(here is the place) where I love you
(post-canon; katniss and clerk carmine)
I stop there sometimes, at the lake, when my arms give out but I haven't yet caught enough game for the week. It's cooler there, because of the water, and I wrap my father's hunting jacket tightly around me, munching on a few berries or one of Peeta's cheese buns. But just as I'm unwrapping my lunch today, a flash of grey on the opposite shore distracts me from my hunger. Wolf?
I slowly walk around the perimeter of the lake until a reach it. It's not an animal at all, as it turns out, but a gravestone, about as tall as my waist. The edges of the stone are decorated with swirling vines and flowers. I kneel down to read the three names etched onto it in careful cursive.
The first is one I don't recognize—a woman's, by the sound of it—but my breath hitches when I read the ones that follow: my father's, and below, in a slightly different hand, Prim's. At the base of the stone is a quote, a modified lyric of one of a familiar tune:
Deep in the meadow / here is the place, where we loved you.
I choke back tears as my father's voice fills my head, and then, my own, singing Rue to sleep.
"Burdock loved this lake," A gruff voice mutters behind me. I whip around and find an old man with scruffy beard a cane in one hand standing a few feet away. He looks vaguely familiar, though I can't place the face.
"He was my father," I supply, unsure of how else to respond.
The man laughs. "Aye. I could've guessed just from the jacket you wear, but your name is the farthest thing from unfamiliar, these days," the man says, a twinkle in his eye. "Everyone in Panem knows."
I nod. The Girl on Fire, the Girl who Killed the President, and everything in between. "And you are?" I ask, mostly out of politeness.
"Clerk." The man doesn't go any further but simply stares at me, eyebrow raised, as if willing me to fill in the rest, and suddenly I realize where I'd seen him.
"You played at Finnick and Annie's wedding!" I exclaim. The fiddler. He'd seemed lonely, even then, and I'd assumed he'd stayed at 13 – most of us who came back had something to tie us here.
"This has been my home longer than anyone else remembers, child," he says, answering the question unprompted. "I didn't want to die in a foreign land."
And, all of a sudden, it clicks. A vague memory of one of Haymitch's stories, the woods, longer than anyone else remembers. "You're Covey," I say. "Clerk…Carmine?"
"I am." Clerk Carmine smiles. "I hope you didn't mind me leaving that here," he says, gesturing to the gravestone. I'd almost forgotten. "Tam Amber, he started it for Burdock's ma, and it felt right to—" He pauses. "Actually, would you like to see them? The others?"
It takes me a minute to respond, my mind still preoccupied with the mention of my father, his mother, Tam Amber. "Yes. Yes, of course," I say, my mouth moving on it's own accord.
Clerk Carmine leads me slowly through the woods, his cane methodically tapping on the forest floor like the beats of a drum. I imagine my father walking this same path as a teenager, perhaps whistling a tune to make the mockingjays in the leaves sing. Haymitch himself had done so once, too, though he never could bring himself to again.
Finally, we arrive at a beautiful grove, hidden far away from the lake. I'd never thought to venture this far out before. Before me are four beautifully-decorated headstones, each with a lines of poetry—or is it song?—rather than names, carved in similar print to the one decorating my family's. But that's where the similarities end: the stones are all different shapes, sizes, and colors, and it occurs to me that, perhaps, their selection itself was a ceremony of sorts, that each person was given a slab that captured them better than any portrait ever could. Clerk Carmine gestures for me to sit next to him.
"Lucy Gray," he starts, nodding to the far right. Snake-like vines almost entirely cover her grave, save for the area surrounding her name-poem, and fresh daisies are placed on top. "She was a lot like you, you know." He gives me that look again, like he expects me to immediately understand what he's trying to say. "Sharp as a tack, voice like a bird." He sighs. "A Victor, too, like yourself."
I gasp. I had no idea.
Clerk Carmine notices my surprise and laughs hollowly. "Oh, yes, he tried very hard to kill her, but somehow, she lived on in memory, all of ours…and his." He doesn't mention who he is, but somehow I know, instinctively, anyway, and I suddenly feel a rush of affection for this girl I never knew who apparently managed to defy Snow, even in death.
Clerk Carmine then gestures to the stone on the far left of the row, a clean, white one that sparkles where the sunlight hits it. "Maude Ivory, Lucy Gray's cousin. Though we were all family." And then the one next to hers, speckled, somehow, with purple. "Lenore Dove, her daughter, but this you know."
I do know. It took a while, because getting Haymitch to open up about anything is as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack, but one night, I found him writing pages and pages in our Book, and Peeta and I learned of her—and our parents' childhoods, as a result—that way.
I ask Clerk Carmine what happened between them, if he knew. Haymitch's memories start at age ten end with his Games, for the most part, and so much has changed since then, my head spins sometimes, thinking about it.
There isn't much to say, as it turns out. My parents got married after the 52nd Games, and the remaining Covey gifted them our house as a wedding present—my grandmother had been Covey-descended through her mother (who had left her with her father), and apparently she and Maude Ivory had been thick as thieves as teenagers, which was how my father came to spend so much time with Lenore Dove. As for the time before my parents, "it's almost too long a story for words," Clerk Carmine tells me, and I'm forced to leave it at that—though I make a mental note to bring him my Book and see if he will write like Haymitch did.
The last stone, in the middle of the row, is Tam Amber's. It, too, stands out from the others, a deep, strong clay. Him, too, I know—knew, in fact, as he was the Goat Man I'd bought Lady from. He passed just before the third Quell.
In the pocket of my father's jacket, my fist closes around my mockingjay pin. Tam Amber was the one who had made it all those years ago. I bring it out and show Clerk Carmine, then carefully kneel by the red gravestone to bury it. "It started here, and should stay here," I explain. He nods, and that's when I notice the tears in his eyes.
"I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to keep you," I say, suddenly feeling like I was intruding on something very private, which I am. "I have to head back to the cabin—eat, then more hunting to do."
I try to back away quietly, but Clerk Carmine motions for me to wait. I watch him struggle to his feet—he refuses my arm when I hold it out—and grab his cane again.
"I'll come with you," he says. "After the girls…Barb, Tam and I…we had to get out, you know. Only ever ventured back here to tend to the graves." He looks at me. "But thank you, for giving me a reason to return."
I didn't do anything, I think, but I shrug in acknowledgement anyway.
This time, it is I who leads him back to the lake, and we share a quiet lunch by the memorial he carved for my family—our family.
