A/N: For those of you who don't already know this, I'm now on AO3. A reader there made the quirky request to have me to delve into the twisted psyche of Mrs. Mellark after Peeta was injured in the Games. I may have stop listening to the brilliant ideas my readers come up with...XD
Disclaimer:The Hunger Games and all the characters in this fic are the property of Susanne Collins.
Enjoy!
Math.
Simple equation.
This was all the Games really boiled down to.
Who had the strength, the guile, the intelligence, the sheer perseverance to endure and bend the algebraic odds of survival in their favor?
The baker's wife had always held a strong affinity for equations, even before their practicality replaced the youthful, naïve hopes for fickle, trifling things like love and passion. As a girl in school, she'd been especially gifted in arithmetic and physics. Algorithms were precise and measurable. They would not bend. She took comfort from that stability. Few other things in her world offered such unyielding precision. She'd learned long ago that she was ill-equipped to fight against those things which she could not control. Those who were more extraordinary would inevitably have the upper hand. So, she chose to take comfort in the measured exactness of the calculable. Anything intangible was irrelevant, useless- worthless.
This was the mantra playing through the deepest recesses of her mind as she, her husband of two decades and her two eldest children sat in the small living quarters above their bakery, watching her youngest son turn away from the sprawled, newly-hallucinating daughter of the woman she was more than aware her husband still loved to face a boy who had nearly a foot and a half height and a good seventy five pounds advantage over him.
Her demeanor did not falter in the slightest as she inwardly mused that-within the last thirty seconds- her son had easily just quartered his odds of survival, not that she had calculated he could possibly survive, of course. However, once he'd teamed up with the Career pack- even if everyone knew it was to keep them as far away from the Everdeen girl as possible- she could see scenarios where he could plausibly pick them off in there sleep or some such, giving him a chance to make it to the last few survivors. Predictably, however, the soft-hearted sixteen-year-old had demonstrated a pretty blatant aversion to taking life thus far, even if it meant preserving his own.
As the behemoth of a District Two tribute charged her boy, she silently wondered if he'd do what he had to if it meant saving her life. Obviously, his had been forfeited to her before the Games even began.
Were all the Mellark men sentimental retards?
She found it unfathomable this had actually come from her.
As she watched on, she realized her son had a chance to escape. The Two boy had been far closer to the tree Katniss had slept in through the night. He'd sustained twice as many tracker jacker stings. The effect of the venom was overtaking him at a much more accelerated rate than it was Peeta, who still seemed coordinated, if the way he pin-wheeled to deflect the bigger boy's oncoming blade was any indication.
The Mellark matriarch ventured that if he took of into the brush at just that moment, the older boy would be too disoriented to realize which direction he'd gone. This was the perfect opportunity for the boy to better his odds of survival.
She should've known better than to expect rationality from this kid, though.
At that exact moment, the Gamemakers decided to split the screen and show the Everdeen girl's position on the field relevant to the quarrelling boys. She was still within easy reach of the Career and he knew in which direction she'd gone. She wasn't moving particularly fast either. She was so small; the venom was ravaging her nervous system at an alarmingly fast rate. She'd be completely incapacitated within a few moments.
Even though she knew her son had no way of knowing how far Katniss had been able to get, the moment he turned to see the Career was not looking for him, but making to go after her, she knew the boy had sealed his own fate.
She didn't chorus her family's shrieks of horrified dismay when the miscalculated pivot to avoid being skewered through the kidney by the massive Two boy's sword earned her youngest an incision in the upper thigh, the blade embedding itself a good three inches before Peeta could volley away. She just shook her head almost imperceptibly.
In the arena, the deathblow would have been a preferable mercy.
It had been four days.
Four days had passed since the District Two tribute fatally wounded her son and collapsed to the ground on his knees, watching as the sixteen-year-old made a distinctly hasty retreat into the brush, leaving an impossible to miss trail of life fluid in his wake.
In those four days, the cameras had barely shown her slowly dying boy, not when they had the far more exciting scenes of the Careers hallucinating into delirium and trying to bash each other's skulls in. Not to mention, the fact that this was overlaid with the riveting subplot of that sickeningly weak Eleven girl finding the Everdeen girl, helping her to health, then teaming up with her to destroy the Career camp. This, of course, had the inevitable apex of ending in the nearly useless girl's death, which had left her ally an emotional cripple for the next day.
The baker's wife couldn't help the disappointment in the Seam girl that swelled up in her at this. The girl was strong enough to make it out, but she had her insufferable mother's weakness. She fell apart at the loss of those she cared for. It was such a waste.
She'd spent those four days waiting for the canon that would herald her son's death. In truth, she yearned for it.
The Gamemakers had only really shown them glimpses Peeta making it as far as the stream before he literally collapsed from what she figured was likely blood loss and sheer exhaustion. It had taken him nearly a day to make it that far. Afterward, other tributes in the arena apparently made for more riveting viewing in the Capitol.
They did get a brief montage two days prior of the sixteen-year-old doing an unbelievable job of draping the growth of the bank over his body in order to conceal himself as close as possible to the water source. She had not seen him eat in those four days, however. She was fairly sure he hadn't. The few quick glimpses of the riverbank that was now her son they were privy to in the last two days, moaned in pain every so often and muttered Katniss' name when the arena displayed nighttime, but it never moved from where it laid.
The Mellark matriarch was at a loss and- were she to be completely honest with herself- starting to panic. Why was he taking so long to die?
This was decidedly notwhat she'd intended for her son! He was not supposed to linger and suffer slowly like this.
By the fourth day of watching and waiting for that infuriating canon to sound, releasing both her boy and her guilt-ridden conscience of its misery, she was beginning to question the prudence of the choice she'd made when he turned twelve.
Then, the unthinkable occurred.
After closing the shop at the end of that fourth day, her second born came rushing into the bakery from outside, where he was watching the Games with his older brother and all but tackled her, tugging on her arm almost to dislocation. "You have to see this, Mom!"
Upon making it upstairs into to the living room, the muscled seventeen-year-old immediately turned her toward the television, where her husband already stood, grinning maniacally. Caesar Flickerman was reiterating something. "That's right, ladies and gentlemen. There has been a rule change and there can now be two Victors if they both hail from the same district!" He punctuated this with a reaction shot from the arena. It was of Katniss blurting out Peeta's name from a treetop and instantly bringing her hand up to her mouth as if she could stop what she'd just said from escaping.
An intrigued, blonde eyebrow arching up of its own accord upon her countenance was the only tell of the woman's wonderment at this turn of events. Had her son's ridiculous little farce at being in love with the Everdeen girl actually played on the simpletons in the Capitol?
Her brow then furrowed at the somewhat disconcerting realization inching its way to the forefront of her consciousness. Was it a farce?
She continued to scowl as her ridiculous middle child hugged her husband so hard he lifted him of the ground, spinning him in the pocess for good measure. "Peeta's got a chance! Katniss will find him! They'll make it out together! He's not dead! She'll get them both out!"
Rolling her eyes in a distasteful grimace, the baker's wife crossed her arms tightly under her breast. "For goodness sake, Rye. Set him down! You're going to break his hip or something." Then, completely ignoring the sobering expressions of her son and husband, she made for her bedroom.
Her face remained twisted into the same impassive scowl as she entered her chambers and sat on her bed. She was not sure how she felt about this turn of events. Her son was dying in the Games. She'd seen it with her own eyes for four days. He was supposed to die.
Nevertheless, now this extraordinary Seam girl seemed willing to save him? How had this weakling of a boy managed to affect this impetuous, strong girl so much? How had he managed to shift the balance of the odds in his favor so?
She finally came to the inexorable conclusion that this Everdeen girl was a radical... an unpredictable and maybe even dangerous variable in an otherwise simple equation.
The Mellark matriarch had always despised variables. They affected controls, meddled with calculations, made the predictable an obscurity.
Then, her mind traveled back to the last shot the Gamemakers had granted her of her son wasting away in agony by that bank and she wondered again how he'd survived four days of that.
Her last thought on the matter as she made her way to her bath was:
'Maybe, there's one radical I could learn to live with, after all...'
A/N: This is barely edited and very short. All the expansions and reviewers requests will likely be this way because I have a nine to five that has absolutely nothing to do with creative writing.
Please Review!