All Along the Watchtower [Harlow/Kate/Kass]

Lt. Harlow Basra

He admired her insolence. The way she was rough and tumble, ready to stand a little straighter just as soon as she thought she could push back. Her comrade in arms did not scratch or hiss but instead kept a watchful eye. Careful not to upset someone with authority, but smart enough to know the language of doublespeak. Instead, Kassandra still grasped at the threat of violence – that at any point she might say or do something to hurt another, that her cruelty could be explosive and wound. Her courage had not yet been muted.

That would prove useful when the time came.

“I could see how you might believe having choices might make people more productive. But you have to remember, Kassandra, not everyone is as determined as you and Katelyn.” He said, hunched with his elbows on the table. These two had survived their harrowing ordeal and came out the other side, and for that, they would spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders. “You can’t trust the rest of your district to understand that some things must be done for the sake of everyone. Not just themselves or those that they love.”

Harlow turned his head to listen when Katelyn spoke.

He had decided that he did not like her.

Not because she had been outrageously rude or spoke out of turn, or even that she had proved herself difficult. But that he knew not matter how tightly he could turn the screws; she had already chosen to live in a world apart from where he resided. Katelyn Persimmon existed on a plane where the world had sprung free from black and white toward technicolor. Just a glimpse would be enough to weaken a man with ideas of freedom and liberty. Except she simmered between the shades of gray and rainbow of color. She did her best to wrench those free and clear – willing to live in the in between so long as it kept others safe.

“Wouldn’t that be a wonderful world, where a man could choose to be a baker, a hovercraft driver, or a rancher?” Harlow leaned back again into the booth. “Your children could grow up to be anything they’d ever wanted to be, and we’d all go to bed dreaming just how much better a place we could make this, now couldn’t we?”

He smiled a crooked grin before it slipped off his face, back to the cold, neutral expression he’d been giving Kass in his stare before.

“We tried all of that before, to let people choose how they wanted to live. There was war. Famine. Cruelty and injustice for the sake of advancing their own self-interest. Greed that almost ended the world as we know it.” Harlow ticked off what they’d taught him of the old world. “Inevitably, even for all the good a man can do, he can’t stop the impulse of another to take. And just as you say – give a one bread and another will ask, why does he get that and not me? And then he asks why his family, his friends, those that look and talk like him don’t have all the things he thinks he deserves.”

Harlow reached forward to hold a hand over the deck. He stared down at his hand a moment before splitting the cards in a cut and stacking them back on top of one another.

“Even men who join the peacekeepers forget our job is not to mete out justice. There’s no justice in Panem.” He smiled again. “Because the moment you think of justice and right and wrong, you’ve already lost. That would mean we think you all have the same right to judge what we – and you – do to one another. No, peacekeepers don’t give you justice.”

He shook his head and leaned further back into the booth. How many heads had he smashed himself, like overripe watermelon across fresh pavement on a summer’s day?

“The capitol gives you mercy.” He said, voice low. “Because mercy is forgiveness. And we spend our lives forgiving men like your mayor for ever thinking he had a right to justice.”