AN: Chapter Two of WtW One Shots is the divergence springboard for this alternate universe. It is not at all necessary to have read it, but it might make the starting point a little clearer.
Disclaimer: I do not own The Hunger Games.
They do not have any unused scrap paper in the house. This is nothing new. Why would they spend what little money they have that is not already earmarked for necessities on something like paper? There are always so many other things that are priorities that they will get around to buying one day when there is enough food in the cupboards and coal in the bin and shoes that fit everyone and Gale's pants are not too short for him again and the soap has not run out and on and on and on for the list that never seems to get any smaller. When they do have scrap paper to be used for the purpose of things like writing down lists, it comes through round about acquisition - the backs of pay stubs or the margins of the few papers that actually get sent home from the school (the brown paper that some of the merchants use to wrap parcels is the other source, but that is even rarer to have at hand). There is no unused surface left from any of those sources - she has used every last bit of it. Every piece of open space at her disposal is covered with her attempts at figuring a way out of their situation that does not involve her eldest going to the Justice Building on his birthday.
Numbers have always come easily to Hazelle. They make sense to her. They work for her. She does not know why - they just do. She has always found a sense of comfort in looking at a column of figures and being able to use it to know that if they do this, then they will be able to afford whatever they were saving for at such and such a time. Numbers have always provided her with goals to reach as well as reassurances that the little deprivations that she employs in their household are succeeding in the larger goal (which has always been no extra slips of paper when she must surrender her children to the chances of Reaping Day).
This is the first time in her life that she has ever found herself wishing that the numbers did not speak so plainly to her. She is not sure if she even means that, but there is a part of her that would like to be able to pretend that she is not seeing what it is that she is seeing. She cannot make the numbers work. The garnishment from Ty's paycheck to cover the cost of taking their two youngest to see the District doctor is going to leave them too short to keep them going. Even with their carefully scrimped savings that was meant to cover the cost of keeping their home above frigid turned to mitigating the expense, it simply will not reach far enough. They will freeze or they will starve - they may do both at the same time. The woods are not going to save them this time. Even on the best days in the best of conditions, the produce of her husband and eldest slipping into the woods on the other side of the fence will not feed them completely (let alone provide them with the other things that are needed to keep their household going). The numbers simply do not work no matter how many times she redoes them.
She cannot argue that tessara will not make the difference between them making it to next spring or not. It will. She knows that it will. The supplies that come with tessara registries hardly constitute an abundance, but they do provide a baseline that, in theory, will keep someone alive. It offers a temporary level of breathing room. It means that everything else you do is an addition to subsistence. It means supplies from the woods can be used to move them into the category of slightly hungry instead of barely functioning. It means that what minute amount of the check that is still going to be coming to them can try to keep the stove going. There will be no wiggle room for anything - not shoes or replacing the clothes of a soon to be adolescent boy that is supposed to be hitting a series of growth spurts or cleaning supplies or any chance at affording medicine if something happens to one of the children again.
She understands where they are. She knows why they have not talked about it since that night when the words were first spoken. What is there to say? They both know exactly what they are facing and that all of the words in the world will not change that. She understands the desperate expression that haunts her husband's eyes. She sees the same expression when she catches a glimpse of herself in the shaving glass she gave him as a wedding present (one of the very few things from her childhood home that she had managed to save). She watches with a strange mix of heartbreak and pride the way that Gale is allowing this new responsibility to settle on his shoulders. He is pleased to be able to help, but he also understands far too much about how perilously close to the edge they are. All of them are silent on the topic.
She and Ty never wanted things to go this way. Some families are outwardly nonchalant about the process. They took tessara during their Reaping years after all, and the odds of it not being you are always greater than the odds otherwise. It is common for parents to hustle their children to the Justice Building on their twelfth birthday as if it is an expectation rather than a failure. The Hawthornes will never see it is anything other than a failure on their parts to provide properly for their children. He still looks at her sometimes - exhausted from a shift in the mines and trying to smile reassuringly for Gale - and she can see the question behind his eyes. What else were they supposed to do? She does not have an answer for that - not for what else they could have done. She is positive they would have been burying Rory and has only the barest tendrils of hope that Vick might not have joined him without intervention. They still almost lost Rory as it was.
Nearly two weeks have gone by since they made their no good choice to make decision, and her boys are not yet back to normal, but they are no longer in imminent danger. The danger, instead, has shifted forward. It has become one of battling the winter first for all of them and changing the odds of the Reaping bowl for Gale next. She has eight days left. The numbers remain unyielding.
Being in District Twelve is not conducive to finding alternatives. The District provides a limited number of options for employment. She thought, briefly, of the mines, but she does not know what she would do with Rory and Vick. They are too young for school yet, and they do not have any family that can step in and help. Paying someone to look after them would add another expense, and her paycheck would immediately become subject to the same garnishment as Ty's. It would get them out of debt faster, but it would not be quickly enough to solve the problem at hand. Between the garnishment and the extra expenses her working out would accrue, they might even end up worse off than they are now.
Ty would rather work himself into the ground than see her working in the mines. He used to joke that that was why she had agreed to marry him right out of school, but she has always known that there was a flicker of seriousness behind the words. He has been proud that he managed to keep his family what is actually fairly comfortable by Seam standards. He risks the woods to keep it that way and teaches Gale because he wants their children to have more options than playing by the rules will afford them. If her in the mines would have been feasible, then she knows that he would have swallowed his pride and honored her commitment to their children. She also knows that watching her drudge into the depths would kill him a little inside each day. (That, however, is an irrelevant consideration because knowing that Gale is about to be added to the roster is doing the exact same thing.)
The mines are simply not a practical choice for their present circumstances. They will not stop Gale from registering this year. Nothing she has found in her scribbling and figuring is enough to stop Gale from registering this year.
She had grown up taking tessara in the rough years following the Second Quarter Quell. Her husband had done likewise. They had both been adamant that they would do better by their children. The restrictions on life in the District are looser now. That does not mean that things are easy, but the woods have always helped. Her husband's willingness to risk it has been the buffer that they needed to help them scrape successfully by, but that has all disintegrated with the illness that swept through the District. One event - that was all that it had taken to shatter all of their carefully constructed plans. That was life (and as easy as it was to dwell on the inequities, she recognized that that was true of most everyone's lives). Plans do not always work out - they have to be adjusted. Sometimes, you have to devise a new plan.
That is what she is doing today. There is nothing in her figuring that will stop Gale from registering this year, but there are things that will mean that it will not have to be repeated in the next.
She should be able to rest again at night now that Rory and Vick have responded to the treatment from the doctor, but she can't because she is a different kind of desperate - no longer to keep her children breathing but to find some way of pulling themselves out of this hole they have fallen into before this becomes a cycle that they simply accept.
She has decided that she can take in laundry. She just has to find enough families that are willing to pay to have the chore taken off of their hands. If she is going to do this, then she figures that she might as well start at the top and work her way down. Thus, she finds herself standing at the back door of the Mayor's house taking a deep breath before she reaches out to knock. She can do this (she can also sew if it comes down to that).
It is Saturday, so Gale has been instructed to watch his brothers while she goes to run errands. It is a sign of the level of tension in their home that her boy simply did as she asked without pestering her for the details of this change in routine. She has until this evening to make her rounds. She hopes that she will have an already finished bargain to present to Ty when he arrives home for supper.
She knocks, and she waits (and finds herself wondering if she should knock again as it was perhaps not a loud enough sound to reach the depths of the interior of the space inside). Just as she is about to reach her hand out again, the door swings inward revealing a little girl with a blond ponytail and what can only be described as questioning eyebrows peering up at her.
"May I help you?" The little person in the doorway asks. It is clear that manners have been drilled into this one, and Hazelle almost sighs thinking of all of the times that she is afraid that her lectures on the topic to her boys have gone in one ear and out the other. She offers the girl a small smile - the best that she can manage with the churning that is going on in her stomach (she is determined, but that does not make her immune to being nervous).
"Is your mother home?" She asks.
She knew in a vague sort of a way that the Mayor had a little girl, but she has never been this close to her before. She finds a bit of hope welling up in her that Mrs. Undersee may be sympathetic to a mother looking for work to better care for her children. She is not here looking for charity after all; she is offering a service - one that she is willing to hazard a guess has not been offered before to this particular household. She will not be the first from the Seam to go looking for this type of work, but no one does the laundry from here to the best of her knowledge. Most people tend to avoid doing anything that causes interaction with District officials unless they absolutely have to do so. (There is a sort of stand offishness between those that work more closely with the Capitol and those in the rest of the District, but she could not possibly care less about social divides - unspoken or not - at this point in time.) She knows that the household employs a couple of servants, but it is a big house. Surely taking the laundry off the rest of the helps' hands would be a proposal to which they would at least be willing to listen?
The little girl is biting her lip and glancing over her shoulder, but Hazelle is not certain of the emotion that is playing out on her features. It is then that she notices the state of the child in front of her. The sleeves of her little blouse are rolled up with the faintest hint of drying soap bubbles visible around her elbows. The shirt is wet enough that it is sticking to her front. Hazelle also notices that there is some sort of a white cream that has been rubbed into a series of red blotches visible down both legs below the hem of her knee length skirt. She realizes that she may have seen red rimmed eyes when the door was first opened, but she cannot say for certain because the girl is now keeping her head tilted toward the ground.
"Mother isn't feeling well today," the little girl tells her. The words sound like a learned phrase from someone older and used to making excuses. "Would you like to leave a message for her?"
The determined whistling of a boiling kettle sounding from somewhere behind the child interrupts before Hazelle can decide on a reply.