After The Storm (A Hunger Games Fanfic)

Happily Ever After - Epilogue

There is a moment's pause. Even Tulip has fallen still, her head lolling slightly, her long thick eyelashes fluttering with small snores. Her untameable hair quivers with every slight movement.

"Thank you," says Sunshine formally, smoothing her dress over her knees, "For telling me." She rarely smiles anyway and her parents' story seems to have only added a depth of thought to her solemn brown eyes, an inheritance from her father's side. Mercedes worries sometimes that she is too serious for a child who has been shielded from almost every kind of hardship.

"It was different to how the videos make it seem," she explains. Hearing her own voice as a mother's voice still startles her, sixteen years after she said her first words to Sunshine; my baby. Ten years after she left the arena, six after she started speaking again. She remembers little of her silent years, just a crushing sense of guilt that only Petro could gradually push away.

She is not the same girl who swore as the woman pricked her finger for the year she was reaped, who killed Rafe. As a parent now, she's found that the only way she can forgive herself is by saying that she is someone else, and she's said it so many times that now it's true. She is almost unidentifiable, not the same sullen teenager who wept over Ever Greenmore's body and cursed the day her name was drawn. She hasn't sworn in years.

She hasn't sworn since Arianna, still widowed in black, still patiently grieving as she had been at the Victory Tour, somehow snuck out of her district, Rafe Jr loping absently behind her, and turned up at their door. Mercedes had answered with baby Sunshine in her arms and Petro at her shoulder, the family that Rafe Jr could never have. For days she refused to leave her room. She didn't deserve any of this.

"I know, mother," Sunshine says, and Mercedes is brought back into the present, where she is a forty year old mother of four with a doting Capitol husband, and all because of the Games. Where would she be, if they had not happened to her?

Sunshine is used to these moods and has left the room quietly. "She's nothing like the teenagers back in Six," Mercedes hazards, once the door is closed. Her eldest child is not the sort to eavesdrop like she once would have. Petro smiles warmly, running a strand of her glossy hair through his fingers.

"You can't expect me to believe that they were all like you!" he teases. A warm, comfortable flush brushes across her cheeks.

"Ford was."

Her husband laughs. He knows the Mayor of District Six, and whilst it would be wrong to say that either of them approve of the trouble he's causing, Petro likes his fighting spirit and Mercedes likes the fact that he has never changed.

She has, though.

Petro's laughing has woken up Tulip, who stretches and manages to club Olive in the face, waking her up too. Their youngest daughter doesn't even blink. "Can I go now?" Tulip asks. The story hasn't sunk in for her. They'll tell it again when she turns sixteen, if Sunshine doesn't tell her first.

"Take Olive with you."

Olive straggles to her feet, her permanent grave expression characteristically awkward amongst Tulip's bouncy frame and hair. Holding her little brother to her chest as if he is her most prized possession, she hands him to Mercedes and bows her tangle of curls, before trotting along after Tulip.

"One...two...three..." Petro counts. Right on cue, there is the traditional thud; Tulip has forgotten to dodge the table. It is no longer accompanied with a cry of pain, which is a relief. Just this little incident is enough to make Mercedes' heart crease a little. None of her children should ever know pain. Let go, Ever.

Her son is in her arms, warm with sleep. She can't even be bothered to lie and say that he looks like Petro; at a week old, his features are all hers. Somebody once told her - and she remembers who, with the dull ache that means the Games - that all babies are born with blue eyes, but his are clear, watchful grey, and when he's hungry they kindle in a way that makes Petro laugh, it's so much like her on the rare occasions that she gets angry.

She has high hopes for this boy. A lot lies ahead; tantrums and tempers and arguments to shake the foundations of their cosy little house. Slamming doors - Tulip still isn't out of that phase yet - and late nights and sulky silences. He's going to cause her grief and joy in equal measure. But it'll be worth it, because one day this little speck is going to make her proud and he's going to teach.

"Even when he's asleep he looks like he's up to something!" Petro comments. She has to laugh; even filled with a kind of dull heaviness from telling her story, she can see that he's right. Did she look like this as a baby? Neither of her parents are around to ask.

"My boy," she murmurs softly. He will never know hurt like she has seen. He will know; she will tell him again like she has told her girls.

"It's been nearly nine days..." Petro mutters; nine days to chose a name and the ceremony on the ninth. Any excuse for a party around here. Mercedes is still talking to the baby. He smiles and leans on her shoulder, looking down at his first-born son. "You've already got a name for him, haven't you?"

She nods, and glances up at him with shining eyes. He notices that there are tears in them, but whether they're tears of sadness or happiness, he can't tell.

"Yeah," she confirms, and her old District Six accent is starting to creep back in around the edge of her vowels, "Yeah. He's called Martin."