutarch f*cking Heavensbee. So, she doesn’t feel bad for making him uncomfortable. Because he was the commander of a rebel army that put journalists in the same cell block as literal war criminals with psychiatric problems and homicidal tendencies.

But Celeste’s still looking for a good story and waiting for someone more up her alley to talk to, so she asks: “Why are you here, anyways? I wouldn’t have pictured you on this guest list, no offense.”

Plutarch flags down an Avox walking with a tray of glittering champagne glasses and takes two. He hands one to Celeste and she gracefully accepts, bringing it to her lips and sniffing it before she takes a dainty sip, holding Plutarch’s eye contact.

“I’m a man with influence,” he says, slow and long, “And the means to prove it.”

“But you’re also Catalina Cain’s ex-husband.”

“Ex-partner, perhaps,” Plutarch sighs, “But not husband. We didn’t date and we certainly didn’t marry. And my life isn’t defined by her. I had a career before her, and I have a career after her.”

“You’re making her sound like nothing but a momentary lapse of judgement.”

“Why would you care?” he empties his glass in one swig, “You campaigned to have her fired six separate times. It’s not like you’re friends.”

“It’s not a good thing to say about a woman,” Celeste answers, “Even if it’s a woman I don’t like.”

Plutarch shrugs. “You’ve always been a weird kid to figure out, Celeste. If you really have to know, I’m here because it’s absurd that I wouldn’t be. I’m one of the most influential men in Panem, and you better remember that before you focus on my personal relationships. Those aren’t the business of the nation. Me as a man is.”

“Alright, alright,” Celeste relents. “If you’ve got the money to pay for the ticket, who am I to judge that you choose to spend it? I got mine sponsored to take some photos and video before you say anything.”

Chapter 25: Catalina Cain Horrifying Peeta Mellark, A Non-Exhaustive List

Chapter Text

1. Catalina deciding to teach Deleon the importance of play-testing accessible design by duct-taping his right leg stiff and straight and making him ascend, and even worse, descend the terrifyingly steep ramp he’d produced using various mobility aids while she ate a blood-red popsicle. She offered both Haymitch and Peeta one, apparently, they’re homemade and she has a minifridge in her office. And apparently, she believes in learning by doing. She leans against the wall, laughing and chiding Deleon, telling him that he could give up wheeling down the ramp and breaking his face if he’d let her teach him about accessible design.

   She finished the popsicle and started flicking a switchblade back and forth. “Deleon,” she’d said, “You can just admit defeat and not break your face. It’s a pretty face. It’d be a pity to f*ck it up, because I’d tease you for the entire time it took me to fix it.”

   Deleon rolled his eyes. “I’d be so bitchy that you’d knock me out for it because you didn’t want to deal with my whining.”

   “I have a high tolerance for whiny bitches, you know.”

   “And I know exactly what pisses you off the most efficiently about those whiny bastards.”

   She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Point noted.”

2. The fact that Catalina and Effie have started working out together. And that it’s a regular thing. And that they’re both into it. Beetee’s been invited, and he’s told Peeta that he’d have to be electrocuted again to go work out with Catalina Cain and Effie Trinket.

   He works out to be able to do more stuff with ease. Catalina Cain works out because she’s a perfectionist who did both figure skating and ballet as a child and is scarred from it. And because she wants to be ready for another war. And he’s pretty sure that Effie’s closer to Catalina Cain’s motivations than she is to Beetee’s, because she makes Haymitch haul all her bags out of the car and claims that it’s good for his heart health.

3. Catalina’s Hose Method. Enough said.
4. Videos of Catalina Cain ice-skating, shown to him by Haymitch, who apparently has a folder of Catalina Cain videos. There’s a lot of terrifying spinning and too much of it is happening with one leg in the air, either right up and flush against her body or at a terrifyingly stiff ninety-degree angle that Peeta doesn’t f*ck with because he doesn’t get the people who willingly strap knives to their feet and do stunts on a lake.
5. Peeta’s pretty sure that Catalina’s committing tax crimes.
6. That time with the tracker-jacker nest and the clear plastic bucket of gasoline.
7. The fact that she’s okay with Deleon as a physical therapist. Don’t get him wrong—Deleon’s a nice man. A lovely man. One of the kindest people Peeta’s met in the Capitol. Deleon’s also very insistent on his goal of delivering physical therapy.
8. Catalina Cain and Plutarch Heavensbee’s insult battle, with absolutely no raising of their voices, delivered completely deadpan from each their side of a bed as they lean forwards in ridiculously uncomfortable plastic chairs. Highlights:

   “Can I borrow your beard oil? I want to know what it’s like to nourish a lost cause.” (Catalina)

   “Yeah, but I can borrow your last brain cell? I want it to stop being so f*cking lonely.” (Plutarch)

   “Yeah, but can I borrow your personality? I want to know what it feels like to be cropped out of group photos.” (Catalina)

   “Yeah, but can I borrow your face in the mirror? I want to see what true disappointment looks like.” (Plutarch)

   “Yeah, but can I borrow your hairline? I want to see what it’s like to barely hang in there.” (Catalina)

9. Catalina somehow being convinced by Effie to teach Haymitch classical Capitol dance for his wedding. Peeta’s not entirely sure how Effie could bribe Catalina, so it’s probably closer to blackmail or guilting. Catalina has also been convinced to go suit-shopping with Haymitch, and Haymitch is telling Peeta to come along as a “verbal homicide buffer”.
10. Deleon Polaris hauling ass across the parking lot at asshole in the morning screaming “GODDAMMIT, CATALINA CAIN!” without any Catalina Cain in sight.

Chapter 26: Catalina's Hall

Chapter Text

This is the story of Finnick’s first and final escape attempt from Pyrena Tress:

Finnick learned a whole lot from Catalina Cain.

Most of it she wouldn’t stand by, or he had to wheedle out of her. She always said that she was a horrible teacher, and that he ought to go ask someone else. Finnick’s had a lot of teachers throughout his life, and none of them or their lessons have stuck like Catalina’s have.

She taught him how to be slick, and more cunning than anyone who mattered.

She didn’t teach him how to play the guitar, but she taught him how to read. She sat cross-legged on the massive four-poster bed that she didn’t like sleeping in anymore and fiddled with her feet instead of looking at him when she promised that when they won, she’d teach him how to play the guitar. She’d just been scared that she wouldn’t be good at teaching it properly. He never asked her what properly meant. He knows she had a weird time, both with how she learned to sing and how she plays guitar.

Finnick wishes he’d let Catalina teach him how to hotwire stock cars.

She told him that he taught her twice as much as she taught him, which was silly and always made him smack her shoulder because the mask was slipping and people would realise that she wasn’t an ice-cold bitch who didn’t care about anything other than making money and going down in history. She’d grin, roll her eyes with affection, and say that he didn’t know sh*t and that she was perfect. She’d tut and stick out her tongue and he remembers thinking in Thirteen that he’d recorded every single one of her smiles and buried the hard-drive somewhere in Four.

He didn’t know what he could teach her.

She was already a strong swimmer. Strong enough that she’d be able to go through deep waters without drowning. She could plunge into the ocean and come up laughing.

Fortunately, she’s haunting him.

He stares up at the ceiling fan and hears her harmonising with it and the birds.

“Catia,” he whispers, tasting his own blood from the busted shiner around his eyes, his breath rattling, “I need to get out of here.”

“And you didn’t see me here,” she sings, gothic and melancholy, like the shiver that runs down your spine before you cut into the meat, like old ashes on the wind and watching the first leaf fall, “No, they never did see me here. And she’s in my dreams… into the mist, into the clouds. Don’t leave. I’ll make a fist. I’ll make it count.”

The humming of the ceiling fan becomes the gentle thrumming of her guitar for five minutes, and Finnick blinks back tears at the lightest whispers of his old life.

“Catalina,” he repeats, not quite sure the words come out, but when his eyes slip closed, he’s standing next to her on the beach and she’s digging her toes into the sand, refusing to look at him, eyes furiously stuck on a flickering purple dot on the horizon. “Catalina, I don’t know what to do without you. But you’re not coming. You don’t know I’m alive. I didn’t come for you. Maybe we’re both dead. That’s why I can’t ever find you. I f*cked up, didn’t I? Now I’m going to chase you forever. I— I want this to be over, Catia.”

Catalina lets out a long breath that shakes and quiets the waves in front of her.

In the blink of eye, she’s turned around and she’s staring directly at him. Instead of black jeans and a weird t-shirt, she’s in the red dress that she wore the night after Seneca died and she was being interviewed about Catalina and Peeta. It was such a sharp and striking red that it almost hurt to look at, and Finnick still shrinks back at the solid fury of it. It’s layers upon layers of silk, draped around her body. Slung over her shoulder is her beat-up, inherited.

“I told you that you shouldn’t dare miss me,” she says, the tides swelling to her tune of her voice and earth-shattering rage as she steps back against the sands, “I was wrong. I don’t want you ever to forget about us.”

“Catalina!” he shouts as she takes another step and he readies himself to throw his body at her, “I didn’t! How could I? I miss you, I want to stay with you—”

“I don’t care how you do it,” she continues, “That’s the truth of it. Listen to songs that remind you of me. I’m buried where I am, but I don’t want you to ever to forget about us. I don’t ever want you to forget about us driving through the freeway, or the smoke on the hoodies that you stole from me. I want you to think about the life that we never had. I want you to think about the life that I never had. How dare you forget about me? If you forget about us, who’s left? No one. You’d kill me in the split second before you kill yourself.”

Finnick wakes up gasping and sobbing, his chest soaked with blood like someone had plunged her nails into it and yanked out his heart. Or maybe thrust it back inside of him.

One night, when she was drunk, Catalina had talked about the power of opera and why it was sh*t to have an opera singer as a mother.

Opera has the terrifying power to warn you that you’ve wasted your life, she’d said, and remind you what it feels like to truly feel your emotions. Every damn single one of them.

She said that your mind lay bleeding on the floor after a good opera.

And that before you were cowed, now, briefly, you’re soaring and electric.

Catalina wasn’t ever an opera singer, even though her mother insisted that she had “the pipes” for it, and Caesar agreed. Catalina had told Finnick that even if she had an interest in opera, she wouldn’t ever do it more than the brief foray that Plutarch’s play took into it, because she thinks her mother would learn how to shoot just to nail her between the eyes in the middle of a solo, right there on the stage.

Because opera has the power to warn you that you’ve wasted your life.

Finnick pushes himself up and bites down the scream.

Chapter 27: The Power Of Opera

Chapter Text

Opera has the power to warn you that you’ve wasted your life.

You haven’t acted on your desires. You’ve suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You’ve silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushes and excess of operatic utterances reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now. How impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment and your throat is closed.

Your soul lays on the floor bleeding after an opera. And every one of your thoughts is screaming.

Before, they were cowed. Now they’re soaring.

Before she was Cassandra Cain, she was Cassandra Birkenfeld and she would have been more famous than her husband if she hadn’t been desperate.

Catalina Cain is the daughter of an opera singer. They should have seen it coming from a mile away. But they didn’t. And there’s no point talking more about it because Catalina Cain and Plutarch Heavensbee are already going down in history for what they did, right alongside Katniss Everdeen, the girl they made the face of their decades-long revenge plot.

One of Caesar’s finest jobs is knowing people’s number. And he’s not talking about the one for their phone. He’s talking about knowing people. Caesar is in prison before he dies, and he has a lot of time to think.

Plutarch believes that an idea cannot die and no country exists forever. A rebellion cannot die, either, because it is an idea.

Yet, Plutarch is scared.

Plutarch is scared to see a large portion of his allies found out and therefore, the group rendered infective and a waste of time. The sunk cost fallacy and all of that. That, regardless of the immortality of the idea of an uprising, this particular group might not succeed. And even though he can’t say it, it’s not just because there wouldn’t be a return on his investment.

Plutarch likes to see himself as someone whose ties to the real world are slim at best. Plutarch’s mother was raped and killed in front of him at the tender age of thirteen, who hid in the closet and watched through the peephole because he couldn’t look away. He clamped his fist into his mouth so he wouldn’t cry out.

Caesar could imagine that he made the rebellion his cause shortly thereafter. That he picked up his mother’s torch in the same way that Catalina Cain picked up her mother’s. Plutarch tells himself that this dedication means little he could miss or fear.

Plutarch is not scared for his own life. He has made the decision to lead a rebel group and to frame himself in the process a long time ago. The cause is much more important than his own life.

Catalina Cain hadn’t meant to become who she ended up becoming.

According to the Capitol, Catalina Cain had meant to be a ditzy heir to the Cain Dynasty, who’d run the company with the investors’ tight grip around her wrist and no real power. According to Aloysius Cain, Catalina was his greatest creation and she better prove herself.

Plutarch Heavensbee is a man who realised what mattered to him eleven minutes too late.

When Catalina grinned through kissing him on the balcony in front of everyone, throwing her arms around his neck and laughing raucously and true when he dipped her, hand steady against the small of her back, Plutarch saw a glimpse of what his life could have been from the rearview mirror as he was already speeding away.

His eyes were wide open and horrified when they came up for air, and she stroked her long, slender fingers across his cheeks, questioning and affectionate. And he could never tell her that even if he couldn’t survive, he wanted her to live a life in freedom.

Catalina’s biggest fear is what’ll happen when the rage that’s carried her through the past two decades of her life leaves her cold. Catalina Cain climbed into a morgue freezer and cried into Cinna Irshad’s stiff hair. Catalina Cain kissed cold nightlock-stained lips like she was at the altar.

Cassandra Cain made Caesar promise that if Catalina chose a man who didn’t deserve her, he would ruin their marriage. She gripped his wrists so tightly that Caesar woke up the next morning with a bruise that didn’t fade properly for weeks and he refused to go to Remake for, and she said: “Caesar, look at me. Look at me, you old piece of sh*t. You do it, okay? You f*cking do it. It’s the one goddamn thing I’ve ever wanted you to do for me.”

The dozens of rings decorating her thin, tiny fingers, matching the chains slung over her neck and dangling from her ears, enough precious stones and metals to rival the yearly financial output of the Outer Districts combined, dug into Caesar’s skin. And it was just a Tuesday. Lucious, sharp crimson silks were draped across her frail and short frame, swallowing her up instead of building her up.

She hadn’t been singing, and Caesar still felt like she’d been holding his head underwater and she’d just let him up for a frantic gasp of air.

“Cassie,” he tried. “I can’t—”

He bites his lip. Doesn’t say that he’s pretty sure she’d be better at it than he would, because that’s not the truth and that’s not why Cassandra is asking. It doesn’t matter that Catalina’s never listened to anything that Caesar ever told her. She’d always been a realist. If she got a sh*tstorm for being in love, she would stop being in love. At least publicly. And it’s fine if she’s doing it in private, because there’s a kind of power that men get when they’re in public and no one is saying anything.

“Of course. I’ll do that. You got it. I’ll—”

Cassandra tugs at his collar, dragging him down to her height and kisses him.

Caesar yelps, but leans into it nonetheless, because he’s already agreeing to a horrible thing. Might as well seal it with something that’ll promise that they never speak of this again.

His eyes slip closed and it feels, briefly, like nothing’s changed at all since they were nineteen.

Cassandra’s kneeing and reaching up for him, and Caesar’s bent down, his head tipped, thighs against the ground, Cassandra’s hands raking through his powdered hair. Cassandra bites his lip, drawing blood and they don’t say anything. They don’t need to. They’ve been here before and he still doesn’t know he’s supposed to be an optimist about any of this rubble.

Chapter 28: Ultrasound Visit!

Chapter Text

Unfortunately, Mrs. Everdeen still hasn’t gotten her sh*t together and built a hospital in six months (damn, how could she?) and Annie’s stuck getting her ultrasound from Catalina Cain. Or one of Catalina Cain’s employees. Annie doesn’t know who she’d prefer, because Catalina Cain seems like the kind of person who’s worshipped by her employees, which is fine. She’s undoubtedly an interesting person who’s done interesting things. But Annie has complicated feelings about Catalina Cain, and in all honesty: just really doesn’t want to think about, or be close to, Catalina Cain right now.

It’s fine, she tells herself, she had to go to the Capitol anyways. She can handle Catalina Cain. She’s just got to avoid Catalina Cain as much as possible, which based on how Catalina was when Annie called her about Finnick’s jacket with Catalina’s initials on it, shouldn’t be hard because Catalina agrees.

This doesn’t go well for her, since Catalina’s a personal friend of Beetee’s and Haymitch won’t admit to adopting her, but that’s because she’s twenty-nine and he can’t forcibly take out adoption papers on her like he did to Katniss and Peeta and has to actually have a conversation about what they mean to each other instead. And Haymitch, even tentatively sober Haymitch, doesn’t do sh*t like that. And Catalina would rather shoot out her knee.

Even Effie likes Catalina. Which on one hand makes sense because they’re both Capitol with rebellious tendencies and could talk about that, but also absolutely does not make sense in any way because she’s never met two people more different from each other who regularly have coffee together.

Effie announced that her and Catalina have picked up working out together, and from Beetee’s exaggerated shudder that he aimed at Annie to make her laugh, they’re into it. According to Beetee, Catalina works out like she’s training to avenge someone, or that she’s in prison and doesn’t have anything better to do than one-armed push-ups to remind everyone that prison assault is a choice, and surviving attempting it isn’t a promise.

Deleon Polaris is great, though. Whoever hired him should get a raise. Deleon Polaris is one of the most effective people Annie knows, and that’s saying a lot. Because even though she’s got weird feelings about Deleon’s boss, she knows her well enough to say that Catalina’s one of those scary productive people. Deleon’s a big man, but he’s a sweetheart. Barrel-chested with close-cropped hair, remnants of pastel-purple dye at the ends, apparently he didn’t want to go shorter, and his natural light brown fans out nicely. And he’s tall, standing out against the décor that’s so dull it looks like it should be on suicide watch.

Those aren’t Annie’s words. Those are Deleon’s words, because he bitches about the décor as he examines her, explaining that they bought it in bulk from some “sh*thole going out of business because it’s owners were killed by angry mob violence” as he presses shockingly gentle fingers against Annie’s blossoming stomach and doesn’t ask anything about how she’s handling all this sh*t without Finnick. She likes that. Usually, people can’t shut the f*ck up about how she’s so brave, or how she’s completely and utterly f*cked. When they call her brave, there’s an undertone of condescending.

Deleon talks about how he’s going to try to convince his boss to team up with him to submit a song for the contest that Plutarch is apparently making instead of the Hunger Games and he doesn’t expect Annie to say anything back to him. It’s a ridiculously pleasant twenty minutes, and then she’s out in the hallway, and Haymitch is goading her down it to get lunch with people who aren’t just Haymitch.

Catalina’s leaning against the cafeteria table, furiously stabbing at a salad as she snorts at something that Effie’s said. “The only competition to the white panel van is a father driving a fully loaded rust-coated car with the entire family of five on board.”

Haymitch sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Catalina?” he questions, “Why are you and Effie talking about the highway?”

“Because,” Catalina clicks her tongue, “Beetee insists that the rules are unknowable and everyone who regularly drives it is a psychopath who’s going to get mowed down by a cargo van.”

“You’d think it’s the sports cars that are the menaces,” Beetee moans, “But it’s the cargo vans casually doing three-sixty and scaring the sh*t out of you in the fast lane.”

“There’s no fast lane on the Capitol highway, only overtaking lanes,” Catalina explains, flicking her hand through the air, “If you are not actively in the process of passing a vehicle? Move right.”

“I’ll get go get lunch,” Haymitch announces.

“There’s still some of that twisted garlic and pesto bread you like,” Catalina informs him.

“Catalina,” Haymitch laughs, “You’re the greatest woman I’ve ever met.” Effie huffs, but then giggles when Haymitch twirls a lock of her natural hair around his finger before walking off, shouting over his shoulder whether Annie wants something or “the pregnancy cravings are still weird and terrifying”. Annie tells him to do his worst, and he throws her a thumbs up.

“Catalina—” she tries, shifting her attention. Catalina raises her hand, tsking.

“It’s fine,” she says, “We’re good. You were weird in my office. I was weird back. We got all the weirdness out of our systems. Let’s eat salad and talk about the freeway. You ever driven on the freeway? It’s called both the highway and the freeway, but it’s only the highway when it cuts into the Districts.”

Catalina’s wearing a tight white t-shirt, cropped right over her mid-riff, that looks to be home-printed. In blocky, red letters it reads: Save a horse, ride a… with a pin-up style lino-block drawing of a cowgirl. She’s wearing mid-rise jeans to show off that she’s a year from thirty, but she’s still got better abs than Peeta, belted with a simple glossy black buckle in the shape of a guitar.

“Nah,” she answers, “I’ve never been on the freeway. Is it the big road I saw when I was flying in?”

“If you’re looking out the window when you enter the Capitol, yeah,” Catalina agrees, “It’s the big, scary-looking one. The one that’s its own landmark, not like, just a main street or some sh*t.”

“Yah,” Annie says, “I saw that. I remember being amazed at the speed of the lights on it.”

“There’s no speed limit,” Catalina explains, “There’s just how good a driver you think you are. I’ll have you know that I’ve never crashed or been hit by another car.”

Beetee interrupts her. “That’s because you’re the menace of the damn freeway! You’re the reason that people are afraid of driving on the freeway! You drive like you’re escaping the cops! Constantly!”

Catalina leans over and snatches one of Beetee’s spring rolls, popping it between her teeth and smirking, challenging him. And not to a fight.

“Anyways,” she says, biting down, swallowing and then continuing, remains of the spring roll between her manicured nails, “Beetee’s proving that some people just don’t understand the glory and gore of the freeway. It’s magical. There’s no speed limits, only recommendations that no one follows and I’m driving today—”

“Catalina’s an icon of the freeway,” Haymitch says, lightly tapping his nails against his tray to announce his presence, Peeta on his heels.

“Are you picking up something heavy today?” Peeta questions, and Catalina tilts her head.

“Why does it matter?”

“I saw you hissing and grunting as you dragged something in yesterday and was going to offer my—”

“You’re not going on the freeway,” Haymitch interjects, cracking a garlic bread in two and offering one half to Annie, “The freeway is not a good place for you right now. The freeway is not a good place for anyone who’s working on their mental health or likes peace in their lives.”

Catalina clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “I’m pretty good on the freeway,” she argues, “Finnick used to sleep through the whole ordeal in the backseat when we were going upstate.”

“I always pictured Finnick as a passenger prince,” Haymitch says and Catalina snorts.

“Maybe when I’m not driving a fully-loaded minivan at meet-your-maker speeds down the freeway.”

“Didn’t you used to only go for a weekend or a week at max?” Annie cuts in, “How the f*ck did you fill a minivan?”

Catalina sighs, but there’s fondness and a little bittersweetness cloaked behind her displeasure. Like remembering old arguments with your siblings in the sweltering summer of your seventh year, when the only thing that could make you argue was who had control of the hose. “Cinna,” she laughs, “Had a packing problem. And by that, I mean that he didn’t know how to bring a normal person’s amount of stuff. The first time we drove up, we crammed all the crap into my actual car. The convertible, for those of you who didn’t know me then. We had to open the roof and rachet-strap the sh*t out of everything. And we still lost a suitcase.”

She rakes a hand through her hair, leaning back on one hand against the tabletop. “I was halfway through saying alright, sometimes there’s casualties because I watched it fly into this disgusting moat-thing of brown water, and then Cinna blurted out that it was his favourite blazer in that. And I don’t know how the f*ck it happened, or I mean—I do. Finnick was sleeping and Cinna couldn’t swim and I’m a stronger swimmer than Seneca was by a lot, so I ended up, because the suitcase was still half-floating and we could see it, to go diving for the c*nt. In that nasty water. We pulled in and I went diving for a goddamn suitcase.”

Chapter 29: Gimme More!

Chapter Text

Finnick proves that he’s still influenced by Catalina’s bullsh*t, because he tries to escape like he’s a batsh*t crazy former heiress who won’t admit that she’s fallen from grace and should retire quietly instead of making a scene out of it and trying to shoehorn herself into the historical canon.

Pyrena’s on the phone with her associates in Seven when two Avoxes drag him in by the shoulders. She’s about to yell at them for manhandling him, before she notices that Finnick’s covered in blood and dressed in Tiberius’ old clothes, a rope tied halfway across his body, boots that steel-toed boots that Tiberius bought for that one time he visited a factory on Finnick’s feet. Tiberius’ sh*t is usually locked away in the guest room that became his room when Pyrena caught him sexting Catalina Cain after Seneca Crane died.

“Did he try to escape?”

Number Twenty-Two nods, while Twenty-Seven hesitates, but nods when it notices Twenty-Two has already started.

“Good that you caught him,” she says, flicking her microphone, “Return him to his quarters and restrain him. I have a conference call I have to complete, but then I’ll decide what to do with him.”

Twenty-Two nods. Twenty-Seven follows suit. They drag Finnick out, and the doors click shut. Pyrena turns her microphone on, and apologises, citing a household conflict.

Fonseca tsks. “Hopefully,” he says, drawing out the words like prisoners to the gallows, “Your household problems won’t take precedence over our mission, Pyrena.”

She scoffs. “Of course not,” she assures him, remembering that he’s a District warlord, and she shouldn’t be insulted that he assumes she’s that shallow. “It’s just one of those annoying moments where you know better for someone, and they don’t think that you do. But it’s very obvious to everyone around you that in fact, you do.” One of the rules of counter-rebellion is that you don’t bore your partners with the drab details of your personal life, like how you just bought new curtains or that your boyfriend is acting out again. Fonseca knows that Finnick’s ill.

“Is it your boyfriend?” he drawls.

“Yes,” Pyrena answers, “The poor thing. He’ll be better when we get out of here, don’t worry.”

“Will he?” Fonseca questions, “Are you escaping from your lavish life to a untraceable bunker because of concern for him?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so,” Fonseca continues, “I think you have other motivations.”

“What would those motivations be?”

“Because every ecosystem has its apex predator,” Fonseca states, “And Catalina Cain eats steak.”

Chapter 30: The Ballad of Lyssa Mountjoy

Chapter Text

Lyssa Mountjoy doesn’t speak of names or faces.

She doesn’t speak of work or wives, unhappy lives. Why should she? She doesn’t speak of husbands or homes either.

Lyssa Mountjoy gets her job done.

And her job is making sure that someone has a roof over their head when they need it. And she gets paid enough to live off it, because she’s built her own guesthouse so she didn’t owe anyone a damn thing. Because owing people is dangerous, and she’s always known it.

Lyssa Mountjoy wasn’t a special woman, growing up. She’s got one of the most common names, and people usually compared her to the Heavensbee woman who shared it with her, saying something they’d read in a three-years-out-of-date tabloid before throwing it in the fire instead of paying attention to anything that Lyssa, the actual real Lyssa in front of them, gave a sh*t about.

On her first date, which wasn’t really a date but her f*cking off from her then-boyfriend after an argument, with Osiris Avant, she mentioned how she’d always wanted to try an orange and two weeks later he was throwing a rock at her window. He was grinning maniacally at her when she cracked it open, ready to call him a bitch, until she noticed that he was leaning against the fencepost, juggling two oranges.

Fonseca Bentzen threw a hissy-fit when she dumped him, but they’d both known that they weren’t going to marry. They didn’t do anything but work and argue, and sometimes when he stormed off to the mill, Lyssa found herself wishing that he wasn’t the owner of it, and he was the one risking maiming every time the workday started. Maybe he’d be less of a bitch with one hand, but probably not, because then he’d make her do sh*t for him.

Osiris Avant was a good man. He didn’t make Lyssa take his surname because she liked Mountjoy. Though, in hindsight, she wished they’d hyphenated them. She’d like the reminder of him, every time she opened her mailbox and got another letter from the IRS that she’d use as kindling. Most of the time, the postal service didn’t actually go to the top of the mountain and left it with one of her neighbours to bring up. She’d just argue that they kept losing her mail, if she ever gets sh*t for ignoring them. Osiris liked doing the taxes. He’d laugh that laugh where he smiled at the same time, and his tongue darted out to wet his lips.

He danced with her in the kitchen, carried her groceries up the mountain from the market, bagged and strung over a broomstick that he’d rest on his shoulders as she biked ahead, and he kept her laughing. When he could see the house, he’d drop all the bags, surge up with a burst of energy he pulled from thin air after complaining dramatically for the past five minutes, scoop her into his arms and carry her over the threshold, announcing that he had to get the most important goods in before the deer snatched them from him. She hated him for how he could make her giggle like a schoolgirl because she decidedly was not.

Lyssa isn’t defined by the husband she had, or the husband she no longer has. She’s her own woman. She built her own house. But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a big part of her life, and that she didn’t love him for quite some time. He couldn’t hold a tune in a bucket with three handles, but when he sang, the forest’s cacophony grew into gentle breaths and whisps, because what he lacked in technique and skill, he made up for in soft-spoken affection.

He’d balance the buckets by their handles on his broomstick, he’d stick one leg in front of the other, high-kicks and all the other dramatics she’d grown to expect, and he’d trot towards the lake, singing with glee about how his wife had been consumed by feminism and was making him wash the porch.

They made more money before her son was born, because they both worked and they didn’t run a guesthouse. It’s not spoken of, but she knows what was expected of them when their son had been born. The crude word for it was very late-term abortion. The word they used with the Peacekeepers, who’d usually eat it with glee because they wanted workers, not dependents and then, like when you cull a bad calf so the mother can get right back to breeding instead of wasting time rearing, was unfortunate accident in the hot spring or with a very sharp rock. Daddy forgot to lock his gun safe. We don’t have a gun safe because we live in bear mating territory. We forgot that human children aren’t born swimmers like ducks.

And that would be that.

Some women had to plead with their husbands not to kill their babies.

Some women got beaten black and blue, and then their baby still fell onto a sharp rock an hour later.

Osiris wasn’t that kind of man. Some couples agreed that it would be humane, no arguments or violence needed. They weren’t that kind of couple. They started building a house, Lyssa taking point while Osiris watched their son, and they got it done. They didn’t always live at the furthest point in the mountains, because nothing existed there before they came. Osiris quit his job and established a garden. And Lyssa set up shop. And it was good.

They learned as they went along, and it’s not that they were perfect. But she desperately, truly has to believe that he knew they tried. And they did the very best that they could. And it wasn’t always good enough and it certainly wasn’t for long enough, but they did what they could. Until the bitter, bitter f*cking end, they did the best that they could with what they had.

Lyssa Mountjoy didn’t get to bury her son, and one of the only people she owes a debt to is the woman who killed him. But she did bury her husband. It started out small, nothing more than a cough here and there. It was three months after their son died on the eve of the Hunger Games, and Harrison Jackstadt, expensive doctor, said that it was because he had a broken heart and a weak mind. Too expensive of a doctor. Quinn Frakes, childhood friend of Lyssa’s, said that it sounded a whole lot like TB. And all she charged was a potato that she lugged at Osiris to check his reflexes and splattered next to his head instead of actually using for just that, just to see him jump.

The diagnosis was confirmed by the blood that followed a few weeks after making their way back to the top of the mountain, swearing to hunker and wait out the storm. There would be no surviving the blizzard.

The mountains were the best and worst thing for him, Lyssa realised. The air was cold, but clear. And Lyssa was the worst and the best thing for him. They sat out on the porch, patched quilts thrown over his thinning shoulders and talked for hours more than they should. When the news spread about her husband’s illness, Lyssa lost customers and stopped being able to buy firewood. She chopped it instead, but it took her away from his side and she will always resent the town for that. She tried to sell it, too, and not a soul would accept it except for Johanna Mason and Blight Frakes.

Blight invited her down to his for an evening, just to talk, he specified. She’d rolled her eyes and told him that his cousin had already snitched about how he’d told her in their teenage years that plain Lyssa Mountjoy had been a damn catch. He’d huffed that she wasn’t plain, little puffs of smoke coming from his lips as she poked his side. Lyssa ended up spending the night throwing back beers and holding back tears and she didn’t stay for breakfast when Blight awkwardly offered.

Osiris made peace with his death in a way that Lyssa never would.

The closest she ever saw him to despair was when he stopped being able to hold his breath.

They found out that the hot springs were good for him, and Lyssa bought a map of them, only to realise that she’d found a dozen uncatalogued ones in her childhood, and that the map was useless bunk that only showed the ones that literally everyone and their mother’s dog knew about. She’d wasted thirty dollars and found herself sitting at the kitchen table hissing about the principle of it. You could ask any child and get a better map. She started sketching out a better one, for something to do.

She brought it with her when she hunted in the times, and they grew, that they couldn’t afford food, passing the downtime by getting the scopes and curves of the landscape just right.

Osiris didn’t ever use the maps that she made, but he framed them and put them up in the bedroom.

He died on a Thursday, while Lyssa was watching him. Lyssa has a scar on her elbow from a Peacekeeper’s baton when she ran away from him after stealing a book about what you should expect from tuberculosis. She’d given him the slip, and she’d read the book in one night before hiding it underneath the floorboards and nailing it shut like a coffin.

“It would be a hundred times easier if we were young again,” she said to the lake where she sunk his body, “But it is what it is, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with you, my darling.”

When you die of tuberculosis, you can’t be buried like a normal person. Because they don’t see you as a normal person. So, Lyssa didn’t tell anyone when Osiris died, and she buried him herself. She cut open his blackened lungs and filled them with stones, chopped off his limbs and bagged them separately. And then she kissed him, thanked him, and gave him back to the earth.

Energy doesn’t die, and she fed her world with him so he’s everywhere with her. He’s in the trees, in the calcium of the buck’s crown of antlers, in the gentle breeze that almost feels like his fingers before and during his decline, stroking her cheek.

“Sometimes when I step out here,” she continues, “It smells a little bit like oranges even though they can’t grow here. It’s funny how things come back, isn’t it? Maybe someone upwind is burning something that smells like oranges, and they’d never know. It’s funny how you always remembered the little things.”

Chapter 31: Dang Varmints

Chapter Text

Deleon’s flicking wadded-up paper at her as she peruses through the security cameras.

“I just don’t get it,” she complains, “Why the f*ck would Pyrena need to send her Avoxes to steal antibiotics from my dumpster on a regular basis? Is she selling them on the black market or some sh*t? I don’t care, Deleon. If she’s doing that, I’m going to fight her. And I’m not going to hold back.”

Deleon flicks another wad of paper at her, hitting her between her brows.

“Cool the murder train,” he chides right as the door clicks open, and Peeta’s hobbling in on crutches because Catalina took his leg, insisting that they’d have to lob off an inch or two from his stump because of burn injuries from the bombing if he wanted to walk without pain. It’d also help her clean out the mess that the Capitol made of it after they hijacked him and bolted the prosthetic straight onto him. They “delivered” him back with a running blade, for f*ck’s sake. Catalina intends to deal with those wounds permanently by tossing that part of his stump into the dumpster out back. The actual dumpster. Not the fake dumpster they throw actual useful stuff in because people refuse to accept charity.

Peeta blinks. “Is now a bad time?”

“Perhaps,” Deleon answers, “Catalina’s just being a bad influence.”

“f*ck that,” Catalina laughs, throwing up her hand and gesturing for Peeta to sit in the chair that Deleon’s not using because they’re both sitting on the table, “Here’s some life advice: get a good lawyer and choose violence. Jail is temporary. Memories are forever.” She flicks her nails. “Beat their face into the curb.”

“I thought we both agreed that a new murder charge wasn’t a good look on you.”

Catalina rolls her eyes, scoffing. “When did I say anything about murder? I never said anything about murder. Keep them breathing so they can feel all the pain.”

Peeta takes a seat.

“… you’re talking about getting a good lawyer so you can beat people’s face into the curb? Don’t you already have a good lawyer since you’re not in prison?”

“I have weird opinions on my past legal representation,” Catalina answers, absentmindedly tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, “He smokes electric cigarettes because he swears they’re better for him and actually helping him quit even though he’d have to be clean in Thirteen so it’s just a bad excuse and he looks like a total tool when he does it.”

Peeta doesn’t say anything to that.

“We’re actually trying to figure out how to handle some…”

“Dumpster varmints,” Catalina finishes for him.

Peeta tilts his head, questioning. “Dumpster varmints?”

“Yep.” Catalina pops the p.

“Do I want to know what you’d define as a dumpster varmint?”

“Probably not,” Deleon says before Catalina can f*ck it up.

Catalina snorts and briefly clicks off the security footage. She steeples her hands and asks:

“Peeta,” she prompts, voice as soft as the fur throws that she’d sent Deleon to pick up from Tigris because she hadn’t visited since the Fall and knew she’d get yelled at, “It’s not my normal office hours. Do you have an issue?”

“I—” Peeta stumbles and Catalina doesn’t surge towards him, but Deleon feels her thigh stiffen from where she’s hooked it over his, like she’s ready to, “You said that I could come whenever the lights were on.”

She nods. “I did,” she agrees, tipping her head towards the green desk lamp, “And the lights are on.” She clicks her tongue. “So, you just wanted to drop by?”

“… something like that.”

Catalina makes a face, but it’s so fast that it’s a blink and you’d miss it kind of thing. And then she’s hopping off the table and landing on terrifyingly graceful, arched feet and saying: “Hey, Peeta? I have something cool to show you.” Which is always a dangerous thing for Catalina Cain to say, because sometimes it’s something that Catalina Cain finds cool and most people find horrifying or at least weird. And even though it’s slightly demeaning, saying that Peeta has a delicate constitution still sounds better than saying that he’s easily triggered.

And before Peeta can say whether he wants to see the cool thing, Catalina’s hauling a catalytic converter onto the table, half wrapped in colourful grocery bags. “A catalytic converter I took from a weirdo at the DMV!” she announces.

Peeta blinks. “A… what that you took from what?”

Catalina leans against the table, waving her hand flippantly through the air. “No, no,” she tells him, “You’ve gotta hear the story before you call me a psycho bitch. You’re gunna agree that she totally had it coming.” Deleon doesn’t think that Peeta would call her a psycho bitch for stealing a catalytic converter. Deleon doesn’t think that Peeta would call her a psycho bitch if she tortured him again and actually meant it this time.

“Alright,” she sets the scene, leaning back on one hand and stabbing the other through the air as she accentuates her points, “You’re me at the DMV, renewing your license. And like, I’m wearing a big hat and sunglasses and big leather coat that I’m kind of baking in. The boring black straight-leg jeans, Cinna would have my head if I didn’t promise you up and down that I don’t and have never worn skinny jeans. No one’s figured out that I’m Catalina Cain. I’m chugging cheap coffee and hating everyone, but like, the normal DMV level of hating everyone.”

Deleon interrupts: “Peeta’s never been to the DMV, Catia.”

“—it’s fine, you can tell the story—”

Catalina rolls her eyes. “The DMV,” she explains, clicking her nails together, “Is a sick and twisted place where two employees f*ck with everyone by going as slowly as possible. It stands for the Department of Motor Vehicles and it’s where you have to go for anything related to your driver’s license. And in front of me at the DMV is this lady who loudly tells her friend, because apparently there’s some people who are sad enough to drag their friends to the DMV with them or even worse: actually both had to go which means that someone’s going to wait forever for the other because they forgot to bring some horribly little niche piece of paper that most of us throw out as soon as we get it. Some sh*t like the receipt for the last time they went to that sh*thole. And so, she loudly tells her friend that it’s really sad that Finnick’s dead because she always fantasised about him getting her co*ckdrunk.”

Catalina snatches Deleon’s water and chugs it.

“And like,” she continues, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to repeat what she said in any detail, but like, she then goes on to loudly talk about what she’d get Finnick to do to her, and how he’d be really into it. And her friend doesn’t look to totally agree, or maybe she’s just barely decent enough that she thinks it’s weird to loudly talk about the sex acts you’d do with a dead rape victim. But maybe I’m just a prude.”

“… so, you stole her catawhatit?”

“Catalytic converter,” Catalina clarifies, “It’s necessary for a car to drive. And yeah, I listened in to her describing her car to a clerk and when she said sour apple green, I thought jackpot, because I’d actually seen that ugly f*cking car outside and then I told this nice old lady behind me if she could keep my spot in line, and she said yeah, and then I went out, took her catalytic converter, dropped it in my boot, bought coffee and chocolate for myself and the woman holding my spot, and went back inside.”

“I didn’t need a reminder not to be on your bad side,” Peeta says after a beat, “But this is why no one’s on your bad side. What—so, she takes her car to get fixed and just gets told the part isn’t there?”

“Yep,” Catalina grins, “And I hacked the security cameras when I got home, so you can’t see me claiming it either.”

“That’s f*cking terrifyingly calculated,” Deleon laughs, “And you didn’t tell me this until now? I didn’t even know you went to the DMV.”

Catalina shrugs. “Why the f*ck would I tell you that I had to go to the DMV? It’s a horrible place.”

“Because you stole some weirdo’s catalytic converter!” Deleon counters, cackling.

“Catalina?” Peeta interrupts, voice high. “You’re good at singing, real or not real?”

Catalina hides her surprise, and because it’s certainly there, he can tell by the stiffening of her shoulders and everything else he knows about her, her discomfort well and answers smoothly: “That’s certainly what I’ve been told by very reputable sources, so yeah, real.”

“And you like nature?”

“Real,” she continues, “I like what little I’ve seen of it. I want to see more of it.”

“How can someone like you live someplace like this?”

Catalina snorts. “I don’t think that can be answered with one word.”

“I—”

“I was born here,” Catalina continues, sitting down on the table and folding her legs under herself, “Despite… its many problems, the Capitol will always be my home. I grew up here, and I fell in love here. And the people of the Capitol are my people, just like the people of the Districts are my people, too. You don’t have to agree with me, because I don’t think it’s the kind of thing everyone has to agree with, I think it’s one of those things that you just realise and innately understand about yourself as soon as you realise it, but I’m proud of being from Panem. If there’s people outside of here, I would be proud to be from Panem in a gathering where I’m the only one.”

Catalina hugs her knees with one arm, using the other to stroke at the air. “When I was younger,” she tells them, “I considered running away. A lot, actually. For a lot of different reasons. And I didn’t do it for a lot of different reasons, too. And those reasons grew to outnumber the reasons why I wanted to buck it, so…”

She shrugs. “I ended up staying and causing a whole lot of trouble for everyone. And I did what I could to stop the cycles that I grew up in. And I’ll keep doing that. So, I guess that’s how I’m here.”

The answer sounds well-practiced, like it’s not the first time that she’s asked or that she’s answered. She doesn’t say anything about how she used to love the wild weather, but now she sees Finnick when it rains and she’s started buying coats with hoods instead of running through it. She doesn’t say that she works so she doesn’t have to think, and she doesn’t say anything about how she’s sh*t-scared to travel the Districts, not because she’s going to get taken out by an angry mob, but because she’s going to realise what was taken from her for almost thirty years.

She doesn’t say that she’s started not exactly opening up at therapy but also not spending it in silence because she’s started having endless dreams of versions of people she doesn’t have but didn’t lose either. Peeta rests his head against the arm of his chair.

“Deleon,” she orders suddenly, “Go hide in one of the portable toilets and wait for the dumpster varmints to come back.”

“… what?”

“I don’t have time,” she clarifies, “I have to finish a proposal that Paylor’s been up my ass about. You can drill a spying hole or something, we’re getting rid of them tomorrow anyways.”

Chapter 32: Somebody Else's Lunch

Chapter Text

Cassandra Cain is twenty-one, and she’s stroking her fingers through Caesar Flickerman’s natural hair. She dances across his tongue, her hips clinking against his to the smooth jazz, the trumpets in tune with her soaring heartbeat.

His eyes had met hers across the room, and she’d pulled up her hair and a chair, tapping her nails against the upholstery and begging him to come save her from a boring conversation with her boring husband’s boring investors.

“I could never get enough of you,” she tells Caesar, just like she told him the week before her wedding night when she cracked and spilled the beans about what she was about to do, feeling like she’s both the headlights and the deer, “I’ll always mean that.”

Caesar should lurch back, at least shove her away. He should yell at her. He should ask her who the f*ck she thinks she is. He doesn’t do any of that, and he just leans into Cassandra’s warmth, breathing her in. Cassandra’s got a child. A couple months old, already trying to escape her cradle. Cassandra isn’t particularly attached to Catalina, but Aloysius is. Aloysius carries her everywhere, cooing at her in a baby voice that’s terrifying coming from him.

And Cassandra is painfully, obviously, completely dissatisfied.

“It’s funny how it’s always the same,” Caesar whispers instead, leaning down to press his lips faintly against the shell of Cassandra’s ear. Cassandra used to grasp at the future, and now she’s blind. Aloysius saw her gifts and what did she get for it? For telling the future, he cut out her tongue. “It’s funny how you always forget that we’re both married.”

Cassandra scoffs. “That bitch has nothing on me and you know. And you haven’t put a cross on your door to keep me out yet.”

“I haven’t,” Caesar agrees, “I haven’t put a cross on my door.”

“You know what I want from you, Caesar?”

Caesar tilts his head.

“I don’t want you ever to forget about us.”

Chapter 33: Ecosystem

Chapter Text

Catalina Cain is twenty-nine and some weeks when she admits that she might have scars.

She doesn’t admit it to her court-ordered therapist, because then she’d have to use the harder word and say that she’s traumatised. And that she needs to be in therapy. And actually talking in therapy, instead of watching the water stains slowly expand from session to session. She admits it to a toothpaste-spit-speckled mirror in a gas station bathroom at the border of District Four.

Catalina Cain is twenty-nine and has recently been compared to a prowling wolf with visible ribs and scars from where her chain collar dug into her until she pulled hard enough to crack it.

Rape is the only crime on the books for which arguing that the temptation to commit it was too clear and obvious to resist is treated as a defence. For every other crime, we call that a confession.

When Catalina was in prison, she wrote a song about her mother. Six months later, she put guitar chords to it. Caesar told her that it’d been surprisingly good, and less call-out-y than he’d expected. She’d rolled her eyes and asked him if he’d forgotten that she was good at writing. He’d shrugged and said that she hadn’t really cared for that side of herself in many years. He’d thought she’d chosen to let it starve.

She’d explained that writing was a function of other things, to her. Writing has been something that she’s always done. It’s not correct to say that she writes to process, but it’s not wrong, either.

Catalina remembers the taste of blood dancing across her giddy tongue. She remembers it well, and it’s hard not to default to wanting it back. Sometimes she listens to people and thinks about what she’d like to do to them, and it grows in fervour until there’s an opera at the back of her mind, her mother swinging a blood-dipped crowbar to the music spilling from her bruised lips.

Catalina’s been trying hard not to overeat.

She’s going insane in her office instead.

Because that’s productive and at least better than doing it in the hallways.

Finnick taught her a song that said that hope was that thing with feathers. He insisted that she sung it well, and that it was a pity that she wasn’t leaning against a pillar on the docks, flicking her flat-cap upside down for pennies and stringing it out for sailors desperate for a dance. Catalina had laughed and smacked his shoulder, saying that she was made for much bigger stages and that’s why. They both knew she was bullsh*tting, so she didn’t lie. She was just joking and never meant it at all.

Personally, she disagreed with the song, even though it was fun to sing.

Hope isn’t that thing with feathers that comes home to roost when you need it most. Hope is an ugly thing with cracked, yellow teeth and matching gross claws and patchy fur that’s seen some sh*t. Hope’s what thrives in the discard piles of humanity because that’s where it finds you, winking with its one remaining eye and gifting you with flea bites. Hope is what survives in the ugliest parts of our world, because it has to. Simple as that. Textbook. It has to be able to find a way to go on when nothing else can even find a way in. It’s got to be a real stubborn motherf*cker.

It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such horrible diseases as optimism, persistence, perseverance, and joy. They’re all transmissible as hope drags its nail across the path and bites you in the ass. Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird. Hope is a mean and lowly little sewer rat that snorts pesticides like they were lines of expensive co*ke in exclusive club bathrooms and still shows up to work the next day, looking not an inch worse for wear and ready to dig through your trash.

Catalina is twenty-nine and doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with all her restless energy. She doesn’t know if she’s furious and wants to smash an old washing machine to smithereens, or if she wants to lay on her side on the bathroom floor, door locked and jammed shut, and weep until she burns her voice out. She can’t sing. She’s tried. She’s picked up her guitar fourteen times in the past two and a half hours, but she can’t get even halfway through a song.

She gets up just to pace once and then sit down again. She repeats this dance every fifteen minutes or so. She sits on her desk, in the chair behind it, the desk again but her legs don’t hang off the edge anymore and she hugs them against her knees like she’d never learned civility, the chair in front of her desk, the one that’s meant for guests. She thinks about how a growing rhetorical debate in the parts of the Capitol that are trying to assimilate to the new world is whether a woman would rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear.

A whole lot of men talk a whole lot of sh*t about it, and they made the debate into what it is.

The bear debate:

It’s because the bear won’t kill her just because she’s a woman. The bear doesn’t kill her for fun. The bear can be shouted at and will leave her alone if she leaves it alone. And she has no interest in tussling with a bear. The bear won’t write social media posts complaining about how she crossed to the other side of the path when she saw him coming, and the bear won’t get all his homeboys to comment on it in support of his point of view. If a bear kills her, it’s just being a bear. It can’t understand logic.

It’s not acting out of malice—just fear or hunger or protective instinct if she’s stepped too close to its cubs. And that’s almost as noble a thing as nature can give you.

She once read somewhere that the front porch might be the only outside space left for women’s taking. The argument had been that it’s still the domain of the house while it’s also outside-but-safe. When she’s in the woods, she’s in the bear’s home and he has a right to defend his property. Outside spaces—anywhere at night, certain parks, and streets in the day—are often implicitly and exclusively “owned” by men.

She can’t explain the feeling of knowing that you’ve entered a man’s “territory”; you walk into a place and just know that you are now in their space and there’s sh*t and f*ck you can do about it. You get a sick sense that you’re in danger by being here.

The last time she was in the woods, she was walking a dog that wasn’t hers. She was in Seven, and a group of about eight men were fooling around while she passed them. She shouldn’t have been afraid of them. They didn’t know who she was, but they should have been afraid of her. She was wearing work clothes and robbing the rearview blind. She was armed to her teeth, and it was all concealed. She walked three extra miles to be in the open so she could see if they were following her, even though they didn’t make a move after her or even say anything to her.

The sickness is forever, it seems.

And it wasn’t even anything worth writing home about. It was just a Tuesday, like seeing fistfights at the beach in Four.

Bear or man?

It’s easy, really. She doesn’t have to think about it at all.

Only one of the situations is seen as a tragic accident. She would rather die and have a park bench erected in her honour near where the bear’s claws degloved her whole chest rather than have family questioned about why they let her, an adult, walk in the woods in the first place when she should really be at home in the kitchen. She liked walking. She’d always liked walking. She’d always wanted more woods to walk in. She was one of the people cataloguing and mapping the formerly forbidden woods stretching out from the Capitol’s borders, because she’d snuck out there once or twice, climbed the fence countless times just to peer over and see what she couldn’t live in. And remind herself why.

Before she was a cautionary tale, she was famous. And before she was famous, she worked in the beauty service industry. She’s had women say and do absolutely heinous and abusive things to her—not because she was a woman, but because she was there, and they were angry. Throughout her life, the way men treated her when they got angry was always different. It was because she was a woman, and usually, because she was a woman where there shouldn’t be any women.

It was because she was bad at being a woman and they were angry about it. And they had to let her know how much she was f*cking with them and f*cking sh*t up by existing.

There’d always been an undertone of I’d hurt you worse than emotionally if I could get away with it. And I’m not entirely sure I couldn’t get away with it. Watch your back, butterfly.

Since the fall of the Capitol, she’s seen a bear thrice. And she died each time, obviously. She’s a ghost talking about bears (it was very scary the first time, but completely and utterly fine). The second encounter was a black bear with her cub. She looked at Catalina and tilted her head and her eyes said:

Do we have to do this or are we good?

The dog that wasn’t hers was busy sniffing a bush, completely nonreactive. She felt like she was in a sitcom, one of the more sad*stic shows on the old Flickerman programming schedule, or someone’s contrived rebuttal. Feminist bitch reacts—does she actually mean that she’d choose the bear when it’s standing right here, right in front of her, because we airdropped it in and that’s totally a thing that happens to people on the regular.

All she could think of was:

She’s so beautiful. Wow. Her paws are massive.

She’s furious about a lot of things, with a quiet yet ever-thrumming undercurrent of misty grief at the edges of the burning field. Most of the sh*t she’s mad about is something that a man did to her, either directly or indirectly through making her watch and try to pick up the pieces in the scorched aftermath. She’s never been able to lose her sh*t like men did. She thinks that’s why she went off the deep end when she was supposed to be dead. And if it wasn’t the whole truth, because part of it was just that someone had to do and there’s not a whole lot of desire in duty, it’s a good fraction of the reasoning. She’s tired of having to come up with fun rhetoric to convince men to have empathy.

Would you rather die in a car accident or a mugging?

Would you rather your house burns down due to an electrical fire or due to arson?

It’s almost like most people would rather risk the accident than the calculated intention.

She would much rather her last thought be oh sh*t, a bear rather than I’m a person, too. Why doesn’t that matter? Why don’t you care?

There’s no smoke, but she knows that the room’s on fire. Even though no one else can see it.

She’s twenty-nine and she’s nineteen and she’s kneeling in front of a bedrail that surged up and got her in the stomach, leaving a massive bruise that would take two weeks to clear completely. It’d also winded her, and she’d accidently thrown her phone across the room. She’s twenty-three, and she’s throwing her phone across the room and hitting Seneca in the man tit instead of an anaemic white wall. She’s twenty-eight and Plutarch’s dipping her for the last time, and when she opens her eyes, his are wide and misty.

She’s twenty-four and Seneca’s carrying her groceries and she’s laughing more than she ever thought possible a year ago. She’s twenty-three and Aurelia’s dead and she’s hearing it from someone who never mattered to either of them, because Celeste hates her. She’s twenty-seven and Cain’s addressing Abel and the elephant in the room.

She’s everyone she’s ever been and she’s no one she’ll ever become.

She’s sad because she’s sad.

It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical. It’s her age.

Go see a shrink or take a pill or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep or something. All children are sad, Catalina. But some get over it. Count your blessings, Catalina. Or, even better than that—buy a hat. Buy a fur coat or a pet or a fur coat and a pet. Take up another hobby where you use your body to forget. Learn a new style of dancing or perfect a new way to fence and you’ll forget.

Forget what?

Forget your shadow, your sadness, the fact that your sadness is your shadow, whatever it was that was done to you that made you unable to one of the kids who got over it—was it the day of the lawn party? You punched Mr. Crane in the face, Catalina. That wasn’t good for our image. Seneca’s trying to talk him out of pressing charges, you know. He had to do that for you. He’ll be a good husband to you, Catalina. Not all men would do that kind of sh*t, you know. Do you remember when you came in flushed with the sun and your knuckles and the front of your pale yellow dress flushed with blood, your mouth still sulky with sugar and the new beautiful yellow dress with the red ribbon around your waist that you said made you look like nothing but a gift completely ruined?

My darling, when it comes to it, right down to it, when the light falls and the chemical fog rolls in and you’re all that’s left when the whole world ends and you’re trapped in your overturned body under a blanket or a burning car—

And the red flame is seeping out of you and igniting the tarmac beside your head or else the floor, or else the pillow;

What will you say?

Right now, you think you’ll f*ck up and talk about why you still remember how your grandmother taught you to pray instead of that you’re sorry for everything you’ve done or something smart about hey, do I get to see my life wrapped in some cool statistics or something like when you finish a video game?

Look, it’s not that you believe in him. And it’s not like he believes in you either. You’ve beyond all of that trite nonsense. You never went to a church because there’s no churches in the Capitol. The kind of religion that your grandmother silently practices would be illegal if you were to actually pick it up. Yet, you’ve still prayed alone three times in your life. So, when she wasn’t there to watch you. When you weren’t doing it for her.

You think you like the thought of having someone there in the dark, or at least a name to address your grievances about the inherently random nature of the universe to. You take a deep breath, get on your knees and do it in silence, waiting for passing headlights to glide across the ceiling and knock stray goodwill loose from where they got stuck on their way to materialisation. It’s like finding an old piece of chocolate that you got with a coffee at a café that doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t existed for a while in the inside pocket of your leather jacket. It’s not dark chocolate, which is the only kind that you like, and you didn’t keep it for yourself.

One time, your prayer was describing eating an avocado in detail.

Another time, you listed places that you’d almost died.

Plutarch’s been hassling you these past couple of days. He’s worried that you’re not sleeping enough. He’s worried that you’re not eating properly or enough. He’s worried that you’re f*cking up a sobriety you’ve never been able to maintain anyways. You’re sober when you don’t have to sit alone with it all, because you can’t do that. You just can’t. You’ve tried. You drank four days ago. You drank yourself stupid and numb and emotional and then you pushed through it in the blink of an eye because someone needed you more than you needed to feel miserable. So, he should f*ck off.

You’re fine. You can kick it when you need to kick it. You’re not doing anything you’re not supposed to right now. You’re just pacing and sitting back down again and trying not to school your breaths to someone else’s or f*ck Johanna in a hallway closet or burn down a building or think about all the times you’ve almost died and how you felt nearly nothing at all when the ground rushed up to meet you each time.

Catalina Cain is purposefully avoiding Annie and Peeta.

Catalina spent thirty minutes hiding in a toilet stall because Peeta was in the one next to her and he wasn’t moving. She’d sat on the toilet, tucking them under her ass and crouched, so Peeta would recognise her by her shoes.

She eats spinach straight out of the bag because it’s the only thing left in the cafeteria once Annie’s left that Catalina’s willing to stomach. She can’t eat the pasties. She just can’t. She’ll throw up again. Not on purpose. Her body just rebels against her, and she doesn’t even have the excuse of being pregnant. Cressida says that she’s handling sh*t well, but that’s because Catalina refuses to show her anything else. Cressida wants the kind of stable Catalina Cain that doesn’t chase her ghosts through hallways in beautiful, flowing dresses, armed to the teeth and with her teeth, too.

She spent time in solitary in prison not because she was a bad prisoner, but because they were afraid of what she’d do to the others. They were afraid that she’d rip someone’s throat out. Both the Peacekeepers and the rebels threw her in solitary at different moments and it felt like someone had cut out her tongue and eyes. Her therapist says that she got a little more insane in a new way from it. Her therapist says that it doesn’t make her broken, and she can work through what her mind did to cope with the trauma. Catalina feels like she’s condemned to it and that she should take a graceful exit.

Haymitch thinks that she’s still glorious. He thinks that she can domesticate gods and grab Fate by the collar. She tips her head back, closes her eyes and tries not to see the burning riot vans imprinted on the insides of her eyelids.

It does things to you, knowing that if you’re caught, you’ll be killed. But they have to catch you first. She still feels her heart thumping in her chest like she’s a furious rabbit instead of a woman. Like she’s got her ear nicked by the wolf instead of crawling into the wolf’s arms and asking to become him, or at least wear his skin and mould it to her body like her leather jacket, the last thing that Cinna ever made just for her.

If she runs fast enough, will she break apart? Will she leave her pieces for someone else to mop up, or will the cathedrals of her old life finally flatten under her feet and become nothing but dust in her heart?

She’s got to get out.

She’s sitting crouched between the rafters of a burning church, watching the wood crackle and chip, feeling the shake of a coming collapse. No matter how far she crawls back, she knows the nature of fire. And she knows that it’s coming for her. And no amount of water or crosses on the door will keep it from singeing her. Even if she could get out, her lungs would have blackened and everyone would know what she’d sprinted through. And sometimes, that’s worse than the dying part.

She’s died a couple of times, she thinks.

She thinks the first time was when she was born a daughter and not son. And that hurt, but then dying was just a thing that happened to her, and the only time she’s ever been afraid to die is when she was running from the Peacekeepers and their dogs, everyone shouting her name and her knee buckling with every step. And she was afraid because she knew that they couldn’t let her die yet, but they might f*ck up and get bored and sloppy.

And then she’d become a statistic.

Catalina Cain is not afraid of men, but her body is.

She thinks it’s just one of those things that happens to you when you’re born a girl and when you see what happens to unruly girls. She’s not afraid of a man hurting her, because she’ll hurt him first, but her body still stiffens when he raises his voice. And it’s always been like that. When Deleon taps her shoulder or drapes his arm across the small of her back, she bites back the hiss before leaning into it. He’s caught on, and he telegraphs his movements now. But he still touches her. And she likes that.

When she’d been a little girl, she’d been far too scared to hit back. Then, she’d wanted to hit them all in a heartbeat and now she’s just tired. She doesn’t want a moderated one-on-one, but breaking things didn’t give her the catharsis she needed it to, just the brief, animalistic satisfaction of watching destruction. And she destroyed herself, too.

Catalina Cain is twenty-four and she found out that a phrase she’d used in two speeches was coined by an abusive man. This felt like getting her teeth taken out without anaesthetic or even the dull lie of whiskey. She felt sick and tired, but not surprised. She holds her breath and counts to ten, and then she rewrites the third speech she’d have used it in and it doesn’t matter that she does that.

Bad people tell you to be careful when you talk badly of bad men, that it could “ruin” a life. She had her life ruined by a bad man. So did her mother. And her grandmother. She’s from a bloodline of women who had their lives ruined by bad men. This never matters to them. Her real-life, lived-in, lived-through consequences are not valued as highly as the potential of his future. It doesn’t matter that he did it on purpose and she was the wrong girl in the wrong room at the wrong time.

This has always been a frustrating little mathematics problem for her. She’s missed school and had to call out sick at work and had panic attacks she restrained to office toilet stalls that smelled faintly of vinegar. It stole sleep and food and friends from her. She cried in public, f*cked her relationships up. And the whole time: her present has never has much as his great what if. Her mother explained it as so:

One life (your life) is already ruined, should we really ruin two?

Yes! Goddammit, yes!

She does not say this, because then suddenly she’s five and picking up a butterfly with shattered wings in the schoolyard after little boys discovered their power for the first time.

So, she lives with the consequences and he doesn’t. And that’s just like, another thing that she needs therapy for. She once discussed this with one of her friends over coffee. She chewed the wooden stirrer, looked off into the distance. “Once I became a victim, everything that happens to me afterward is automatically less interesting in the eyes of the general public. It’s always about him. He changed my identity. To survivor. To statistic. Meanwhile, this whole f*cking time, I’m a person.”

Catalina sat there, hallucinating old friends she didn’t speak to, stirring the chocolate into her coffee with Catalina’s stirrer.

She learned in her twenties that three out of five of her favourite writers and artists and scientists and visionaries and musicians were actually abusive assholes. These days, she’s no longer surprised. These days, it takes a whole lot to surprise her. Oh, that’s what’s happening behind those dang closed doors? Of course it was. He’s a “genius” and she was just a girl. She’s talking about him in art history, so obviously his career was absolutely ruined, for eternity and all that. That’s what happens, right? They strike your name from the record as soon as you touch something you had no right to and refuse to remember you? Nobody really knows the girl’s name, but hey, that’s what you get for being close to celebrity.

Catalina’s dating life has never been something she got to choose to keep private. She was rich, and even worse, she was beautiful. And she stayed beautiful because she did not have children. And she was vilified for this, but also praised for her flat stomach without any stretchmarks. She didn’t get to choose whether she wanted to tell Caesar Flickerman about her boyfriend. She didn’t get to choose if she even wanted a boyfriend.

Seneca was a good man and she loved him. Two weeks after he died, she was photographed at a café with Plutarch and the suspicion that they were f*cking could be found on every front page the following day.

She got into an argument about the poets and the painters and the speechwriters who were actually horrible f*cking people. A bad argument, because it made her cry. Her mother said: what? You want us to just ignore all the things this man did because he made a few women uncomfortable? You make men uncomfortable. And she’d balled up her fists and choked on it. Later, in bed, she’d agonised over the response that she’d been trying to articulate but never found the right moment to deploy: you are ignoring what any person could do if they weren’t being f*cking abused.

Maybe her talents far exceeded his and she was just never allowed to f*cking use them. Maybe we only see genius in rich-white-straight-men because they purposefully f*cking squash and silence any other people with talent.

But she cried about it instead of saying that because she is the cost and she knows it well. She is the talent and she is the potential that he took. She used to be brave and smart and clever and unafraid. Like a lich, he stole years of her life.

They made a miniseries about her brother’s abuse before she took control of his estate. It made her sad and sick and tired, but not surprised. Unfortunately, all the things he said were true and enough people thought that the public needed to have those true things slammed into the backs of their heads until they f*cking understood. And she got it, she really did. She might have agreed if she hadn’t been more miserable than furious because he was dead and they didn’t say anything about how he liked writing poetry and making beaded bracelets and necklaces. They just got some psychologists and historians and archival footage of him to talk about how he got systematically and repeatedly raped through acts of sex trafficking for blackmail.

Here's one of the important things the historian said, even though he’d said it too: an entire network of people allowed it to continue. This is not news to her, but it doesn’t matter if it’s news to her. She probably shouldn’t be watching it front-to-back in her locked office, anyways, because watching it makes her want to drape her wrist over the steering wheel and make out with the tar off the side of the freeway. It’s not news to her because she’s seen entire networks of people make the same f*cking excuses when the same thing or worse happened to other people and her brother.

One of them wasn’t even that famous. It was just a girl and a guy. And a guy. It was still so difficult getting people to stand up for the girl who happened to be her friend, but she’d have done it for anyone who needed it, and she’d had to say that again and again, because everyone thought she was upset because it was her friend and she was biased towards believing her side of the story.

Her and her friend wait in line for another coffee. Like a standup joke, one man turns to the other and says: “Can’t wait for every bitch to come crawling out of the woodwork to complain about harassment. Everyone’s going to do it now that you can, and you can get money and time on TV out of it.”

Chapter 34: I'm Doing It Again, Baby!

Chapter Text

Peeta’s balancing on crutches and Catalina’s across the room, beating the sh*t out of a punching bag with terrifying grace, skill, and efficiency. And wearing wrist and ankle weights as she practically dances.

Haymitch sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose.

She’s not at the physical peak that she’s trying to match and her rippling back is mapped with thick, gnarly scar tissues underneath her tight-fitting tank top, but she could easily beat him in a fight and give him such a bad shoulder injury that he’d have to get used to writing with his left hand if he tried to touch her when she didn’t want it.

“Catalina,” he starts, “Why are you working out like a psycho?”

Catalina delivers a punishing roundhouse kick with much more flexibility than someone who not even a calendar year earlier had performed a complete knee replacement on herself before she answers him. “I just like to keep fit,” she argues, like a liar. “And Peeta’s a better gym buddy than Deleon.”

“That’s absolute horsesh*t and you know it,” Haymitch shoots back, “Peeta, you’re great, but Deleon is one of those psychopaths who actually likes jogging and does it socially.”

Catalina shrugs. “I’ve decided that I prefer sprinting.”

“Bullsh*t,” Haymitch continues, “Why are you trying to kill a punching bag?”

“Peeta,” Catalina says, sounding like Haymitch just got her to agree to go fight a racoon that’d taken over an outhouse, “Why don’t you call it a day and I’ll clean up this place so Beetee stops calling us both heathens?”

Peeta, because he’s smart, figures out what she wants him to do. And that it’s leaving as quickly as possible. And because he’s Peeta, he doesn’t fight her on it and there’s only a fifty-something-percent chance that he’ll be trying to spy on their conversation.

When Peeta’s gone, door clicked shut, Catalina picks up the spray and a cloth. She starts wiping down the balance bars with more meticulousness than that task would ever require.

“You’re not doing it again, are you?” Haymitch interrogates.

Catalina doesn’t ask for clarification. She knows damn well.

“You know I wouldn’t,” she says instead, “I just care about being physically fit for many reasons. I haul ass at my job sometimes, because machinery’s f*cking hard to move. And so are people. I don’t want my ass handed to me by Peeta the next time he has a f*ckin’ flashback because then he’ll be out of it and feel bad for bashing my brains into the side of those ugly-ass flower pots Deleon’s bought even though I’d be happy to get rid of one by way of shattering.”

“Catalina.”

“Ugh. I mean it, dickhe*d. It was satisfying, but I’m not doing it again.”

Haymitch lets out a choked, stuttering laugh. “Satisfying? You perpetuated a brutal massacre with a shot-through leg, a broken arm and a mutt’s claw still in your shoulder.”

Catalina snorts, hopping onto her hands and balancing with her legs straight out in front of her, in the air, on the rest bench. “I mean,” she laughs, “I’ve always been described as fully committed to the task at hand. Even when I was seventeen going under.” She winks. “It’s just gotten worse.”

“You’re still avoiding things,” Haymitch deadpans.

Catalina rolls her eyes. “Do you blame me?”

“Not really,” Haymitch says, “But I know that you can do better than me. So, you really shouldn’t be pretending that you’re not.”

She hops off the bench.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re not me,” Haymitch explains, “And I don’t really blame you for running away and doing stupid sh*t instead of facing the fires, because that’s what I’ve done my whole life. But I’m trying not to, anymore. And one of the reasons I’m trying not to is because I know you and you’re not like that. And maybe it’s weird to say, but that’s kind of motivating to me. And I don’t mean it in the way to praise your strength where I’m giving you no proper option but endurance, I wish you could just step back and say f*ck it, but you can’t and you won’t, so you might as well get your sh*t together. That’s why I was so furious with you on the phone, the times that I called.”

Catalina blinks.

“Oh.”

Chapter 35: Previously On...

Chapter Text

Celeste’s sister died when she was nineteen. Of a neglectful drowning accident. One of those where the court scrunches up their noses and reminds everyone to be more careful and no one actually goes to prison for it. No one even paid a fine or anything to the family who wouldn’t have let her drown, because the court couldn’t rule out that she didn’t want to kill herself.

The three days after the verdict were the only time that Celeste Berry, unmarried except to her job, who became everything that her younger self would have hated, called in sick to work. She sent a short, clipped message to Caesar, explaining that she wouldn’t be in and nothing more, nothing less.

Caesar showed up knocking gently on her door, balancing a casserole between his hip and the wood. And Celeste didn’t know what to do other than open it up.

“I’m not really in the mood to people,” she warns as she cracks the door enough for him to slip his body through if he goes sideways. And he obliges her, hopping on one foot over the threshold of her door.

“That’s fine,” he agrees, “I wouldn’t be in the mood to people if I was you, too. I just thought you’d like casserole.”

Celeste wants a bloody sword to swing and empty halls to echo with self-aggrandising mythologies. She doesn’t tell Caesar this, but from the frown he sends her, she’s sure that he’s picked it up from her scowl. He crosses the room, putting the casserole in her fridge and putting a Flickerman-branded cotton tote bag on her counter. It clinks against the marble and she raises her brow. “You’re getting your interns drunk now?” she can’t help but tease, “That sounds like you’re not just sleepwalking into a scandal, but swan-diving.”

Caesar tsks. “You haven’t been my intern for years, little sh*t. And if you want to be drunk, you can get drunk.”

Celeste drops onto the couch and tucks her knees against her chest. “I don’t know what I want,” she answers, “Maybe I want to fight Catalina Cain in a Denny’s parking lot at three in the morning. Maybe I want to become one of those weirdos who think you can raise the dead under the moonlight with a dance and mythical ass shaking. Maybe I want a moderated one-on-one so I can know why she did it. You don’t have to tell me that I shouldn’t hate her, I know that you have a soft spot for her.”

“For who?” Caesar questions, “Catalina Cain? f*ck no. She scares the sh*t out of me and she’s hated me for years.”

“You have a soft spot for her,” Celeste continues, sure, “You wouldn’t act like you do around her if you didn’t. She’s literally never been kind to you even though she used to be capable of kindness, and you’re still nice to her.”

“I like to be nice to everyone until or unless they give me a reason not to be,” Caesar explains, pulling out three bottles of wine, putting two of them in the fridge, “Where’s your cork thingy? I like—”

“Top left drawer,” she says, “And Catalina Cain killed my sister. Is that enough of a reason to be mean to her?”

Caesar sighs. “You know who or what killed your sister,” Caesar tells her, “And you know that not even Catalina Cain can control the fact that sometimes, people drown in stupid ways. Not even Catalina Cain can stop every storm, or death as a concept and a thing that happens to everyone. And some people die tragically, and that’s horrible and wrong, but it’s nothing that you can change. Trust me on that one. You’ll quit breathing right if you try to outsmart circ*mstance and tragedy. They’re slick f*ckers.”

Celeste snorts. “You know it’s legit when you swear.”

Caesar finds the glasses and pours two nearly to the brims.

Celeste stares at the ceiling. “I don’t know how you’re thinking that you’re going to make this better,” she says, “I don’t know what I want from you, so I’m sorry if this is your plan to get me back at work as quickly as possible. It probably won’t work out, because I don’t even know how to picture myself in a week.”

Caesar tsks. “I’m here,” he says, “Because I think that you don’t deserve to be alone. I’m not here because I want you back at the office as quickly as possible. That’s actually the opposite of what I want. I want you back at the office when you feel like you’re ready to go back to the office. So, I made comfort food and bought alcohol.”

Celeste blinks.

“Oh.”

Chapter 36: Morality Power Hour

Chapter Text

Catalina Cain and Caesar Flickerman talked about Finnick Odair once before the Fall.

Like, properly talked about. The kind of talked about where it was the middle of the night and they were both drunk.

Annie Cresta had just been crowned Victor, and Caesar knew that Catalina had something to do with why she wasn’t anywhere on the public circuit six months after her win. He called her about it, and she offered to drive over when he’d finished his tapings, surprising him. It wasn’t like her to choose to see him, but he tentatively said yes, and when he’d wiped off his stage makeup and walked to his office, she was sitting on his desk with a bottle of whiskey being opened with her teeth and two glasses in front of her.

“I know you’re not a whiskey man,” she’d said, “But it’s what I had. And the liquor store was closed when you called me, even if I’d sped.”

Caesar sat down in front of her, in the chair that she was supposed to be sitting in as he was behind the desk. She grinned at him from above and poured out a glass for him when he gestured to them. “Would you kill me if I swigged straight from the bottle?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “That’s the definition of unladylike belligerence.”

She shrugged. “It’s how I was raised.”

“Absolutely not.”

She laughed and poured herself a glass as she handed Caesar his, the crystal-cut glass tucked between her thighs as she aimed. She necked it.

“It’s not my fault that Annie can’t be booked for your show,” she said, “It’s because she’s gone crazy.”

“It didn’t stop them before,” Caesar shot back. “It’s because she went crazy in public and lost her sh*t at you specifically. And everyone’s afraid of offending you, especially since your boyfriend’s the new Gamemaker. And your boyfriend’s very dedicated to you.”

Catalina scoffed. “Seneca isn’t my attack dog,” she replied, voice dipping into muddy waters at the end, “And I don’t like you talking about him like that. We love each other, and that’s that. He doesn’t do favours for me because he’s my boyfriend. He didn’t gift me my position. I got it because I was the most qualified person in the room by a long shot and Knave just refused to acknowledge that. But then Knave f*cked up, and now he’s dead.”

Caesar tilted his head, sipping at his own neat whiskey even though Catalina knew he couldn’t handle the taste of it, and raised her brow every time he winced from it. “Knave f*cked up?”

“Knave rigged the Arena so that Annie would win,” Catalina explained, “And then he got executed for it.”

“I know,” Caesar agreed, “The first public execution in decades here in the Capitol. Snow must have wanted to prove just how big and all-encompassing the knife is, right?”

Catalina nodded, poured herself another glass.

“Truthfully,” Caesar decided to tell her, “I couldn’t ever really wrap my head around Knave doing that. It wasn’t his style. He wouldn’t have rigged the Arena for anyone, let alone Finnick Odair.”

“Finnick Odair’s sexy,” Catalina had argued, “A lot of people would do a surprising amount of things for Finnick Odair, if they think it would curry his favour. You and I both know that there’s a difference between paying for sex with someone who’s doing it for the money and someone who’s doing it for the money and the fact that they happen to not hate you. It’s like how you’re nice to service workers not just because it’s the right thing to do, because most people would agree that they aren’t obligated to not be assholes, but because you know your food will be better if you do. And that’s why most people here in the Capitol are close to human beings to waiters.”

“Catalina,” Caesar exhaled, “I need you to know that I was always against Finnick doing… that stuff. At least as young as he’d been.”

Catalina swirled her glass, watching the amber liquid instead of meeting Caesar’s eyes. “A lot of people should think it’s wrong,” she said after a beat and two breaths, “And a lot of people think that and never do anything about it, so it keeps happening. My mother should think it’s wrong, but she participated instead, because that’s easier than standing out from the crowd and admitting that something’s f*cked. It doesn’t really matter to me if you’re one of those people who thinks it’s wrong or you have some excuse. You helped make him a sex symbol at fourteen, and that’s what matters to me.”

“Finnick becoming a sex symbol is what helped him survive,” Caesar said instead of anything else. “And you know that.”

Catalina emptied her glass. “Do I? I didn’t think I did. Good to know that you know me better than I know myself. I see why you and Cassie get along.”

“Don’t bring your mother into this, Catalina,” Caesar said.

“Why the f*ck not?” Catalina said. “She’s part of the problem. She’s my mother. I’ve been stuck with her for years. And I’m going to be stuck with her when my father dies and we have to go through all his sh*t and decide what we’re selling and if we even want to keep anything or if it’s just sell and burn piles.”

“I do what I can for every Tribute,” Caesar said. “You’re not more innocent than I am.”

“I don’t tell people that children are sexy,” Catalina said, “My mutts have big teeth and instincts to clamp down fast and hard.”

She inhaled. Caesar didn’t say anything.

“But you’re right,” she continued, “I’m not trying to say that I’m a good person for what I do.”

“You’re a fine person, Catalina. The Hunger Games are necessary,” Caesar said, “You’re doing a job that someone has to do. And you’re doing it well. A lot of people doing jobs like ours have moral crises in their twenties. I did, too. But isn’t it better that it’s someone who’s good at their job who does it? I think it is. I think it’s good that it’s someone who can see all the sides of it, because then you can change it for the better.”

Catalina raised her brow. “Have you changed your role for the better?”

“Every Tribute gets an equal change,” Caesar explained, “And I’m the reason for it. I do everything I can do to help them raise their odds. So, yes. I would say that I have. And I would say that I don’t regret it at all, even though they die. Only one person can win, after all. And the Hunger Games, again, is necessary. Like doctors knowing that they can’t save everyone.”

Catalina balled up her fist and bit her lip, setting her empty glass against Caesar’s desk and leaning with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. “Why are the Games necessary?”

“You can’t possibly think they’re not—” Caesar was flushed when Catalina interrupted him, waving her hand through the air.

“I didn’t say that,” she flicked her nails at the air, glimmering gold, “I was just wondering why you thought they’re important. My reasons are pretty boring, just what we learn in school. So, I was curious if yours were different because you’re older than me.”

“I didn’t live through the Dark Days,” Caesar said, “But my father did.”

“And your father taught you why the Hunger Games were important and necessary?”

“Panem is a broken nation,” Caesar explained, “That’s what he said, again and again. And people need a higher power, or the lights will extinguished and the nights will become endless again. And there are no gods in Panem, because the world is both burning and freezing. People need the Hunger Games, because you can never fix the Districts’ hatred for us and each other, Catalina. The Hunger Games is a brutal but necessary reminder of what happens if they try to act on that hatred.”

“You don’t think that people could rebuild something close to peace without the threat of dead children?”

“No,” Caesar sighed, “Admittedly, I don’t. I’ve never heard stories of it working long-term, and it’s always going to be someone’s children, or someone’s sick, or someone’s elderly. It’s up to us to make sure that it’s never ours again, because the Districts hate us, and we’re walking targets.”

Catalina clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, her empty glass clinking against the half-full bottle. “I think there’s this teenage idealism that I haven’t managed to strangle limp yet who says that we could rebuild. But I’m young. What do I know? There’s just this part of me that wishes it could be different.”

“And that’s why you’re exactly where you need to be,” Caesar assured her, “You get to be the pride of Panem, and you get to change Panem for the better. I can’t wait to see what you do with the Hunger Games, because I know you. And I know your heart. And your mind. And I know that it’s going to be spectacular.”

“You really mean that?”

Caesar reached out to pat her knee.

“Yes,” he’d said, and there’d only been one liar in that room, “I do.”

Chapter 37: The World’s On Fire, But We’re Still Buying Shoes

Chapter Text

The fashion industry is one of the most enviable and admirable of the Capitol’s ambitious exploits because it’s the most sophisticated branding and marketing machine that Celeste knows of. Put politely: the industry is just extremely, extremely good at making new things seem utterly essential in a way that you don’t really find in a lot of other industries outside of home furnishings and tech. But the issue with those two is that they require materials that are getting harder and harder to come by.

They bombed Twelve into oblivion for facilitating Katniss Everdeen’s defilement of the sanctity of the Games, and there’s strikes that are proving annoyingly difficult to combat in Seven. This makes new phones with electric batteries and mahogany furniture more expensive, and it makes people like Celeste who works in news have to find clever go-arounds to avoid upsetting the masses.

Of course, it’s difficult to comprehend why the minor frustrations of a couple of inbreds should affect whether you can buy what you want—she gets that, she really, really does but it’s not Celeste’s job to solve the problems; it’s her job to make sure that no one devolves to savagery and throws a brick through a furniture store’s window.

Sometimes, like now, when it’s a little past midnight and she’s sitting in front of her desk going through tomorrow’s briefs, she thinks that this would be easier if she had a second pair of eyes. She’d like to call up her sister, or even Catalina, and ask them how they’d spin the lumber strikes into something advantageous for the Capitol. They both fell to Thirteen’s propaganda, and maybe they could repent and help her figure out how to protect people like them.

And Catalina Cain is still alive.

President Snow proved it to her, because as he said, she had a soft spot for Catalina, and she shouldn’t be punished for that even though Catalina had chosen to rebel—because Coriolanus Snow also had a soft spot for Catalina Cain, and he hoped that Celeste could set her straight and remind her of who she’d been. Celeste didn’t tell him that she had the absolute opposite of a soft spot for Catalina Cain, because then he wouldn’t have let her see Catalina in prison. And she very much did want to see Catalina Cain in prison.

She picks up her keys and starts driving to the Training Centre.

Peeta Mellark screams in agony and Johanna Mason screams in rage. Even though Catalina’s in a different cell block, Celeste can hear them through the walls.

Catalina’s sitting cross-legged in a cell with no chairs, and the first thing Celeste thinks is that Catalina used to complain about back pain when she’d be hunched over Celeste’s homework, trying to teach her the value of both Shakespeare and ergonomic office furniture. There’s a leak in the roof, and it seems to be aimed right above the bars, where her steepled, chained hands rest. Her wrists are red and bloody from where the metals digs into her skin.

“Celeste,” she says, not hiding her surprise.

“I need to talk to you about something,” she says, “I need to use your head.”

Catalina tilts her head. “Use my head?”

“You were ruined by the rebellion,” Celeste elaborates, “You had your brain rotted by them, and you rotted my sister’s brain. I need to know how that happened so I can prevent people from ending up like you.”

Catalina’s voice is soft when she speaks, like they’re still at Celeste’s mother’s kitchen table, and Celeste’s complaining about how hard math is when your teacher’s too mean to explain how you actually get to the answers and just glosses over them instead. “I don’t think that’s how I’d describe things happening.”

“You’re insane,” Celeste argues, “You’re housed separately because they think that you’ll kill people.”

Catalina shrugs her shoulders, then winces. “That’s what they’re saying, that’s for sure.”

“You had a good life,” Celeste continues, “And you still threw it away. I want to know why you did it, because we have Peeta live next week and I need him to say that. You must understand that it’s for his own sake as much as that of the nation.”

“I disagree,” Catalina states, annoyingly calm while Celeste feels like she wants to explode. Everyone’s saying that Catalina lost her mind. Why isn’t she trying to lunge across the room and bite off Celeste’s nose, frothing at the mouth and yelling expletives? Both her ankles and wrists are so tightly chained that she can’t straighten her posture. She’s too tall for how they’ve tied her, and they’ve got to have done that because she’s too dangerous to adjust the bindings of. “But ask me, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

There’s a very good chance that she’ll lie. There’s a very good chance that she’ll fly into a rage when Celeste clocks her for lying. Celeste speaks anyways:

“If you could say one thing to the people of Panem after this tragedy that you caused, what would you say?”

“I’m not Peeta,” she answers, “Peeta wouldn’t say what I’d say.”

“Why? Because you’d just tell everyone to get f*cked and Peeta has class that you, a multi-millionaire heiress who was born into high society, apparently don’t?”

Catalina snorts out a little half-laugh. “I totally think Peeta would tell people to get f*cked.”

She huffs and first Celeste thinks it’s out of frustration, but then she notices the strand of blonde hair that’s fallen into Catalina’s eye and across her face. It’s long and straight and right in her eyes. And she can’t reach her own face. She huffs again. Slowly, cognisant of the risk she’s taking, Celeste reaches over and tucks it behind Catalina’s ear.

“Thanks,” she says, and she doesn’t bite Celeste’s finger off.

“I think that I’d probably say something about how the world’s on fire but we’ve still got to sell and buy shoes.”

Celeste’s fingers are still against the cold metal table, tracing a head-shaped dent from one of the fights that Catalina tried to start. Her fingers are cold, and they remember that Catalina’s skin was feverishly hot. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she questions.

Peeta briefly screeches instead of screams, and Catalina winces. It’s a tiny, minute thing that Celeste wouldn’t have caught if she didn’t know Catalina well, and if she hadn’t been looking at her. Celeste lurches back in her seat when seconds later, Peeta screeches again.

“It’s okay,” Catalina assures her, “He won’t be like that when Caesar has to speak to him.”

“I’m hoping you’re not lying,” Celeste answers, “Because f*ck that.”

Catalina shrugs, winces again. Celeste almost asks her if she’s got a sprained shoulder again.

She doesn’t. For many reasons.

“And the thing about the shoes, it means,” Catalina bites her lip, “Life goes on. People have got sh*t to do. Don’t go firebomb a Denny’s because people have got to buy and sell shoes.”

“That makes sense.”

“Thanks?”

“It’s annoying that you’re not acting crazy.”

Catalina laughs.

“Would it make you feel better if I said I was in the hole because I tried to rappel out the third-floor window and started a brawl with the whole Peacekeeper unit across the street and that they had to chain me up because I did too many one-armed push-ups and that’s apparently f*cking terrifying?”

“Is that really why you’re in the hole?”

Catalina winks. “It’s the reason I’m telling you for why I’m in the hole. I thought I could take that unit of Peacekeepers. All they do is beat their meat to weird p*rn and do livestreams whining about us being at war even though they spent their whole careers saying how they’d have ended the Dark Days in hours by just blasting the Districts to sh*t and not being afraid of anything.”

Chapter 38: All The Times You’ve Screwed Me Over I

Chapter Text

Catalina Cain killed Celeste Berry’s big sister. Not literally—Catalina didn’t shoot her or anything—but metaphorically.

“You didn’t have to cut me off,” Catalina says, turning her figure to the side and resting her hand against the door, palm flat against the wood. “You don’t have to pretend that we’re strangers, Celeste. We can talk about it. I would tell you about it. I’d tell you anything you wanted to know. I wouldn’t dare lie to you. Not ever. Certainly not about this.”

She doesn’t shout that she doesn’t want to hear anything that Catalina has to say. Even though it’s true. It’s very true. It will always be true. She doesn’t want to watch her lip wobble or her brows furrow. It’s all bullsh*t. It’s all such bullsh*t. She doesn’t open the door just to slam it in Catalina’s face or throw all the sh*t she’s ever touched out in her stupid waiting hands.

But Celeste just walks away from the door.

She didn’t even get to say goodbye. It just happened. No one asked her. No one even called her about it. Catalina was the one to text it, and it was mostly a rant about how much she wanted to tear Magnus’ apart in graphic ways, like she wasn’t the cause of it all. It didn’t say anything about how she’d spend her life repenting or it was her greatest mistake, even though it was. It rings back and forth in Aurelia’s mind:

It should have been Catalina. It should have been f*cking Catalina!

Aurelia wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t love Catalina, and for some stupid f*cking reason wanted to protect Catalina, like Catalina couldn’t protect herself.

A text rings in:

She never told me about it, Celeste. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have let her if I knew. Not in a million f*cking years. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to do. Please open the door.

“I don’t give a sh*t!” Celeste shouts at the walls.

Chapter 39: Let Peeta Say f*ck: Local Disabled Orphan Terrorised By Local Terrifying Divorcees

Chapter Text

Catalina Cain is a sweetheart.

But Catalina Cain is also one of the scariest people that Peeta has ever met.

And he doesn’t say that because she’s the person who synthetised the drugs that hijacked him, even though that’s terrifying just from the standpoint of that if she wanted to, she could do it again. She could do it to him, or she could do it to someone else. It’s easy for him to see her as a victim, and he’s not just talking about the fact that it’s obvious that she was tortured. And that she was beaten worse than he was, because they needed him to chase down Katniss. He’s not even saying that she’s terrifying because she’s been to prison and been utterly terrifying in prison, because she wasn’t.

She’s terrifying because she’s the apex predator, and even though she’s more of Haymitch’s half-domesticated exotic pet, she doesn’t have any issue with baring her claws and reminding everyone that they’re only safe if she likes them. She stalks the halls for the thrill of the kill as soon as Plutarch enters the building, tossing her hair as the room goes perfectly still and she delivers what Haymitch calls career-ending insults as soon as Plutarch steps into the room.

She’s scary because she admits that she’s not innocent, and that she’d do it all again.

Peeta hears what people say about Catalina Cain.

They say that she can smell fear.

They say that she’s the queen of beasts. They say that she likes feeding her mutts living people, that she’s kept recordings of the screams of her victims even though she didn’t have a phone because she’d been legally dead. And legally dead people don’t have phones. Or at least Peeta doesn’t think they do.

And there’s probably truth to all of that, but one of the truly terrifying things about Catalina Cain is how she keeps getting up in the morning after everything that’s happened to her.

Peeta watched, out of his hospital window, as Catalina Cain climbed onto Deleon’s shoulders to get rid of a rogue tracker-jacker nest. Peeta didn’t know how it’d gotten into the courtyard because Catalina did not elaborate. Feet flat against Deleon’s broad shoulders, clad in full beekeeper gear that Peeta had no clue if was tracker-jacker-proof, she said: “Hand me the bucket we just filled with gasoline.”

And when Deleon hesitated, expressing concern about f*cking with a tracker-jacker nest, Catalina said: “Don’t be a bitch now. Hand me that bucket.”

“Catalina,” Deleon had protested, “If I die, I’m going to haunt you so bad.”

“Oh, f*ck off,” she scoffed, “We’d be done by now if you handed me the bucket already.”

Deleon picked up the bucket and Catalina didn’t even sway on his shoulders. “Why couldn’t you have gotten Effie to do this?” he questioned, “She expressly told you that she’d have loved to watch these little f*ckers die.”

“One,” Catalina had answered, “I can’t stand on Effie’s shoulders. Two, I don’t know if recruiting Effie Trinket to help me control genetically modified pests is a very good idea. I’m sure you can see why.” And then, in one swift movement, she slammed the clear bucket against the nest, tight against the tree so nothing could escape, and both Peeta and Deleon watched in horror as the tracker-jackers started dropping dead out of their nest, to Catalina’s utter lack of f*cks given.

Catalina said that if he needed to, he could come to her in the middle of the night. Because she usually stayed late or came to work early. Peeta had never done it, until he woke up screaming with the taste of Katniss’ blood against his tongue and couldn’t for the life of him tell if the pressing memory of her clawing out his throat was real. And Catalina knew everything about mutts, and she’d never lied to him.

He padded to her office on socked, silent feet; pushing the door open with his toes when he saw light spilling out from the crack of the half-closed door. Right as he did, he heard a raucous laugh. The kind of laugh where you can hear the smile in it.

And then the door was open, and Catalina and Plutarch were staring at him like deer in the headlights of an incoming semi-truck. Catalina was sitting on her desk with her feet in Plutarch’s lap and Plutarch’s hands against them. It got worse. Catalina and Plutarch were wearing matching pale green scrubs, and they were splattered with blood.

“HELLO PEETA!” Plutarch blurts out, throwing his hands into the air as Catalina watches Peeta with growing concern, swinging her legs over the edge. “I’M JUST HERE BECAUSE DELEON WASN’T ANSWERING HIS PHONE!”

“Peeta, darling,” she says, hopping off her desk and beginning to walk towards him, “Are you okay?”

Peeta backs away and closes the door.

Through the door, he can hear what sounds like someone being smacked by a rolled-up newspaper, and then feet moving closer. Peeta bucks it.

Chapter 40: I Told You So!

Chapter Text

The point is that you aren’t promised closure or clarity about when it’s supposed to come.

You won’t necessarily know that you’re not living in a splatter flick and unfortunately for you, you’re the final girl. You won’t know that you’ve been trudging through a science fiction reality and that’s why nothing makes sense. Just like you won’t learn after the final episode whether the captain meant all those things he said about aviation or if he just plummeted to his death.

And his wife. All the things he said about his wife.

What were you doing, anyways? In that chamber? Running down that hallway in that long, red dress, silk and tulle tailing after your burning feet? There were signs everywhere and they all whispered tread with caution, Catalina. In the past, horses were the chief vehicle of man’s dreams of escape. Then the locomotive. Now we can lose ourselves in six dimensions. Ain’t that neat?

Something tells her that she should have plead the Fifth even though she’s pretty sure that didn’t exist by the time that she got tossed in the slammer and had to decide whether she wanted to beat the charges. Lust is very real. Love is a momentary lapse of treason. Technology means that there is no such thing as persistence anymore and she’s having a hell of a time with her ghosts.

She’s not speaking first.

She wore the mascara for herself. To remind her eyes that they’re not just brown, but whiskey flecked with gold. Expensive. It feels like it’s December and she’s bundling up to meet old friends for an afternoon and talk about nothing that actually matters, because they weren’t ever friends. And she still remembers him like she remembers every side street of Despard, the city she grew up in and thinks is special even though it’s nothing but an upper-class refuge that she’s a guest in because she’s trying to sell her father’s house. No one’s buying it, though, and sometimes she drives out just to sit on the kitchen table without getting yelled at.

She remembers him like she remembers Despard or the edge of the border, before Mr. Crane got that call about her not being able to cross it and immediately turned around with a screech of burning rubber.

She thinks about her father, and the times she really, properly saw him.

One of those was a couple of nights after she’d met Finnick.

She found him on the porch that morning, sipping cold coffee, watching a crow dip down from the power line into the pile of black bags stuffed in the dumpster where he pecked and snagged a can tab, then caried it off clamped in his beak like the key to a room only he knew about.

Her father turned to her then, taking in the reek of her smoke and thinly-veiled desperation, traces of last night’s eyeliner that she decided not to wipe off this time. Out late was all that he said. And then smiled, rubbing the small of her back through the robe for a while before heading back inside, letting the storm door click shut behind him. Later, when she stepped into the kitchen, she saw it waiting there on the table: a glass of orange juice in a patch of sunlight so bright and gold that she couldn’t touch it at first.

Chapter 41: Concerning Finnick Odair

Chapter Text

Twenty-Seven knows that Mistress isn’t moving because she wants to. Mistress is afraid of Catalina Cain, and what Catalina Cain would do to her.

And even though Twenty-Seven shouldn’t think like this: she thinks that Mistress is right to be afraid of what Catalina Cain would do to her. When Twenty-Seven was sent to steal antibiotics from Catalina Cain’s dumpster, marvelling at the fact that one of them is always full of useless garbage and the other one perfectly sorted in a way that didn’t make sense if you were throwing out stuff, she watched Catalina Cain through the windows and she didn’t look like a monster.

Catalina Cain was heaving Peeta Mellark onto her back through the windows and kicking open the door as quietly as possible, because Peeta Mellark’s head was lolling like he was asleep. “sh*t,” Catalina Cain grumbled under her breath, “You have to get better at lifting, Catia. Just because you can deadlift it doesn’t mean that you can haul the same weight as dead weight on your back. Ouch. God, I’m getting old. Or weak. One of those. Chaff was in good shape, so I’ve got to get to it. f*ck me. f*ckity f*ck me.”

Twenty-Seven followed Catalina through the shadows of the courtyard, and the fact that the lights inside seemed to be on motion-sensors because they flicked on every time Catalina stepped into a new room, until she eventually hit the hallway and passed a man in a wheelchair who stopped up but didn’t say anything. Catalina grunted in either greeting or effort and continued on.

Finnick Odair hadn’t been the same since Mistress had let the man with the crowbar beat him within an inch of his life, crumpled on the floor and not even sobbing. For a week or two, Finnick sobbed a lot and Twenty-Seven silently thought that it was a good thing because it was a reaction and he’d been staring at the ceiling before and not responding when Mistress called his name. One of those nights, Finnick had gripped Twenty-Seven’s wrist so tightly that it bruised, and he’d asked through ragged, pain-hazy breaths if he was alive. And all Twenty-Seven had been able to do was nod and tug at her wrist.

“I want to die,” Finnick had said. Twenty-Seven had shook her head and dragged her wrist free from Finnick.

They’d started having to feed him through a tube in his nose because he refused to eat when they spooned broth for him. Then he started pulling at that, and the man with the crowbar came back, but he didn’t have a crowbar with him this time. He had an electric shock collar. They shoved a tube down Finnick’s throat and Twenty-Seven could choose between holding it in place, holding him up or pouring white sludge down the funnel. The man was the only one allowed to hold the shock collar’s remote, and he said that he’d paid good money for it, even though Mistress was a friend of his.

After he left, Mistress was the one with the remote, and she’d stroke Finnick’s sweaty brow and talk about how it was all his fault, and she didn’t understand why he couldn’t understand that he had to eat to get better. Did he not want to get better? He had to eat because he was sick, she’d said, and no one’s any good when they’re sick and getting sicker.

Finnick stopped reacting when Mistress called his name, and when he threw up on himself, he was too weak to clean himself up. The first time, Mistress had demanded that they wait so he could understand what he’d done to himself, but then he did it again. And again. And they got to get to work cleaning him up immediately. It was hard not to notice how his ribs became more pronounced and bruised over time.

One day, they moved in the way that ribs shouldn’t when Twenty-Seven touched his side. He shuddered and whimpered and she couldn’t say anything.

Twenty-Seven stood outside of Catalina Cain’s windows and thought about how Mistress had said that Catalina Cain would kill Finnick if she could get her hands on him. How she wouldn’t even hesitate. How people like Catalina Cain did not hesitate. Twenty-Seven ducked back into the shadows when Catalina emerged from a room with nobody on her back, fishing a packet of cigarettes out from her back pocket and shrugging as she walked onto a fire escape to light it.

Twenty-Seven could not shout, but if she threw a can or even a bag of drugs, Catalina Cain was outside and she would hear. Catalina Cain pulled out a silver flask that glimmered in the moonlight, and with a cigarette in one hand, tipped her head back and emptied the flask in one swig.

Chapter 42: Anti-Hero (Reprise)

Chapter Text

Catalina Cain is twenty-nine and standing in the pouring rain in a blue silk dress covered in slick red blood. Seneca Crane is thirty and rubbing his nose against hers as he presses the microphone between their chests. He’s wearing a suit as white as the walls of an operating room, and when Catalina runs her stained hands up and down his body, she smells the antiseptic and hears the dull ringing of a heart bottoming out.

She presses her forehead against his, closes her eyes and begins to sing:

“You were raised by wolves and voices,” she whispers, “Every night I hear them howling beneath our bed. They say it all comes down to you.” Seneca’s hand is against the small of her back, but they’re not dancing. They’re just standing. His breath is hot and alive against her skin, fogging in the air.

“You are the daughter of silent watching stones,” Seneca follows, “You watch the stars hurl all their fundaments in wonderment at you and yours, forever asking more.”

She cups his cheeks and joins him. “You are the space that’s in between every page, every chord and every screen. You are the driftwood and the rift. You’re the words that I promise I don’t mean. We’re drunk but drinking.”

“Sunk but sinking.”

Seneca rests his clean hand against her mouth and she bites her lip, lets him sing on his own.

“They thought us blind, we were just blinking. All the stones and kings of old will hear us screaming at the cold.”

“Remember me, I ask. Remember me, I sing—”

“Give me back my heart, you wingless thing!” Catalina interrupts, voice swelling and leaving everything else bleeding and crumpled on the floor, her eyes wide open, “Think of all the horrors that I promised you I’d bring! I promised—”

Seneca strokes a hand across her cheek. “I promise you, they’ll sing of you every time.”

“They’ll sing of every time you passed your fingers through my hair,” she answers. “They’ll sing of every time he passed his fingers through my hair and called me child! Witness me, old man! I am the wild!”

Seneca tilts her head up to the dark sky and she wraps her arms around his shoulders, staining his suit.

“Fret not, dear heart,” they sing, “I will not let them hear the mutterings of all your fears or the fluttering of all your wings. Welcome to the storm, my thunder. Welcome to my table, bring your hunger!”

“Think of all the horrors that I promised you I’d bring! Give me back my heart, you wingless thing! Witness me, old man! I am—”

“I am—”

Catalina surges through time, interrupting him with a kiss, and only when she surfaces for air, when she’s still a breathing thing, does she finish:

“I am the wild!”

Chapter 43: On Choosing Love Over Everything Else

Chapter Text

It’s Finnick Odair’s turn to whip the crowd into a frenzy pre-Quell, and he doesn’t disappoint for a single second. Catalina Cain, Panem’s richest woman, sits on the front row and rolls her eyes as the woman next to her faints. Despite all of her money, she decides to sit on the left edge of the stage, closest to Finnick’s exit. And she makes hers towards the end of his speech, swiftly getting up, gathering her skirt and walking backstage, knowing that no one’s going to say anything to her about it.

In the green room, Catalina Cain waits stiff-lipped for Finnick to stumble off the stage and away from the cameras. She’s biting her lip to stop herself from surging up when he almost misses a step. But she’s media trained. She’s been doing this for decades and she’s stopped comparing it to walking a tightrope suspended between two skyscrapers, because she does it too gracefully for the comparison to mean anything anymore.

Caesar thinks about how she’d buried her clenched fists in her skirt when she’d given that interview about Seneca’s death, the only time that Panem really talked about it. They got to feel sad for Catalina Cain walking in and finding that her boyfriend killed himself, and then everyone was cooing about Katniss and Peeta’s Victory Tour and that’s how it was supposed to be. Caesar couldn’t help but feel like he was taking advantage of Catalina Cain that day.

It’s a strange feeling to have about such a famously indomitable person. Someone who’d stepped onto his stage just two days after finding her boyfriend lifeless, someone who didn’t flinch or cry when the audience shouted their questions, unprompted and unasked and utterly unmasked.

She told him everything that he wanted to know, perfectly placed lines, perfectly tousled hair, perfectly tailored black dress with tasteful red accents. Roses were braided through her loose braid—all the rage as of late. She wore a simple red lip and smiled when she was prompted to and he wondered if she wanted to make it out alive. Her words had teeth to them, and so did her smile.

Now, Finnick stumbles into the arms that she’s opened just for him and when he misses his footing, they’re both on their knees and Catalina’s breaking his fall with effortless skill. She presses their foreheads together and works her long fingers through Finnick’s sweaty hair. Caesar doesn’t say anything about Finnick’s high bottoming out and Finnick being a dipsh*t for going on stage like that, because she’s Catalina Cain. She knows.

If someone’s got permission to scold Finnick, it’s her. And he’s not going to challenge her for that because he likes living. He thinks about how Celeste can’t say Catalina Cain’s name without bile, and how Caesar still doesn’t know exactly how it happened. Catalina had been ready to bribe him to accept Celeste as his intern, and he’s not a fool. He knows that Catalina and he are very different people, with very different priorities and communication styles.

He’s attached to her mother’s tragedy and she’s done everything that she can to get away from Cassandra. And he’s not going to blame her for that, because Cassandra could impossibly have been good to the daughter that she never wanted. Catalina strokes her fingers down Finnick’s cheeks, both of their eyes shut, and says something that’s not meant for Caesar’s prying eyes and ears. He just hears the schooling and steeling of her breath.

Chapter 44: Girl Genius

Chapter Text

Celeste was told never to see Catalina Cain as a role model, because Catalina Cain’s version of girlhood is unladylike belligerence. Celeste’s mother doesn’t like Catalina Cain’s mother after a midnight conversation about husbands on a balcony. She’s worried that Cassandra Cain will pass the wrong ideas of marriage onto her daughter, and that Catalina’s beauty won’t be enough to save her from the wrongness she’s been taught. It’s fine that Celeste is around Catalina because Aurelia would throw a fit if Catalina was banned from the house and Aurelia’s doing everything right.

Aurelia might be a good influence on Catalina, which would be good for them as a family because Catalina is richer than all of them even without her inheritance. Celeste f*cked up and reminded them that Catalina was that rich because she worked. She didn’t have her inheritance yet. Her father was still alive, and she was the kind of stubborn who refused money gifts from her rich parents. Everything that she flaunted around town, most importantly Finnick Odair glued to her arm, came from her work.

This was the wrong answer because it’s one of the things that Catalina Cain is doing wrong. She should be getting her wealth through her husband’s work, not her own—and that’s why she’s a bad role model and Celeste has to remember that. Catalina Cain wears tailored suits instead of full-skirted gowns with plunging bodices and yes, those suits are expensive—but she works and dresses like a man.

She doesn’t comb back her unruly hair; she says how she thinks getting sew-ins are a hassle because of how long they take to do and how she’s actually fond of her real hair. She doesn’t even dye it an interesting colour. Celeste knows that Catalina Cain isn’t the kind of role model she wants to follow, but her mother still says it every time she mentions that she’s going to Catalina’s expensive penthouse apartment in the heart of the city.

“From since I was a little girl,” Catalina says, stirring the pot, “I knew that there was greatness in store for me because I didn’t just want to change the world, I wanted to completely reshape it into something wholly my own.”

Celeste is sitting on the table, watching the oxymoron in front of her. Catalina doesn’t want to be a wife, but she’s still good at cooking.

“Why did the world make you a girl, then? Girls don’t do that, Catalina. When girls do that, they become social pariahs.”

“Comedy, I guess. But I don’t give a sh*t about what some dipsh*t like Pyrena Tress thinks of me.”

Celeste remembers Catalina’s biology classes.

Every food chain has its lion.

And Catalina Cain eats steak.

“I will not be the girl who’s asked how it feels to be trotting along at the genius man’s heels like a dog and you shouldn’t either.” Catalina Cain’s gripping the edge of the chain-link fence like she needs it to steady herself.

“Seneca said that you were his muse,” Celeste suggests, “You are someone. You’re Seneca Crane’s muse. That’s pretty great, isn’t it? Everyone’s talking about you being Seneca Crane’s muse.”

“I have absolutely no f*cking interest in being someone’s muse. I am someone. That’s it. I’m not some ephemeral concept to be caught through someone else’s creation. I’m my own creation. I’m the someone. End of story.”

Chapter 45: The “Miss You Forever” Preface

Chapter Text

Catalina Cain, because she’s a little sh*t and an asshole and a terrifying person, doesn’t warn Celeste about what she’s going to walk into. And Celeste walks right through the door to see Finnick Odair sitting cross-legged on the couch, alternating between sipping hot chocolate with bobbing marshmallows and braiding Catalina’s hair, her head tipped against his chest, grinning smugly as he grumbles.

“You asked me if you could braid it,” she laughs right as Celeste steps over the threshold, “Stop hissing at me.”

Finnick lets out an exaggerated huff as he pulls a curl straight to braid and Celeste tries hard not to scream at the sight, while Catalina slowly turns to look at her, Finnick complaining and not noticing Celeste at all.

Catalina laughs, raising her hand up to tip his head towards Celeste’s.

“This is Celeste,” she introduces, “Aurelia’s younger sister. She’s your age. She’s cool.”

“Oh,” Finnick says, bobbins between his teeth, “Hi. I’ll say properly hi when I’m done fixing Catalina’s scary hair.” Celeste snorts and drops down to sit on the floor next to the couch. She used to braid Catalina’s hair as a kid because she found it more interesting than braiding Aurelia’s. Aurelia’s hair was straight as a dagger, and thin. Catalina’s was the exact opposite, and she’d string something on her guitar as Celeste got her hair ready for the weave that she’d get done for her mother’s sake or if she had to get in the President’s good graces, because she swore that he liked her more when she had straight, long hair instead of her natural curls.

Chapter 46: Cain Addressing Abel

Chapter Text

She’s trying to drink away her sorrows and Magnus Abel decides that it’s his right to bother her at the bar.

“Can I at least buy you a drink?” Magnus Abel suggests, a little ragged.

Catalina Cain buries her head in her hands. “Don’t you get that I don’t want anything to do with you?” she groans. “Don’t you get that the kindest thing you could do for me is to stay out of my hair?”

She hears Magnus shrug. “I don’t think you’re really giving me a fair shot, here.”

“I gave you a perfectly fair shot,” Catalina bites back, a little too fast, a little too sharp, revealing more of her hand than she’d like, “I gave you a perfectly fair shot in that I didn’t stick my hand up and object to your marriage.”

He flags down the bartender.

“Catalina,” he says, “Do you still like your whiskey neat?”

Catalina bites her lip. “Yes,” she says after a beat of awkward, awkward silence. The kind that you want to spear your way through.

“You want to know the truth? Aurelia asked me to make sure that you didn’t do something stupid in your anger. I didn’t get it at first, but then I realised what she meant. You’re angry at her, aren’t you? It was stupid and reckless and could only have ended one way, and she both implicated you and left you behind.”

Catalina grits her teeth. Oh, how she wishes that was the truth. Oh, how she wishes that she could throw her glass on the floor and shout about how Magnus could ever have gotten it so f*cking wrong. Aurelia didn’t implicate her in sh*t. It was all Catalina. It was all her fault.

It was all Catalina’s fault and she didn’t know why Aurelia chose to take the fall for her. Aurelia hadn’t even been in the room where it happened. Aurelia shouldn’t have known. Aurelia had taken the fall for her, and then something horrible but predictable had happened to Aurelia and Catalina’s stuck.

One of the annoying things about closure is that it’s not a promise. You aren’t owed closure by anyone, even when you are. Because that’s just how the world works.

“Something like that,” she forces herself to say so Magnus won’t start asking the kinds of questions that are significantly harder for her to answer like they’re nothing.

“You might think I’m an asshole for saying this because I think you’re the kind of person who likes to punish yourself, but it’s not your fault, either. You don’t control what people choose to do, even if they bring up your name as a reason why they’re doing it. I don’t know why she thought you’d have liked her to go rebelling for you. You work for the Games, for f*ck’s sake.”

Catalina digs her nails into her palms.

Last night, after Finnick had fallen asleep on the couch and Catalina had muted the film they’d been watching, she’d read the paper front-to-back, read everyone’s think pieces about what’d happened to Aurelia Abel, and then she’d carried Finnick to bed. She’d tucked him in, draping his favourite quilt atop the blankets and leaving a glass of water by the bedside table. Then, she cracked the window open and left it on the latch after she’d snuck out. She didn’t want to be spotted by whoever was hiding in the bushes, so she walked across the roofs of four separate apartment buildings until she slid down and landed on a fire escape far enough away that no one would be looking for her. She tugged up her hood, just to be sure.

And then she walked through the city and growing storm until she was soaked to the bone.

And she tried not to think about Aurelia, but she failed. She found herself walking the maps of their shared childhood and teenage years, X’es marking spots outside of cafés where pieces of her heart took up permanent residence. She’d gone downtown and seen a street dog lying in the gutter. The gutter was filling with water because the sewer was clogged. If the dog was alive, he would be drowning. But was it ended up, the water was simply stroking his fur.

Catalina and her mother were so afraid of each other.

What if I become you, Catalina had shouted throughout her whole life.

What if you become more, Cassandra shrieked back.

Catalina doesn’t tell Magnus that she ran back and climbed through the window breathless and panting. She doesn’t tell him that she stripped and then took a shower so hot and boiling that her skin was red when she got out. She doesn’t tell him that she laid down next to Finnick on top of the covers and fell asleep there, on her side, even though she swore that she wouldn’t.

She doesn’t tell him that she’s having a hard time imagining that she’s got any good love left even when she’s looking at it. She doesn’t tell him that she’s pretty sure that’s why Finnick’s staying in the Capitol for longer than he’s required to, because Coriolanus says that’s a good thing. He likes that Finnick is acclimating to Capitol society because then he might stop causing trouble. He thinks that it’s because Annie is working like she’s supposed to, and that’s the reason that Annie’s still alive.

“We’ve got to keep going,” she says instead, “Or they’ll call us quitters.”

She can’t look back, but she doesn’t dare look too far ahead either.

She’s got to get back home to Finnick. She can’t wallow here forever, and certainly not if it’s with Magnus Abel. Finnick’s tearing himself up about Annie, and Catalina’s trying to give him advice without outwardly admitting that she’s been in the same position, because Finnick feels horrible and he might think that he’s brought her nothing but hurt in all these years. Catalina’s not good at making people feel appreciated because whenever she says something nice, it feels like her throat clams up and gets really dry all of a sudden. It’s why she also wants to run away when she’s being appreciated. So, Finnick will probably think that he’s nothing but a burden to her, because she’s not good at saying all the ways he’s changed her life. She just wants to point to everything ever and shout at him to look and for him to innately understand exactly what she means.

She doesn’t say any of that to Magnus Abel.

Instead, she says:

“I’ve got to go.”

And then she necks her drink and doesn’t thank him for it.

Chapter 47: Miss You Forever

Chapter Text

Catalina misses throwing beer tabs at Finnick. Catalina misses a whole lot of things, but it’s never the grand stuff. It’s sitting on the edge of her bed and softly repeating that she’s Catalina Cain and knowing that it still means something because there’s no war yet and she hasn’t proven herself shockingly impotent for all that she’s growled and begged and skinned her knees for petty vengeance.

She misses standing on the balcony and leaning against Seneca’s chest and knowing that everyone calls them a power couple and knowing that they’re not wrong about it, just the execution. She misses Cinna whacking her foot as soon as someone they both hate says something stupid and her whacking back and it meaning that they’re going to stay up to all hours talking sh*t in the kitchen and he’s going to try to be graceful about it all, but she’s going to chip free the greatest insults mankind will never hear out of him.

And she misses throwing beer tabs at Finnick because her aim was fantastic and she was fast enough that with a head start, he wouldn’t get it in her hair.

She misses pushing through her body’s limits for something other than spite, the blood inside of her rushing left and right for a reason other than desperation. Now, she’s just sitting stricken in a cell, damp, clutching her own cheek because it’s ached for days since the last escape attempt, thinking about how the bastard who put her there is lying in a bed custom-built by child slaves, sleeping easy after the news of his third wife drowning herself in nine inches of water in wild despair instead of going through with the messy divorce.

She’s a little surprised when she sees a new body being thrown into the cell across from her. Usually, she doesn’t have neighbours because she’s either considered a cognitive hazard or too great of an additional punishment to put someone through. She’s very surprised when he lifts his face and behind all the bruising, she recognises Caesar Flickerman.

They’re both smart enough to wait for the Peacekeepers to leave, secure in the fact that neither of them can get past the electrified forcefield two inches past the bars of their cells. It’s a new thing. And it burns like a motherf*cker.

“Catalina,” Caesar gasps, “I can’t say that I’m completely surprised.”

She barks out a laugh, loud and uncomfortable.

“Come on,” she teases, “I played a good game.”

He nods. “You did,” he agrees, “You really did. But seeing you down here? Things are falling into place, if you know what I mean.”

“I wish I could say the same about you,” she answers, “But I’m genuinely surprised. That you’re here, I mean. Do you want to delay your rotting and tell me the story?”

Caesar laughs and it sounds nothing like when he’s on the stage.

“I tried to get Peeta out but—”

“Trigger words,” Catalina grits out.

She bites her lip.

“Sorry,” she adds.

“It’s no harm, Catalina,” Caesar assures her, like she’s six and spilled champagne on his powder-blue suit again, “I should have expected it. And I should have known that you would never have done… that willingly. What is done is done and now we’re both here.”

“I don’t know,” she chuckles hollowly, “I think a lot of people would assume I was giddy at the prospect of finally testing out just how far I could go—”

“I’ve known you since you were a little girl, Catalina. Don’t try me with that kind of nonsense. Just answer me. It was Finnick Odair, wasn’t it?”

She tilts her head. “What?”

“You did it for Finnick, didn’t you?”

Catalina takes a stiff breath and thinks about lightning breaking through the thunderstorm instead of warning about it.

“Finnick Odair was certainly a contributing factor,” she decides on, “A significant one.”

“What else?”

“I’m the product of rape. My mother was raped and nine months later she had me.”

“She told you that far too young.”

“It was good,” Catalina insists, “It was good for me to know the truth. Because then I wouldn’t expect love. Because I didn’t even come from love. You know, even people with sh*tty parents can at least usually say that to themselves. That even though there’s no love now, there used to be and that matters in a weird way, because at least your body knows what that feels like. I was a little girl and I thought that love was duty and duty was love. I thought that my father loved me, and maybe he did, but it was a love that was no good to me in the end. It wasn’t a love that chose to protect me when it came down to it.”

Chapter 48: Letter I

Chapter Text

Celeste,

You often called me a fool, so I hope that this shows you that even a man like me can change. I’m writing to you because I have to tell you that I’m sorry for what I’m about to do. I know you won’t understand, and I don’t want to ask you to change your beliefs because I changed mine.

Here’s the short and sweet of it: I’m going to desert the Capitol. And if you’re reading this, it means that I at least committed to trying and there’s no way for me to go back to you.

I’m sorry that you’re finding out like this, I really am. I promise you that I’ll do the best I can to explain why. It’s not because I don’t adore you. In fact, you’re the only reason I would consider staying. And it was an incredibly hard decision. It was the hardest decision of my life. I don’t want to leave you, but I can’t put you in danger by getting you wrapped up in my messes. You don’t know this: but you’re under surveillance because of what happened to your sister. They told me it when I chose to hire you. They tried to talk me out of hiring you because of it, but that wasn’t ever on the table.

But I can’t do it anymore, Celeste.

Peeta was a bright boy and they snuffed him out for nothing other than winning a petty game against another teenager. Snow is losing his mind. He is unravelling in front of us and I cannot stand idly by. I always told myself that I did the best I could for both Tributes and Victors. That I was important because I gave them a fair shot, no matter where they came from. I couldn’t turn the odds in their favour and I wasn’t allowed to bet nor sponsor, but I could level the playing field. It made me feel like the Games were something other than atrocities. That’s not the truth. I know that now. It has taken an embarrassing amount of time.

I don’t support the rebel cause like Catalina or Plutarch evidently did. I don’t believe in some grand political ideal. I was very happy with my life in the Capitol. I’m not the kind of man who can dress in grey fatigues to go get gunned down because of how strongly I believe in something that might be possible. Freedom is a big word and I’ve learned that I’m not quite sure what it means. But here’s what I do know. I know that I cannot stay here anymore. I know that no matter what, the rebellion must win or I must not live to see it fail because I can’t go back to my life.

I’m leaving because I cannot stay. It’s that simple. If I could bring you with me and know you’d be safe, I would do it in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t let you say no. I would throw you over my shoulder and we would run. I need to leave, I need to do whatever I can to make sure that Snow does not see more sunrises than strictly necessary. I think I would collapse into nothing if I didn’t give whatever I have to offer—even though it’s vanishingly little compared to others. I need to get Peeta out of here.

I’m not a genius. I’m not a great soldier. I know how to speak so people listen. I know how to speak to the Capitol. I don’t need you to agree with me on politics, I know that you like your life and I’m sorry for ruining it. I’ve done what I can do to position you as my successor, if you would like to take the role. The network loves you even without me. I’m completely confident that you will blow me out of the water, and people will forget my name against the brightness of yours.

Chapter 49: Gunfight: Deer Versus Headlights

Chapter Text

In Finnick’s dreams, a woman in floor-length red lace, slick as an oil spill or blood against her body, stands in the middle of a burned-out house. The red lace doesn’t depict gentle flowers, but a tableau of burning houses, bodies with necks bent in ways they never should be, and at her feet, a screaming Pyrena embroidered with great attention to detail. Her eyes are tightly shut, and she does not stumble in the rubble. She walks gracefully, as if she knows the quiet rage and gentle destruction more intimately than than the beating of her own heart.

“Your little friends in high places with their drops of holy water can’t help you now,” she breathes, arms in front of her, lace-gloved hands clasped around a rotting white rose as flames fall from her red lips. “A thousand armies couldn’t keep me out.”

At her feet, the flames fall and grow into blazes that do not touch their mistress. In the distance, wolves howl and bears scrape their claws against the underbrush, impatient. The flames continue to rise even though there’s nothing to feed them. She opens her eyes, and they’re burning.

“I don’t want your money nor your crown. I care not for your title or your grounds. You see, I’ve come to burn your kingdom and leave no survivors.”

She does not shout, nor does her voice quiver. It’s as strong as the soft, yet all-encompassing and all-knowing wind.

“No rivers nor lakes could put my fire out.”

“I’ll raise the stakes. I’ll smoke you out.”

She inhales.

“I’ll be dead before the day is done.”

Finnick wakes up with a strangled gasp.

Someone’s touching his dick.

He thinks about a woman who sat on her knees in front of destruction, her heart beating slowly with the kind of quiet, furious resignation that made you able to swing a mallet over your shoulder and bash the teeth right out of someone else’s jaw. He thinks about how her hands were always soft.

He thinks about a lot of hands. He thinks about calloused ones; both with long fingers perfect for playing piano with guitar string scars instead, and ones with hard skin all over the webbing because of harsh home-cut axes handles. He thinks about small, sweaty palms holding his in the middle of a humming crowd. He thinks about them being completely cool, calm, and cleansing when they’re by the beach or in a clementine field, surrounded by jewel-toned butterflies.

He thinks about liver spots and loose brown braids and blue eyes with tentative smiles that never got to learn kindness as a thing that’s given just because.

He’d have liked to choose his own clothes and who he wanted to spend time with.

Desperation crawls across his body with a flaming touch that digs into every spot that hurts. He whines, tipping his head back. Nails dig into his chin, pulling him back. Somewhere between the foreplay and the org*sm, Finnick falls asleep and dreams of waves meeting the shore and monsters that don’t bite ripping into the silk ribbons around his torn wrists.

Chapter 50: Unfortunately, The Only Person In My Life Who Could Install A Shower Bar Will Probably Be Mean To Me

Chapter Text

The start of the story: Haymitch Abernathy f*cks up installing a shower bar.

Catalina Cain shows up in loose-but-belted carpenter jeans with a hammer dangling off the loop. When Effie shows her to the mess that Haymitch has made of their rented bathroom, she crosses her arms and says, very poshly and succinctly: “What the f*ck?”

And then, after a breath and a customary scoff as she shifts her weight, she adds: “Why didn’t you call me before you let him at this? Now I have to fix all of these holes just so Haymitch could feel like a useful man.”

“He was afraid that you were still bitter about him talking you into treating Peeta,” Effie answers easily, voice airy and gleeful, like she’s expecting Catalina to deny it right in front of Haymitch. Bless her, but Haymitch knows Catalina better. Catalina rolls her eyes and strides through the room, dropping to the ground to examine Haymitch’s sacrificial shower bar.

“I am,” she agrees, “But I also don’t really want him making holes in my property, so next time? Call me before you go around f*cking with my tiles. I’m going to have to go to the Home Depot to get more tiles because you ain’t patching half of those holes. And that’s f*ckin’ ages ago, anyways.”

“You like the Home Depot,” Effie argues, “You use any excuse to go there. And you’re good at holding grudges, Catalina. I’d expect that you could hate someone for your whole life if you had a reason to, and you could absolutely be petty.”

“I’ve got a thing going with an employee there,” Catalina grins, “And no, not a sexy thing. I just scare the sh*t out of them, but they’re also kind of interested in my everything, but especially the fact that I used to expose that location to Finnick Odair’s dipsh*ttery. Godspeed Kyle. I’ll get going. I have sh*t to do today that isn’t this.”

That’s Catalina for that she’s thinking about killing you for your sins, but she’s not going to do it because she’s sentimental and sappy and you better know it, because you conned her into liking you and she’s petty about it.

Catalina probably breaks the speed limit because her car screeches back into the parking lot. She throws open the door, hooks the rachet straps off the roof where she’s attached five metal poles and probably scared the sh*t out of everyone else on the freeway. She strolls into the bathroom with her ill-gotten gains and gets to work. Haymitch stands at the side and tries to help but ends up holding the flashlight.

“Do you remember that smoothie stand? You used to always get terrifying green juices there.”

Catalina spits the screw into the sink.

“I miss that f*ckin’ smoothie stand more than certain dead relatives.”

“You do know,” Haymitch teases, “Because it’s you saying that, it’s really not as impactful as if literally anyone else said it.”

Catalina exaggerates a huff. “I have relatives I miss!”

Catalina gets the bar up in less than five minutes and without looking at the instructions for the one Haymitch bought. And she built the bar, too. Because Catalina Cain’s too good for buying sh*t pre-made. It has a rubber grip and a cord down the side, discreet but visible if you need to unlock the door for someone to help you because you ate sh*t on the tiles. She explains this as she wires it into the wall, scoffing when Haymitch asks her if it’s a good idea to have electrics in a shower. “It’s fine,” she says, “I’ll invent one that registers the sound of a fall, someday, but I’m stuck on the issue that sometimes people knock themselves out when they fall and if you just have it register bangs and thunks, it goes off when someone f*cks in the shower. I’m confident enough in this that I’ll put it in all the bathrooms at the CI.”

“CI? Wait—you just came up with that?!—”

Catalina waves her hand through the air in a gesture very obviously meant as chill out, old man. She says: “Don’t give yourself an aneurism, Haymitch. I thought of it at the drive to the Home Depot and fine-tuned it on the way back. It’ll be fine. It’s waterproof. You should see the other sh*t I’m coming up with right now. I just invented a topical cream that makes the skin fireproof to the degree that you can have flames dancing off yourself and your clothes, no special fabrics or sprays required anymore. I’m thinking of doing a pseudo-Seneca’s-brother and horrifying everyone at the board meeting.”

“Catalina!”

Effie doesn’t know how he managed to pull it off, but Peeta convinced Catalina to stay for dinner and Haymitch convinced her to cook. But that was probably not that hard—Catalina knows she’s leagues better than Haymitch and Effie combined, and while Peeta’s a good baker, he burns rice. Catalina gets Peeta to make the pastry dough, and then she’s rolling little balls of fragrant vegetables and spices with her thumb.

“That’s the thing about anger,” she says, leaning her head over her shoulder to grin at Peeta, who’s standing by her side, handing her little bowls of crispy dough, “It begs to stick around. I… when I was a kid, I was too scared to hit people and I think my issue is that I’d hit them in a heartbeat now.”

Peeta laughs. “There’s no debate about you hitting people in a heartbeat, Catalina,” he tells her, and Catalina pokes his side with her shoulder, snorting. “You know,” she says, rolling her eyes, “Finnick taught me how to make these. You know something funnier? Mine are better than his.”

“A subject that’s much more cheery than Catalina beating someone up,” Haymitch interjects, “Greasy Sae says hi and verbatim that she hopes you don’t have too hard a time with your own bad memories of Catalina’s meat-cleaving skills. She asked me to say that specifically.”

“Pfft,” Catalina huffs, “Cutting a leg off ain’t nothing like cleaving meat. Or, that leg was actually. Because it was that effed. It was just hup, up with the blade, cut. Actually, I’m going to stop talking.”

Peeta laughs, then deadpans:

“I don’t remember much of it. I heard a woman grunt and crack her knuckles, then yell to someone she was calling Polaris to get ready to move because something was f*cked. And I was pretty sure I was the f*cked thing.”

“PEETA!” Effie admonishes. “You’re in polite company!”

“I’m quoting,” Peeta defends. “And no, I ain’t.” Catalina snorts. It’s low, like she doesn’t want Effie to hear. Effie hears. Little sh*t.

“Oh, that’s Catalina. That makes sense. Deleon’s surname is Polaris,” Haymitch agrees, “I hate to tell you this, but you were the f*cked something. It’s never a good thing when you hear Catalina grunt and crack her knuckles. It means that someone’s going to die, and you can’t decide whether it’d be best if you’re that someone. The only worse thing to hear when you’re half-conscious is Catalina talking about speeding or how she should probably give her lawyer a heads-up.”

“She has a lawyer on speed dial?”

“I’m assuming she does.”

Catalina refuses to confirm nor deny.

You wouldn’t want to try to challenge Catalina’s supremacy of the kitchen. There’s no leftovers, except for the separate filling and dough, that Catalina insists Haymitch’s got to have the skills to cobble together. “C’mon dude,” she laughs, grabbing her guitar by the neck and gesturing to Haymitch with it, “You lived for way too long as a bachelor and didn’t starve.”

“That’s because Greasy Sae felt bad for him and brought him soup,” Effie explains, “And Averard Cain bought him a microwave. Had it shipped priority and everything.”

Catalina snorts. “You’re sh*tting me. The Averard Cain? My dead uncle and much better bastard child of Sejanus Plinth than the surviving one ever was?”

“Absolutely.”

Catalina waggles her guitar at Haymitch like it’s a dagger and Haymitch shows his teeth, hissing.

“How the actual f*ck have you managed to guilt two whole Cains into buying you kitchen appliances,” Catalina laughs, “I don’t even think we sold microwaves when Averard was alive, so that bitch wasn’t bought with the five-finger c-suite discount.”

Effie pushes herself off the couch, saying something under her breath about dishes not doing themselves, even though she knows not a single person other than Peeta will volunteer to help her because Haymitch and Catalina both know that she’s play-testing a consumer-ready version of the new Cain Dishwasher. It’s apparently much cheaper to produce without compromising on quality and durability, focusing on making it easily repairable instead of virtually indestructible. But it’s still a Cain product. Effie’s pretty sure you could drop that thing in the highway moat, wait a couple of years, trawl it out, turn it on—and it might not be purring at you, but it’ll do the dishes.

Catalina answers her with a snort and a loose chord from the neck of her guitar, Peeta watching in awe as her fingers leap across the strings and she doesn’t look at them at all.

Catalina tips her head back, still warming up, and asks: “Greasy Sae’s the one you’ve got watching Katniss right? You told me that you had someone to watch her before I paid for your emergency first class and I’m pretty sure that I heard her name.”

“Yeah,” Effie answers, and then because she’s a good citizen even though Catalina didn’t offer to help her do the dishes even though it’s just loading the dishwasher, she adds: “And thank you, by the way. I really appreciated it. And you didn’t have to spring for first class, you know. Even though the coffee cart is marvellous.”

Catalina shrugs. “It was what was available at such short notice, to be honest,” she says, “And I make so much more money than you, so no biggie. You can pay me back by compensating for my lack of emotional f*cks given. And yes, that’s a choice. I have emotional intelligence. But only for people who deserve it.”

Effie laughs and thinks about that most people are afraid of Catalina Cain. She thinks those people are fools.

Effie’s not going to kid herself and say that she thinks Catalina’s doing better because she hears Catalina singing as she loads the dishwasher. She’s pretty sure it’s because it’s Peeta who’s asking, and Catalina’s always been a sucker. And she refuses to admit it, which is fine, because everyone who knows just operates on what they know to be the truth and that’s that. But regardless, Catalina’s leaning back against the couch cushions, singing out a rattly yet darkly melodic song that sounds like something you’d hear from the porch of the wrong back that you’re trying to sneak around.

“You can unload a six shooter,” she sings, without the pompously exaggerated Capitol accent that Caesar Flickerman made the standard, “You’re handy with your gun. ‘Last more than eight seconds—”

Effie can hear the grin, and bets that Catalina’s winking at Haymitch.

“You can lasso on the run,” she continues, “Rocking a big shiny belt buckle with no dirt on them boots.”

“When you moseyed your ass over here, ‘betcha thought I’d be your fool.”

Effie pads over to the open door, leaning against the side of it, watching Peeta stretching forwards in enrapturement as Catalina sitting cross-legged, back against the cushions, eyes closed, head tipping back.

“So, you think you’re a cowboy?”

She chuckles low to herself, whispering:

“Yeehaw, you ain’t got sh*t on me.”

And she lets it hang in the air.

Haymitch is the first to clap.

“Woah,” Peeta follows up, “Finnick wasn’t kidding when he said that you could sing.”

Catalina rolls her eyes. “You’ve heard me sing before.”

“There’s a difference between you humming about what you’d like to do to Johanna in the gym and you actually playing a song. You just came up with that on the spot?”

Catalina rests her guitar on its side next to her, so it looks like they’re answering questions about their new album on a talk show that’s not Caesar Flickerman’s. “Nah,” Catalina tells him, “I’ve kind of been humming it to myself for a couple of days, maybe a week. I usually write half of a song when I experience something that inspires it and have to process it and then I have it bouncing around in my head for a bit, before I pull out the thoughts and get to work making it an actual song.”

“And you write all your songs?”

Catalina tilts her head. “You mean all the songs I sing?”

“Yeah.”

“Most of them,” Catalina agrees, “I also know a good couple of old folk songs that my grandmother thought me even though they were so illegal when I was a kid.”

“Songs were illegal in the Capitol? What would—”

Peeta freezes up.

Catalina finishes his sentence for him. “What would have happened to her if she was caught?”

Slowly, Peeta nods.

Catalina sighs. “To be completely honest,” she says, “My grandmother would probably have been executed for it. She’d probably have gotten off with a massive fine if she only did it once or was rich, but that wasn’t the case. So, yeah. She’d probably have been executed.”

“Your grandmother wasn’t rich? But I thought your family was loaded.”

Catalina laughs. “Nah,” she says, whistling a little, “My grandmother wasn’t rich. My family wasn’t always rich, either, actually. My paternal grandmother shotgun-wedding’d herself into wealth, and my maternal grandmother married her daughter off to wealth. My father used to be more of a normal kind of rich, before he became a billionaire. People kept saying how good of an example my family was for the whole if you just have enough motivation, you can do it too crap. It was bullsh*t and don’t let anyone tell you sh*t like that in any meaningful capacity, because it’s just hot air and cowardly revisionist history. Everything’s about connections and how ruthless you’re willing to be, especially back then.”

“Catalina?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you play another song?”

“Sure,” she says, and then she picks up her guitar, “But it’ll be as punkish.”

And so, she sings:

“I went and walked myself like a dog who bit off her leash, now I’m growling at an old stranger. I’m biting at his knees.”

And Peeta drinks it in. And Haymitch watches like he remembers the night the first lyrics were written.

“If I wanted it, do you really think I’d wait for permission?”

Catalina Cain was the one who cut down the dummy that Katniss vandalised to look like Seneca Crane. In a split second decision, Catalina Cain, who was a couple of inches taller than Seneca Crane in real life, realised that this lifelong difference was reversed in death. On the tips of her toes, she arched up to cradle a plastic cheek. And then she slipped her knife between the rope and his throat, cutting him down and catching him like he’d been a person.

“For protection and assurances that all will be delivered?”

Catalina turns to look at Effie over her shoulder and the arm of the couch, catching her eyes right when the next line spills from her lips like rushing blood.

“Like our fathers did, our mothers did and them and those before.”

“When you say you want a difference, the honour is all yours.” Catalina’s voice stands on the tips of her toes, a little girl reaching with twitching hands for greatness, peeking through cracks in the glass ceiling.

“I’m stuck inside of my loneliness, I’m stuck inside my grief, I wish I could have been there to save you from the reach, I’m spiteful like a god, seek a vengeance like the rest, for what they did to you I will never lay to rest.” For each promise, her voice swells and climbs with her rage, a princess who escaped the tower with a razor blade furiously breaking back in to get even.

“When you say you want a difference,”

She exhales.

“The horror is all yours.”

Effie and Catalina end up being the last up, laughing about how a week ago, Catalina, without an inch of hesitation, brained a socialite with Peeta’s cane. Like, swung it over her shoulder like it was a bat and hit him in the back of the head. Effie didn’t even think he head her coming. Effie didn’t hear her coming and she could see behind his head. Effie blinked, and she was there, furious and going for it.

And then she without missing a beat snatched some kind of aerosol from some kind of place, flicked her lighter, pressed down and showed everyone how to make an improvised flamethrower and put your second enemy in a world of pain.

Catalina necks the fruity pink mocktail that Effie insisted she try, sticking out her tongue in disgust right after finishing it. Instead of blunt force trauma, Catalina had knocked out Haymitch and Peeta who were now snoring on the couch with her impromptu presentation on the medical innovations of her thirteen departments, including a detailed and graphic explanation of osseointegration that she stole Effie’s printer paper to draw shockingly detailed diagrams on. Effie took notes during that one. And she asked Catalina if she could keep the diagrams. She’s got a folder of Catalina’s explanations already.

Catalina leans her elbow against the kitchen counter and asks Effie if she wants a neat whiskey.

“We don’t have whiskey in the house,” Effie reminds her.

“I brought whiskey,” Catalina counters.

Two days later, Haymitch is yelling at Catalina on the phone because she f*cked off to Seven with no set return date. Effie sits on the couch and doesn’t say anything at all, because if she’s being honest:

If she was Catalina, she would have done the same. And she wouldn’t have hesitated.

Still, it’s a dick move, as Haymitch is insisting to Catalina’s voicemail. And it’s spineless that she doesn’t pick up, but Effie gets that, too. She’d probably do the same if she was Catalina. Sometimes, you have to commit yourself fully to the task at hand. And that means not picking up the phone when you know what’s on the other line, and that it’s going to cause you to linger when you should do anything but.

There are just some things that are true.

Like how if she were District, Effie would have met Catalina Cain anyways. Because she would have been a volunteer. Regardless of District. And if she’d been from Four specifically, Finnick would never have been in the Games. Because Catalina Cain was younger than Lotan Odair by just enough to still be eligible. And Effie thinks she thought about that more than she should have, for a Capitol girl. Finnick called the assault on the Capitol the 76^th Hunger Games. It was morbid and Haymitch hates it.

Effie thinks about Catalina’s silver earpiece shimmering as she sang.

Chapter 51: Gotta Get Out!

Chapter Text

Coriolanus gives Caesar the rare permission to see Peeta Mellark in his hospital room. He watches Peeta for hours, hands steepled, as Peeta sleeps strapped down by thick, gruff leather with tears drying on his cheeks and blood crusting around his wrists.

On hour three, when Caesar’s looking at the floor and counting his breaths, Catalina Cain walks inside. She’s got a large, hinged collar around her throat that blinks and lets out a shrill beep when she bends down in a mocking bow. She quickly straightens herself, wincing at the speed of her movements.

“Catalina—” Caesar tries.

She raises her hand, her fingers gnarled and bruised, swelled around the joints, interrupting him: “Forget about it. You know what’s happening here. Save us both the hassle.”

He doesn’t. So he tells her that and she laughs, shrill and manic. Caesar’s eyes dart to Peeta.

“Don’t worry,” Catalina tells him, “He’s drugged to the gills before I get to go in here now. Apparently,” she shrugs, resting one hand against her jagged hip and waving the other one through the air in a so-so gesture, “I’m a bad influence who inspires rebellion, so I get my ass beaten an inch within my life and the sweet release of death for not liking how the straps dig into my patient’s wrists.”

“You did what?”

Catalina’s eyes narrow as she levels Caesar with a manic grin, leaning against the foot of the bed. She hides it well, but she doesn’t do it for intimidation. Her legs are shaking. “They almost killed me for bandaging his wrists. And that’s the f*cking truth. I don’t give a sh*t if I’m telling you the truth anymore. That bastard can kill me if he wants. But he’s not going to. Because he’s a dickless coward.”

Caesar bites his thumbnail, holding his breath.

Catalina’s voice drops an octave, into murky, dangerous waters: “Coryo’s already told you that I’m insane. I might as well prove it to you. I’ll take a blood sample and leave you to your other lovely chat, don’t worry.”

Caesar tells Coriolanus that Catalina Cain is insane and Coriolanus sighs, leaning against the edge of his desk. “I know that,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose, “But thank you for recognising it. She says very out-of-pocket things right now. I forgot that I’d requested a sample from her, to see her progress. I think she scares Peeta’s guests on purpose, like she doesn’t understand that we’re all trying to protect her.” Caesar doesn’t ask Coriolanus if Catalina’s there of her own volition. Instead, he says:

“She’s always been stubborn like that.”

“She has,” Coriolanus agrees, “She sure has. For longer than you’d ever know.”

Caesar thinks about how Finnick had folded himself into Catalina’s body like he never wanted to let her go. Caesar thinks about how they don’t know if Finnick’s alive. And that Catalina would have found out, with all of the fury and determination that she was using to make him stare at the floor for another two hours after she’d left. He thinks about how Catalina, ridiculously private, ridiculously cold, had written her full name and phone number on the inside of Finnick’s forearm when he first started to go out. She’d done it because she was afraid of him forgetting it in a panic or a haze.

Caesar knows by the time the Quell rolled around, Finnick knew Catalina’s phone number like his childhood street.

Cassandra is dead, and they’re not really sure who killed her.

Coriolanus says that it was too neat to be Catalina, even though he’s sure that she’s the one who killed Aloysius. He says that she’s been poisoned by rebels, that she’d been vulnerable after Seneca died and it’d caused her to fall into Plutarch’s traitorous orbit. Knowing Catalina, Caesar thinks that she leapt instead of sauntering vaguely into someone’s arms.

Knowing Catalina and Cassandra, Catalina did the clean kill and she thought of it as a mercy.

Caesar doesn’t know how he feels about it.

He goes home after he’s sure that Coriolanus doesn’t suspect anything from him, after he’s sufficiently buttered up the President, as a nineteen-year-old Cassandra Birkenfeld would have said, Caesar’s hand in her hair, braiding flowers into it as she sang to him and him alone.

Caesar knows that Celeste visits Catalina, too. But he doesn’t tell her that he saw her, let alone spoke to her, when they have dinner together. He heaps oysters onto her plate and chastises her for forgetting to eat, but she’s picking up his slack and she’s kind enough not to say so. He’s been spending most of his time staring at the ceilings and walls instead of doing actual work.

It’s funny; he could have sworn that he was the kind of person who could work through anything, because until now, he has. And it’s not like he was that close to Cassandra anymore. They’d started to spend most of their time together arguing about small stupid sh*t. And he’s not working through it. His body is teaching him complete submission even though he’s never asked for it. He’s never wanted to be this person. Cassandra wasn’t his wife and he’s not sure that she’d be his friend anymore if they weren’t Cassandra and Caesar.

He’s forced to get it together enough to interview Peeta. He thinks that’s why Coriolanus let him see Peeta. He thinks that Coriolanus wanted him to be prepared. Coriolanus had condoled, remembering Caesar as a younger man speaking highly of Cassandra Birkenfeld. He’d said: I know you were waiting for Aloysius to die first. And Caesar wasn’t. Not for the reason that Coriolanus thought he was, that was for sure.

Peeta is dragged away by the Peacekeepers after he yells about the bombs and Caesar can hear the dull thud of metal hitting body. He stays in his chair, one leg over the other. And he listens as the Peacekeepers eat Peeta for lunch. And he thinks about Catalina, beaten for bandaging a boy’s wrists. And he thinks about how there’d been blood crusted all over Peeta’s skin, the sheets and the restraints. Peeta’s wrists had been bandaged, and then they hadn’t. He wore long sleeves for his interview and he sat very, very still until he very suddenly didn’t.

Caesar shouldn’t be thinking about doing something stupid.

Caesar shouldn’t be thinking about it at all. Caesar’s got things to stay alive for right here. Caesar’s got Celeste. Celeste’s very important. Celeste’s the most important thing in his life.

Celeste’s sister was killed for caring about someone else. Catalina’s boyfriend was killed for a brief moment of empathy, when he recognised his own story on the screen after a lifetime of being reminded of how important it was to play nice with the people in power. Caesar’s heard stories of what happened to Arachne Crane. Catalina Cain has a collar around her throat that beeps when she bends too far, because it thinks she’s trying to get it off. It looks like a mutt’s collar. It looks like something her own father would have invented. Cinna Irshad should have had his first exhibition, sponsored by Cain Industries despite not speaking to Catalina for a year, and he was beaten to death and died in hospital hours later. But Caesar thinks that he was dead on that floor.

Some Victors “talked sh*t” about the Capitol. Like Johanna Mason and Haymitch Abernathy. Some Victors were wildcards, like Finnick Odair and Annie Cresta and the fan-favourite Katniss Everdeen. You never quite knew what you were getting with those Victors. Annie didn’t do interviews because big wigs were afraid of pissing off Catalina Cain’s supposedly fragile ego. Sometimes you had to cancel your Finnick Odair interview with almost no notice. Katniss was new, and fiery even before the Arena blew up. But either way, you’d get great viewership. Some Victors were the definition of safe. Augustus Braun always sung the Capitol’s praises. He was still killed in the purge even though Caesar’s lines had him say that it was only Victors who were suspected collaborators.

Catalina Cain, one of the most influential people alive, couldn’t keep her family safe.

Caesar sits in the bathtub without any water in it and flicks through holograms of Cassandra Birkenfeld’s performances, but not any that happened on a stage. He’s found his old camcorder and transferred the files.

“Well, I come down here from the mountaintop,” Cassandra sings, leaning back against her stool, fingers hooked around a bow flying across fiddle strings, eyes meeting the camera, and Caesar’s, in the dense crowd of one of the Capitol’s last remaining pre-war speakeasies that’d kept the right spirit. And spirits. In both senses of the word. They closed down last year. Caesar had wanted to go, and then he’d driven there, seen the sign on the door, snapped a photo of it and texted it to Cassandra who left him on read.

“And I cut you down like an autumn crop,” she sings, thirty years in the past, tapping her foot against the floor as she hums between the lyrics and the verses, “My love for you will never stop. But I pulled you over like a small-town cop.”

“Hay fever’s knocking at your door, baby, you can feed the dogs lying on our floor. ‘took all the gold from your chest o’ drawers, I can drive you crazy, yes I can!” Cassandra knocks her fist against the body of her fiddle, laughing as she reaps all the love from Caesar’s ground, even all these years later, translucent and flickering.

“Well, I can’t hunt and I can’t fish, but I can drive you crazy, yes I can!”

She takes one stride, leg kicked out high in front of her, like she’s stepping into a glorious future and refusing to fall off the stage this time.

“I can’t even make a dish, but I can drive you crazy, yes I can!”

Caesar tucks his aching, aging knees against his chest and thinks about how Cassandra won’t turn fifty. He won’t get to see how old age looks on her. He knows she would have been beautiful. Because she’d always been beautiful.

“Ask me on a date, and I’ll show up late!”

“I can drive you crazy, yes I can!”

“Blow out your birthday candles and steal your cake!”

Caesar buries his face in his knees and listens as the song familiarly bottoms out into raucous cheers from the crowd. He knows if he looked up, Cassandra would be twirling once, twice, then running towards him. And he would drop the camera, and their bodies would melt into one another.

And Caesar Flickerman makes the choice that he thinks Catalina Cain made.

And it’s selfish and it’s wrong and it’s horrible and it’s going to get him killed, but he thinks about slow dancing with Cassandra in their old school gymnasium in their late thirties, when they’d both been married.

They danced like the truth. They danced like they used to have something together that was no longer there, but they were trying to relive it in one single dance, knowing they’d have to go home and back to their lives. They’d snuck away from their school reunion, which was happening in the courtyard outside. The gymnasium was dark and musty and their shoes squeaked against the floor and they didn’t have any music, but it was still the dance that Caesar knew he’d be thinking back on when he died. It wouldn’t be any of his wedding dances. He’s sorry about that. He really is.

It would be a hundred times easier if he was young again.

It’s young people who do stupid sh*t like running for the hills with a boy whose brains got fried by a girl who didn’t want to do it. Caesar doesn’t know what Snow’s holding over Catalina’s head, but he knows that it’s horrible. He knows that it’s not an explosive collar that she’s wearing, and if it is, it’s not going to detonate around her own neck. Because then she’d already have relieved her shoulders of her head.

Caesar does it anyways.

And he gets away with it for as long as he does because no one suspected he would be the one to crack open the window locks. The thing is that Peeta isn’t the vibrant, smooth-talking, crowd-playing boy that Caesar remembers. Caesar tugs at his shoulders after undoing the restraints in the middle of the night and whisper-shouts, “Peeta! We have to get going. I’ll get you out. You’ll see Katniss again.”

And Peeta starts screeching, lurching away from Caesar and clattering to the floor like shattering glass, alerting absolutely everyone.

“Peeta! Peeta!” Caesar tries to shush.

“YOU CAN’T TAKE ME! I WON’T GO! I STAY HERE! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME GO WITH YOU!”

Peeta slumps to the ground, seizing right as the badly jammed door is kicked down. Caesar’s eyes are wide when he’s hauled away, and he forgets that he’s supposed to be kicking and screaming and calling them pigs and frothing at the mouth. They drop him in a cell, grunting and talking about what they’re going to do with him like he’s not right there and can hear them.

“Moron,” Catalina rasps when the Peacekeepers stomp off. Her cell is across from him, and she’s slumped on her side, one side of her face stamped with a boot-shaped bruise, yellowing at the edges and almost black at the centre.

Chapter 52: Birds Of A Feather I

Chapter Text

Celeste is one of those people who tries to tell herself that she likes parties, but she actually doesn’t.

She tries to like parties because that’s what she’s supposed to, right? Even Catalina likes some parties. And Catalina hates way more people than Celeste does. But Catalina likes the kind of parties where she can choose who she wants to dance with and she’s not expected to woo a husband or a new buyer for some terrifying home security system that her father’s struggling to move units of.

Celeste doesn’t like those kinds of parties, either. Even though she should. Even though Catalina pulls her into the fold, shows her how to dance like you’re actually having fun instead of being beautiful on purpose. She’s described it to Catalina as them being too loud in her brain, especially when they’re the ones that Aurelia took to hosting after she got married.

It’s at one of those where she skulks off to smoke on the balcony after listening to one too many of Magnus Abel’s stupid stories that are all about the same thing—how great Magnus Abel is at the job he inherited from his father, even though he’s done nothing to move the needle in either society or the company itself. She’s pretty sure that Magnus Abel will always be a paper towel magnate, but Celeste knows more interesting magnates. And some of them are even secret smokers, like her.

Catalina comes up from behind, taps Celeste’s shoulder, snatches the cigarette out of Celeste’s hand and takes a long drag, blowing smoke into Celeste’s face. “What did I say about smoking?” she asks as Celeste pulls out another cigarette and lights it.

“You said,” Celeste says between drags, “Only to do it if you’re a dipsh*t, or a genius who can probably invent new lungs or something like that.”

Catalina nods smugly and sagely.

Celeste says: “You’re kind of a dick sometimes, you know. You know that, right?”

Catalina clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

“Catalina,” Celeste tries, “Aren’t you tired of trying to make parties fun for someone who just isn’t built to like them? You could be dancing with Seneca instead of sitting out here.”

Catalina flicks her hand behind her, gesturing to the scene clear through the newly polished windows. Seneca’s doing the worm while Cinna excitedly records and doesn’t hide it at all.

“I think he’s got it covered,” Catalina laughs with obvious and unshielded affection, “I think he’s got it very, very much covered, the whole having fun on his own thing. You know, I think I could blink and sink into the moss, and maybe he’d miss me a bit, but he’d be just fine on his own.”

“He needs you to take over the world with him,” Celeste protests, “You’re so lucky. Someone picked you—”

Catalina interrupts her.

“Someone would pick you, too. If it came down to it, I would pick you. You get it—”

“Catalina—”

Catalina rolls her eyes. “I’ll love you ‘till the day that I die, like, truly. Until there’s no light in my eyes and the earth’s settled over the casket that you helped carry. I don’t give a sh*t whether we’re smoking on a balcony or burning the soles off our shoes on marble floors. I’m spending time with you, and I like doing that.”

“Catalina.”

“Don’t Catalina me. It’s the truth. Sit with it.”

Celeste doesn’t sit with it.

Finnick slides up behind her, whining into her hair as Catalina chuckles, rumbling low in her throat.

“Catia,” Finnick moans, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and slouching against her body, “I’m done with this sh*t. People are weird here and I’m tired.” Catalina snorts, leaning back a little to take Finnick’s weight. She raises her hand to play with Finnick’s hair, but keeps her eyes locked on the skyline.

“I appreciate that you came,” she says, “Because it matters to me. And it matters to me that I stick around until midnight, but then I’ll f*ck off. I can go see if Cinna likes me enough to drive you to mine, because I know he’s leaving early because he’s weird and doesn’t like going to work on five hours of sleep.”

Finnick groans. “I don’t want to drive with Cinna,” he complains, “I want to drive with you.”

Catalina tsks. “Then,” she tells him, “You’re going to have to wait until midnight.”

“I’ll just sleep here on you,” Finnick tries to hook his legs around Catalina’s, but she stands stiff as a board and doesn’t take his weight further. Finnick stumbles a little, and Catalina huffs. “Celeste,” Finnick protests, “She’s being mean.”

Catalina might say that she would choose Celeste, but she’d also choose Finnick. Without hesitation. At first, Celeste was weirded out by Catalina and Finnick and Catalina’s adamant and furious denials that she wasn’t dating Finnick or even trying to date Finnick. Now, Celeste finds it hard to imagine Finnick without Catalina or Catalina without Finnick.

Catalina is fierce about Finnick, and Finnick is fierce about Catalina. But they’re fierce in their own ways. Catalina will scare the sh*t out of an asshole who thinks that Finnick shouldn’t be eating ice cream if he wants ice cream, like, Celeste has both watched people break down crying and actually piss themselves in fear when Catalina’s really gone at them. And it’s not just because she’s Catalina Cain, billionaire bad bitch who could sue you and three generations of your family out of existence, but because she’s Catalina, notoriously terrifying who’s honed her verbal assaults for her whole life. The money and status helps, but she doesn’t need it.

Finnick is fierce in the way that he refuses to let the world remember Catalina as an ice-cold bitch. According to Finnick, Catalina is a good person for the sake of being good, and he wants the world to know that. Catalina’s told Celeste that Finnick reminds her of the kind of person that she’d like to be, and that it scares her sh*tless to admit that to him because she doesn’t know how he’ll take it.

Catalina finally acquiesces and hooks her hands underneath Finnick’s knees, lifting him onto her back. Another thing Celeste can’t fathom to imagine is a Catalina that couldn’t pick Finnick up. Or Seneca. Or Cinna. Or Celeste. Or Aurelia on the night of her bachelorette party, when one of her heels had snapped and she’d thrown off the other one, yelling about Catalina’s muscles and how good her hair smelled when she’d mashed her face into it as Catalina had been walking, trying not to laugh her ass off.

Finnick nuzzles against Catalina’s hair.

“You should really learn how to carry more people,” Finnick mumbles, eyes closed, and Catalina laughs.

“I don’t think my chiropractor would like that,” she says.

“You don’t go to a chiropractor,” Finnick grumbles. “Cinna keeps telling you that you should and Seneca keeps threatening to override your independence and book you one.”

Chapter 53: One Of Deleon's (Many) Functions

Chapter Text

Because Haymitch doesn’t know what the f*ck he’s supposed to do, he follows Deleon.

Deleon grunts and heaves the black Haymitch-shaped carpenter bag over his broad shoulder. “I’m going to need to start incinerating this stuff,” Deleon tells him, “So, I hope you don’t have an issue with burning if you’re following me like a lost duckling.”

Haymitch wants to say that he remembers Deleon being less Catalina-like, but he’s probably wrong. Catalina did drunkenly rant about how Deleon had basically hostile-takeover’d his way back into her life, orbit and his old job from before she fired him so Snow wouldn’t purge him if he decided that Catalina’s staff should pay for her crimes.

“I don’t have an issue with the incinerator,” Haymitch says, because Deleon’s looking at him like he’s demanding an answer. “Why would I have an issue with the incinerator? I’m a grown man. I burn plastic out back instead of recycling it like everyone else.”

Deleon raises his eyebrow but doesn’t say anything and starts walking again.

“I don’t burn plastic because I hate the environment, by the way,” Haymitch says as Deleon, with goggles on and massive welding gloves, furiously digs out the remains of burnings past. He doesn’t ask for Haymitch’s help, and he tsks when Haymitch offers it.

“You’ll put out your back, old man,” he chides, and Haymitch picks up the matching shovel to whack him on the hollow of his disturbingly massive shoulder. Deleon’s as wide as an oak, and as tall as Catalina, famous scary tree. But Catalina’s got slight shoulders, especially now, when she’s standing with one foot in the sea and the other on shore. And she hunches them, too.

Deleon ducks under Haymitch’s assault and he leans the repurposed snow shovel back against the wall. He mirrors it and says, “You know, I’m kind of disturbed by how you’re taking all of this so well.”

Deleon huffs and starts de-bagging the contents, throwing them into the incinerator like he’s trying to show off. “I have sh*t to do,” he explains, “This morning, it was ME who made sure we had working toilets in the building for the first time. It was ME who was on the customer helpline and it was ME who mitigated the literal burning car fire. I have sh*t to do. I don’t have time to ruminate. It’s probably not healthy, but I’m in therapy, so I do have a safe space to let it all out. And my mother’s a good listener, too.”

“Your mother’s the one that sends those deadly jellied things right? The hate crimes?”

Deleon sighs. “She means well.”

“She means to kill us all well.”

“By the way,” Deleon adds, “I think you should know that Catalina called Effie. She told me not to tell you because you’d be bitchy, but I’m my own man and I do what I want.”

Haymitch snorts, watches Deleon grimace at a ripped, bloodstained white sheet before balling it up and throwing it in with the others. On the wall, there’s a handwritten guide for how long different materials take to burn. It includes such common items as polyester, cotton-polyester blend, pure cotton, person, person part and five different categories of mutt, differentiated by weight.

“I’m not really surprised,” Haymitch agrees, “And is it weird to say that I’m kind of glad?”

He didn’t think about it until he said it, but it was the truth. He was happy, mainly, that someone else had done it before he needed to. Even if that someone was Catalina Cain, and he’s kind of insulted because he didn’t think that he needed Effie to abandon Katniss in Twelve to come up and ply him, but Catalina’s right about most things that she goes to bat for, so she’s probably right about this, too. And it’s annoying, because Catalina’s not a know-it-all in the way that she shows it off or even really cares about proving herself the smartest person in the room.

She was more interested in that when she was younger, but now time and experience have proved everything true. Catalina Cain is the smartest person in almost any room, and she doesn’t have to fight mediocre men for recognition anymore. Not because sexism suddenly vanished, but because she’s become one of the few women who’s famous enough for her work that you’re laughed out of the conversation if you try to say she couldn’t obliterate you.

The annoying thing about Catalina is that everything she says proves itself right in time, and she’s smug about it by simply existing and not giving a f*ck about it. She doesn’t screech that she told you so, but you wonder how much she must have been internally laughing at you when you tried to argue with her. He doesn’t say any of this to Deleon. Deleon doesn’t worship Catalina, but he’s in her corner. And he likes her as a person, and not just a concept or a persona that she plays on TV. And Haymitch is very happy that Catalina has someone like Deleon in her corner.

“I made all the other calls, too,” Deleon tells him, “The calls that Catalina didn’t insist on making because of some f*cked up view of like, responsibility or whatever. The guilt is eating her alive, and I told her to f*ck off with that notion, but we all know that’s not how she works or how most of us work, really.”

It strikes Haymitch that even though Deleon defines himself as the pillars that keep the house up, he’s Catalina’s age. And he should have been protected from all of this, too. Even though he carries it well. They all do, and Haymitch hates it.

Deleon slams the incinerator shut, hands on his hips. “I can’t believe I got that whole bag in here,” he announces, gleeful.

“Isn’t that exactly what it’s for?”

Deleon laughs and shakes his head. “Nah,” he says, “It’s meant for like, medical waste. And the kind of medical waste that’s weird to throw in the dumpsters, so, really, just amputated limbs. Everything else goes in the dumpsters. Oh, and we also burn the mutts. But like, Catalina usually chops the big ones into smaller pieces.”

“What the actual f*ck?”

“I’ve never asked her how she feels about it, but it’s probably the same kind of neutral she feels about killing them. She does it so she can fit more in the incinerator. It’s good for the climate, too. Uses less fuel, you know.”

“That’s traumatic as f*ck,” Haymitch decides, “I hate watching her kill them in the first place. I’ve never seen someone so unbothered by some of the most horrific creatures known to mankind.”

Deleon shrugs, straightening out the bag and folding it, ready for reusing. The earpiece that Catalina fitted him with glints against the backdrop of the growing incinerator flames.

Chapter 54: Birds Of A Feather II

Chapter Text

Pyrena is serving a metric f*ckload of seafood, for some f*cking reason. Celeste f*cking despises seafood. Especially caviar and oysters, which is all a skinny Avox is offering her. She gently pushes them away and turns her attention back to watching Plutarch charm the socks and perhaps pants off Rainier Blair.

After all, Plutarch led the push to legalise both gay sex and gay marriage, giving them the exact same rights as everyone else in the blink of an eye and with none of the hesitation that Celeste would expect someone like Plutarch to have about a drastic policy decision like that. It’s no secret that there’s people who don’t support it, and are very, very vocal about it. It was a dangerous thing to force through at the birth of a new government.

Plutarch did it anyways, and now he’s laughing as Rainier reaches out to touch the gold embroidery of his coat.

Pyrena idles over, and Plutarch says something unforgivable.

He says, “Thank you, Rainier. I was inspired by one of Catalina’s dresses during the Quell.” And it doesn’t matter if he had it made before the war, or if it’s a new idea of his, some weird way to get his glorified ex-wife back. Pyrena’s eyes widen and she tries to hide the fact that her disgust is masking fear and shock. Celeste quirks her brow, interested. And she watches as Pyrena continues to intrigue her by hurriedly making some horrible excuse to leave that Celeste doesn’t completely catch, but knows is complete bullsh*t. She’d been gliding around the ballroom like she didn’t have anything better to do than inflict her presence on other people.

Caesar hadn’t ever liked Pyrena Tress. He’d said that he could smell something off with her, like she was doing terrible things in the shadows. Celeste sneakily follows her out the door and stands behind a massive artificial plant—purple palm leaves dripping thick, crimson sap with a thick, royal blue trunk.

“I don’t give a sh*t!” Pyrena shouts into the phone, stomping her foot against the ground, “I don’t know what to do! He’s coming for me! He referred to her as Catalina and not Cain! I should have known! She’s a witch, that woman! A f*cking siren! No man can ever touch her and forget about her! No, f*ck off! I don’t know what to do! He’s here!”

Why does Pyrena Tress sound so afraid of someone she despises and takes every chance to badmouth, like she’s got something that Catalina can’t get with all her money, power and glory? Pyrena Tress shouldn’t be afraid of Catalina Cain. But she is.

“No,” Pyrena says, “I didn’t bring him out yet. He’s— deteriorating. Rapidly. I sent Twenty-Seven out to stock up on Cain garbage. No, she hasn’t come back yet. She’s probably stalled. Cain’s had a lot of people in the parking lot recently, and has been spending time near the windows. You’re right, you’re right. I’m just stressing. I’m worried about him, of course. I love him. I worry about what would happen to him if she got her claws on him. And she probably has literal claws! That woman would modify her own DNA. She’d become a greater freak than Tigris Snow, ha!” And Pyrena actually cackles. “You’re right, you’re right. Of course, you’re right, Fonseca. What would I do without you? Yes, I’ll secure the weapons for you. Tonight, darling. When do you need them by? Oh, you have that coordinated attack on the new Cain vaccine infrastructure, I forgot. I like that. And you’re right. We’re not neighbours. She’s eleven minutes away if she speeds. And I’d know if she was speeding here.”

Celeste arches her feet.

And against her better judgement, when Pyrena agrees with the phone that she’ll feel better after she sits with him and starts walking down the hallway, Celeste follows her silently. She follows her into the library, always a couple of paces behind her, always able to slip behind something. Always finding the next thing for her to slip behind. She’d been the one who’d exposed Tiberius Snow for sexting Catalina Cain in the first place, and not because Catalina Cain had volunteered this information. Catalina Cain’s name still makes Celeste feel like a blister that’s been rubbed raw and furious in heels. She’d found that out all on her own, and she hadn’t published it because she liked Catalina or she didn’t like Tiberius, she’d published it because she knew that it would make money and if you f*ck around, you should find out sometimes.

She watches silently as Pyrena clicks open a bookcase and slips behind it.

And Celeste lies in wait, like a starved tiger.

Celeste is patient. Celeste is sharp. Celeste is fully committed to the task at hand. Celeste once waited for twenty-seven hours in a bush, in the rain sleet armed only with her camera and six protein bars, to catch a photo of Haymitch Abernathy leaving Effie Trinket’s apartment. Catalina had ended up buying that photo up for a price that not even Caesar could refuse before it’d been published. She’d put in a clause that if anyone mentioned it, she’d sue them out of existence. Celeste had been silently fuming, but it wasn’t the worst thing Catalina had done. But it was a weird thing.

It isn’t a challenge for Celeste to wait. Pyrena’s got a ball to attend to. She only takes fifteen minutes before the door is clicking open again, and she’s slipping out, straightening her bodice. Celeste watches, figures out that there’s a latch after a book intended for children, about a spirit, the sea and a very, very vengeful older sister trying to drag the spirit out of her brother. It’s a tragedy, that’s all Celeste remembers. It’s one of those President Ravinstill ordered to be written after the rebellion, to warn people of the consequences of love turning into radicalism. Of course, that was before he got stabbed to death with a curtain pole by Aja Cain during a mental break. She’d wrenched it right out of the wall and gone for his throat in the middle of dinner.

Even decades later, no one knows why Aja Cain did it. Celeste supposes that you don’t know why insane people do things, even if they’re only insane in the moment. Catalina used to insist that her paternal grandmother was relatively normal, even if she talked a lot about triumphing over things and about her time in prison before they decided that she was too insane for trial, blaming it on postpartum depression and letting her go to a facility instead. One that she was eventually released from, instead of hung.

Pyrena breathes in deeply, like she’s just gotten out of a full-service spa, and walks back out into the hallway. And Celeste, without a moment’s hesitation, walks to the false bookcase. Up close, real up close, pressing her face to it kind of up close, Celeste can see that the books are fake. She opens the door and descends into the darkness, finding slick, damp steps and hearing absolutely nothing.

Pyrena grips the railing, cusses herself and her curiosity out, and when she can’t hear anyone else’s breaths or grunts, begins to walk, feet smacking against the bottom of each step as she goes down. When she can’t find another step, she presumes that she’s at the bottom, and she fishes her phone out from where she’s shoved it between her tit*. She flicks on the flashlight, and promptly drops it when she sees Finnick Odair’s hollowed-out, emaciated, but undoubtably his, eyes staring back at her, his body crumpled and naked on a thin mattress, the ridges of his spine stark in the harsh light of Celeste’s phone.

“Holy sh*t!” she can’t help but shout. Finnick jerks back with a weak whine, falling to the floor.

Chapter 55: Physical Prime

Chapter Text

Haymitch thinks that he should rest.

Peeta thinks that it’s very relaxing watching Catalina Cain go to town on twelve orange holograms at once. She growls as she sinks her spear through a charging one, spinning around and decapitating another. There’s sweat on her brow, and if Peeta thought she’d let her, he’d like to sketch her, and draw her in a beautiful, flowing red lace dress instead of the bike shorts and Cain Industries promotional t-shirt that she actually wore to the gym.

“Restart the pattern,” Catalina says, “Randomise it. It’s embarrassing how sloppy I’ve gotten.”

Peeta does what she asks.

“Catalina?” he asks, when she collapses her spear and spins the carabiner around her finger. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” Catalina nods, not breaking her pattern. Twin forearm block, upward punch sending her flickering opponent to the floor, heel against their skull, pixels cracking, middle punch in fixed stance meeting the second victim.

“Why did you work out um… Haymitch says that you’ve been into this stuff your whole life, and sorry if it’s stereotypical, but it doesn’t seem like a normal hobby for a girl in the Capitol.”

“It’s always good to think outside of the stereotypes,” Catalina answers, doing a downward strike better than Peeta’s instructor in Thirteen had demonstrated it. Catalina dances across the room, relying on the speed and flexibility of her body instead of the sharp tip of her spear. She pulls up her hair in between strikes and says: “I used to do it because it gave me a sense of control that was healthier than starving myself, and it was a good outlet for the anger that didn’t really have a place to go. I could work myself so tired that I just collapsed in bed and didn’t think about all the reasons I was pissed. Now, I do it because I had a physical prime and it’s not this.”

I see why Beetee’s afraid of you sometimes, Peeta thinks.

Instead of saying that, he mirrors Plutarch and says: “Wanna spar when you’re done with your pattern?”

Catalina is one of the few people who’s willing to spar Peeta. And he’s not sure that it’s only because she usually wins easily. Catalina considers for a moment as she finishes off her second-last assailant.

Catalina might not have had the same brutal upbringing as someone like Katniss or Johanna, but she’s still a woman with a great deal of combat training that ended up making her unnaturally skilled. Peeta had to pass a physical to go to war. He knows enough about fighting to recognise that Catalina’s got more than talent and luck. She’s swift-footed, cruel and willing to exploit that he’s not. He feels like a lumbering idiot while Catalina bobs and weaves through his attempted strikes, reminding him that sometimes, you don’t get to spar people who challenge you.

Catalina drops the last one with a middle punch in left walking stance, low block with the left forearm. She looks bored.

“All right,” she says, and it’s not out of a deep desire to make her workout more challenging. She’s the kind of fighter that Peeta shouldn’t step to, because all of her strengths feed into his weaknesses. His instructor, and Johanna, would say that Catalina was the kind of fighter that Peeta should avoid like the plague.

Catalina moves to the sparring mat, and Peeta follows her.

“I heard that Plutarch was talking about insurrectionists getting strongholds in isolated parts of the Districts,” he says as they bow to each other and settle into guarding blocks. Peeta opens with a light kick, to test how willing she is to slip into acrobatics. Catalina mixes disciplines, which makes her a very hard opponent to predict. From what he’s figured out by asking around, Catalina’s done everything from fencing to boxing and acrobatics for two decades. Catalina dodges him easily by dipping under, sliding and ending up behind him. Instead of striking, she circles, dragging it out. She’s so fast that she could have taken him out before he could block her, and he’s sure that she knows it.

Peeta tries to strike again, and Catalina blocks and deflects.

“You shouldn’t be listening in on Plutarch’s private conversations,” Catalina cautions, “He’s more of a dipsh*t when he thinks that no one’s listening.” Catalina retreats, drawing Peeta in and feinting to the side in the blink of an eye, forcing Peeta to follow through with the momentum of his upwards strike, slashing through the air so he doesn’t fall victim of gravity. Catalina surges forwards, stopping a knife-hand strike a hair’s breadth from Peeta’s neck.

Peeta flinches.

Catalina drops it, ducks under a lumbering strike and delivers a punishing spinning back kick that skims his hairline.

Bullsh*t that you’re not in your physical prime, thinks Peeta, you’re f*cking running laps around me and I’m supposed to be a brainwashed murder machine with a leg literally welded to me with a running blade for charging and murdering teenagers.

Peeta tries Catalina’s knife-hand strike and he winces when she blocks it.

“I wasn’t listening in,” Peeta argues, approaching and swinging as Catalina ducks without getting out of breath, “He was yelling in the hallway.”

She sighs.

"I know that you're busy with everything going on, but I just..."

Peeta bites his lip. He just what? He doesn't know. So, he says, instead: "Haymitch told me that one of your grandmothers stabbed President Ravinstill in the throat with a curtain rod and it wasn't the one that calls you screeching bloody murder from the nursing home."

Catalina snorts, dipping under Peeta's fist, walking backwards. "Aja was pretty chill," she tells him, "You wouldn't think that she'd killed a president. She went crazy under the stress, it happens to the best of us. And then she got a housekeeper, who ended up being my other grandmother. No, my parents didn't have a meet-cute."

"No offense, but how did Snow let your family? Literally every generation of Cains have a... habit."

Chapter 56: Holy sh*t Holy sh*t Holy sh*t Holy sh*t

Chapter Text

Celeste, because she doesn’t know what to do and isn’t really in the position to think about it, yells again:

“WHAT THE f*ck—”

And Finnick forces trembling hands over his ears as he curls more tightly into himself.

Holy sh*t holy sh*t holy sh*t holy sh*t holy sh*t holy sh*t holy sh*t holy sh*t holy sh*t holy sh*t holy sh*t—

Celeste bites her lip until she draws blood. And then she drops to her knees, slowly crawling towards Finnick, closing the distance between them. “I want to ask if you’re some kind of clone or poor bastard who had a ridiculous amount of expensive plastic surgery even though only Catalina—”

Catalina Cain.

Finnick’s eyes widen and Celeste surges forwards, cupping his cheeks. “Finnick?” she questions. “Finnick, Catalina Cain’s little brother, pride of Panem? Other things that aren’t alliterated? Finnick, look at me, please.”

Finnick’s eyes drift to the ceiling and Celeste curses the fact that she’s wearing a wig, so she hooks one hand under it and throws it off. “Look,” she says, tugging at a strand of strawberry blonde hair in front of Finnick’s face, “You remember me, right? You used to braid this. I taught you how to make less sh*tty braids. I’m—”

She can’t make herself say that she’s Aurelia’s little sister. She hasn’t been Aurelia’s little sister for six years now. Because Aurelia’s been dead. And yet, even though she previously felt gratified that even though Catalina had gotten out of prison and wriggled out of the noose, Catalina knew what it felt like to lose a sibling, now—even though she’d felt all of that, the terrifying thing was that not a single part of her didn’t want to call Catalina.

So, she says that to Finnick: “Finnick,” she promises, “I’m going to call Catalina. And she’s going to get us out of here.” And Celeste doesn’t want to think about why she still has this trust in someone who doesn’t deserve an inch of it. Instead, she narrows her eyes and thinks about what she’s going to do right now.

“Finnick,” she continues to narrate, because she’s always liked people talking to when she’s scared, especially when they didn’t expect an answer back, and she’s pretty sure she remembers Catalina drunkenly instructing her to do the same when Celeste had interrupted Catalina’s anaconda-like swallowing of a wrap from the only place open at five in the morning: the Denny’s, to ask her what she was supposed to do when Finnick started staring at corners and not responding to other people. “I’m going to fix this. f*ck it, I’m going to fix this and—”

How is she going to fix this?

Celeste spent too many nights yelling at Caesar and wanting to burn the letter he had the gall to write her. She’d cussed him out every way she could think of, and she’d thrown everything he’d ever bought her at the wall. But they’d mostly been clothes, so she didn’t break anything. She’d threatened to quit her job to no one but herself, and then she’d gone and done it anyways, because she knew that it was going to fall apart and quitting felt better because then they couldn’t fire her and she had the first and last word and she was angry and she’d been the first to get out.

Caesar said that he couldn’t stand and watch what happened to Peeta, so he had to do something stupid and sentimental even though he’d watched a lot of other horrible sh*t and it wasn’t like he didn’t feel bad about it, she knows he did, but he had her, too. And she’d been there for him. And she would have been there for him if he’d come to her.

“God,” she gasps, “I f*cking hate you. You f*cking bitch. I f*cking get it now, you f*cking f*ck.”

Caesar Flickerman died in prison and Catalina Cain says that she watched it. She says that the Peacekeepers descended on him, after Katarzyna Birkenfeld, who was supposed to be demented to the point that she didn’t cause problems on purpose and the problems she caused was pissing on the floor instead of engaging in rebellion, showed up at the door and demanded to be able to pay his bail. Caesar Flickerman’s death aligns with the last time Catalina Cain was documented killing prison guards, because it was her escape, too. Caesar almost lived to see the collapse, and then he would have lived to be here.

Celeste grits her teeth and rips the bottom of her underskirt. She stands up, makes sure that you can’t see what she’s done, and then she balls it up gently lifts Finnick’s head up. She puts the bundle of tulle underneath his head, and lays it back down again. She hisses when she realises that the mattress doesn’t have bedclothes, and then she digs her nails into the edge of it, ripping the cover off. She grunts and puts her whole body into it, and Finnick winces. She slips off her heel and uses it to cut the last strip. She drapes it over Finnick and stands back, hands on her hips.

She tries not to think about what Finnick looks like under her handiwork, or why she didn’t move him back up to the mattress. The reason is that she remembers Catalina saying that you should try not to move people who look like Finnick. She exhales. “I’ll be back,” she tells him, “I’ll be back.”

And then she has a thought.

She winces.

“I’m sorry,” she says, but she’s already kicking her phone over to herself from where she’s been using it as a light and flicking on the camera, angling Finnick’s face with his half-lidded eyes up, her hand and golden nails against his pale, pale skin, strung taut over jutting cheekbones. It looks like they’re about to slice through. And then she snaps the photo.

Chapter 57: What The Water Gives

Chapter Text

Catalina picks up the phone because she sees it’s Deleon on the caller ID. And he’s been very good. He hasn’t even called her once to bitch at her. Haymitch has called her twenty-three times. Effie has called her four times. Johanna’s called her once, but that was after she tricked her, so that’s probably warranted even though Catalina hasn’t listened to the message that Johanna left. She tells herself that she picks up because she technically put him in charge, and she’s supposed to care enough to know whether everything’s on fire while she’s gone.

Even if she’s not sure that it would be enough to pull her back. She’s written overrides. She’ll know if anything truly catastrophic happens that requires her immediate attention according to the extremely complicated system she wrote while she was coming down off chasing two pots of black coffee with whiskey. She doesn’t take out her earpiece, and she’s glad that it’s moulded to the shape of her ear, because otherwise she’d be getting an ache from sleeping on it. She’d know if she had an actual problem. She still picks up when Deleon calls.

“Deleon,” she greets. “What’s on fire?”

Deleon sounds like he’s gritting his teeth when he answers her. “You know exactly what’s on fire. The fact that you’re needed here, and you’re busy running a marathon away from your responsibilities.”

Catalina bites her lip. “My responsibilities are also here, Deleon. And I’ve settled what I needed to settle in the Capitol. Unless something has crawled out of the woodwork that didn’t fit my criteria, I know that it’s still the truth.”

“Catalina,” Deleon tries, and Catalina sighs. Loud and assuredly. “I think you’re really f*cking up.”

Catalina slips off her shoes and walks into the sand, curling her toes into it. She doesn’t want to tell Deleon the truth, because she doesn’t want to burden him with it. It haunts her, and it hurts, and it’s horrible, and she doesn’t want to do that to someone who didn’t ask for it. Because she didn’t ask for it, either. Deleon knows the bare bones of why she had to go, and why she didn’t have time to look over her shoulder and really think about it. That’s it. She’s not telling him anything else, even though he’s smart and she’s sure that he’s halfway to figuring it out on his own. She’s told him not to go digging and if he does, well, that’s his own fault.

And he’ll have proven that he can get through some of her most complicated encryptions, so at least he listens when she speaks. It’s a little bit like how she feels when she looks at Plutarch. She smiled at him before she left, but when she smiled at him, she felt her blood rattle. And she felt that inside of that blood and the bone and their networks of tendons and meat that kept it all together, her and Plutarch, and their histories of hunting and being the beast, spurred to life once more with a ragged, panting breath.

“I promise you I’ll be back as soon as possible,” she says instead.

“That’s what you said to Haymitch three weeks ago, Catalina,” Deleon answers. “And you’re not back yet.”

“Because I’m not done,” Catalina argues, “I said I’d be back when I was done. I’m not done.”

“I think you’re afraid,” Deleon says. And Catalina thinks about when she was a little girl, she used to run away from home and hide in somebody else’s garden for hours. She thinks about how she made borscht for Finnick before the Quarter Quell, because no matter how much he laughed about it being an acquired taste, he liked her borscht, and he tried to make Johanna like it and talked about trying to make Peeta and Katniss like it, too.

She’d ruffled his hair and told him to f*ck away from her counters if he wasn’t going to help her chop, and he told her that she always bitched because he chopped horribly, even though he’s supposed to be better with knives than her. Catalina was a surgeon at twenty-eight and she had been for years. He wasn’t ever better with knives, because she was a swordswoman long before she picked up that first scalpel.

She’d looked down at her hands, in her old kitchen, and seen how they were bright pink from spending the night clapping at and praising Plutarch. It’s strange, the things brains choose to remember. Catalina has to dig for how it felt when she’d paid her way into saying goodbye to Finnick in that f*cking tube. Catalina doesn’t remember at all that she tried to punch down the door to the room where Cinna died, but she remembers sitting cross-legged in a hospital bathroom and painting over her knuckles with Plutarch’s foundation. She remembers being pissed at the flickering bulb and the fact that it was a couple of shades too light for her. She remembers thinking about how she couldn’t figure out if it was because Plutarch was just naturally pale as f*ck, if he didn’t get outside as much as she did or if it’d always been like that and she hadn’t noticed. She didn’t know why it mattered enough to think about and remember.

Cinna was dead, and she was thinking about how it looked like she’d gotten vitiligo of the knuckles, and only the knuckles.

“I had a dream last night, Catalina,” Deleon says, and she doesn’t say anything. “I dreamed that you were down on your knees, furiously building houses full of rooms that I couldn’t go into. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the keys. I tried to throw a rock through the window, and it bounced right off and hit me between the eyes. I think you should come home.”

Catalina hangs up, and Deleon doesn’t call her back.

And she collapses to her knees, sobbing in front of the ocean’s wide-open maw.

“I’m so f*cking sorry,” she pleads even though she knows everyone she’s asking forgiveness from and skinning her knees and elbows for can’t hear her, “I’m so f*cking sorry.”

She doesn’t know how long she stays in the half-awareness of her body and complete awareness and awe at the sea, but she does know that it’s Lotan clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth like he’s noticed she does when she wants to warn him of her incoming presence that shakes her back into it, like she’s a flesh bag of salt going into her antique grinder.

“I thought I might find you out here,” he says and doesn’t comment on her red-rimmed eyes or the fact that she’s on her knees in front of the ocean and furiously swiping at her cheeks and under-eyes with her sleeve, “I’m sorry about what I said—”

“That’s not why I’m out here,” Catalina interrupts, “I took a call. You shouldn’t feel bad about what you said. You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

Lotan sits down next to her and looks out at the waves meeting the shore.

“That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t a dick about it,” he tells her, “I could have said it more gracefully. This might surprise you, but I don’t think you’re a completely irredeemable monster.”

Catalina snorts and tries not to think about how much Lotan looks like a skinnier, bearded Finnick. One of Lotan’s aunts had shown her family photos last night as a thanks for her whipping Lotan’s grandfather’s old white guitar back into shape for the family bonfire by the beach, even though all she’d been able to sing about had been tripping on hallucinogens and the time a cigarette burned her finger because she forgot that she lit it or how she feels like she’s sailing down a raging river on a piece of cardboard without a paddle.

Everyone had said that she was good. One of the aunts, not one of the ones who’d shown photos, said that she should have made a career out of that instead of bombs and she’d laughed the kind of awkward laugh you laugh when someone who doesn’t know you well enough for it to be a playful joke says something like that. And then she sang about her bloodshot eyes and shaky hands when almost everyone had gone home, and Penelope said it was good, too.

“You know,” Lotan says, “Finnick had this thing where he bought everyone stupid hoodies in the Capitol and I always wondered if you had one—”

Catalina groans. “The fluffy tie-dye ones?”

“Yes!” Lotan laughs, “I always wondered if he got you one ever since I met you, because no offense, you don’t strike me as a rainbow tie-dyed fleece person.”

“I will actually bash your brains in, Lotan,” Catalina mock-threatens, “Don’t think that we’re trauma-bonded just because we survived a burning forest together. It takes more than that to trauma-bond with me. Haymitch and I weren’t trauma-bonded when we got out of a vent shaft that we shared with a mutt. But yeah, he did buy me. But it wasn’t rainbow. It was like, dark blue with like a swirly white tie-dye pattern all over it. I still have it, but I don’t wear it a lot outside of the house. It’s in my old apartment.”

“Sadie’s used to commandeer mine,” Lotan says, “But now she prefers leather jackets.”

Catalina gestures to the fact that she’s not wearing hers. “I know,” she smirks, “It’s kind of cute watching her romp around the garden with the rake and threatening the bushes in a way oversized leather jacket.”

“If her mother wasn’t Pen,” Lotan says, “I would say that you’re the worst possible influence. But she already knew how to say f*ck and bitch before you crashed on our couch.”

Catalina laughs.

“When I was a little girl,” she says, seagulls squawking, “We still had annual air raid drills. My grandmother was terrified of them. She’d lived through when the sirens had been real threats. Once, when I was fourteen, I sat in the attic with her because she refused to come down, and I told her I could wait. She looked at me and told me how I reminded her of my mother.”

Lotan tips his head back and looks up at the sky. “You shot your mother, didn’t you?”

Catalina takes a deep breath and says: “Yes. I did.”

Lotan steeples his hands. “Tell me about your grandmother and the attic.”

“She looked at me,” Catalina continues, “And she told me that in that moment, when I’d shouted down the ladder that my father was being an asshole and I could wait, that they could go to the stupid Victory Day parade without me, she said that I looked so much like my mother. She called my mother Cassie, a childhood nickname, and said how she wished she’d seen her grow into a woman. My mother was thirty-four at the time, but I didn’t ask about that. Instead, I asked her what a woman was, and I gestured to the bottle of cheap screw-top wine that she was gripping like a lifeline between chugs and asked if that was what a woman was.”

Lotan, sounding more enraptured than she thought he ought to be, asks, voice hanging off the edge of a cliff: “What did she say to that?”

“She said,” Catalina continues, “Sure. You’ll drink. Champagne if you’re happy. Champagne if you’re sad. You’ll drive a car, gamble if you want, gamble diamonds if you want, learn to shoot a gun, travel to somewhere warm and unknown, take up lovers. Make them suffer. You’ll look a tiger in the eye, and trust without fear. That’s what it’s like to be a woman. And I asked her how I could know who I should trust, and she laughed. She stroked my cheek and said that you didn’t know. You just trusted people.”

“Did you do any of that stuff?”

Catalina snorts out a startled laugh. “Did what?”

“Did you look a tiger in the eye and trust without fear? Gamble diamonds? Travel somewhere warm and take up lovers only to make them suffer when they hurt you or you wanted to hurt them? Did you do all of that?”

Catalina steeples her hands and thinks about porcelain cups.

“I looked a tiger in the eye,” she finally says. “And it didn’t swallow me whole. I didn’t let it.”

She pulls up her hair and pulls herself off the sand.

“We have sh*t to do, and places to get to, Lotan,” she says, offering him her hand. He takes it and she heaves him up with an exaggerated groan.

“Let’s get to it,” he agrees.

Chapter 58: Heavesbee

Chapter Text

Plutarch’s watching a nameless socialite slurp from the chocolate fountain as two others bitch about the “main event” being delayed and he can’t help but miss her. If she was here, she’d be leaning against his chest, rolling her eyes and asking him if he’d like to drive through the night and get some pizza later. And he wouldn’t say it, but he’d love her and pull her closer, curling his arm around her waist and breathing her in like she’s still his and he’s still someone actually good in her life. He’d listen to her heartbeat banging in her chest, and it wouldn’t be because she was running the meter.

Someone bumps into him and spills a whole flute of champagne all over his shoes. He groans, but waves his hands and says something about it being okay as he watches Celeste Berry burst through the door, eyes mad and rowing through the room until they settle on him and he feels a chill run down his spine. And not because she looks so like Aurelia that it’s terrifying, and she’s older than Aurelia would ever get to be. And God, how age and life looked good on Celeste. It would have looked good on Aurelia, too.

“Plutarch!” she whisper-hisses when she’s within range, “You have to go with me to the bathroom.”

Plutarch takes a step back. “I don’t think so,” he says, but Celeste grabs him by the collar.

“You’re going to, you stupid piece of sh*t.”

Plutarch huffs. “Excuse you, I’m—”

Celeste keeps dragging him, and Plutarch decides not to make a scene. When they’re alone in a locked bathroom, Celeste says: “Plutarch, I have a photo that you have to see, but you have to promise me that you’ll help me.”

“That’s absolutely not happening,” Plutarch tells her, “I don’t even know what kind of help you want. The last time you and I spoke—”

“I tried to sell out your wife, I know, I know—”

Celeste pulls out her phone and doesn’t give Plutarch a chance to say anything at all.

She turns it on and shoves it towards him.

At first, Plutarch doesn’t know what he’s looking at.

“That’s not true,” he says, “That’s—”

“Yes.”

“He’s dead.”

“That’s what you said. Did you ever find a body?”

“I didn’t need to find a body, Celeste. He was—”

“You said the same about Catalina. You went on national TV and said that you didn’t need to find a body because you knew that she was dead. And she was not dead. You have a sh*tty track record, dude. And it’s not plastic surgery or a clone or a mutt. He flinched when I raised my voice and it smelled of sex.”

“It’s not—”

“It is.”

And then he very sharply and suddenly does know what he’s looking at, and he’s hurriedly turning around, throwing the toilet lid back and throwing up. Celeste stands awkwardly behind him.

“This was a FINNICK ODAIR SEX PARTY?!?!?!?!??!??” Plutarch shouts. Celeste clamps her hand over his mouth from behind. He rapidly undoes his tie like he’s being choked out by it. “Oh God,” he repeats, murmuring low, “God, she would have killed me. She might still kill me.”

Celeste sighs. She’ll have her crisis when it’s safe, and Finnick’s somewhere warm. Plutarch envies her. “You have her number, right?”

“Who? Catalina?”

Celeste’s teeth click against each other. “Yes.”

“Where is he?” Plutarch questions, “We need to go there immediately, he looks—”

On the verge of death? Like he’s been held captive for almost seven months? Like—

Plutarch settles on: “Not great.”

“Did you drive here?” Celeste asks.

“I don’t know if there’s cameras here,” Plutarch says, “We have to go. Now. We have to call her.”

“No,” Celeste corrects, “We have to get him out first. She’ll burn the place down with us in it.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” Plutarch argues, fast and furious and not thinking that yeah, she actually might or how he’d even say something like that to her in a way that she’d believe, “She wouldn’t do that. She cares—”

“He’s in the basem*nt,” Celeste interrupts. “There’s a secret entrance in the library.”

Chapter 59: Blocked!

Chapter Text

Catalina’s raking her hands through her hair, glaring at an old phone number that she’s got no business keeping. It’s not Annie’s. It’s not even Johanna’s. It’s Celeste’s. Celeste’s, who changed her name and her address and who shouted through the walls at Catalina in prison as soon as she’d heard that they were neighbours because everyone was worried that Catalina would break out and snap Snow’s windpipe before he could die poetically on national TV.

(Apparently, some of the surviving Peacekeepers had snitched about just how much a bitch she was to keep in prison. They’d been whiny cry-baby bitches. All she did was tear the spine out of one of their (recently killed) coworkers with a piece of sharpened bedframe and ask them if they knew how to bend while covered in said coworker’s blood. And that’s how she lost her bedframe privileges.)

Celeste wouldn’t want to ever talk to her and it’s fine because Celeste is fine and she’s not throwing herself off buildings or into too much work and that’s the only reason why Catalina has her number. Even though Celeste wouldn’t pick up if she called, and Celeste certainly wouldn’t listen if Catalina said that she was worried and needed her to be okay because she cares about her. And not just because Celeste has Aurelia’s eyes.

Catalina’s worried about her. She’s falling into bad friends, and Catalina was a bad friend, too. But she’s worried about Celeste. And she’s not just saying that because she’s pissy that Celeste doesn’t want to talk to her. She’s saying that because she’s older, and she’s been where Celeste is. Celeste does not listen. And instead of staring at her phone, Catalina stares at the locked drawer where she used to keep a gun and now keeps a bottle of whiskey because Haymitch wasn’t comfortable with the gun. And bitched so much about it that she ended up getting rid of it. She’s got other guns in the building. But they’re not in her solitary office.

There’s a thousand and one good reasons why she shouldn’t get drunk tonight. One of them is that she has to drive home, because Deleon’s staking out the dumpsters with a flashlight and a loaded shotgun and a magazine in the portable toilet. Catalina carried Peeta on her back even though she shouldn’t be carrying anyone on her back anymore, or at least not until she’d been through at least six sessions with the chiropractor that she’d seen once and then ghosted after he’d told her what she already knew. That’s the annoying thing about having multiple doctorates. She knew that she had a problem. She just didn’t want to admit it. It’s like her and Seneca.

He said he’d love her for all of his life, but that life was too f*cking short.

And Cinna.

And Finnick.

And it’s why Catalina drives home, stops by the liquor store and works the muscle of her black card. Plutarch’s at Pyrena’s stupid ball, and he called her about it. f*cking why? Haymitch is drinking Effie’s homemade iced tea out of his old flask, and Catalina sits on her couch and tips back a bottle of whiskey. You know you have a problem when you’re getting drunk alone in your apartment just so you can eat a pint of ice cream without a good reason. She hasn’t ran a marathon or been dumped by an asshole, but she wants to eat a pint of ice cream on her couch. So, she drinks liquor that’s low in calories on an empty stomach.

She drinks because she took the stairs instead of the elevator because Plutarch was in it. She drinks because she doesn’t have to drive Haymitch in the morning because she bought him a hotel near her office, but she knows he’s actually going to spend the night hunched over in the plastic chair because she texted him that Peeta showed up in her office and acted like he was haunted by something. She drinks because she struggled to pick up Peeta. Or, she didn’t struggle. She did it well and she didn’t wake him after he fell asleep in her office.

She lays down on her side on the floor next to her brand-new bed and orthopaedic mattress. She uses her hand to pillow her head and looks at the grain of the wood floors. Notices how the paint on the wall is sh*tty, but knows damn well that she’s not going to fix it in the morning. She’s had a drink, so she can’t drive anywhere even though she wants to tear off into the dark. Deleon tells her that she’s self-destructive, that she’s pushing people away. He tells her that he’s too stubborn to leave, because he loves her, and that’s what love is. If you love someone, you stick around when they’re an asshole. She thinks Deleon has a lot of optimism and strength. Like Haymitch. Like Finnick, who told her that in a weird way, he was happy that Panem was the way that it was, because otherwise he probably wouldn’t have met her.

Catalina was supposed to be from Two. Or she was supposed to not exist. She didn’t say any of that to Finnick, but it’s the truth. Catalina Cain is a product of Panem and Panem alone. Maybe that’s why she has it in herself to be proud of where she’s from, and to love the people of Panem, regardless of what they think of her. Deleon says that she should have been a diplomat instead of what she turned out to be.

And she passes out, uncaring of her phone and the fact that it starts ringing. Furiously and repeatedly. And she's eleven minutes away, if she speeds.

Chapter 60: I Need To Discuss This With Catalina

Chapter Text

Before the Quell, when Plutarch had a crisis, he would leave his fishbowl office and show up at Catalina’s and she’d sit on the edge of her desk, kicking her feet into his lap, and he’d talk her through it. She’d nod and roll her eyes and call him a stupid piece of sh*t when she thought he needed to hear it, and he loved her for it. He’d tease her that past the layers of mean and sour, like an onion, lay a mushy centre. And she’d smack his shoulder and ask him if he’d ever seen a f*cking onion, because onions don’t have mushy centres unless they’re got some kind of onion disease.

Plutarch lets Celeste heave him off the floor and grab him by the wrist, leading him out of the bathroom. He lets her run with him down the hallway, her dress billowing behind him and revealing that she’d ripped her underskirt. He thinks of the fact that there was shimmery tulle behind Finnick’s head. He thinks about how it can’t be Finnick, for a hundred-and-one reasons.

He thinks about how one of Finnick’s prized possessions was a weighted blanket that Catalina mathed out and sewed sitting cross-legged on the floor. And by mathed out, he means that she calculated the exact weight in relation to Finnick’s average body weight for maximum therapeutic effect. And because Catalina didn’t own a scale, didn’t intend to buy one and certainly didn’t intend to get Finnick to step on it, she mathed that out, too. She tried to explain it to Plutarch, but he’d watched her hands flying around in excitement as she spoke and forgot to hear what she was actually saying. But he’s sure she was right. Because she’s Catalina.

And Catalina’s always right.

Catalina would know what to do, and even though she was screaming inside, she wouldn’t show it. She would smile softly and she would tell him that he was right to call her, but she’d just be stating a fact and she wouldn’t be trying to win anything with her hand on her hip and her lip quirked like a little sh*t.

“Don’t eat sh*t,” Celeste tells him when she proves that she’s not lying and there is a door to a disgusting basem*nt that smells of damp, mould and things Plutarch would rather not name because that makes it real, and gestures for him to go down. He does, and she follows, closing the door behind them. There’s a small beep after Celeste’s hand leaves the metal, and Plutarch raises his brow, but Celeste pushes at him to continue, her phone out and acting like a flashlight.

And then she pans it towards a bundle laying on the floor next to a half-gutted mattress.

“He doesn’t have clothes,” Celeste says, “And I think he’s too hurt to move unless we’re getting out of here and there’s a damn good reason and at least half a plan.”

The body in front of him looks like the worst photos that Catalina has shown him of famine victims. The kind that she throws across his desk when she’s yelling about him not doing enough fast enough, even though it’s not his department. He’s supposed to be making TV. When he tells her this, she throws her hands in the air and says that if he’s making TV, he should stop dicking around and let her do her work, then. But she knows that he hasn’t given up his more influential role as a commander, even though that’s what he’s started to tell people he grew up with while he’s still trying to figure out who’s a threat.

Plutarch crouches down, and f*cking goddammit, he sees it.

“Finnick,” he breathes, “Hi. Hey. I’m sorry.”

Plutarch reaches out a hand and Finnick flinches.

“He does that,” Celeste fills in. “I haven’t been able to get him to speak.”

He thinks about the time that Catalina lifted a baby goat by hauling it up under its front legs and it pissed in Plutarch’s eye. Instead of being horrified, Catalina had laughed and said that the conjunctivitis fairy would visit him soon. And then the bastard pissed again, all over itself and Plutarch’s shirt and Catalina’s hands. And she said, in a baby voice, “We have to wash the bug because he smell of many things. He smell of piss. He smell of pee. He smell of urine.” And she somehow roped Plutarch into helping her wash the goat that pissed in his eye while still wearing his pissed-on shirt. And yes, the conjunctivitis fairy did visit him a couple of days afterward, right when he’d thought he was in the clear. He doesn’t know why he thinks about this.

“Why do you think that he’s too injured to move?”

“He was cold,” Celeste answers, “I don’t want to take the sheet off… but…”

She does, and Plutarch doesn’t even know where to begin. Finnick’s ribs are practically cutting through his skin, and they’re flanked by deep, furious red bite marks, both mutt and human, scratches and burns decorating both of his shoulders and curling around his neck. Plutarch assumes that at least some of them must be from the explosion that was supposed to have killed him, but they don’t look like they’ve ever got the chance to heal. Across his stomach and thighs are slow, weeping wounds that have been stapled together. And not with medical-grade staples.

There isn’t an inch of healthy skin on Finnick’s legs.

Finnick shivers, then whines, and Celeste covers him again.

“sh*t,” Plutarch says. “sh*t.”

He reaches out to wipe white fluid off Finnick’s lips with his sleeve before stripping his coat and tucking it around Finnick, trying to remember what Catalina would have said. He comes up blank and says, “We have to call her right now.”

“She’s going to make it a big thing,” Celeste says, sounding sure, “We’ll call her when we get out. You drove here, right?”

“I got a cab,” Plutarch says.

“f*ck you,” Celeste answers.

Finnick’s hair is long and greasy. Plutarch strokes it back.

“If you don’t want to call Catalina,” Plutarch says, “How do you suggest that we get out of here?”

“This basem*nt has to have an exit that’s not that door,” Celeste suggests, “You couldn’t carry someone in Finnick’s condition down those steps.”

“He might have been able to walk when he was brought down here. Or at least been less dubious to bridal-carry instead of a full stretcher with spinal support. Which, I’ll remind you, we don’t have.”

“And it’s not like we could call your ex-wife and she’d be able to smuggle one in under the ballgown that she’s totally wearing right now, ready to go.” Celeste waves her phone around the room, landing on a metal door with a flimsy bike lock.

“I think you could kick that one in,” Celeste says.

“I think that this is a horrible idea,” Plutarch says.

“I think that this is the half of a plan we need,” Celeste answers.

Plutarch leans down to press a kiss against Finnick’s forehead, but then he thinks better of it. He’s not sure that Finnick knows who he is right now, and he doesn’t want him to think for a moment that he’s in a more unpleasant memory or present. He rubs his thumb against Finnick’s cheek instead, trying to rouse him into something more than just pained noises.

It doesn’t work, and Plutarch forces himself up. He looks at the door, tilts his head, and decides that he probably can kick it down. He kicked down a good couple of doors while Catalina whooped from behind during their grand escape from the Capitol.

Plutarch takes a couple of steps back, runs at it, and the sh*tty little lock snaps off and so does the door.

“Damn,” says Celeste, and it doesn’t sound one bit like what it’s supposed to. She doesn’t whoop or throw her fist into the air, a fold-out spear jangling next to her keys on her carabiner, hooked in the loop of her jeans and waiting excitedly.

Plutarch steps into the darkness, and the lights turn on.

And something tells him that this is a bad sign.

But Celeste calls from behind.

“Plutarch!” she says, “You’re steadier. You pick him up and I’ll lead.”

Plutarch watches her over his shoulder for a moment.

“Okay,” he says, feeling like he’s being pushed into the dark deep end of the pool. “I’ll do that.”

Chapter 61: False Ruthless

Chapter Text

Pyrena Tress wants to scream.

“How the f*ck could you not have seen them?!” she shouts at Thirty-One, spinning the crowbar in her hands before bringing it down furiously against Thirty-One’s back. “You had one f*cking job!” Behind her, video loops of Plutarch Heavensbee and Celeste Berry descending into her basem*nt from the library entrance.

Something cracks deep inside of Thirty-One and it slumps to the floor. She points to Seven, who’s standing guard at the door of Pyrena’s office, hands folded in front of it. “We don’t need to feed it to the mutts tonight,” she tells Seven, gesturing to Thirty-One, “Put it on ice and release the mutts. Watch them, and when they’ve indisposed the intruders, blow their brains out so they don’t touch Finny.”

And then for good measure, flips Thirty-One over, seeing that there’s panicked eyes and a body that won’t respond to them. She presses her nails against Thirty-One’s throat until she finds where the sensation has stayed, and then she digs them in. “I hope you live long enough to be torn apart,” she tells it, “The mutts will eat you alive, and they’d get to something you can feel before the blood loss gets you. They’re fast, but every second feels like hours.”

Pyrena drops Thirty-One’s head.

Pyrena Tress has a lot of things that she’s not supposed to have. Avoxes, Finnick Odair, mutts. Fonseca scored her the mutts, because due to Seven’s isolation, Catalina Cain, the bitch, couldn’t be as fast as she’d like with repossessing the mutts she suddenly didn’t believe people had a right to own anymore even though it’d been her company that produced and sold them.

Pyrena has thirty-seven Avoxes and forty-one mutts and one Finnick Odair.

And she’s not willing to give any of them up.

And both Celeste Berry and Plutarch Heavensbee are smart enough to get mauled for Finnick Odair, because one Finnick Odair is worth a whole lot of them. And money.

She picks up her phone. And calls Fonseca.

When he picks up, she says: “Change of plans. We need to get out of here immediately. We have to burn the mansion down and start the plan early. No discussion. Be ready to pick us up.”

Chapter 62: Please Pick Up The f*cking Phone (Reprise)

Chapter Text

“Holy f*cking sh*t!” Plutarch shouts, running away from a smooth-scaled lizard mutt that’s foaming at the mouth and snapping its jaws, Finnick tucked against his chest and Plutarch tries to keep his running form good enough that Finnick doesn’t bob, but he’s shifting to a sprint because the mutt is gaining, “Holy f*cking sh*t!”

Celeste comes in from the side with a steel chair that the mutt latches its jaws around as Celeste screeches. It tugs furiously, almost toppling Celeste. She yelps and drops the chair, running behind Plutarch. He’s locked eyes with a door in front of him.

“Door! Door!!” Celeste shouts. “Door!”

“I know!” Plutarch answers. “f*cking hold it off!”

“f*ck that!”

And they keep sprinting down the white hall, seconds feeling like hours, the floor and Plutarch’s head spinning and throwing him a year back in the past, with another body and voice flush against him. He forces through, his feet burning in his stupid dress shoes. He reaches the door, wrenches it open and is ready to marry it when it’s unlocked and it opens. Celeste crashes into him, and they almost land on Finnick as Plutarch pulls the door shut behind them, bracing against it as the mutt crashes into it. It leaves a dent in the metal, and Plutarch can hear its claws.

“Holy sh*t,” he gasps. “Holy sh*t.”

Celeste finds the latch and locks the door from the inside as Plutarch looks around and realises that they’re in the boiler room.

When his heart stops trying to climb up his throat and pry its way out through his clenched teeth, Plutarch notices that Celeste’s ripped more of her dress and is making somewhere for him to lay Finnick down, close to the pipes, but not where he’ll get burned. Plutarch strokes back Finnick’s hair, mussed up from being pressed against Plutarch’s chest and agitated throughout the run. He thought he’d felt Finnick’s breath quicken and seen his eyes fly open as they ran, but in the moment, Plutarch begged him not to regain consciousness just to be trapped in another underground space with a furious lizard mutt.

It growls from outside.

Plutarch rubs his thumb against Finnick’s cheek again as he lays him down, stiffening as he feels Finnick’s ribs move. He meets Celeste’s eyes. “I saw that,” Celeste says, voice low and drawn, like the strings of a bow in a quiet forest, “That can’t be good.”

“We have to call Catalina,” Plutarch says.

“What could she possibly do to get us out of here?” Celeste questions, but she doesn’t sound like she means it anymore. She sounds like the teenager who Catalina used to drive home from parties.

“I don’t know, to be honest,” Plutarch says, “But I know that she would do something. And I know what we need to call her. And she needs to be called.”

Celeste tucks Finnick in and Plutarch takes off his shirt, handing it to her. He’s standing there in an underskirt and fishing his phone out from his back pocket. Celeste dropped her phone when they ran from the mutts. Plutarch’s got five percent battery.

“sh*t,” he says, mostly to himself.

When Celeste raises her brow, he tells her.

“sh*t,” she repeats, and that’s when he knows that he’s making the right choice.

“Celeste,” he says, trying to remember that he’s eight years older than Celeste and that he remembers when she’d come running up to him in the middle of balls and beg him to quiz her about pop culture or play Trivia Blast with her. “Why don’t you put Finnick’s head on your lap. The elevation should be good for him. We might even get him to open his eyes. Rub your thumb against his cheek like I just did. It’ll help prompt his body awake.”

“Who the f*ck told you that?” Celeste questions, but she still sits down and does what Plutarch asks of her and Plutarch tries not to lose his sh*t. He can lose his sh*t when he’s in the Cain Institute’s portable toilets and Catalina’s finished her whiteboard presentation of the emergency surgery she just aced. That’s when he can lose his sh*t. When Catalina’s trying to pawn calling Annie onto anyone but her, and it’ll end up being Deleon who does it, because Deleon takes things for the team. And Deleon gets paid to take things for the team.

“Hey there,” Celeste coos, and Plutarch’s attention is drawn to Finnick, blinking confusedly at the ceiling, tears welling in his eyes.

“Oh no you don’t,” Celeste says, wiping them for him before they run down the side of his face, or they’re horrified by the fact that Finnick didn’t make any move to clean them up himself. Celeste spits into her hand and starts wiping the stains off his face. “That’s what’s getting you worked up, isn’t it? Look, I’m cleaning it. I’m cleaning you up.”

Plutarch dials Catalina.

The call bottoms out.

Plutarch calls again.

The call bottoms out.

Plutarch calls again.

Plutarch focuses on his breathing, on Celeste, spitting into her hand, on how she’s comforting Finnick and not on the words she’s actually saying, how Finnick’s eyes are open and the whites are yellowed and reddened at the same time, but no one could look at them and say that they weren’t Finnick Odair’s.

How even through all the grime and pain, Finnick’s got all the right moles all the right places. Plutarch knows where they are because Finnick had a heart attack, and Catalina insisted on taking detailed scans of his entire chest, in multiple different mediums, with multiple different methods, and it’d been after Seneca died, so Plutarch had shown up to make sure Catalina was eating and hadn’t restocked the whiskey and vodka without buying ready-to-toss-in-the-pot-I-don’t-care-if-you-can-make-it-better-you’re-depressed-and-grieving-and-that’s-fine-but-you’re-not-going-to-make-pasta-Catalina filled pasta.

“Catalina,” Plutarch pleads, on attempt twenty-seven as Celeste scrapes her foot against the tiles and Finnick whines, “Please pick up the f*cking phone. Please, Catia. Please.” She’d gotten up and pillowed Finnick’s face on a mix of her ripped-up skirts and Plutarch’s coat. It bottoms out into nothing—hopefully, it’s because Catalina Cain has never really believed in voicemails and not because she’s blocked specifically him from leaving one—and he immediately dials again. Plutarch swaps her out and lifts Finnick’s head onto his lap. And he calls her back.

Plutarch strokes his free hand against Finnick’s matted, blood-soaked and sweat-mussed hair, trying to remember what Catalina would have done or said if she’d been here. Finnick’s eyes are half-lidded and trying to focus on him. The only thing Plutarch can make himself do is say: “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry it’s me. I’m trying to call her. You were right, you were so f*cking right, Finnick. She wasn’t just haunting me for no reason. She was alive and you’re alive and I’m calling her.”

Finnick blinks and doesn’t say a single thing.

The call bottoms out.

Someone else might have decided that Catalina’s just not close to her phone for whatever reason—maybe she went for a run or a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up yogurt. But Plutarch knows Catalina. And he knows that she’s never anywhere you can’t get in touch with her if you’re stubborn enough, because she needs that. Yes, she’s important. But she’s also a control freak. And she’s not hanging up on him. She’s letting it ring out.

“You can’t keep calling her,” Celeste huffs, “We have to get out of here before we’re fed to the mutts. It won’t matter that the bitch is a mutt-whisperer or whatever if they just feed us to them and I—”

“One last call,” Plutarch interrupts, and doesn’t bother to explain that they’re dead in so many ways if she doesn’t come. And he’s not just talking about the mutts. When he pulled Finnick into his lap, it felt like picking up a sack of chicken bones, and Finnick would have gloated if he’d known what was happening. He wouldn’t have kept staring at the ceiling. He would have called Plutarch an asshole and wondered why his nose remained unbroken. Plutarch dials Catalina’s number from scratch. He doesn’t know why he does that. He could just have gone back through the call logs or his contacts.

“Catalina,” he begs, “You’re going to hate me so much if you don’t pick up. And it’ll be fair. Because I made you hate me. And you’ll hate yourself. And I’ll hate it—”

“Plutarch—” Catalina’s voice is scratchy and rumpled at the edge, like she’s just rolled out of bed five years ago. “—did you get into a fight again?”

Plutarch imagines her rubbing at the sleep in her eyes, wearing a massive shirt and limbs still waxy and unbidden. He almost feels bad, but it’s overshadowed by the same kind of relief that surged through his body the first time he laid eyes on her after everything burned down—even though she’d been in a cell, spitting blood and hating him.

“Catia,” he says, sounding like he’s dangling off a skyscraper and her steady fingers are wrapped around his wrist, like he should have sounded when she should have been the first call after he made it big even though in the worst way possible, she was, “I need you. Right now. It’s about Finnick—”

“It’s too f*cking early for this,” she interrupts, growling, sounding like herself again instead of pulling him under into the murky waters of a past he can’t return to even if he’s willing to beg, “Why did you call me twenty-nine times as if you were dying just to argue with me again, what did—”

“Finnick is alive,” Plutarch blurts out, desperate, “I really, really didn’t want to tell you that over the phone. But he needs you. And I need you. Please believe me, Catia.”

It sounds like she might have dropped a glass.

Chapter 63: Finnick's Deathbed

Chapter Text

He drowsed and was aware of only the silence heaped around him, as heavy as the blankets, as soaked wool sinking into the blue. As unshaken as the steadfast walls and Catalina’s warm hands, like her voice when she sung or taught him new words and made him associate them to others so he’d remember; aqueous like floating rays of light cutting tiger stripes into his childhood bedroom’s ceiling on the first morning he woke up there after the Tour. Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep. Silence and safety.

There’s a girl, and she’s poignant and assertive, poking at his shoulder with the tip of her gold-tipped nail. She sounds like she’s ten feet underwater, and she’s struggling to fight her way up. The tears burn Finnick’s cheek, everything is dry and he can’t see where she’s fallen in. She gasps and he’s all alone in the dark.

And his mortal shore continued to be lipped by the inward, moonless waves of approaching death.

Someone was holding water to his mouth. He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped through crimson gloom to darkness. A strong hand cupped the back of his head, and the ground was hard. The hand was warm and he briefly forgot the opiate throb and ache that were his wounds in the search for more of its warmth, the crown of his hand bumping against callouses. Someone was saying his name, but it wasn’t high-pitched or furious.

The hand stroked back his sweaty hair and Finnick thought about the water. Water—calm, sliding green above the weir; water—a sky-lit alley for his boat, the wind bird-voiced instead of roaring and bordered with reflected flowers and the shaken hues of old summers drifting down. He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.

Chapter 64: Catalina Ex Machina

Chapter Text

“Catalina,” Plutarch continues, “You can punch my teeth out when you get here, you can yell at me until your voice bottoms out and the thunder hides from you, but right now, I just need you to listen to me. I need you to trust me.”

“I don’t know if I can trust you,” Catalina grits out, and he imagines her like when the lock clicked shut behind them in her apartment after the Quell presentation to Snow and she’d barely caught herself on a picture frame when her knees had buckled under her. Her knuckles had been lab-white and in the blink of an eye, both Catalina and the frame shattered on the ground.

“Please try,” Plutarch begs, and she doesn’t say anything to that, so he keeps talking. “I don’t know how or why or when, but Finnick was in Pyrena’s…”

Possession? Basem*nt?

Basem*nt it is.

Possession would probably get him hung up on.

“… basem*nt.”

“Pyrena’s basem*nt? Pyrena Tress? Why are you in Pyrena’s basem*nt? Plutarch, is this your consciousness finally catching you? Do I need to call Fulvia to come get you and drive you to someone who’ll make sure you never call me with this again? Do you… need help? Is that why… you called me?”

“Catalina!” Plutarch shouts, causing Celeste to yelp and jump back. Finnick keeps staring at the ceiling, his eyelids growing heavier. “You need to listen to me! I don’t have a lot of time. My battery is low and I—Finnick needs you. We’re in Pyrena’s basem*nt. In the generator room. She has mutts. A lot of mutts. Mutts I thought we’d gotten the last of. God—Catalina, I’m so sorry. I thought—”

She hangs up.

“Catalina! Goddammit!”

Plutarch tries to call her again, but his phone dies.

Catalina Cain lived approximately eleven minutes away from Pyrena Tress if she stuck to the freeway and pushed the needle a little higher than she probably should. Catalina Cain didn’t mind paying for speeding, but she’d always contest it in court even though it was obvious that they wanted to nail her. She’d hope that the Peacekeeper that caught her couldn’t be f*cked to show up, and sometimes, she got her wish and she didn’t pay for speeding. Finnick moans, low and tiny and terrifying, in Celeste’s lap again, and Celeste looks at him with Aurelia Berry’s big, soulful eyes and he feels terrible. Plutarch found a stash of water bottles and a mop in the boiler room.

He’d handed Celeste a water bottle and told her to try and get Finnick to drink some. She’s trying to give him it from the cap, but Finnick isn’t registering that it’s an option. Celeste slowly opens his mouth and tips a tiny amount in. Thankfully, Finnick swallows. Plutarch’s sharpening the mop’s shaft with a key and it’s not going great, but it’s going.

“We should—”

“Wait,” Plutarch insists, “She’ll come.”

Plutarch doesn’t have the foggiest clue whether she’ll come. She hung up on him and didn’t hear him out. Maybe she’s lying passed out on the floor. Maybe she’s dying too, because Plutarch shocked her into a heart attack or into dropping something heavy on her head or something like that. Maybe she dropped a glass of wine and she’s pre-cleaning the stain first instead of running, because she thinks that he’s full of sh*t and trying to get a rise out of her. He’s not. He’s never tried to get a rise out of her. It’s just that since she came back to life or proved she wasn’t ever really dead and he was an idiot, he hasn’t known how to speak to her about anything at all.

The mutt is still growling outside, and Plutarch watches as its claws start to cut closer to breaking through the metal. There’s a screech of metal, and the wail of a mutt in the distance. Oh, great. It’s bringing friends. Plutarch can hear a scuffle. It’s bringing the whole family to dine on them.

The door shoots open and Plutarch involuntarily flinches, closing his eyes and preparing for teeth.

They don’t come.

A tall, black-clad figure obscuring her face with a sleek, black motorcycle helmet surges through the door, barrelling straight into the mutt with a hiss that matches its and bringing it to the floor. She brandishes a candlestick like it’s the finest sword, slamming it under the mutt’s snapping jaw and straight up with a sickening crunch.

The mutt collapses to the ground with a dull thud and she pulls a gun from her hip, shooting two approaching mutts dead in their tracks before they can reach the door.

And then, like she’s a goddamn action movie heroine or maybe a tragic goddess who travelled through battlefield after battlefield in beautiful blue chiffon so the love of her life could die in her arms, she unclasps her helmet and shakes brown hair like she’s standing in the windy rubble of a city and she’s ready to reclaim it.

It’s Catalina motherf*cking Cain—in leather biker gear, holster belted around her waist and thighs, smoking gun in her hand as she playfully rakes a hand through her short, curly hair.

Catalina throws her head back, grinning at him from over her shoulder.

He can’t help but gasp. “You came.”

She winks. “You called.”