Hunger Games fic: Happy Endings Are Overrated (1/3), PG-13
Title: Happy Endings Are Overrated
Part One: The Rebel
Rating: PG-13
Word count: (this chapter) 3,301
Beta: thank you deathmallow
Characters: Mags, Finnick Odair, Haymitch Abernathy, Plutarch Heavensbee
Summary: Mags' life story - a tale told in reverse
Author's note: This started life as a pinch hit for rarewomen, but ended up not being needed after all. And that allowed me to give Mags' life the attention it deserved, but since I'd already become attached to Mags in the course of writing my monster Finnick/Annie fic, I decided to get the end of the story out of the way first, just to get that bit over with. I kinda like the result and I hope you do, too. Enjoy!
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13 July, 75
The pain was excruciating. She struggled just to breathe as she lost control of her spasming muscles. Her fingers and lips began to tingle, the sensation oddly comforting as it momentarily distracted from the agony of burning skin. Mags closed her eyes - her eyesight was failing, anyway - clinging to the last sight of her boy, handsome and strong, as she fought to pull in one last breath. He had to live, and she was the only thing holding him immobile, unable to leave her behind and do the things they all needed him to do.
Resolute, she breathed in the poison as deeply as she could and opened her mouth to scream as the fog shorted out already overloaded nerves, turning the pain to blessed numbness, instead. There was no sound, her vocal chords ruined when she breathed in the gas.
Te amo, hijo de mi corazón. Her last words to the green-eyed, bronze-haired boy, who’d grown into a good man in spite of the manipulations of Snow and the Capitol, rolled through her head like the tide. Vivo, hijo. Vivo.
4 July, 75
“Volunteer!”
Mags shouted it at the top of her lungs, making sure they heard her over Annie’s screams. The child was hysterical, understandably so. The girl had begun to whimper when they called Finnick’s name; a soft word and Mags’ steady hand on her arm had quieted her, but hearing her own name called moments later, the realization that both she and her love were headed back to the arena, had pushed Annie over the edge. Knowing that Annie in the arena would be a death sentence for them both, these children so dear to her, Mags had done the only thing she could do.
“Me ofrezco…” she whispered in the language of her childhood. The Peacekeeper who escorted her up the stairs to the stage couldn’t possibly recognize the words, even if he heard them. And if he recognized it for the treason it was, what could he do about it, this late in the game?
It’s better this way, Mags thought as she took her place beside Finnick. It was better that her tired, worn out body, flesh and bone that no longer obeyed her will, die. Her death in the arena would give her boy - and by extension, the rebellion - a chance to live.
21 July, 74
A fierce excitement welled up within Mags as she watched the girl from 12 pour poison berries into her district partner’s waiting hand. The words wouldn’t come, the left side of her face, of her entire body, refused to work, paralyzed for who knew how long by the stroke that had left her confined to a hospital bed, tied there by tubes and damned noisy machines. But her voice still worked and she used it to gain her son’s attention. When he looked up from his book - always with his nose stuck in a book, her Camilo - she flailed toward the television with the one arm that still mostly worked.
“Mama? What is it? Do you need water?”
Frustrated, Mags hooted louder, gestured more emphatically toward the television in the corner of the room, and finally Camilo understood. Reaching for the remote, he unmuted it just as Claudius Templesmith announced the winners - winners! - of the 74th Hunger Games: Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark of District 12.
Mags couldn’t contain her laughter and didn’t try. Poor Camilo stared at her as though the stroke had destroyed her mind as well as crippling her body, but her mind, trapped as it might be, was as sharp as it ever was. She stared, smiling with half of her face and all of her will, at the dark-haired, gray-eyed girl who herself stared defiantly at the hovercraft descending to return her and the boy to the Capitol.
Katniss Everdeen was going to set President Coriolanus Snow’s world on fire, and Margreta Moreno wanted nothing more than to watch it burn.
3 July, 74
Dipping a supper plate into hot, soapy water, Mags watched Finnick and Annie from her kitchen window. Following the hearty supper she had prepared, they walked hand-in-hand along the beach, heading in the general direction of their house at the northern end of the cove. It had been an enjoyable meal, with Finnick keeping both women laughing about a crab that had somehow hitched a ride on one of his father’s fishing nets only to escape and terrorized the seiner’s crew.
It was good to see Annie so relaxed; the poor child never had an easy time of it, this close to the Games. Once Finnick was sure Annie would be alright for a little while alone, he would return to discuss tomorrow’s reaping. They had a list of several likely volunteer candidates this year, unless, of course, LaSalle called a child who might stand a chance in the arena.
She had first suggested that they train their children for the Games nearly sixty years ago. And though the men and women who held the positions had changed several times since then, the mayor and the head school master still chose not to field volunteers every year. Unlike their fellow “Career” districts. The mayor in particular maintained that a victory was better when earned, as if the honor of two dead children was somehow more acceptable than one live child and the extra food a victory bought the entire district because that child had been trained.
Closing her eyes, Mags ran her washrag over the smooth surface of the plate in her hands, remembering the warm presence of Ewen at her side, his steady hands waiting to take the clean plate from her. She had always enjoyed doing the dishes, the slippery heat of the soapy water on her hands, the rhythm of it, especially with her beloved Ewen. Gone almost twenty years, she still missed him so much sometimes that it took her breath away, always at odd moments like this.
Reaching over the sink to set the plate in the drying rack, it was as though a shadow fell over Mags. She blinked to try to clear her vision, but only her right eye cooperated. The world tilted to the left and shattered as she fell. Her left arm scraped across the counter, but she felt only a fuzzy sensation of pressure. Her head hit the floor with a sickening thud.
As she blacked out, she wondered if she was dying.
5 July, 73
“Congratulations, Plutarch,” Mags said with a smile. She raised her glass in salute and Plutarch Heavensbee nodded once in gracious acceptance.
“What’d you do?” Haymitch asked, one eyebrow raised high as he approached them from the hors d’oeuvre table. He lifted a champagne flute from a passing tray and tossed the contents back as though it was a shot of whiskey, grimacing at the taste. Mags laughed.
“Our Plutarch has been promoted,” she murmured when Haymitch was close enough, her voice loud enough for the two men to hear her, but soft enough to foil the inevitable listening devices. “With any luck at all, he’ll be Head Gamemaker in a year or two.”
“Well, it might take a little longer than that,” Heavensbee demurred. “Crane is young and quite talented.”
“Sticks in your craw, don’t it, him getting it before you?” Heavensbee frowned at the victor from 12 and Mags reached up and swatted the back of Haymitch’s head. “Hey!”
“Behave, boy. Plutarch’s promotion is right on schedule. Any faster and we’d have our dear president looking into his background personally.” She lifted her glass to her lips and looked past Haymitch and Plutarch to the colorful crowd of Capitolites fussing over the dozen or so victors in the courtyard. The younger, more attractive ones, not like her and Haymitch. Her gaze fell on Finnick and Johanna, surrounded by a flock of admirers. “We’ve worked too hard to get where we are, my friends. With the Quell coming, we need to be careful.”
22 July, 72
From her console in the control room, Mags watched as the massive boy from District 2 pushed her tribute from the edge of the cliff into the depths of the abandoned quarry. She heard the report of a cannon over her headset a moment later; her monitor changed abruptly to static as the boy’s vital signs flatlined and she pulled her headset off. Luis Montero had been their first real hope, but that hope lay dead at the bottom of a rocky pit.
The rebellion would have to wait another year.
28 July, 70
“What do we do, Mags?” Finnick asked, a thread of near-panic in his voice. It was only his second time out as a mentor, his first time in the control room during either a major crisis or with a tribute who had a real chance at surviving.
Mags watched the roiling, swirling flood waters on the screen, glanced at the girl’s vital signs on the monitor. Her pulse and respiration both were near the top of the scale, but that wasn’t surprising. Nor was it alarming, in and of itself. Not under the circumstances. She laid a calming hand on Finnick’s knee.
“We wait, hijo. Annie is a strong swimmer.” She nodded toward the chaotic scene in the arena, the feed that showed the girl riding out the waves, bobbing to the surface for a great gulp of air before the currents dragged her under once more. “She’ll sink or swim on her own, boy, and there’s not a thing we can do for her. Not right now.”
8 July, 68
Finnick slunk into the District 4 suite and headed to his room, doing his level best to avoid detection. Concerned, Mags called his name, but he didn’t stop, just hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself look smaller. Moving more quickly through the room, the boy didn’t say a word and he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Ignoring Phineas LaSalle’s questions, Mags followed her boy with a sinking heart.
He had closed the door behind him, but it had no lock - none of the doors in the Training Center living quarters did - and when a light knock elicited no response, Mags opened it in time to see Finnick hurl his expensive jacket at the corner near the bathroom. It fell in a crumpled heap to the floor as he yanked his thin shirt over his head and sent it sailing through the air after the jacket. He reached the bathroom and switched on the light, illuminating at least a dozen bright red welts on his back, a couple of them oozing blood.
“Madre de Dios…” Mags gasped, striding across the room toward him. Finnick whirled around, cutting off her sight of the damage; he grabbed at the door jamb with one hand to steady himself when his movement turned out to be a little too fast. A flash of fear on his expressive face caught at her heart and she stopped a few feet away.
“Damn it, Mags, don’t do that here.” He didn’t refer to her sneaking up on him, and she laughed bitterly.
“It’s nothing those who listen haven’t heard before.” Even so, she said nothing else in Castellan. Taking a couple of steps closer to him, she reached out to touch his right collar bone, where some of the angry red marks extended over his shoulder, but he stumbled backward, desperate that she not touch him. Mags jerked her hand away as if stung.
The boy’s eyes were nearly black, his pupils dilated to the point there was only a thin line of green remaining, and he held himself so utterly still just then that she could see the tattoo of his pulse racing beneath the skin of his throat. Swallowing her questions and her worry, she breathed deeply to calm her own racing pulse.
“Don’t forget we have a mandatory party this evening,” she told him when she wanted nothing more than to gather him in her arms and tell him that it would all be okay, even though it would have been a lie. Finnick blinked a couple of times and straightened, standing a little taller, and some of the trapped look leached out of his too dark eyes.
“I know, Mags.” He looked down at the marks on his skin, stared at them a moment before looking back up at her. “I probably should have just gone straight to Remake, but…” He shrugged, trying for nonchalance, but not quite achieving it. “I need a shower.” He started to close the bathroom door, taking a step back into the light and drawing Mags’ gaze again to the painful-looking welts. She started to offer him something to help with the pain, but stopped, leaving the words unsaid. Instead, she nodded and turned away, feeling sick inside. Sweet Mother, he’s only seventeen.
“Do me a favor, boy,” she said when she reached the door, aware that he still stood in the bathroom doorway, watching her. “Try not to mix alcohol with the drugs.”
*
Mags rested her arms on the low wall that surrounded the Training Center roof and watched the city lights below as she waited for Haymitch Abernathy. From this high up, the Capitol was a beautiful, if cold, sight, but Mags didn’t really see the tableau laid out before her. Instead, she replayed in her mind the party she’d just left, the sight of Finnick with the much older woman who had bought his company for the evening, and earlier that afternoon, when he’d returned from “entertaining” one of his less civilized “patrons.” She hated that they all simply accepted such things as normal; it had become part of being a victor, at least for some, just as it had become normal to let their children be pieces in a deadly game, year after year.
The sound of the wind chimes scattered throughout the gardens behind her masked Haymitch’s approach, but even so, it was no surprise when he joined her at the wall. The two of them stood side by side for a moment, breathing in the illusion of freedom that the rooftop gardens always seemed to give. He offered her a drink from the bottle he held, but Mags demurred and he shrugged and drank from it himself.
Swallowing whatever liquor was in the bottle, Haymitch began, “After our talk last year, I got to thinking…” He paused, considering what he wanted to say. “I’ve done a lot of thinking over the years, sitting in that damned control room.” The wind that was as much a fixture of the Training Center rooftop as the gardens tugged at Mags’ hair, pulling some of it free from the chignon someone had decided she should wear for the party; she brushed away the resulting tickle.
“I have no doubt of that, boy.” Haymitch had been the sole mentor to two children for his district every year since the last Quarter Quell. She and a few of the others gave him what support they could; no one should go through the Capitol’s damned Games alone.
Laughing, Haymitch leaned in a little closer to Mags. “You and Greasy Sae are the only two people I know who call me ‘boy.’” She had no idea who Greasy Sae was and she didn’t want to be up here for what remained of the night.
“These old bones are tired, Haymitch,” she told him, a bit of a bite in her tone as she glanced over her shoulder at him. He nodded once, short and sharp.
“Every year, it seems, things get worse in the districts, rising quotas for coal or shrimp or cloth. They tell us the higher quotas are to make up for some shortfall, but they never seem to go back down again.” Listening intently, she wondered where he was going with this, although given his desire for privacy, she had her suspicions. “And every year we have twenty-three dead kids to go along with it just plain getting harder to live.” He looked away from Mags then, back out over the city lights, and took another swallow from the bottle. “In spite of what the Capitol promises, it ain’t a damned picnic for that one kid who survives.”
“It never has been,” she told him. “But it has indeed become worse with the years.” Looking over at Mags once more, Haymitch turned his back on the city.
“There is one thing we victors have going for us.” She raised her eyebrows in question. “Come Games time, we get to go to the Capitol, travel across other districts to get there. We can see what it’s like for ourselves and talk to people, even if it is only once a year.” He drinks again. “Twice, if one of our kids happens to make it.” Mags’ heart beat faster, fueled by a growing excitement. “Most of us enjoy a level of respect within our own districts. We all of us do what the Capitol tells us to do.” He grinned down at her and lowered his voice. “But what if we didn’t?”
A measure of terror at what he proposed filled her, but then she remembered Finnick with his arm around the waist of a woman old enough to be his mother, the awful marks on his back, Gloss in the embrace of one of the president’s advisors when she knew for a fact the boy would rather be in his room with a book.
“It won’t be easy,” Haymitch continued. “But if we’re smart about it, if we take it slow and steady, we could make a change.”
Mags remembered a time before the Capitol. She had known freedom once. Her papa and brother had fought to keep that freedom, had fought for the right of their people to live their lives as they chose. But her papa and brother had died and the freedom they had fought so hard for died with them. Even her mother had died because of the Capitol. She didn’t have to think about what Haymitch proposed; her decision had long since been made.
“Woof will join us,” she told Haymitch, thinking of the elder victor from 8. Woof had said things recently that indicated he, too, was concerned for his district. “We need to keep it small, for now, and recruit people only as we need them.”
2 August, 67
Raising her face to the sun, Mags closed her eyes and listened to the gulls as they wheeled and dove toward the water. The waves broke against the sand, their rhythm soothing. She breathed deeply, letting the scents and sounds of the sea wash over her; soon enough the salt of it would wash over her, too, or at least over her bare feet. She wondered if it could wash her away, or if she’d allow it to happen, given the opportunity.
Finnick wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t even look at her. And she didn’t blame him. She’d done what she could for him, called Haymitch, hoping he could help the boy through it, this thing they both shared. Mags was too old when Snow came to power for anyone to be interested in using her the way they had once used Haymitch or the way they now used her sweet boy. He was only sixteen. Only sixteen.
The tears ran unchecked down her cheeks. We can’t go on like this, she thought. They promise us that it ends when we leave the arena, but it doesn’t end. It never ends.
“Dulce madre de Dios,” she whispered, the words dredged from her memories, a mantra her mother once used when she needed more strength than she thought she had, “esto debe terminar.”
Sweet mother of God, this must end.
Part II: The Victor
Part One: The Rebel
Rating: PG-13
Word count: (this chapter) 3,301
Beta: thank you deathmallow
Characters: Mags, Finnick Odair, Haymitch Abernathy, Plutarch Heavensbee
Summary: Mags' life story - a tale told in reverse
Author's note: This started life as a pinch hit for rarewomen, but ended up not being needed after all. And that allowed me to give Mags' life the attention it deserved, but since I'd already become attached to Mags in the course of writing my monster Finnick/Annie fic, I decided to get the end of the story out of the way first, just to get that bit over with. I kinda like the result and I hope you do, too. Enjoy!
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13 July, 75
The pain was excruciating. She struggled just to breathe as she lost control of her spasming muscles. Her fingers and lips began to tingle, the sensation oddly comforting as it momentarily distracted from the agony of burning skin. Mags closed her eyes - her eyesight was failing, anyway - clinging to the last sight of her boy, handsome and strong, as she fought to pull in one last breath. He had to live, and she was the only thing holding him immobile, unable to leave her behind and do the things they all needed him to do.
Resolute, she breathed in the poison as deeply as she could and opened her mouth to scream as the fog shorted out already overloaded nerves, turning the pain to blessed numbness, instead. There was no sound, her vocal chords ruined when she breathed in the gas.
Te amo, hijo de mi corazón. Her last words to the green-eyed, bronze-haired boy, who’d grown into a good man in spite of the manipulations of Snow and the Capitol, rolled through her head like the tide. Vivo, hijo. Vivo.
4 July, 75
“Volunteer!”
Mags shouted it at the top of her lungs, making sure they heard her over Annie’s screams. The child was hysterical, understandably so. The girl had begun to whimper when they called Finnick’s name; a soft word and Mags’ steady hand on her arm had quieted her, but hearing her own name called moments later, the realization that both she and her love were headed back to the arena, had pushed Annie over the edge. Knowing that Annie in the arena would be a death sentence for them both, these children so dear to her, Mags had done the only thing she could do.
“Me ofrezco…” she whispered in the language of her childhood. The Peacekeeper who escorted her up the stairs to the stage couldn’t possibly recognize the words, even if he heard them. And if he recognized it for the treason it was, what could he do about it, this late in the game?
It’s better this way, Mags thought as she took her place beside Finnick. It was better that her tired, worn out body, flesh and bone that no longer obeyed her will, die. Her death in the arena would give her boy - and by extension, the rebellion - a chance to live.
21 July, 74
A fierce excitement welled up within Mags as she watched the girl from 12 pour poison berries into her district partner’s waiting hand. The words wouldn’t come, the left side of her face, of her entire body, refused to work, paralyzed for who knew how long by the stroke that had left her confined to a hospital bed, tied there by tubes and damned noisy machines. But her voice still worked and she used it to gain her son’s attention. When he looked up from his book - always with his nose stuck in a book, her Camilo - she flailed toward the television with the one arm that still mostly worked.
“Mama? What is it? Do you need water?”
Frustrated, Mags hooted louder, gestured more emphatically toward the television in the corner of the room, and finally Camilo understood. Reaching for the remote, he unmuted it just as Claudius Templesmith announced the winners - winners! - of the 74th Hunger Games: Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark of District 12.
Mags couldn’t contain her laughter and didn’t try. Poor Camilo stared at her as though the stroke had destroyed her mind as well as crippling her body, but her mind, trapped as it might be, was as sharp as it ever was. She stared, smiling with half of her face and all of her will, at the dark-haired, gray-eyed girl who herself stared defiantly at the hovercraft descending to return her and the boy to the Capitol.
Katniss Everdeen was going to set President Coriolanus Snow’s world on fire, and Margreta Moreno wanted nothing more than to watch it burn.
3 July, 74
Dipping a supper plate into hot, soapy water, Mags watched Finnick and Annie from her kitchen window. Following the hearty supper she had prepared, they walked hand-in-hand along the beach, heading in the general direction of their house at the northern end of the cove. It had been an enjoyable meal, with Finnick keeping both women laughing about a crab that had somehow hitched a ride on one of his father’s fishing nets only to escape and terrorized the seiner’s crew.
It was good to see Annie so relaxed; the poor child never had an easy time of it, this close to the Games. Once Finnick was sure Annie would be alright for a little while alone, he would return to discuss tomorrow’s reaping. They had a list of several likely volunteer candidates this year, unless, of course, LaSalle called a child who might stand a chance in the arena.
She had first suggested that they train their children for the Games nearly sixty years ago. And though the men and women who held the positions had changed several times since then, the mayor and the head school master still chose not to field volunteers every year. Unlike their fellow “Career” districts. The mayor in particular maintained that a victory was better when earned, as if the honor of two dead children was somehow more acceptable than one live child and the extra food a victory bought the entire district because that child had been trained.
Closing her eyes, Mags ran her washrag over the smooth surface of the plate in her hands, remembering the warm presence of Ewen at her side, his steady hands waiting to take the clean plate from her. She had always enjoyed doing the dishes, the slippery heat of the soapy water on her hands, the rhythm of it, especially with her beloved Ewen. Gone almost twenty years, she still missed him so much sometimes that it took her breath away, always at odd moments like this.
Reaching over the sink to set the plate in the drying rack, it was as though a shadow fell over Mags. She blinked to try to clear her vision, but only her right eye cooperated. The world tilted to the left and shattered as she fell. Her left arm scraped across the counter, but she felt only a fuzzy sensation of pressure. Her head hit the floor with a sickening thud.
As she blacked out, she wondered if she was dying.
5 July, 73
“Congratulations, Plutarch,” Mags said with a smile. She raised her glass in salute and Plutarch Heavensbee nodded once in gracious acceptance.
“What’d you do?” Haymitch asked, one eyebrow raised high as he approached them from the hors d’oeuvre table. He lifted a champagne flute from a passing tray and tossed the contents back as though it was a shot of whiskey, grimacing at the taste. Mags laughed.
“Our Plutarch has been promoted,” she murmured when Haymitch was close enough, her voice loud enough for the two men to hear her, but soft enough to foil the inevitable listening devices. “With any luck at all, he’ll be Head Gamemaker in a year or two.”
“Well, it might take a little longer than that,” Heavensbee demurred. “Crane is young and quite talented.”
“Sticks in your craw, don’t it, him getting it before you?” Heavensbee frowned at the victor from 12 and Mags reached up and swatted the back of Haymitch’s head. “Hey!”
“Behave, boy. Plutarch’s promotion is right on schedule. Any faster and we’d have our dear president looking into his background personally.” She lifted her glass to her lips and looked past Haymitch and Plutarch to the colorful crowd of Capitolites fussing over the dozen or so victors in the courtyard. The younger, more attractive ones, not like her and Haymitch. Her gaze fell on Finnick and Johanna, surrounded by a flock of admirers. “We’ve worked too hard to get where we are, my friends. With the Quell coming, we need to be careful.”
22 July, 72
From her console in the control room, Mags watched as the massive boy from District 2 pushed her tribute from the edge of the cliff into the depths of the abandoned quarry. She heard the report of a cannon over her headset a moment later; her monitor changed abruptly to static as the boy’s vital signs flatlined and she pulled her headset off. Luis Montero had been their first real hope, but that hope lay dead at the bottom of a rocky pit.
The rebellion would have to wait another year.
28 July, 70
“What do we do, Mags?” Finnick asked, a thread of near-panic in his voice. It was only his second time out as a mentor, his first time in the control room during either a major crisis or with a tribute who had a real chance at surviving.
Mags watched the roiling, swirling flood waters on the screen, glanced at the girl’s vital signs on the monitor. Her pulse and respiration both were near the top of the scale, but that wasn’t surprising. Nor was it alarming, in and of itself. Not under the circumstances. She laid a calming hand on Finnick’s knee.
“We wait, hijo. Annie is a strong swimmer.” She nodded toward the chaotic scene in the arena, the feed that showed the girl riding out the waves, bobbing to the surface for a great gulp of air before the currents dragged her under once more. “She’ll sink or swim on her own, boy, and there’s not a thing we can do for her. Not right now.”
8 July, 68
Finnick slunk into the District 4 suite and headed to his room, doing his level best to avoid detection. Concerned, Mags called his name, but he didn’t stop, just hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself look smaller. Moving more quickly through the room, the boy didn’t say a word and he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Ignoring Phineas LaSalle’s questions, Mags followed her boy with a sinking heart.
He had closed the door behind him, but it had no lock - none of the doors in the Training Center living quarters did - and when a light knock elicited no response, Mags opened it in time to see Finnick hurl his expensive jacket at the corner near the bathroom. It fell in a crumpled heap to the floor as he yanked his thin shirt over his head and sent it sailing through the air after the jacket. He reached the bathroom and switched on the light, illuminating at least a dozen bright red welts on his back, a couple of them oozing blood.
“Madre de Dios…” Mags gasped, striding across the room toward him. Finnick whirled around, cutting off her sight of the damage; he grabbed at the door jamb with one hand to steady himself when his movement turned out to be a little too fast. A flash of fear on his expressive face caught at her heart and she stopped a few feet away.
“Damn it, Mags, don’t do that here.” He didn’t refer to her sneaking up on him, and she laughed bitterly.
“It’s nothing those who listen haven’t heard before.” Even so, she said nothing else in Castellan. Taking a couple of steps closer to him, she reached out to touch his right collar bone, where some of the angry red marks extended over his shoulder, but he stumbled backward, desperate that she not touch him. Mags jerked her hand away as if stung.
The boy’s eyes were nearly black, his pupils dilated to the point there was only a thin line of green remaining, and he held himself so utterly still just then that she could see the tattoo of his pulse racing beneath the skin of his throat. Swallowing her questions and her worry, she breathed deeply to calm her own racing pulse.
“Don’t forget we have a mandatory party this evening,” she told him when she wanted nothing more than to gather him in her arms and tell him that it would all be okay, even though it would have been a lie. Finnick blinked a couple of times and straightened, standing a little taller, and some of the trapped look leached out of his too dark eyes.
“I know, Mags.” He looked down at the marks on his skin, stared at them a moment before looking back up at her. “I probably should have just gone straight to Remake, but…” He shrugged, trying for nonchalance, but not quite achieving it. “I need a shower.” He started to close the bathroom door, taking a step back into the light and drawing Mags’ gaze again to the painful-looking welts. She started to offer him something to help with the pain, but stopped, leaving the words unsaid. Instead, she nodded and turned away, feeling sick inside. Sweet Mother, he’s only seventeen.
“Do me a favor, boy,” she said when she reached the door, aware that he still stood in the bathroom doorway, watching her. “Try not to mix alcohol with the drugs.”
*
Mags rested her arms on the low wall that surrounded the Training Center roof and watched the city lights below as she waited for Haymitch Abernathy. From this high up, the Capitol was a beautiful, if cold, sight, but Mags didn’t really see the tableau laid out before her. Instead, she replayed in her mind the party she’d just left, the sight of Finnick with the much older woman who had bought his company for the evening, and earlier that afternoon, when he’d returned from “entertaining” one of his less civilized “patrons.” She hated that they all simply accepted such things as normal; it had become part of being a victor, at least for some, just as it had become normal to let their children be pieces in a deadly game, year after year.
The sound of the wind chimes scattered throughout the gardens behind her masked Haymitch’s approach, but even so, it was no surprise when he joined her at the wall. The two of them stood side by side for a moment, breathing in the illusion of freedom that the rooftop gardens always seemed to give. He offered her a drink from the bottle he held, but Mags demurred and he shrugged and drank from it himself.
Swallowing whatever liquor was in the bottle, Haymitch began, “After our talk last year, I got to thinking…” He paused, considering what he wanted to say. “I’ve done a lot of thinking over the years, sitting in that damned control room.” The wind that was as much a fixture of the Training Center rooftop as the gardens tugged at Mags’ hair, pulling some of it free from the chignon someone had decided she should wear for the party; she brushed away the resulting tickle.
“I have no doubt of that, boy.” Haymitch had been the sole mentor to two children for his district every year since the last Quarter Quell. She and a few of the others gave him what support they could; no one should go through the Capitol’s damned Games alone.
Laughing, Haymitch leaned in a little closer to Mags. “You and Greasy Sae are the only two people I know who call me ‘boy.’” She had no idea who Greasy Sae was and she didn’t want to be up here for what remained of the night.
“These old bones are tired, Haymitch,” she told him, a bit of a bite in her tone as she glanced over her shoulder at him. He nodded once, short and sharp.
“Every year, it seems, things get worse in the districts, rising quotas for coal or shrimp or cloth. They tell us the higher quotas are to make up for some shortfall, but they never seem to go back down again.” Listening intently, she wondered where he was going with this, although given his desire for privacy, she had her suspicions. “And every year we have twenty-three dead kids to go along with it just plain getting harder to live.” He looked away from Mags then, back out over the city lights, and took another swallow from the bottle. “In spite of what the Capitol promises, it ain’t a damned picnic for that one kid who survives.”
“It never has been,” she told him. “But it has indeed become worse with the years.” Looking over at Mags once more, Haymitch turned his back on the city.
“There is one thing we victors have going for us.” She raised her eyebrows in question. “Come Games time, we get to go to the Capitol, travel across other districts to get there. We can see what it’s like for ourselves and talk to people, even if it is only once a year.” He drinks again. “Twice, if one of our kids happens to make it.” Mags’ heart beat faster, fueled by a growing excitement. “Most of us enjoy a level of respect within our own districts. We all of us do what the Capitol tells us to do.” He grinned down at her and lowered his voice. “But what if we didn’t?”
A measure of terror at what he proposed filled her, but then she remembered Finnick with his arm around the waist of a woman old enough to be his mother, the awful marks on his back, Gloss in the embrace of one of the president’s advisors when she knew for a fact the boy would rather be in his room with a book.
“It won’t be easy,” Haymitch continued. “But if we’re smart about it, if we take it slow and steady, we could make a change.”
Mags remembered a time before the Capitol. She had known freedom once. Her papa and brother had fought to keep that freedom, had fought for the right of their people to live their lives as they chose. But her papa and brother had died and the freedom they had fought so hard for died with them. Even her mother had died because of the Capitol. She didn’t have to think about what Haymitch proposed; her decision had long since been made.
“Woof will join us,” she told Haymitch, thinking of the elder victor from 8. Woof had said things recently that indicated he, too, was concerned for his district. “We need to keep it small, for now, and recruit people only as we need them.”
2 August, 67
Raising her face to the sun, Mags closed her eyes and listened to the gulls as they wheeled and dove toward the water. The waves broke against the sand, their rhythm soothing. She breathed deeply, letting the scents and sounds of the sea wash over her; soon enough the salt of it would wash over her, too, or at least over her bare feet. She wondered if it could wash her away, or if she’d allow it to happen, given the opportunity.
Finnick wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t even look at her. And she didn’t blame him. She’d done what she could for him, called Haymitch, hoping he could help the boy through it, this thing they both shared. Mags was too old when Snow came to power for anyone to be interested in using her the way they had once used Haymitch or the way they now used her sweet boy. He was only sixteen. Only sixteen.
The tears ran unchecked down her cheeks. We can’t go on like this, she thought. They promise us that it ends when we leave the arena, but it doesn’t end. It never ends.
“Dulce madre de Dios,” she whispered, the words dredged from her memories, a mantra her mother once used when she needed more strength than she thought she had, “esto debe terminar.”
Sweet mother of God, this must end.
Part II: The Victor