Chapter Text
It is the day before the reaping, and my mother is being lifted into the ground. I can’t say that, with the soil dusting my worn hands, I feel much at all. I stare at the black, wooden box now laying still in the ditch, with a sort of “nothing” expression on my face. It’s the same face I learned to wear when my mother would beat me, or yell at me for something. It’s the kind of face that doesn’t offer up anything, not too little to be considered ignorance, but not too much of any other emotion either. That’s how it was with her, how all of us were, you never really said much. We’d say our thank-you’s and please’s at dinner, we’d be silent in the bakery, and we’d carry sacks of flour with a simple smile on our faces. I think the only real words spoken by any of us other than my mother were small courtesies and the hushed conversations between my father and the hunters that used to sneak by our back door.
When I look up at my father now, summer rain pelting his cheeks, I see the same “nothing” expression on his face. It tells me all I need to know about the coming months. They will pass in silence. Days will be spent reading books, sitting on the porch, decorating cakes, and staring out of the window. Tomorrow will be especially silent, as we stand in the muddy square and pretend we don’t expect 2 more malnourished Seam kids to be killed. Despite this, every single time those 2 kids get picked, it never gets easier to watch the stony look on their faces, sunken in with charcoal dust, eyes just pricked with tears. It’s never good to show your vulnerabilities in the reaping unless you actually have some strength to hide. God knows Seam kids have nothing but brittle bones and an empty stomach to show.
District 12’s graveyard is on an empty heath, turf trodden to just mud, in the hills opposite the Victor’s Village. It’s littered with graves, rocks shoved in the ground when families only had the money for the hole. It always looks a little ghostly, especially knowing that beneath you is crammed with bodies. Nothing grows in the graveyard. It’s just mud, grave, mud, all along the horizon. Sometimes you’ll see a person or two gathered in mourning.
But today?
There isn’t anybody besides us. Just our family, standing next to each other, saying nothing and staring at the ground. The weather is just perfect for a funeral. The sky is that sick, overcast, grey colour, with a tumultuous riot of clouds spilling all over each other, spitting out shards of rain. But in that awful way, the rain doesn’t make you cold, no, July rain makes you feel like a corpse yourself. A damp, rotten body, all humid but never dry. I shouldn’t be thinking about corpses right now. Not here.
My focus turns back from the rain to my oldest brother, who has just finished shovelling dirt on top of the coffin, and slammed the shovel into the ground next to it with a satisfying crunch.
My family all take one last look, and turn to leave. My feet remain planted on the ground.
“You coming?” My father asks me.
I look into his stormy blue eyes that we all share. My mother was the outlier, she had a sort of greenish, grey-blue, but if she ever heard you compare it to the grey of the Seam, she’d give you more than a scolding. I sigh, and lower my gaze. He takes it as my answer, doesn’t respond, and he and my brothers simply continue walking down the heath towards the centre of our district.
They’ll be heading to their homes, with their wives and children. Technically, they’re my little nieces and nephews, but it’s not like I even know their names. I still live at the bakery, now just with my father. As I watch them go, I wonder how long it will take until he will start up my mother’s spiel.
“When are you going to stop leeching off of this family, and get yourself a wife?” She would say.
I always supposed that, when the time came, I would marry some merchant girl. Maybe Delly Cartwright, I could probably handle that. Comments like that weren’t uncommon in our house - if my mother didn’t say something like that to you in passing, you were probably in even more trouble. She had a way about her, every living moment with her was expecting some punishment, and every single day she fulfilled and sometimes exceeded those expectations. It could be anything. Something as simple as not saying “Thank you” loud enough, to as much as burning a loaf of bread. I wince at the thought. Days like this always remind me of then. The ‘girl in the rain’. That was the nickname I came up with, that danced around my mind. All skin and bones with no voice left to beg for scraps as water skittered down off the tree she was under. Katniss Everdeen. She never acknowledged me after that. Except, perhaps, when I got reaped, just before Gale Hawthorne volunteered. I think for a second, wondering if at that moment she remembered the bread.
Probably not.
I stay at the grave, looking down at the freshly disturbed earth, fiddling with my fingers. I should feel something. Something more than this. Nothing offers itself up as an emotion to facade. I’m standing in a field of tombstone roses, and all I can think is how much I don’t care. I sigh again. I’ve gotten pretty good at sighing. I’m just about to turn away when I hear a gasp, and a crunch of body weight hitting the dirt.
I turn to see, a couple graves along and behind me, a cloaked figure kneeling in the dirt, back quaking in that telltale sign of grief and tears. I lift my hand, motioning my approach, but I doubt they’ve seen me. I walk myself up to the figure, bend down and lift my hand out.
“Are you alright?” I ask, leaving my hand barely hovering above the person’s back.
The figure gasps again at my words, pushing me away and tumbling backwards. The hood on their head falls, revealing dark, wet, knotted hair and a flash of dirty skin. Shit. Probably someone mourning their child lost to starvation or something, and I’ve just interrupted. They manage to topple me over, my back landing in the mud, and for a moment all the air in my chest escapes. I start wheezing out, blinking my eyes as I adjust back to normal. When I look up, grey eyes catch my gaze.
Sunken face, wide eyes, lips drawn in a line, dark hair pushed to the side. I know her. The last time those eyes looked back at me was on TV, when she made eye contact with the camera last year at some interview. I mentally curse myself for essentially shoving a not only Victor, but the girl in the rain, into the mud at a graveyard. We are at a standoff for a moment, staring at eachother like a deer in headlights.
I break the silence first.
“Uh..” I mumble. Way to go, Mellark. “Excuse me.”
I jump up, straightening my coat and hurrying down the heath, no doubt looking like I’d soiled myself.
---
When I wake up, I wince at the light streaming through the window that my father has just uncovered. He looks at me with his lips in a thin line, motioning his hands to the garments laid out across a chair at the end of my bed, before trudging out. Reaping day. Mandatory attendance, unless you are old or dying. I feel like it. And, for some paltry reason, we have to dress the smartest our closets allow. For most, that means some trousers and your dad’s shirt. For me, it’s my bakery shirt, spare the apron. It’s the most formal thing I own.
For the next 20 minutes, I lay still on my squeaky, childhood bed. My feet stick out off the end of it, it’s rusted and if more than one person were to lay on it, I think it would genuinely fall through the floor. I’ve slept in this room every night for 26 years. It’s not like I couldn’t get a girlfriend, or get married. I saw the way girls looked at me at school, and now I see the way all the unmarried Seam girls look at me. But marriage in District 12 means children, and children mean names in the reaping bowl. I couldn’t do that. I always wanted kids. But not here, not with the games. And that means not ever. I brush the thought away and sit up, wiping the little sleep from my eyes and swinging my legs round to plant them on the floorboards. I am still once more. Most mornings for me follow this pattern, waking up and wasting a ridiculous amount of minutes to do one simple action. However, I don’t have the time to do that on this particular morning. I get up, get changed and swipe a razor over my upper lip above the basin.
I hurry downstairs, where my father is waiting by the door, a stoic look in his eye. He’s practically wearing the same as me if not only a size bigger. He doesn’t say a word, just pulls the door open to usher me outside, locking it behind him. I follow my father toward the Justice Building as if I don’t know where I’m going. As we walk down the Peacekeeper-lined street, more and more people amass together, in front and behind us, as we all are herded onward. Like lambs to the slaughter, a common look of futile fear in all of our eyes. I can never eat on Reaping day, knowing the eyes of some kid walking past me will bring everything up onto the mud. To be completely honest, I don’t eat much anymore these days. I don’t have the same stocky look I used to, my cheeks less round and more sunken in - like the face of a chain-smoker. The world around you seems to get darker and more hopeless as you grow old.
The Peacekeepers beside us stick out like a sore thumb among the grey background of the District, staring silently at us behind a thick black visor. When I was young I saw a lot more of the Peacekeeper's faces than I do now. Old Cray kicked the bucket a couple of years back, rendering an even sicker man into power. Commander Lucius, the new Head Peacekeeper, didn’t even try to hide the exchanging of coins for sex like Cray did, and paid the poor girls even less. He almost publicly advertised it, having women line up at his back door in the middle of the day. Lucius even resurrected the whipping post in the square, though never being used other than a scare tactic. At least the Hob was still functioning. The ground is still wet muddy from yesterday’s rain, sticking to everyones boots like glue.
Upon reaching the square, the kids are coralled off into their sections, and us adults are pushed back to not take up too much screentime. I’ve heard terrified, flea-bitten kids are all the rage in the Capitol this season. I end up in a huddle of merchant men, some of my father’s friends I believe, at the back of the perimeter crowd. I don’t have anybody I care about that could be reaped, and I’m not a fan of the whole ceremony the Capitol makes it out to be. The processions go along as expected; as the clock reads closer to 2pm, the seats on the stage fill up and the kids file in. I like to get here a little early every year so I don’t have to stand by any of the kids. Or any of the parents.
When the clock hits the hour with a gong, the mayor steps up, pretending to ignore his displeasure with the two empty seats beside his. He reads his usual speech, which I tune out, until he begins to read the names of the 3 previous Victors from our district. Haymitch Abernathy and Katniss Everdeen are the only living ones we have. Haymitch is a rough looking man, early fifties though looking like he’s entering his sixties; with an unshaved chin, clothes dishevelled, and speaking in only garbled slurs as he wobbles to his seat with a not so rousing applause from everyone around me. He is drunk. Not an uncommon sight, he seemed to have drunk himself to oblivion after his Hunger Games.
Then something I don’t expect happens. Something that hasn’t happened since the Third Quarter Quell, when a little blonde girl with two braids instead of one, was picked from a bowl with only a few slips. Katniss Everdeen walks onto the stage, wobbling like the other Victor, to fall unceremoniously into her chair.
Oh.
Primrose was picked the year after Katniss in the Quarter Quell.
“As a reminder to the rebels, that the most decorated among us can and will lose their loved ones in the throes of war, this years tributes will be reaped from the existing pool of friends and family of previous Victors.”
I bet that Hunger Games almost caused a rebellion in the Capitol. Or they relished in the gruesome tragedy of it all. Most likely the latter. I remember everyone in the market avoiding Katniss like the plague during the leadup, and people would post anonymous 'tips' about whonwas sighted with her. The Hawthornes were singled out, led up onto the stage with Katniss' family, shivering and holding eachother like a vise. Quarter Quell ideas are meant to have been written at the end of the war, but who could avoid the glaring irony of the little sister she volunteered to save, could be picked for the consecutive game. Katniss was on stage for that. To spend every last moment with her eyes on Primrose, praying she wouldn’t be picked, only to watch her walk up there and stand tall with a brave face. Katniss, not once, appeared on the stage after that point.
There wasn’t time to question it before the names were being picked out. This year it was two Seam kids, no surprises there, but the boy rushed to the stage after his name was called. I recognised their faces, having seen them together about town. They were a couple, almost inseparable. And now they were being sent to the death. Together.
I can feel my jaw clenching as I watch them hold hands, with tears in their eyes, as their escort laughs and jokes about how romantic it all is. I decide I don’t want to watch any more of it, pushing my way through the crowd to the streets. A white gloved hand pushes me back, and metal juts into my stomach. “Attendance of the Reaping is mandatory. Please head back to your designated place.” Comes a low voice muffled by a helmet. I grit my teeth and turn around, edging back into the throng of people. I’m now closer to the stage than I was before, and with several Peacekeepers’ eyes boring into the back of my head. Great. When my focus returns back to the tributes, I notice a certain someone has had the same idea as me, and who is now being pushed back to her seat next to her fellow Victor. She can’t put up much of a fight, being intoxicated, so she just sits down and closes her eyes, hands fiddling with something shiny in her palm.
The square is packed up within hours. The tributes have gone into the Justice Building to say their goodbyes, and been shoved into a train towards the Capitol. All the cameras and lights have been shed from the surrounding buildings, and Peacekeepers have spread out through the streets to gather everyone back home. I watch trucks pull away through the front window, sitting on the last 2 steps of the stairs.
“Are you going to eat?” My father’s voice resonates from beside me, making me flinch.
“I’m not hungry,” I murmur. He doesn’t say anything else and paces off to the dining room to eat alone. I watch the sky turn dark, as dusk falls upon 12. Nobody is on the streets today. Everyone stays home after the reaping, either celebrating silently or mourning the loss of a child. I’m not sure what I’m doing. For the next two or so weeks, that is what I spend doing. Sitting at the bottom of the staircase letting time fly by, like a child being punished. I don’t bother to watch the ‘mandatory’ viewing of the games, and I know my father won’t force me to. If I’m not staring out the window, I’m decorating cakes or cleaning up the kitchen. Though, every year around this time I decorate a lot less cakes, and a lot less customers come in to buy them.
It’s a rainy night when the two kids from our District die. The second day of the games. They’d gotten lost in the fray of the Bloodbath, but found eachother later on. They went quickly. And together. I can’t say that if I wasn’t in the same situation I would do any different. They were on the edge of a cliff, holding hands, and decided to take a step forward. Two cannons sounded after a moment, and that was it. No more District 12. No more pretending like anyone here gives a fuck about these games. All we care about is watching our brothers and sisters in the arena, hoping they somehow get home not within the confines of a coffin.
I feel guilty for thinking that. I don’t have the right to think about it that way. These games have never harmed me. Even when I was reaped, someone much braver than I put hisself forward in my place. I don’t have kids. I don’t have loved ones. I don’t have anything. But I suppose that’s only fair, given nobody cares about me in return.
I go up to bed, and lie down, falling into a dreamless slumber.
—
I take the rope from the drawer, stuffing it into my backpack, followed by a knife and nothing else. I don’t need much where I’m going. I say goodbye to my father, muttering an excuse and walk out the back, swinging the screen door shut behind me. Following the track behind the row of shops, I find my way to the meadow, and eventually the supposedly electric fence. It’s cold to the touch, so I figure that’s not the way I’m going to go.
I find a weak spot in it, slipping my way underneath and heading into the undergrowth. If this were a different day, I would be scared shitless, watching every leaf for a twitch. But today? I’m walking through the brush as if on a morning stroll, looking for a sturdy enough tree that is climbable for me.
I never realised how beautiful the outskirts of 12 were, with winding streams, summer light pattering through bright green leaves, even the grey of the rocks around me light up from sunlight with such a fervour I almost believe I’m dreaming, as I hear a thunk of something hitting a solid object. However, in dreams, you don’t feel pain.
What?
I feel a searing heat in my leg. Sticky blood. Torn skin. An arrow, sticking right through my calf. I cry out in pain, feeling adrenaline course through me. But then I hear it. Another scream. Punctuated by abject terror, not hurt. And I recognise it. The scream I heard far too much, all those years ago at 16. The scream that made me want to reach through the screen to the rescue. Before I know it, I’m crawling, no, dragging myself towards a hunched body of one Katniss Everdeen.