Epilogue

"What's the last thing you remember?"

The question drops into my brain, disturbing ripples of memory. I'm always being asked this question. Or similar ones. What's the first thing you remember? And then what happened? Do you remember anything at all?

As if memory was linear. As if it could be listed, first to last. Just the question puts me in two or three time periods at once, none of them very distinct from each other because, fuck if all hospital rooms and cells and torture chambers don't look almost exactly the same. At least as far as I remember.

This voice isn't urgent, but soft, fuzzy almost. Safety is in it. Wake up, Peeta.

My eyes flutter open on a bright light - the lamp next to our bed. "What?" I ask, the unsettling images fading away.

"Did you fall asleep?" asks Katniss, with a huff. "I hadn't even started reading, yet."

I turn to look at her - her long hair spilling out over her pillow - and I laugh. "I can't help it. The boy had me up half the night."

"I told you to wake me up when it's my turn," she says.

"Guilty conscience, I guess," I reply, pulling the book out of her hands and putting my head on her arm. "It was my idea to move him to his own room, above the both of your objections."

I stare at the ceiling. How strange, I think, to go back there in my dreams, even now. Flashbacks – those moments the memories came flooding into my waking conscience, bringing paralysis and frustration – are rare now, but I guess I will never be rid of the nightmares. "At least you're alive to have them," Haymitch said to me once, and that's true enough. It's something to be a citizen of that old world only in my dreams, only every once in a while.

Later that night, I wake with moonlight flooding the room, Katniss curled up against me, her hair in my mouth, as it ever happens. I wonder which of us subconsciously makes the move toward the other in our sleep. I suspect it is me, though I like to think that it's mutual, at least some of the time. But I've always been drawn to flame – inescapably.

For a moment, I admire the still-mottled pattern of the skin at the back of her neck – exactly the same color and texture as the back of my arms. But I shiver – I think I was dreaming of the mutt; the moonlight on her fur, the pain of teeth and fire. Fear and desire, jealousy and admiration all contained together in one flash of aching ecstasy….

I slither carefully out of bed. Long habit – many years of managing my damaged head – has me separate myself from Katniss when the flashbacks and dreams take this particular hue. And then I realize that it is the silence of the house that is actually disturbing me, and I creep down the hall to the boy's room, suddenly filled with anxious worry. But I find him well-guarded.

"Shhh." I stop short at the sight – the little girl, sitting in the glowing light of the open window. She's on the rocking chair, her still-chubby legs jutting out over the edge of the seat. Her baby brother is sleeping on her lap – he's nearly two, now, and takes up the entire space. Her long, dark braid is draped over his golden head, and she gently pats his little back with her tiny fingers.

"Sweetie, did he wake you? He's so fussy."

"He's teething again," she says matter-of-factly.

"Little mama," I say, "let's get him back to bed. You should be asleep."

"So should you, papa," she whispers, as we coordinate the peaceful transfer of the sleeping boy into his crib. "Did you have nightmares again?" she adds, while we both pause a moment to look at the baby.

I glance down at her with a pang. She came to us like this – as if preternaturally aware that her parents were fragile, their relationship with the world, with each other, delicate: self-aware and pragmatic and concerned and empathetic and – at her core – incredibly strong. I don't know much about raising children, but every protective instinct in me – to soften her world, to explain things to her in terms of gossamer and light – is constantly being shuttled by her insistent demand for the truth. Once she asked me why her eyes were blue, not gray like her mother's, whom she otherwise resembles so closely, and then grew frustrated at my flippant answers. That Katniss and I divvied up hair color and eye color. That she was born when the bluebonnets were in season. That Katniss had eaten too many berries. Finally, I had to explain – painfully, given all that I can't remember about the little I was taught in my abbreviated time in school – that blue eyes are the absence of a kind of normal pigment, like the powder that makes up my paints; like me, she doesn't have this pigment and so her eyes, like mine, look blue.

"That makes more sense," she said. She was three.

"Some," I admit. "Earlier."

She takes my hand and we walk out – out of the house to the porch, to sit together on the porch swing, startling Piddycat – one of Buttercup's descendants – who bolts away over the green of Victor's Village.

"How old will I be when I have nightmares?" she asks me.

"I don't know," I tell her, startled that she has never had any, yet. "Everyone has them."

"Oh, I thought only grown-ups got them."

Now I understand what is troubling her. "Sweetie, most people do have bad dreams. They come from the brain remembering bad things that happened, or bad things that you're afraid might happen. But most nightmares are not like mine – or your mother's. Ours are worse than most. I hope – I believe – you will never have them like I do."

"Where did yours come from? Did they come from the Hunger Games?"

Damn. Katniss has been fretting about this. It's impossible that she won't know, I argued sensibly. There are monuments everywhere. Old video clips. Hell, we still get interviewed, occasionally. She likes to watch me paint and sometimes it is still the arena - rock faces and clock faces, the ghosts of tributes, the teeth of monsters - that come out of my brushes. Soon, she'll be in school, where it's taught a little too pervasively. A little too sanitarily. People forget, so readily, the ugliness in things. They're always looking to find the angle that makes everyone look a little more glorious, a little more heroic, than they really were. And yet – my instinctive pull is to somehow do the same; to smooth the edges off the true story for the sake of my daughter's continued belief in the essential goodness and beauty of things.

"Yes," I say shortly, wondering what she heard and where she heard it from, but knowing this is going to have to be a long conversation, in the daytime, with Katniss as well as me here to answer questions.

"What are the Hunger Games?"

That was the question all parents used to dread. I can almost hear my own voice asking the words one day at the dinner table, before I was old enough to learn how to moderate my thoughts.

"A time for penitence and a time for gratitude," Ryan had said, sarcastically.

"What?"

"It is your duty," my mother had told me, frowning heavily, "as a citizen of Panem, to bring honor to your district and your family if you happen to be called to the Games."

"And to kill people," Will had chimed in. "So, you aren't killed instead. And then you get rich."

"What if I don't want to play that game?" I had asked, horrified.

"Who do you think you are?" my mother had snapped. "You'll do as you're told."

"There is more than one way to play the game," my father had said, almost too softly to be heard.

Katniss is sitting up in bed, her eyes glowing softly in the moonlight. "You did it again," she says.

I shrug. "Turned out I didn't have to. Little mama had him rocked back to sleep before I even woke up to do it."

I lean over and kiss her before settling back into bed beside her. Visions from the past are a reminder that it was once a rare privilege to kiss Katniss Everdeen in private, away from cameras and spotlights. In the morning I'll tell her that there are some hard conversations to be had with her bright and questing daughter. But first, but first ….

What are the Hunger Games?

I asked Dr. Aurelius this once, in the Capitol, when the little blond boy was still aggravating my subconscious with his questions. Now I am about to have that question turned around on me, and I am fretting, again, over the answers.

"What do you mean?" he had asked. "As a tribute, as a victor, don't you know better than I?"

"No – I think I understand them even less. Were they meant to control us – or you? Did you really enjoy them – or did they terrify you like they terrified us … deep down?"

"I can't speak for everyone in the Capitol. We didn't all have the exact same opinion about these things. Plenty of people objected …."

"But the people who enjoyed it – the ones who really got off on it. The control – the terror – the blood – whatever it was that they liked. Why? Why? I don't get it. We only wanted to live and be left alone. Why build a nation on misery?"

And, as it turned out, even Dr. Aurelius had no answer to the question. So – how can I? How will we explain it?

"I think our daughter is raising us, to be perfectly honest about it," I say, and she laughs.

"Seriously," she says, and kisses me. Her lips are warm, bringing fire. Fire flickers all around me – the edge of memory, the memory of dreams. The dreams that became true – the good and the bad. Firebombs in the City Circle. The flicker of Cinna's and Portia's costumes. The sparks rising around my fingers as bread drops – deliberately – into the fire.

"Seriously," I reply, and I put a hand on her cheek. She traps my hand with her long, slender fingers and she hums, very softly - automatically, from long habit - the lullaby, and it has its usual soothing effect on my racing mind:

Deep in the Meadow, under the willow

A bed of grass, a soft green pillow

Lay down your head, and close your eyes

And when they open, the sun will rise.

Here it's safe, here it's warm

Here the daisies guard you from every harm

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true

Here is the place where I love you.

Who do I think I am?

"There is more than one way to play the game."

That's what we will tell her, I think suddenly - the little girl and, later, the fussy little boy. As we remembered the dead – the reasons that they died as well as every good thing about their lives – so too will our children. They will understand about choices. About standing for something – even if it is only standing in the way of the Capitol when the bombs fall – about choosing life when you are told to kill; about choosing love when you are told to hate. Because the Games are never truly gone – they live in the heart of human beings, the fruit of our worst selves, the consequences of not paying attention to the small things while they grow out of control. That is what they are. It is not by avoiding them, but by remembering – always remembering – that we hold them at bay. So, we will tell them, and they will understand.

And they will be brave.

The End