Chapter 32
Epilogue: Election Night

Not quite twenty-two years later: June 14, 2738
7:01 p.m. (one minute after Twelve's polls closed)
Katniss's mansion in Victors' Village, District Twelve

It was the last Tuesday before Children's Day (formerly Reaping Day, a.k.a. the summer solstice)—which meant that today was Election Day. And in this election, forty-year-old Katniss was running for re-election as president—

—in a manner of speaking. Under the Constitution of 2720, when Panem had held its first elections in centuries (in June of 2720), twenty-two-year-old President Katniss had been too young to run for president! So President Katniss, despite her popularity in the districts, had watched the June 2720 election as a spectator, not a tribute; and Katniss and family had left the Presidential Mansion on the first day of autumn in 2720. But on the other hand, the brand-new Constitution had not barred Katniss for life from holding the office again. As a result, older Katniss had spent the first half of 2738 campaigning to become president again.

(And just as President Katniss had campaigned for Distaff Paylor to be elected president in 2720, and to be re-elected in 2726, so twice-elected President Paylor had campaigned for Katniss's own election as president during 2738.)

But now on Election Night 2738, Katniss Mellark, mother of four, looked around, and saw that everyone else in the living room looked nervous about the election. Katniss herself was calm, because—only Peeta knew this—Katniss was perfectly okay with losing the election. (She was running for president again to demonstrate public service to her children, not because Katniss coveted a return to power.)

Katniss, in her living room, saw that over on the couch, twenty-one-year-old Primmy Rue Mellark was talking about medicines with her aunt, Dr. Primrose Hawthorne; while Prim's husband Rory and Rory's brother, Judge Gale Hawthorne, watched election returns on the holoprojector. Elsewhere in the living room, the three younger Mellark children—Hayward Cory, Marjorie Euphemia, and Hannah Cashmere—were acting amazingly well-behaved for teenagers.

Under the Constitution of 2720, a candidate for president had to be at least forty years old; today Katniss was only one month older than the minimum. Severus Nickson, age fifty-eight, who was running for re-election as president, had kept saying that Katniss Mellark "lacked maturity"; and Katniss's campaign manager (Effie Abernathy) was worried Nickson's smear would cost Katniss the election. Katniss got the feeling that Effie was not the only one in the room who was worried.

(Of course when Katniss on the campaign trail had been asked about her "maturity," she always had answered, "I came into office when I was eighteen, and I left when I was twenty-two; and can anyone say that I was a bad president? Heck, Nickson would not even be president now, if not for the Constitution of 2720 that I commissioned.")

Still, it was likely that in tonight's election, the Capitol would give more votes to Nickson (because he was a Capitol citizen too); and if Katniss scored even a hundred votes from District Thirteen, she would be shocked. So even as popular as Katniss was nowadays as a national hero, it was not a sure thing that she would return to the presidency, eighteen years after she (and Peeta, and preschooler Primmy Rue) had left the Presidential Mansion.

Speaking of Peeta—

Step-slap-step-slap. Now standing next to Katniss, Peeta casually slipped an arm around her waist. He asked in a low voice, "How are you holding up?"

Katniss grinned at him. "Any minute now will the vote-count for District Twelve be announced. I'm not too worried how Twelve's vote will go."

Johanna, overhearing, made an unladylike snort. "Yeah, right, like there's any chance that Twelve would choose that rainbow Nickson over you!"

Sure enough, when Mayor Madge Hawthorne went on holo five minutes later, announcing the final results of District Twelve's presidential and legislator votes, Katniss had received all but fifty-eight of District Twelve's votes for president.

After the cheering and applause in the living room died down, Hayward Cory looked over at Gale and said very seriously, "Your Honor, Twelve has fifty-eight bums in it. You need to find those people and deal with them."

The older people in the room gasped.

Gale shook his head hard. "No, Hay. We don't do shit like that anymore. It's why I entered the"—six-month-long—"law school and became a judge: to stop people from disappearing just because they think the 'wrong' thoughts."

Katniss said, "Which proves, Hayward, that loaning Gale the money for law school was the best investment I ever made."

Gale looked at Katniss and said, "Especially since I paid back every centidollar within seven years."

Gamma Churchill-Dixon, formerly Minister of Education for both President Katniss and President Distaff Paylor, now turned away from her husband Henricus, in order to nod at Gale. "You're Seam, Gale, so duh, of course you paid Katniss back in full."

The eldest child of Haymitch and Effie, Hayden Tiberius Abernathy, walked up to Hayward and slapped him on the back. "You say bonehead sh—"

"Language!" called out Hayden's mother from across the room.

Hayden tried again: "You say bonehead stuff sometimes, HC, but you're still my best friend."

District Twelve was the first district to have all of its votes counted, because it was the smallest district, and because it was in Panem's most eastward time zone; but District Thirteen was the second district to count all votes, because Thirteen also was in Panem's most eastward time zone (and because the Thirteens were inhumanly organized). Just as Katniss had expected, she received only eighty-one votes from Thirteen's final vote-count. In Thirteen, Katniss not only received fewer votes than Severus Nickson, Katniss lost out to write-in candidate Anna Leeg.

Other than Twelve and Thirteen, only in District Eleven had the polls closed. Right now, Eleven's vote-counts were partial. Katniss was ahead in nationwide total votes for now, but most of Panem still was voting.

Two hours later (9:23 p.m. in District Twelve, 7:23 p.m. in the Capitol)

Now the polls were closed in the Capitol, and in every district except for Five and Seven.

In the Capitol, only 12 percent of voting precincts had reported-in. The good news was that Katniss still was ahead nationwide in total votes; the bad news was that as the Capitol counted its votes, Katniss's lead would slip.

In Katniss's living room, Minerva Snow-Hall's teenaged twin sons were flirting with the second Mellark daughter, Marjorie Euphemia, who clearly was enjoying the attention. Katniss smiled fondly.

Not quite an hour later (10:16 p.m. in District Twelve, 7:16 p.m. in Districts Five and Seven)

As Henricus rolled his eyes, Gamma was telling a story: "...I met Severus Nickson once, in the Capitol. Henry-Bear's oldest sister was dating him at the time. Long story short, the two of us went to a party at the sister's apartment; and Severus told my boyfriend right in front of me, 'District girls are good for only one thing, and attending a party with Capitol citizens is not that thing.' Effing rainbow, I want him to lose tonight."

Meanwhile, according to Panem District News, District Five had 8 percent of voting-precincts reporting in; District Seven had 6 percent of voting-districts reporting in; the Capitol had 48 percent of voting-precincts counted; the number for District Four voting-precincts was 87 percent, which was close to the number for District Eleven (91 percent). The other nine districts had by now reported votes from 100 percent of their voting-districts.

Gamma, even as she had socialized, had spent the evening scribbling on a pad and punching numbers into her calculator. Now, after staring at the calculator display, Gamma breathed, "Yes! Eat shit, Nickson."

Then Gamma told herself, "Calm down, let's double-check these numbers." By now, everyone in the living room was quiet.

Not quite a minute later, Gamma grinned at Katniss. "Even if every vote that is counted after now goes to Nickson, he can't win. Katniss, you won."

The mansion screamed.

Two minutes later

Katniss and Peeta, holding hands, stood on one side of the iron gates that separated Victors' Village from the rest of District Twelve. On the other side of those gates stood many news reporters. (However, no reporter outside the gates was from "Victors Tonight"—the show had been cancelled almost twenty years ago.)

"Where are your kids?" a reporter now asked Katniss and Peeta.

Katniss scowled. "You know we don't expose them to the whole 'celebrity' thing when we can avoid it. Anyway, Gamma just called the election for me—this was the cheering you just heard."

A PDN—Panem District News—reporter sneered, "Gamma is losing her touch. PDN called the election for you a half-hour ago."

Katniss scowled, but Peeta laughed at the PDN reporter. Peeta said, "You just showed everyone you don't listen to your own expert. Your guy called the election when Nickson had only a 5-percent chance of winning. Gamma is more thorough—she waited till Nickson's chance was a flat zero."

"Has Nickson telephoned you to concede the election?"

"Not yet," Katniss said. Grinning, she added, "But he will."

A different reporter said, "It isn't surprising you've won. Every voter over the age of thirty remembers evil President Snow, and how you, 'President Katniss,' were a complete change from him."

Katniss turned her head to look at Peeta's face, as the Mellarks silently conferred. Then Katniss looked back at the reporter. "I'm sorry, but I can't let your words about Coriolanus slide. Coriolanus wasn't evil, he was a non-evil man who did many evil things."

"Great," a different reporter muttered, "after so long as a politician, she's learned to split hairs."

Katniss scowled. "Not at all. I've met three evil people: Septicus Kopf, a Capitol citizen; Romulus Thread, a Head Peacekeeper; and Alma Coin, formerly the mayor of District Thirteen. Evil people are selfish and cruel, and they never walk away from being selfish and cruel. But when I watched Coriolanus around his granddaughter Minerva, I saw no evil in him. More than this, Coriolanus Snow listened to me and eventually he ended the Hunger Games. The districts won't like hearing this, but at times Coriolanus was a good president—he taught me knowledge that I used when I was 'President Katniss'; and three months from now"—after Katniss would be inaugurated—"I'll start using this knowledge again."

Someone outside the iron bars said, "It's shocking that you of all people would now say that Snow wasn't evil. Didn't you call him this very thing, 'evil,' on the night you discovered he was your soulmate?"

"Oh, I did, several times that night—and several more times in telephone conversations after that night. He was fiercely prejudiced against 'monkeys,' never seeing any district person as a person like him, except for me and Peeta. Many of his ways to 'keep order in Panem' were cruel. But eventually I saw that he was unselfish—he wanted to make his granddaughter happy and he wanted to keep Panem peaceful, and I honor him now for these things."

A reporter asked Katniss, "Do you miss him? Snow?"

"You haven't noticed that I have a white-roses rosebush in front of my mansion?"

THE END

AUTHOR END NOTE: To all of you who have read this story to the end: Thank you. To those of you who skipped to the end: Hey, you've missed lots of good stuff (IMNSHO), so go back and read it!

This story got more readers than I expected. Had I written a story in which Katniss and Peeta were soulmates, or Haymitch and Effie, or Madge and Gale, I would have drawn readers by the thousands. But since "Katniss & Snow" is nobody's One True Pairing, I started this story imagining a worst-case scenario of zero readers. Now at the end, I am relieved this did not happen.

I originally intended for the "soulmate" thing to be merely a plot gimmick, my way to make Katniss become president of Panem at a young age. But as I was writing chapters, I realized that the shock of Snow discovering that "the unruly Victor" was his perfect match, and Snow's discussions with Katniss that he could not dismiss out of hand, would make the old man re-evaluate his life. I did not intend all this when I started this story; but by Snow's death, he and Katniss have changed their implacable enmity to a mentor-protégé relationship; and Snow dies being almost a good man.

I am an old coot, and three times in my lifetime, a man became President of the United States by other than the usual means. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed and Lyndon Johnson became president; in 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned the office and Gerald Ford became president; in 2001, George W. Bush took office because he was the electoral-college winner of the election, even though he was the popular-vote loser.

My point is that Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford took office quietly; nobody ran up to either of them yelling "You shouldn't be president!" or "I should be president instead of you!" (As for George W. Bush, Inauguration Day 2001 had the police out in force in Washington, D.C.; the tension was palpable.) However, between Panem being the kind of place it is, and Katniss being the kind of person she is, nobody could expect Katniss's teenage transition to the presidency to be free of drama; so I as author made sure to pack in the drama—thirty-one chapters' worth, before this epilogue!

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