Disclaimer: I do hate repeating myself. I own nothing but the fic.
Set in Mockingjay- When Katniss first sees Effie after her imprisonment and torture.
"In the bedroom, I find another surprise. Sitting upright in a chair. Polished from her metallic gold wig to her patent leather high heels, gripping a clipboard. Remarkably unchanged except for the vacant look in her eyes." – Mockingjay,Chapter 25
"Effie," I breathe, my tone breaks from its whisper, sending my voice into a deep, harsh warble.
She stands and smoothes down her skirt with thin, trembling fingers. Her sweet, sunken face breaks into a smile, "Hello, Katniss." she kisses me on the cheek, beaming, looking both overjoyed and terrified. She's trying so hard to keep the smile on her face it seems it will break. Or she will.
"Well!" she trills, shattering the silence, "Looks like we've got a big, big, big day ahead of us! We'd better get you spruced up, dear." She talks on, wondering aloud where Cinna could be, I try not to flinch as I realise she must have forgotten. Maybe no one told her. It had become an unspoken rule between us all (I swallow down my feeling of nostalgia) that Effie not be told of the horrors that went on around us while her back was turned. It hits me that maybe it could have saved or helped her in some way if she had known. It was almost a crime, though, to end her blissful ignorance. To stop her smiling. Now it was all I wanted. Effie to take off that smile, that painful, petrified smile that almost hid those horrors that lived behind the painted lips and pearly teeth. Almost.
Before long her voice goes out like a candle, but her smile still stays on.
She's looking to me for some sort of answer. I nod. It's all I can do to keep from crying. But I reach out. Touch her arm. My hand is shaking, I notice. She does not flinch, as I thought she might, she simply freezes, staring down somewhere between my throat and my shoulder. Behind all this, I'm desperately trying to find the last remainders of her, of my friend.
My fingers on her skin begin to tremble as she does. I move my hands over Effie, as lovingly as I used to, hoping that this isn't what I think it is and hoping she'll respond. She does not move as my hands find what I never would have expected in all of my nightmares. I place my other hand on her waist, as gently as I can, and the silk gives way under my palm. I can feel padding under the fabric. A sick feeling rises in my stomach. As my hand moves silently around her waist, over her hips, I find padding, filling in the hollows beneath her ribcage and over her stomach. Brushing my fingers up her sides, I find her chest has been filled in too. Pressing my fingers down ever so slightly, I can feel sharp ridges beneath my fingertips. She's thin, so thin, too thin. Too horribly, horribly thin, like they've stripped away everything of Effie, stuffed her and made her into a puppet. I bite harshly into the inside of my cheek, but that doesn't stop the hollow rage that I know there's no use in feeling.
I try not to think about it, about how long it has been. It has been months. Months and months and months, so many months separating now from our last meeting before the Quarter Quell when I made her cry. Our last embrace.
Our last kiss.
I stretch up and balance on my toes to press my lips to hers, one hand still clutching her arm, feeling how frail it is. She's soft and sweet under my lips and trembling beneath my hands, but she's not Effie. This is not the woman I grew used to having knock on my door to wake me up, to chide me endlessly about my lack of manners and where my hemline should never rise above, the woman who always seemed to soften instead of bristle at my temper, who always greeted me with a smile, and a kiss on my cheek. Kisses that became more than kisses, kisses that grew into more than shades of lipstick on my teeth. This is not the woman I fell in love with.
I can taste desperation in my mouth now, and blood. Maybe the two go hand in hand.
I break the kiss, a soft sound from our lips as I pull back to look at her. She blinks her glassy eyes, staring at the floor. My face twists in a pain I have felt only once before. Loss, loss when that person is still there but completely beyond your reach. My mother had found her way back eventually. But I'd given up on her and I know that I'll never let myself need her again. But Effie I need. She was my friend when I had none. She was so ridiculously not who I thought I needed, she was everything. She was my hope. She was my mockingjay.
This, this is not Effie. This beautiful, hollow, fearfully fragile shell is not Effie. The rouge that is supposed to be colour in her cheeks is a lie. The padding over her ravaged form. The heavily fringed eyelashes that frame her empty stare, the lipstick painted over cracked lips.
A broken doll.
"We've no idea what happened to Effie Trinket."
Neither do I, I think.