Of Victors and Tributes

Epilogue: The Final Chapter

"I'll call as soon as I can," Lacey tells me, bags slung over her shoulders. She's grown so much in these past seven years, so as soon as she turned seventeen and the rebellion ended I knew she would want to leave home. Especially since District 12 was destroyed, and she has decided her sole purpose is to go there and rebuild it.

"Good. Just stay safe," I tell her. I hand her her brother's watch, my husband's.

"No, Jean, you keep it. Camden can have it," Lacey says, referring to my five-year-old son who stands by my legs. I wrap her fingers around the watch, not letting her force it back into my hands.

"So you don't forget to call," I tell her. She smiles, then hugs me one more time. She kisses Camden on the top of his black hair.

"I won't forget!" she calls to us as she boards the train filled with other people on their way to fix up 12. I pick up Camden so he has a better view of his aunt who is now on her way to the next district. We wave the train off and watch it disappear into the distance. It reminds me painfully of the years I spent saying goodbye to Taylor before he returned to the Capitol for the Games.

"Why don't we go to 12 too, Mom?" Camden asks as we weave between rubble and people that have begun the task of cleaning it up.

"Because Eight needs our help, too," I remind him. Though the Victors' Village, and thus myself and Camden, generally went unscathed during the bombings that plagued us, our district is a mess. We've lost so many, including all of our victors, my husband.

I knew as soon as Katniss Everdeen sang to that poor young girl dying in the Games that Taylor would see something in her. How could he not, considering she sang Meadow's song and the two could be sisters? So when he returned home with ideas of rebellion in his mind, I accepted that there was no stopping him. District 12 and 8 had made its final alliance.

The horror I felt when Taylor told me he was joining the cause officially and thus risking his life before the 75th Games was unmatched to the pain I felt when he did not return from the Capitol after Katniss Everdeen escaped the arena. I had watched Cecelia and Woof be murdered in the Games, the Games they were supposed to be safe from, and now my husband had been taken from me. When I finally was able to get word from district spies in the Capitol of what happened to him, they told me he had been tortured and killed by Snow in an attempt to get information about the rebellion out of him. I was proud that he didn't say anything, though I no longer had- have- my best friend with me.

But the Mockingjay did not fail us. She rescued us from tyranny, made way for a better life for my son, Lacey, and I. We are free of the Games, free of Snow, the oppression of the Capitol. Camden may grow up without his father, but he will know that he fought and died for a great cause. Sometimes I wake up at night, angry, furious at Katniss and the people alongside her that survived the Games. But then I look at Meadow in her locket, and the matching picture of my husband on the other side, and I think.

We can't all be victors. 

End