i was a dangerous girl (the hunger games | katniss~alma coin)

[fiachairecht]

i was a dangerous girl. the hunger games trilogy - suzanne collins, katniss~alma coin. there are no good people left at the end of a war like this. 1.2k words, rated t.

It starts when two women meet:

Katniss Everdeen, the Girl On Fire, the Mockingjay, is tired, battered, and a little bit broken but still proud. The scars from her last time in the arena not quite healed, but her face is resolute. There is a space at her side where a boy with bread once stood that she refuses to acknowledge, because acknowledgement means acceptance. She didn't mean to start a war, but she will see it through.

Alma Coin, President of District Thirteen, has been living a shadow of what others would call a life since she can remember. Rebellion is in her blood, this war is in her hands. And now that the Mockingjay is here, she has everything she needs to finish the fight.

But their fates aren't sealed until:

Yes, Coin thinks, Yes, I can work with this.

*

After two Hunger Games Katniss is well acquainted with selling lies to keep herself alive. It's not too difficult at first. Fight. Live as the Mockingjay. Survive, for Prim.

Surviving, she's good at that. Not so much good at living, though, not anymore.

But playing star-crossed lovers for the Capitol isn't like playing the Mockingjay for Coin.  Coin is not here to be dazzled into buying her supplies. President Coin is hard and brittle, built up through war and never allowed to live. She has her own ideas about the role Katniss has to play in this rebellion.

Katniss wonders how much the war has taken from this woman, this hard, cruel woman who was fighting before Katniss was born. She wonders if the war will take as much from her one day, until she remembers Peeta in the Capitol, Cinna dead, Gale too caught up in the fighting to say five words to her that aren't about the war, Prim in the medic corps.

There is nothing left for the war to take.

(There is everything left for Coin to craft.)

*

Katniss looks over blueprints, face expressionless. Coin leans over, watches, traces meaningless patterns on the girl's arm while her gun digs into her hip. Katniss shuts her eyes and thinks of Peeta.

So young, Coin thinks, Only seventeen behind those masks. It's easy to forget. It's also easy to see the power this young woman holds in her body, wrapped up tight in layers of performance, all just waiting for its moment in the light. Coin can give her that.

For a price.

*

Katniss isn't real in Thirteen. Just the Mockingjay, shaped with careful hands by Coin and Haymitch and accepted numbly by Katniss-That-Was.

It's okay, though. Panem doesn't need Katniss Everdeen, they need the Girl on Fire and the Mockingjay, ready to lead them to a new age. She thinks at first that it will be good to give Katniss time to rest, to let her wounds heal. 

When Peeta comes back with empty eyes and tries to snap her neck, something in Katniss breaks. She can never go back, not even to the time after the first Games when at least she had someone who understood. But Peeta is gone, killed by the Capitol as surely as if he'd died in the games. All the medications in the world won't be able to erase her memory of this: Peeta’s body, but not Peeta. She will never look at him the same way again.

Haymitch holds her as cries, stands by while she destroys her room. When President Coin arrives, declares that she needs something to take Peeta off her mind, he almost intervenes. The look in her eyes is deadly, and he stays quiet.

*

Coin's hands arrange the latest outfit over her shoulders: functional enough for missions, fancy enough for the symbol of revolution. Katniss looks in the mirror and sees a stranger in her eyes.

The hands slip lower, just barely beneath the waistband of her new pants and she doesn't move. After all, it's what victors do.

The President and the Mockingjay doesn't even sound that bad, really.

And then, because she is so desperate to feel she turns around and bites down, and—

And the blood is real, and Coin is real, and the Mockingjay is real.

She leaves Thirteen for the streets of the Capitol the next day wondering if everyone can see her transgressions painted across her skin.

*

Her arrows sing in crowded skies.

Coin smiles behind the monitor. Katniss may have been the one to strike the match of the rebellion, but the Girl on Fire would be just another game for the Capitol's citizens without her direction. She watches the furrow of the girl's brow, the way her lips part just slightly in concentration, and thinks she's never seen anything more beautiful than this weapon that she's created.

*

This war was Coin's war, too, Katniss reminds herself. But the Mockingjay was only hers.

To kill Coin would be to save Panem from her twisted reign (to set herself free of the president).

To kill Coin would be to allow another one just like her into the presidency.

To kill Coin would be to become her (and wasn't that coin’s plan all along?).

There are no good people left at the end of a war like this. There's only the broken, and then the irreparable.

Prim stands beside her, little face in her hands, too tired to see one more death.

Katniss nocks her arrow.

*

(In the end: they part ways after the war — Katniss will have nothing to do with Coin's Games for the Capitol's children, Coin takes this as a personal failure. They part ways before they destroy each other and leave Panem with nothing.)

(In the end: Coin is dead, and Katniss is empty. She goes back to Twelve, to Gale, to Prim, and the three of them rebuild. The Mockingjay died with Coin, the Capitol is very far away, and Katniss — exists.)

(In the end: Katniss has never killed except out of necessity before. Coin agrees to no more Games. Katniss stays in the Capitol and helps unravel the years of hate that have poisoned the children there.)

(In the end: they’re too alike. Killing Coin would kill something inside her, too. She lowers her bow, gives Coin a nod, and Snow's neck cracks. She melts away into the celebrating crowd and cries on Gale's shoulder.)

(In the end: she is the Mockingjay, but not Coin's Mockingjay. She didn't fight for this woman, she fought for her family, for her fellow tributes — the ones that never made it out alive and the ones who were lucky enough not to be chosen. But she had people to pull her back from the edge — they were all mad, they had to be to survive in Panem, the trick was finding the balance, and Coin never did. She won’t let their work go to waste. She rebuilds the Capitol, talks the president back from the abyss a day at a time.)

(In the end: victory changes people. Peace changes people. There’s a chance for them to — not rebuild, they've lost too much for that, but to reshape. To adapt. That's how the mockingjays were first formed, after all.)

*

She wins by refusing to become one of the irreparable, by offering Coin a chance to prove that she isn't one of them either.

The Mockingjay never misses. Alma Coin holds up a rose covered with Snow's blood for all the Capitol to see.