Title: Ice Queen

Summary: Cecelia, district eight victor. Life after the victory: hating, loving, living and collecting happiness like a patchwork.

Disclaimer: Suzanne Collins.

Written for the May Starvation challenge: "What don't you understand? I won."

~.~

Cecelia wins the Hunger Games by slicing a fourteen year old's head nearly off his shoulders and pushing four teenagers off the icy cliffs that made up the arena of the 61st Hunger Games. The last Career had grabbed at her before sliding down the sharp slice of mountain to join the mangled bodies at the base of the flanking mountains, beyond the fog of frost. Fisher Odair's blue hands had tangled in her scarf – a patchwork of leaves and net and wrappings Cecelia had sewn together the first night, while others merely succumbed to the unforgiving tundra – a flash of winter sun and he was gone, the scarf flapping uselessly as it was buoyed by the wind. A scream had rented the air then, bouncing against the diamond cliffs, mingling with the trumpets, and she only realized the screaming was hers because everyone else was dead.

At the Victor's Interview, they called her the Ice-Queen, her dress all cool blue silk and silver thread, run with crystals and glass. An elaborate crown of ice upon her head. Applause rained like a downpour on her soul. On the screen, they played clip after clip of her assured, unflappable face, even while foraging nature for anything to cloak against the bitter wind, being pursued by Careers up the glacial face of a mountain, or squaring off with another tribute in an alliance gone amiss. They extolled her then, for her poise like a model, the liquid grace under pressure, bravery in the very face of death. Cecelia smiled and bobbed her head best as she could under the weight off the headdress, perpetuated the myth of courage rather than telling them that it was the exact opposite, that victors were those so afraid of the face of death that they ripped the universe to live.

~.~

It takes a long time to find her way home, after it was all over and the train had dropped her and Woof back in Eight. The crowd had stared at their victor, wide-eyed and fearful, and the world crested to a vertigo: the earth and its elements moving and melding and dissipating and her in the middle, static, a ghost. The road leading to home beneath her feet and her, looking for it, lost. A puzzle piece chopped and sawed and forced to find the space where it once belonged.

Home, after all, had never been just the latticework of fancy woods and enamels and fancy electronics of the Victor's houses; everyone who worked with fabric and knew the importance of its integrity understood this: home is your place in the interweave.

The first months after the Games are infinitely hard, a daze that spun and blurred and focused seemingly at will. There are snatches of memory: of hands attempting to reach out; of pairs of feet and hushed voices outside her room, alerted to her screaming; of working endlessly into the night, until the dawn, amid the loveliest materials – rivers of silk, sheer jade chiffon, soft velvet the color of wine, creamy spiderwebs of lace, sky-colored brocades, nothing too extravagant because she'd never been that girl – transforming them with ruthless efficiency into fashion; of long days of simply going through the motions, affecting emotion until they felt real.

~.~

She manages the ice-queen facade for the next Games where she mentors – and this is the greater tragedy: the Games go on. Her tributes meet death on a bloodstained pier, a mercy Arena she thinks, toppling lifelessly on the gently lapping waves. It might be her fault; often the tributes from the previous victor's district are targeted. Gloss of District 1 dethrones her, is overturned in turn by his sister. Then Fisher Odair's younger brother wins the Games. Fisher had been handsome too; he'd gotten so many sponsors then.

She approaches the boy before his interview, before she has to leave on the arm of a nameless Capitol man. "I'm sorry."

Finnick, pale and young and hardened, rolls his eyes. "'Yeah, we all are."

That's all he says but it's enough, enough.

~.~

Because for so long Cecelia tried to lose herself in the anonymity of cloth, she didn't notice how – with the exception of a few – people in her District look to her with a film over their eyes: intermingling envy, fear, disdain. They loved her certainly – because for first time in a long while, meat and grain and oil and hope came in parcels every month and for that, their gratitude was without scope – but they hated her too. Because she was victor and that twenty-three others had to die, that she came back when their own children, friends, lover hadn't, that she would live in victor's village in relative security the rest of her life, never wanting for anything.

If she thought about it, she would've hated them back. Hated their ignorance and their judgments and their double-sided kindnesses and their bovine passivity. History was replete with victors who succumbed to hatred, but Cecelia had never learned to cultivate the habit herself.

But there were slices of days when she would curl up rocking on the vast canopy bed in her blood-bought house, lost in the currents that coursed inside like the blood in her veins: the glittering anger, the steely hardness, and – in particularly bad moments – the raging frustration for the mundane. Rare few people would understand how to feel for a people who laud and fear and shun them in the same motion and, among them, fellow victors: alcoholics, morphlings, desperates, incestuous psychopaths.

~.~

Her mother had asked her softly how was she, really, her first night home. Cecelia had been angry then, heart a hard fist, and impatient.

She snapped at the crooked hand tending to her hair. "What don't you understand? I won."

~.~

Her people wait.

They take the abuse she unfairly lashes at them. They stand at the doors Cecelia has slammed in their faces. Her parents watch over her at night, as though she were a child. Her bestfriend Twyne keeps showing up, the cheer in her tired eyes bright and determined. Woof visits and says nothing, just stays there and sits quietly. Weeve, who may just be the most delusional of them all, more ideology than flesh-and-blood, insists on looking at her as her and never an extension of something terrible. He is warm, callused fingers on snow-white skin, a body to steal heat from at night.

They keep themselves open, waiting for her to sew herself back in, and Cecelia knows she is lucky, luckier than she deserved, and she is grateful enough to come back to life again.

~.~

Life wasn't perfect but it can be so good sometimes.

Love feels like something lost and warm brushing her skin and, for the first time in years, she almost can't feel ice. Love, she thinks, is a patchwork of happiness, affection in the stitchery and fondness in the cloth, fierceness in the colors and quietly devastating in its design: the boy bouncing balls of yarn on his knee, the girl collecting scraps of lace and shiny fabric, happiness hatching on her face, a fairytale-beautiful house, bedtimes and picnics and forgiveness.

It's such a fragile thing, love, and yet it seeps deep, into blood and bone. Her children take it for granted, as they do her, their Victor mother who's just a bit cold and distant and not half as good as dad. Weave oozes love, but even he doesn't see it as she does, how good it is, how hopeful, how worth saving. None of them understand that this is the reason she doesn't ever bring them to the Capitol's attention, doesn't ever resist the blatant manipulation of the President, doesn't ever let them see Ice Queen Cecelia.

"I love you," she whispers one night as they lie in bed, the spectre of the Capitol lingering just there.

"Hmmm," Weeve turns over in his sleep, chuckling, eyes closed. "Love you, Cecelia, but sleeping here."

That's all he says, and it's enough, enough.

~.~

And yet, even then, despite Beauty Base Zero, despite years of healing and learning to live again, there are scars. A coldness in her heart that jags and scars and never really thaws. There are no clean slates after the Games.

I love you, she says. Means, I'll kill for you.

~.~

This, this is the moment she knew was coming, the moment she would come to regret, when the Capitol would stretch out its cloyingly brutal hand and show that nothing gold is untouchable. The moment Victors like Johanna and Finnick and so many others dreaded so much they gave up the dream up from the start, a boundary they dared not cross: bringing children into this world.

Cecelia closes her eyes before the announcement of the Quell even finishes and regrets not going down that same path. She would've chosen what they did – loneliness and isolation and dead-at-forty – sacrificed every minute of years of extravagant happiness if it meant never having to live this moment: life, falling like a slashed curtain of immaculate, flimsy material, years of yearning and making do and grasping and clawing and hoping against hope – wasted.

Haymitch should've been enough of a warning. What was she thinking – being young and in love and thinking Ice Queen Cecelia could have normal life without consequence? She should've known; when one kills twenty-three children – twenty-three – there wasn't an out.

~.~

Cecelia remembers how the rebels had turned up at her station and how, amid the whirring machines, they told her of District Thirteen and the upcoming war and the need for a victor to rally around. She had listened with ever-increasing dread and a renewed coldness creeping up her arms and a scathing speech born of terror prepared – Don't you dare ask that of me, don't you dare, I have children – but even then, in the back of her mind, she knew that the very fact would be her downfall. She thinks of the patchwork, the interweave, the borrowed happiness, and knows she couldn't ever stand idly by.

~.~

The beach sand glitters bright under the hot sun and the salt breeze does little to stem to stifling heat in the air, but they have to see the Ice Queen now, unflappable, calm as she had been detaching from her children. It's the bravest she'd ever been, facing death like this, head high, cool. Charging straight at her greatest fear – that freezing emptiness, death – for the uncertain hope that somewhere, someday, she'll meet everyone again in a patchwork, a world far better than here.

~.~

~.~

~.~

Notes: Rushed and such a sugary fic my teeth ache, but whatever. :)