Archive of Our Own ^beta

Clerk Carmine is an old man now, but he’s outlived the Hunger Games. 

He’s outlived Snow, who Lucy Gray was sweet on. He’s outlived his family. He’s outlived old District Twelve, even, because it’s not the same now that it’s being rebuilt after the firebombs. 

There’s a great deal more people buried in the old Meadow now, not just his Covey folk. Everyone who didn’t make it to Thirteen has made it to the Meadow, bones intermingling as they all head together into the hereafter. 

Someone had tracked him down for the memorial service. Probably asked questions around of those from the Seam who lived, who’d known old Burdock Everdeen had sung for the funerals before he’d been blown to bits in a mine like so many folk. They’d followed the trail of memories, of faint recollections, of parents and grandparents mentioning something years and years on back, all the way to him. 

Clerk Carmine had never been much of a singer, not compared to most of his other Covey people, anyway. They could all sing, but Lucy Gray was the singer. He had his fiddle, and that was his lifeblood after his partner had faded away to death. But he sang for his district and played his fiddle through The Old Therebefore. The days of the Covey being travelers are too far gone. Twelve is his so long as his family are cradled in the dirt, and they’ll be there forever.

Clerk Carmine is the last of the old Covey, but he isn’t alone. Funny, though, it ain’t the comforting kind of togetherness, not entirely. 

His days revolve around the Meadow. It takes him a while to hobble there, so when he gets to the Covey graveyard, he sits and he stays. He even brings food, has a little picnic, like he’s doing now. Lucy Gray would like that, he thinks. 

-Yet some maintain that to this day

She is a living child;

That you may see sweet Lucy Gray

Upon the lonesome wild

It’s been too long since he’s seen her. Sixty-six years, give or take. In his mind, she’s still frozen as he saw her all the time, though the edges are blurred with time and his old memory. She’s a whirlwind of sound, a husky but soothing voice, a strum of a long-lost guitar with callused fingertips, and a blur of color. But her color name was Grey and she still loved color more than most. He still, somehow, through the war and District Thirteen and everything, managed to keep a strip of that rainbow-ruffled dress she’d worn to the Capitol with him. He’d had it tied round his belt- a pink one. And it’s still there, frayed and faded, but still there. It was the cleanest bit of the skirt he could get when it started falling apart beyond repair twenty years or so after she’d vanished. Her grave is empty, but there’s no way she’s still kicking around somewhere. If she was still alive, she would’ve come back to her Covey, because nothing was as important to Lucy Gray as togetherness. 

But the not knowing, even so long afterwards, is worst. It’s worse than everybody else. Because he knows where everybody else went, but there’ll always be a chance that he just gave up on Lucy Gray. 

They didn’t sing The Old Therebefore at her little memorial when they’d put up the stone in a copse of the Meadow she so loved, near the trees so she’d have shade. Maybe it was defiance. Maybe it was hope. But she’d already sung it for herself during her time in that Hunger Games arena with the rainbow snakes crawling all over her, and everybody knew they couldn’t do it better. So they just didn’t. They couldn’t.

The silence was almost unbearable, but nobody said a word. 

He pops a raspberry in his mouth as he listens to the cicadas screech and leans a little against a white stone. 

“Lady,” he said-

“Maude Clare,” he said-

“Maude Clare-” and hid his face.

Oh, Maude Ivory. So little for so long, and then she seemed to get grown too quickly. There was only so much Barb Azure could do for her. Lucy Gray’s disappearance hit her hard, and Clerk Carmine never had the strength to tell her what he thought of that Snow she’d been sweet on and how he knew he had something to do with it. It would’ve crushed her. He remembers vividly one day, before they’d gone to the lake with Lucy Gray’s boy and his friend, where she’d asked Barb Azure if there were any ballads about a Coriolanus. 

“Don’t think so,” Barb Azure had said. “Never heard of one. Seems hard to rhyme and rhythm, anyhow.” 

“I was just thinkin’,” Maude Ivory had squeaked, rolling a few stones she’d used as marbles  around in her hand. “‘Cause Lucy Gray’s boy, his last name is Snow. And if we could find a ballad with his name, or close enough, he’d kinda be part of the Covey like us, ‘cause Snow counts as a color name. I think it’d be sweet.” 

“I can look,” Barb Azure had conceded. “But I’m not sure.”

“Well, I’ll ask him, anyhow,” Maude Ivory said, rolling the marbles on the floor. “Maybe they got ballads in the Capitol, too.”

They’d all put together that Coriolanus Snow had vanished with Lucy Gray, and then reappeared in the Capitol as a Gamemaker, and then gradually the President. They’d never acknowledged it, though. 

Maude Ivory didn’t much like the snow after that. 

She was an innocent soul, a tiny romantic, and always had a soft spot for the Peacekeepers she thought were handsome. Sure, she hated their brutality like anyone else, but she insisted they were still people, too. 

The one she was sweet on was from Three. Neo. A troublemaker back home in his second year of deployment to the other districts. Maybe they thought sending him to Twelve would bore him enough that he’d get into line. The opposite was true. She’d met him after trying to get cozy with the Peacekeepers, to see if any of them knew a man named Snow so she could figure out what had happened to Lucy Gray. A few older ones remembered their superiors talking about ‘Gent’, but nobody knew a Snow. There, Neo had taken to being flirty, and Maude Ivory had been given an inch and taken a mile. And eventually, she was pregnant. Not at too young an age for Twelve, but to Clerk Carmine, only three years older, she was still a baby. Always the baby. 

It was hard to say whether or not it was just the baby that had killed her. She was always so delicate, too delicate for a place like Twelve, too delicate for a baby growing large and swollen in her belly. She loved that child, though. Barely got a chance to love her, but she did. Maude Ivory had so much fire and love in her. It’s still hard not to think she died of a broken heart, too, after Neo got repositioned to another district. He hadn’t even been able to look her nine-month-pregnant, delicate self in the eye as he’d boarded the train and been carried away by the rhythmic wheels. Just a few days later, Maude Ivory went into labor. Barb Azure did her best, and Clerk Carmine had tried to help, and Tam Amber had brought someone in from town to try and help, but there’d just been too much blood against her pale, pale self. He’d tried to restart her heart like he’d learned, but when someone goes beyond, there ain’t no bringing them back here. They’re gone for good. 

She’d been able to hold and name her baby before she drew her last, though. And Tam Amber had held little Lenore Dove as Clerk Carmine had carved that biting stanza into a pure white stone. And they’d buried her. 

To this day, he’s sure it wasn’t just the internal bleeding that had killed her. Maude Ivory had died of childbirth and a broken heart. 

Barb Azure couldn’t stand to stay around after that. Lenore Dove, though her skin was darker like her father, still had those fiery eyes that Maude Ivory had brought everywhere, and at first that squeaky voice, and though she chose to use them carefully, a set of lungs that could’ve carried Oh, My Darling Clementine throughout the entirety of the Seam. It was all just too painful and Clerk Carmine couldn’t even blame her. She’d been living in town for a bit, but had spent a lot of time at their Covey house; afterwards, she’d come by less and less frequently until she’d stopped coming altogether. 

Barb Azure’s grave only got added five years after Lenore Dove’s. 

It was harder to find her a stone- stones don’t really come blue naturally, much less ones that can be carved and withstand the rain. Much less ones people can find without selling their lives and their children’s lives away in Twelve. So they’d bought blue ink and a white stone and brushed it all over after carving Barb Azure’s verse into the rectangular rock. After a while in the sun and the rain, it fades to the perfect shade of azure, like the sky. Over the years, he and Tam Amber had gone back to brush more blue ink onto the stone so it wouldn’t lose its color. Though with time, the stone’s become more and more dyed, and they have to use less and less ink. 

She’d chosen the verse and wouldn’t budge about it, though he couldn’t help but feel she was digging at herself a little. 

He turned his face unto the wall

He turned his back upon her

“Adieu, adieu, to all my friends,

And be kind, be kind to Barbara Allen.”

She’d stopped coming back to the Covey house with her lady ‘friend’ after Maude Ivory’s burial. The town spinsters, they were. They’d adopted a little orphan boy before then, a few years after Lucy Gray had disappeared. Definitely not because they were two women in love who wanted a family. Barb Azure had said that often. Thought it was hilarious. And they’d raised the little boy in a more Covey way, though he didn’t have a name ballad, not technically; Barb Azure had said it was too recognizable since they were known as being less willing to fall in line. Things had to be subtle, though, she’d said. So Barb Azure had chosen a song to name him after that wasn’t a name ballad. He still had his color name, though: Evergreen. Things got switched around for hiding’s sake, but by the time he was twelve and had to be registered for the Reaping, his name was put down all official as Corbie Everdeen. 

Corbie was probably in his late teens, early twenties when Lenore Dove was born and his Auntie Maude Ivory died. He’d been engaged. He was married just after and soon came his and his wife’s first child- little Burdock Everdeen. 

Burdock had run around with Lenore Dove most of his life. They weren’t best friends, but they were family, and that was close enough. 

And Burdock had introduced Lenore Dove to Haymitch Abernathy. 

There’s still a part of Clerk Carmine that blames him for it, but he’s too used to grief by now that he knows it’s just his mind trying to get her back, even twenty-six years out. If only, if only, he can think all he wants, he can run down the chain of blame all the way to Maude Ivory loving Neo and even further back still, but nothing will bring any of them back. He’s ashamed to admit it, though. How could a little child have known? And surely Lenore Dove would’ve met Haymitch any other way, too. That’s just how the world works. Sometimes, no matter how hard your thoughts try to twist themselves about to get to a different ending, they end up in the same place no matter what. 

He reaches out and runs a gnarled finger down the side of Lenore Dove’s grave. He and Tam Amber were lucky they could find the right color stone for little Lenore Dovey. He’d cried all through carving it, because it was exactly what had happened. 

But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”-

Merely this and nothing more. 

If he can describe Lenore Dove in one word, it’d be ‘spitfire’. She got that from her mother, but she certainly went toe to toe with any Peacekeeper she could. Clerk Carmine had once wondered if it was someone’s idea of a funny joke, or revenge from beyond, or Maude Ivory’s spirit egging her daughter on from death to make as much trouble as she could to spite the Peacekeeper that had left her. But that was too much like in the fairy tales, and though signs do exist, he never saw sign of spirits like in Lucy Gray’s ballad. He thinks now that it would’ve hurt more anyhow to have Maude Ivory back but not here. Besides, that’d take Lenore Dove’s own credit for her strength and her fire away from her. 

That girl loved like her mother. Fully and completely. She loved life and hated anything that could take it away before its time. Sure, she understood death. Most ballads are about it; hers certainly is. She lived in nature with her geese. She lived in Twelve. Lenore Dove believed death should be a natural thing, the natural end to a life. Anything that took someone or something away before its time was unjust. 

And oh, she hated the Capitol. She hated the starvation, the whippings, the Peacekeepers, the posters, the propaganda, the hangings. But most of all, she hated the Games. 

How ironic that Haymitch, in doing what she would’ve done, was chosen to replace Woodbine Chance after the kid got the back of his head blown off for trying to run. He’d seemed like a troublemaker, but he had a good heart. That didn’t mean Clerk Carmine approved of he and Lenore Dove running out into the Meadow and kissing at every given opportunity. 

Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber hadn’t been focused on catching too much of the Games, not after Lenore Dove went and got herself arrested again, this time for playing forbidden music on the still-up stage for the Reaping. But Clerk Carmine had, at least, seen all the other tributes from Twelve die. Poor Louella McCoy didn’t seem like herself at all in the Capitol, and watching her bleed from every part of her face was horrific. Wyatt Callow had sacrificed himself for her; nobody’d expected that of a Booker Boy, and he’d at least died honorably. Maysilee Donner had gone out defiantly, gripping Haymitch’s hand, holding onto life until she couldn’t anymore but never screaming. 

If he’d have been the songwriting type, maybe he’d have written ballads about them. Lucy Gray probably would have. Something about them seemed poetic. 

And then Haymitch had lived, against every single one of the odds. Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber got Lenore Dove out of the Peacekeeper’s jail. The Abernathy house burned down early in the morning for a reason nobody understood. Wyatt’s father hung himself. Burdock sung at what turned from a funeral for three to a funeral for six people. Haymitch was damaged. Who wouldn’t be? Clerk Carmine remembered Lucy Gray after she’d been unceremoniously dunked back into Twelve: flinching at every sudden move, waking up everybody with worse screams than Maude Ivory’s after a nightmare, crying at random reminders, not touching her mother’s precious dress. 

He should have known Haymitch would come looking for Lenore Dove. He should have noticed the door was a little more ajar than usual when they’d come back from the Peacekeeper’s jail with Lenore Dove. That her pillow was more rumpled than it should’ve been, considering she’d spent the last few weeks in a cell. He should’ve noticed. He should’ve kept better eyes on her with the geese. He should’ve asked about those damned red gumdrops, because he knew they weren’t the ones he remembered her with. 

Because he’d let her go out with her geese, and just a few minutes later he’d heard Haymitch screaming his name like nobody’d ever screamed it before or since. He and Tam Amber had dropped everything and ran into the Meadow, and even now, he remembers the scene like it was yesterday. 

Haymitch cradling their little girl, face gaunt and shocked as tears poured down his face. Lenore Dove with bloody, foamy spit all over her face. The bag of bright red gumdrops lying scattered in the early August grass. 

And just like her mother, he’d tried to restart her heart, but when someone’s that gone, there ain’t no bringing them back. He’d still tried, though, tried to defy fate and poison as Tam Amber pleaded and cried not again, but his precious niece and the last living bit of Maude Ivory’s life was dead and gone. 

They’d buried her next to Maude Ivory. 

Then it was just him and Tam Amber in the house.

He couldn’t stand to look at Haymitch. Lenore Dove would’ve been furious. Barb Azure understood. Lucy Gray would’ve told him about how everybody’s got feelings, and just ‘cause you don’t like someone doesn’t mean they aren’t hurting too. Maude Ivory would’ve just looked at him and asked, why not?

But he would not look at damaged little Haymitch Abernathy, because all he could see was the little bits of reddish sugar on the ends of the kid’s fingertips as he held Lenore Dovey’s lifeless body. And all of his hatred and grief had someone easy to point at. Even when Haymitch started drinking heavy like someone who’s lost it all—which he had—he wouldn’t have sympathy. They’d never really spoken, not even in Thirteen. The kid was mad. Utterly mad with grief and shock and trauma and drugs. Wandering around as the town drunkard who everybody couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for as they tried to ignore him.  And Clerk Carmine refused to reach out. He just couldn’t. He kept having people ripped away. Lucy Gray vanished. Maude Ivory’s heart had broken and her body had torn from the inside. Lenore Dove was murdered by poison.

He didn’t know how to function. Her bed was still there. Her geese still looked for her. And she just…wasn’t, anymore. 

One night, he’d decided to play The Raven quietly on his violin after Tam Amber had fallen asleep. The moon had been setting, and soon the sun would rise, and he hadn’t been able to stop staring at her empty bed and all her things. 

Just a few minutes into the ballad, someone had begun to pound on the door. He’d jumped, heart full of adrenaline at who could be arresting him and Tam Amber at this hour-

But then the screaming had started. Desperate, cracking, breaking, bloodcurdling sobbing shrieking mad. 

“Where is she!? Where is she!? Where is she!?” 

Haymitch. 

Eventually, he screamed himself out and just started wailing. Clerk Carmine could feel him leaning against the door as he sat just on the other side, fiddle still in his hands as Tam Amber, who’d remained in bed throughout the whole of the screaming, finally stood up and kneeled beside Clerk Carmine the best his aged joints could allow. 

They’d sat there, silently weeping, and never opened the door to Haymitch. 

Eventually, he wandered off. He was no semblance of sane. He wandered for weeks, calling for Lenore Dove, even into the autumn coming and the chill of the air. Even as he started developing an alcohol tolerance no sixteen-year-old should have ever dreamed of having. 

One day, he just stopped. They’d never known why. Not then, anyhow. 

Not until a few weeks and a few rainfalls later, when he, Tam Amber, and old Barb Azure went to go visit before the first snow, and upon putting his hand down before Lenore Dove’s grave, Tam Amber had found the flint striker he’d spent so much time making. The one Lenore Dove had designed for Haymitch. The one he’d taken into the Games and never let out of his sight. 

He’d never seen Tam Amber look so small as he started to sob and clutch the dirt-crusted striker to his chest with gnarled fingers. 

They’d buried the striker back where they’d found it. Clerk Carmine thought he could at least do one thing for Haymitch. 

Five years later, Barb Azure’s ink-dyed gravestone joined the others. And Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber were the only ones left, but for real this time.

Clerk Carmine’s eyes drift to the reddish-yellow stone he’d been lucky to find. It’s tall, mostly unblemished by the moss and erosion that’s started to creep over everyone else’s graves despite his best efforts. 

“Oh tell to me, Tam Lin,” she said,

“Why came you here to dwell?”

“The Queen of Fairies caught me,

When from my horse I fell.”

He’d picked the verse deliberately; told Clerk Carmine, “I don’t want it to be about my death and how it happened. I don’t care about that. It’s gotta be about life, best it can be. How I came into the Covey. That’s what I want on the stone.” The Covey were his Queen of Fairies, and he refused to have it any other way, so what else was Clerk Carmine meant to do? He didn’t want to protest anyway. He didn’t want to think about the one last person he’d had with him his whole life leaving him behind. 

Tam Amber had tried his best. But he was never the leader type. He was quiet, reserved, that lost soul all his life that Lucy Gray had said he was. Losing the ability to perform at the Hob just after Lucy Gray’s disappearance hit him hard. He always was more internal. Music was his escape from the world. When he couldn’t get his emotions out by playing his old mandolin, he took it upon himself to learn to be a blacksmith. After Barb Azure moved out with her partner, he hammered, and then he played; after Maude Ivory died, he did his best, but it was hard with a baby. Clerk Carmine had tried to get his own partner’s advice, but he didn’t have much. And baby Lenore Dove loved sound, so Tam Amber learned to pluck his mandolin one-handed as best he could to bounce her and entertain her at the same time. The blacksmithing had kept their house going, and supplemented with some private playing, it wasn’t half bad money-wise most of the time. 

Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber went through everything together. Everything. They were some of the only ones still in Twelve who remembered before the Games; Tam Amber even remembered the Dark Days and would tell him about them as much as he could. Tam Amber had held Clerk Carmine as he’d cried for Billy Taupe, as he’d cried for Lucy Gray, for Maude Ivory, Lenore Dove, and Barb Azure. Tam Amber had listened to everybody singing their ballads when they were still around, and had carefully written them all down in an old notebook someone had found once upon a time. Every time someone sang a song, the lyrics were meticulously written in the notebook for a show and for remembrance, and Tam Amber had taken a silent pride in it. In the last few years of his life, Clerk Carmine had caught Tam Amber reading it slowly, eyes squinting, mid-brown gnarled hands trembling as they turned the yellowed pages, paying particular attention to the songs Lucy Gray had sung or written and the ballads nobody had ever been named after. 

Tam Amber was old, and so they both knew he’d go soon. It loomed over them. Two melancholy old men who sometimes played instruments at people’s parties; that’s what they’d become. The last few years of Tam Amber’s life were painful for him- painful joints, illnesses, inability to forge things. Even plucking the strings of his old mandolin was hard. So he hummed. Relentlessly. Every ballad and song in the book, and then some, and then he’d write those ones down. It was never silent, and Clerk Carmine learned to listen to the faint humming to hear if Tam Amber was still awake or not. Tam Amber was louder in the last bit of his life than he’d ever been before. 

Tam Amber had gotten out to sing at Burdock’s funeral. An empty grave for a good man with a beautiful voice, body blown to pieces in a mine, with a wife Clerk Carmine could tell was fighting to stay in reality, a dark-haired girl who looked just like him, and a tiny blond girl clutching to the skirts of her sister. He’d sung his heart out as best he could for Burdock Everdeen, Barb Azure’s grandson. 

Three days later, Clerk Carmine had gone to wake him up and he was just…gone. Tam Amber seemed to slip out of life as quietly as he’d lived it. He was wrapped up quietly in bed like he was sleeping, even smiling a little, but he was cold. He’d had to have died just after Clerk Carmine had wished him goodnight and gone to sleep. 

Clerk Carmine runs a gnarled finger over the side of Tam Amber’s grave as a tear slips down his wrinkled cheek. 

He remembers the feeling of utter numb loneliness that had wrapped him like a cold blanket after he’d sat back and finally accepted that his only other fellow member of the Covey was dead. He’d expected it, had been for years. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hit him upside the head like a sack of bricks. 

He hadn’t sobbed, hadn’t been loud, hadn’t made any noise, really. He’d shaken Tam Amber, and realized he was cold. He’d pulled over a chair to Tam Amber’s bed, sat down heavily, and stared at his body as he cried. Silently. He didn’t know for how long. 

After months and months of relentless humming, it was so, so quiet.

At some point, he’d realized he needed to prepare for the funeral. And he would be the only one he was holding it for. 

So, he’d numbly wandered his way into the Seam, shivering with the cold and the slushy snow, and gone to the house of a man who did woodwork after shifts at the mine. 

His wife had opened the door, holding a small child on her hip. 

“I need to order a coffin,” he’d croaked, and then looked away from the child, staring resolutely at him with a hand in their mouth. 

He remembers, even now, when Tam Amber would hold Lenore Dove like that when she was young. But that’s the image he’d had while staring at that momma and little child.

Somehow, that was what truly broke him.  

He hadn’t truly been alone all his life. Even when he’d felt alone, like after Billy Taupe had gone, and then when he’d been murdered and nobody knew who’d done it. He’d cried himself to sleep because even though the Covey were all his family, Billy Taupe had been his brother. Even after Lucy Gray had disappeared, everyone else had still been there. After Maude Ivory died, Barb Azure had moved out, but she was still there. And they’d had Lenore Dove. After that, he’d still had Tam Amber, he’d had Tam Amber the whole time. Someone had known his way of life, his Covey way of life. 

His own partner was long since gone, and Barb Azure’s even longer so. Both buried in Twelve’s normal graveyard. Barb Azure’s girl had said that they’d be like in her name ballad- connected afterwards no matter how far they were apart, so she wasn’t worried about being buried in the Covey graveyard. His partner’s niece had gone into the Games a few years after Haymitch had won and Lenore Dove had died, and he’d wasted away, lashing out at anyone and anything in his alcohol-fueled despair. Clerk Carmine just…hadn’t been able to make himself stay. He’d still gone to the funeral. Corbie was out there too, with his wife and a small stone carved with a line from his ballad. 

It was cold and raining when he’d buried Tam Amber. Too rainy for him to bring out his old fiddle for risk of ruining it, and it was all he had left. But he stood there and he sang The Old Therebefore for Tam Amber, and he sang it by himself. Someone from town had helped dig the grave after word had spread that one of the old musicians had died. He remembers the wife of the woodworker sitting him down and giving him a weak tea of mint after he’d started crying. But after he’d wandered back to their house- his house, and warmed himself up, he’d picked up that old, scratched fiddle and played Tam Lin. 

Then, something had seized him. He’d run to that old book of songs Tam Amber had hummed his way through so many times over and started playing them. He played every song- every name ballad, every ditty, every mourning song, every jig, every mountain air, every instrumental piece he still knew by heart. When he was finally finished, the silence echoed around his house, and it was louder than any song he’d ever heard in all his life.

So Clerk Carmine found himself alone. 

The old fiddle player of Twelve, that’s what he became known as. Never known by his name. Playing at weddings. Parties. Funerals. Unaccompanied. Maybe a little grouchy. Alone. Always, always alone. Like in Lenore Dove’s ballad. Nameless here for evermore. 

He’d never have thought Burdock’s daughter would’ve been Reaped, but then again, who ever thought their child would be?

But nobody’d thought her sister would volunteer for her. And come home with her partner. Partner in maybe more ways than one. 

Lucy Gray would’ve been obsessed with Katniss’ story. Lenore Dove would’ve been obsessed with her refusal to play the Games by anything other than her own rules by the time she finally reached the end with Peeta. Barb Azure would’ve been proud of her great-granddaughter for her tenacity. Maude Ivory would’ve adored the love story, no matter how real or not real it ended up being. Tam Amber would’ve loved that Katniss had done it all while wearing the pin he’d made for Maysilee Donner. 

Clerk Carmine couldn’t bring himself past the moment where Katniss had sung little Rue to her eternal sleep in the sweet old hereafter with the tune Lucy Gray had used to sing to him and Maude Ivory. He could hear Burdock in her voice. And Lucy Gray, but that came more after. 

Clerk Carmine reaches into the bag he brought with him. Beneath the food, and the book of ballads Tam Amber had spent the last few years of his life obsessed with, is a small stone. A pale shade of brownish-grey. Taupe. 

Carved into the stone, no bigger than a brick, is a little snippet of Billy Taupe’s name ballad. 

It fits Clerk Carmine’s life better than Billy Taupe’s, but he can’t leave his blood-brother out, even sixty-six years afterwards and everything he’d done. It’s about time, anyhow. 

Oh, where have you been, Billy boy, Billy boy?

Where have you been, charming Billy?

Katniss had never struck him as a singer before the rebellion, but during it, she sang like the mockingjay on her pin. Probably why the leaders in Thirteen had made her just that. The Mockingjay. Because of Tam Amber’s pin, and helped along by Lucy Gray’s song. 

Afterwards, now, she still sings. He’d passed by her humming Billy Boy under her breath in town. That’s what started the earworm.

He places the stone down a little further away from everyone else’s, but close enough that he’s still there. Somehow. Because even though Billy Taupe had left them, even though he’d gotten Lucy Gray Reaped for the Games, he was still his brother. 

They’d never figured out who’d killed him and Mayfair Lipp. 

Even now, all this time later, part of him wonders what would’ve happened if his brother hadn’t been gunned down that day during their performance. How would he have reacted to Lucy Gray going missing just a little bit after?

“Where have you been, Billy boy, Billy boy?” He whispers under his breath. “Where have you been?”

Clerk Carmine pushes himself to his feet. He may be old, but he doesn’t think he needs a cane just yet. The sun is streaming down over the Covey graveyard, shining off the shades of white and grey; the spots of color in the green grasses from Barb Azure and Tam Amber’s graves almost liven them up. 

He will be here someday. Hopefully not someday too soon. 

The thought comes on him quick, like a brick to the skull, almost knocking him back onto the ground. Any bit of melancholic peace he had while reminiscing at his family’s graves and memorials is gone, replaced with a kind of sick feeling in his chest. 

Who will bury him? 

Who will carve the verse into his stone? Who will get a stone the perfect shade of carmine for him? He has no family left, no descendants of his own, the only person left is-

The girl on fire. The Mockingjay. Burdock’s voice, Lucy Gray’s song. A little sister that looked like Maude Ivory. 

A not yet eighteen-year-old girl who has lost her whole family to the Capitol, as well as her childhood, and yet still came back to District Twelve with burn scars that match her partner’s as he limps along on one artificial leg. 

Katniss. Little Burdie Everdeen’s daughter.

A girl. A traumatized one, at that. He remembers how Lucy Gray used to shake, how Maude Ivory screamed after a nightmare, how he still wakes up from his own of Lucy Gray being swallowed up by rainbow snakes until he can’t tell what’s her and what’s snake anymore. And Katniss has been a plaything of the Capitol’s arena not once but twice in a row, and then was the face of a revolution. She deserves her peace. 

Still, it’s not entirely for unselfish reasons that Clerk Carmine, that afternoon, finds himself hobbling along the long road to the Twelve that is being rebuilt. In the bag at his side is the book of ballads Tam Amber hummed the last bit of his life through over and over again. In his other hand is his fiddle case. 

He remembers what Lucy Gray used to say after their performances at the Hob. Sometimes it’s those who can’t pay for music that need it most. 

Workers are still clearing rubble; they’d been mostly focused on the bodies before, but now everyone’s buried in the Meadow, and they can focus on cleaning up everything in Twelve that got firebombed…which was everything. 

Clerk Carmine sets his bag down on a pile of concrete blocks, then puts down his fiddle case and opens it up. 

His fiddle is scratched and old beyond his imagination: it was someone else’s before it was his, and who knows how far back the line stretches. It was in his bag with the book of songs when the Hawthorne boy ran to his house, shouting to run to the Meadow. Luckily, the Covey lived further from the Seam than most, so his house wasn’t completely destroyed like most people’s in Twelve. So he’d been able to save his fiddle and play it at the wedding for the Victors from Four they’d had in Thirteen. 

He flips open the book and turns a few pages before tuning his fiddle. 

A few of the workers and people going through what used to be town glance at him, but don’t pay him any mind, really. Until he starts to play. 

Despite his old fingers, they start flying over the strings as he draws the bow back, then starts playing his backing part of Nothing You Can Take From Me. 

He remembers Lucy Gray singing it after she was Reaped. He remembers standing in the crowd, listening to Maude Ivory and Tam Amber sing before she began. 

It sounds odd without Tam Amber on his mandolin and Barb Azure on her bass, and without Lucy Gray and Maude Ivory singing, but he’s figured out how to play the backing and the melody at the same time after all these years. 

And so he goes through the book, playing his fiddle. He tries to pick the happiest tunes, the ones that make people want to bounce on their toes or dance. He plays for a long time, he’s not sure how long, but long enough that people start laughing and dancing just like he thought they would. 

After a few hours, he sits down, a little winded. Playing the fiddle for hours on end is hard work, and his joints and lungs aren’t what they used to be. 

A curly-haired blond boy, hardly a boy with his age and what he’s been through, walks up to him. He hobbles a bit from the leg the world knows is fake, and gnarled burn scars stretch over his fingers, palms, arms, face, as he holds out a small bundle in a white cloth. 

“I figured you would be hungry,” he says with a smile. “After playing for so long. Katniss thought you should have something.” 

“Were these her idea or yours?” Clerk Carmine huffs, though he gratefully takes and opens the bundle. Inside are small buns of bread with cheese on top. 

“Both, really,” Peeta says. “I realized after she said it that we don’t know your name. You’ve been here since before we were born and nobody knows it, we asked around. You’re just-” 

“The old fiddle player,” he grunts. “Nameless here forever more.” 

“Nobody deserves to be nameless,” Peeta insists. “Especially after all this.” He gestures to the workers, who have gone back to picking up rubble and tossing it into carts. “People need to remember.” 

“Ain’t nobody here who remembers me,” he says softly. “Now, I’m just a fiddle player.”

“But who are you?” Peeta presses. His eyes are piercing, but not sharp. 

Clerk Carmine opens his mouth, then pauses. He reaches over to his fiddle that’s been with him for so long. It’s all he’s got left now, besides some colorful graves and a book of songs. 

“My name’s Clerk Carmine of the Covey,” he whispers, running a finger over the body of his fiddle. “And I’ve been here in Twelve since the Games began.” 

As days go on, he and Peeta strike up an odd little friendship. Gradually, Katniss comes along, and once she hears that he knew Burdie Everdeen, she demands more stories, pulling out a big book of her own that she says is for memories. And so he tells the stories. 

Haymitch pipes up when he talks about Lucy Gray in the Capitol, talking about how he saw her on TV after his Games had ended. So breaks the first wall between them. 

Katniss learns of her Covey line, and when Clerk Carmine shows her the book of songs, she holds it almost reverently, tracing scarred and shaking fingers down the pages of Tam Amber’s careful handwriting, face lighting up when she sees a song she recognizes. She almost gasps when she sees that Lucy Gray wrote The Hanging Tree. 

Clerk Carmine and Haymitch sit down one evening as they watch the geese Haymitch has started to raise. They sit and Clerk Carmine finally apologizes for what he did- or rather, didn’t do twenty six years ago. Haymitch just laughs bitterly and says he chased off Burdie by throwing a rock at Asterid’s head because anybody he loved had to die by the Capitol. The Capitol had burned his house down with his momma and little brother still inside. The Capitol had planted those gumdrops because Haymitch Abernathy had been part of a rebel plot to blow up the arena and it had failed. 

And Clerk Carmine’s heart breaks a little more for the sixteen-year-old kid and the forty-two-year-old man sitting beside him, nursing a bottle of liquor a quarter of a century has dictated he can no longer live without. 

They spend the next few hours reminiscing about Lenore Dove. Haymitch tells him of the orange painted messages hidden around Twelve, and in the morning, Clerk Carmine goes on a wild goose chase trying to see if any are still there. 

One is. 

NO CAPITOL, NO HANGING TREE.

That’s his little Lenore Dovey. 

He gets older. He shows Katniss and Peeta the Covey graveyard, and they hold hands the whole time. Haymitch already knows where it is. He sits and reminisces there most days still, lying with his family. 

Clerk Carmine has outlived Coriolanus Snow. He’s outlived his Hunger Games. He’s outlived most of his family, except for his distant great-something, Katniss Everdeen, who used her own stubbornness and a song by Lucy Gray to help bring down the Capitol. 

He knows now who will bury him. They know how to. He knows that when he goes, Katniss will sing for him. His grave will be carmine red. He will be buried beside Tam Amber, and they will move Billy Taupe’s little memorial to be laying at the foot of his grave. 

And they know what he wants his stone to say. 

But for now, he is still alive in the old therebefore. So he’ll leave the verse for when he leaves and joins his family again after so long. As for now, he stands on the street with his fiddle in his arms, playing through his name ballad as the workers rebuild Twelve up from the ground. 

He closes his eyes and smiles as he gets to the verse he has chosen for his carmine stone. 

And it’s in and came her father dear, 

Said, “Daughter, let your mourning be.

We’ll take Clerk Saunders to his grave,

Then come back and comfort thee.”