1.

Shadow, and the glow of fire on her skin, red and black and the pale of the girl like marble. It was crystal and rubies, jet black and dancing flame, all those words she liked to roll out to sell a beauty he would never see. But he saw this, and he remembered. It was during that one day she had spent in the district. She had made him light the fire that went so often cold and dusty in the grate. He never lit it again after, did not want the warmth that reminded him of everything they could never have had.

She had been a mystery to him before then, but he had seen something that day that she could never cover up, no matter under how many layers and with how much paint and sparkle. He watched her closely every day he saw her after that, watching to see that girl again in her eyes.

He remembered now, in the cold of District Thirteen. Remembered the fire reflected in her eyes and the almost creepy perfection of her skin. She was like something from another world that day, more than she had ever been when she was just the girl from the Capitol. Even that distance was not as great as the strangeness that surrounded her that evening, as dark fell across the District and she came alive in the flame that rose out of the one fire that burned in the victor's village. He remembered how he had reached to touch her skin, that seemed like snow magically never melting in the heat.

She must have been magical. He supposed he must have let her kneel over him, pressing his own knife to his throat as she did. He would never have let anyone do that. He could never have imagined it of her before. But she sank down on him in the warm silence and the intensity was too strong for screaming and he had died so quickly in the firelight in her eyes and he had never guessed so much of all she could contain within herself and so rarely let out. But after that day he never could see her as otherwise again, and he held on to this Effie, this creature so bright and so primal, so briefly glimpsed, but that once was enough to remember who she was forever.

She was so easy to hate. He took comfort in that in the days when she was never there and in the times when she was and to admit to anything else would have been abysmally dangerous. But those dangers were gone now and the worst having happened he would have been relieved if he had not been so damned worried.

-x-

He remembered:

She had not snuck up on him as Finnick had said of Annie; he wished he could have said that she had. Sneaking up on someone would have been the height of bad manners and instead she had just barged into his life like an obnoxious ray of sunshine he never thought he had wanted.

She had admitted to him later she had only been thirteen that day, and he had not thought there was much that could have made his wanting her from that very first meeting any worse. All those nights between then and the Games it had been her he had found himself thinking of and not the girl he had left behind, and he took the guilt of this to heart when that girl was gone and his heart had already left her.

But it had not been until that day she had come out to Twelve that he stopped telling himself it was only sex. Only lust. Only convenience. Hardly even friendship. He carried on with these affirmations to himself after that but it was harder, rang less true in his own mind, led him to take more refuge in drink even than before.

When he realised that he cared it chilled him to the bone with fear. It seemed like he had carried all the poison out of that arena. It was in his blood now and he was toxic, lethal to anyone he dared to care about. There were days he swore he would never touch her again, he was so caustic to everything around him, as though just by having feelings he could harm her. It was not as strange or unlikely as it sounded.

Then it started to become more and more apparent that she cared too. That she was not the cold hearted bitch he liked to convince himself she was. He had known it really, but that did not help; the persistent attempt to tell himself it was otherwise had been one of their major bones of contention every time they met for almost twenty years. That and the fact that the only times they even could meet were the times he most dreaded, bringing with them as they always did a re-opening of all the old scars and the widening of them with two new dead tributes to add to his conscience.

But with Katniss and Peeta, she had started to find it harder and harder even to pretend she did not care. More and more it had become clear to him that actually there was no-one else in her life that she could call family and that this, as the closest she could come to it, meant the world to her. He had not wanted this awareness when it came, neither did he want it to continue. But it did. By the time of the reaping for the seventy-fifth, it had become painfully apparent that she was not going to be able to keep up the front that she had for much longer at all and it terrified him to know that he would not be the only one noticing it.

The morning of the Games, when it came, seemed like the worst time he could pick to leave her alone in the Capitol. But he had not picked it. The entire operation had been so carefully arranged between himself and Plutarch, those already in the know in District Thirteen and the tributes involved in the games that it would have been impossible not to leave only on her account. Still he had made arrangements with Plutarch to bring her when he left himself and nobody could have predicted anyone would come for her as quickly as they did.

They came that same morning, at the same time they came for Cinna.

He had told Plutarch he would kill him himself if anything happened to her. He had also told him it was not personal. He had told him they needed Effie Trinket in Thirteen purely for practical reasons. That she was an ally. That she was indispensable, to them, to the Mockingjay, to the revolution.

Drying out in a corner of Thirteen, he paced the solitary cell they had left him in raging at the walls. He remembered her, the perfect pale creature rising up out of the flames. Remembered how soft, how pale, how alive she was. So strong, so filled with that fire, so exquisitely vicious, so perfect – that skin that had never known a bruise she had not begged him to put there.

If they hurt her, he fumed, if they did anything to her, if they so much as made her break a nail he was going to kill them all.

_x_

Quick note: I'm going as far as I can with a combination of what we got about Effie from the book, i.e. that she was captured by the Capitol and Haymitch and Plutarch had trouble getting her out and to thirteen, and also with the film in which she's in 13 for the events of Mockingjay.