Disclaimer: The Hunger Games is not mine.
(Mayor Undersee)
I have been waiting. There hasn't been much else to do. I can't make them unsee what they saw. I can't make them unknow that District 12 no longer conforms to their standards. So, I wait. I wait for them to decide what form of correction they will administer. I wait to see if I will be able to do anything to mitigate it when it comes. I wait to see what form of recompense they will require from me personally. There are so many things that they could take, and there are so few of them that actually matter. They know that. They will make their choices accordingly.
Our naturally quiet home has become unnaturally quiet once again - not with the same tension that flowed between Madge and me at the start of the last of the Games, but with a tension that comes from three people waiting to see how their lives will be unraveled next. It isn't a pleasant way to exist. I admit that I'm not helping. I could try to not let my tension seep into the atmosphere of our home, I could ignore the desire to constantly be looking for signs of what may be coming, or I could be cherishing the time I currently have with my daughter instead of worrying that that time may be coming to a close. Somehow, I can't.
I have found myself spending longer and longer hours in the Justice Building. The memos keep me company, and they do nothing to ease my mind. I read memos, I respond to memos, I try to head off further potential disasters as presented by the memos, and I ponder every possible implication of each word that each of the memos contains. I am drowning in them. There are memos about the school curriculum, memos about mine productivity and repair requests, memos about the Peacekeeper contingent, and memos about every possible detail of life in District 12 that could be used against us.
I see them in my sleep (when sleep is something that I can no longer manage to avoid), and I agonize over every phrase I use in each response. Am I choosing the correct words? Am I making it better? Am I making it worse? Does where their wrath falls depend upon my answers to the questions? And when I am sitting bleary eyed in a dimly lit office nearly at the end of my mental rope drafting my eighth attempt at finding the words that will deflect any part of their ire, I wonder what type of horrible person it makes me that I wish they would just get on with it already and end this limbo in which they have suspended us.
I have been waiting, but I have not been doing so graciously. Madge would testify to that. She waits as well, but she does so with the calm determination she displayed when she was insisting that Katniss would come home. We understand each other better, but that doesn't mean that I understand all. I don't grasp what it is that keeps her so calm.
They are planning something intricate. That's the only option that makes any sort of sense. I wasn't in any position to be aware of the deeper bureaucratic workings of the District in the aftermath of the last Quarter Quell. I do not know if the mayor at the time found himself buried underneath a flurry of double meaning messages stacked in piles on his desk. I only know what I saw from the outside. I only know what the entire District saw. I saw the sudden influx of new Peacekeepers. I saw the sudden crackdown on tiny infractions that hadn't previously been worth their time to bother about. I saw someone who was supposed to be a Victor return with all the pomp and circumstance that a Capitol arranged celebration entailed only to be left to bury the entirety of his family after the cameras and their wielders had disappeared on the train to go back from whence they came. I saw blood splattered pieces of a board game marking the entrance to a shop of a family who had buried a daughter and sister and then had to bury a husband and father.
It was decisive, and it was swift. It was very, very swift. And that begs the question, what are they waiting for now? Why are they waiting? What are they waiting for? We forgot out lesson too quickly, and they can't have that. It's too troublesome to have Districts that won't remain in their place. I would say that I wished that my daughter had understood that in the first place, but I suspect that she caught on quicker than I realized and that it didn't matter nearly as much to her as I would have wanted it to when she did.
My Madge wasn't meant to live in fear. My practical, rational girl with her calm demeanor and quiet ways doesn't flinch in the face of everything going wrong because, for her, everything has been wrong all along. That becomes another reason, another justification to myself of why it is best that I not darken the doorstep of our home when it can be avoided. I've learned I'm often a coward when it comes to my daughter. The truth is that I'm shamed in the face of her conviction. I cannot share it. I saw how easily hope was squashed the last time our home on the outskirts of the realm was in the line of fire. I saw how quickly people forgot (or chose not to remember) when it made their lives more convenient.
Simultaneously, I can't want Madge to lose her belief. Partly, because I have no desire to witness the crushing blows that would require. Partly, because her conviction is such a deeply ingrained part of all she is that I think I would lose her completely if it were to go. That may, of course, be a moot point. I may lose her anyway.
He arrived this morning. He being President Snow. I was so shocked that I don't think I even verbalized a response to the security officer's announcement. I was drenched in sweat in the few moments between that announcement and the appearance of my visitor coming through the door. I had never seen him face to face before. It was an honor I was always rather well pleased to forgo. President Snow does not conduct business with anyone from the Districts for any reason. Except, apparently, to ensure that he has made his point clear when he is issuing a threat.
Something about that man is wrong. I've always sensed it from a distance. The preoccupation with power manifests itself even across a television broadcast to anyone who knows what they are looking for. The whispered rumors add to the feeling (although everyone knows that they would be best served by forgetting that there ever was such a thing as whispers where the President is concerned). In person, there was nothing to be seen or heard that would cause me to amend my belief that there is something not right about the man that was standing in front of me.
It took me nearly the entire interview to place the cloying part of the combination of smells that filled the space that he was occupying. It was slow of me; I know. I blame years of visitors from the Capitol traipsing through my home with their fake hair colors and fake faces and fake additions to their bodies for the fact that the thought that the President would actually be wearing a real flower had not occurred to me. It served as a reminder that I was not dealing with a member of the Capitol citizenry; I was dealing with one of them - in person. Although I was not in need of much in the way of further reminders with the scent of blood calling to mind whippings in the square and Peacekeepers using their rifles to bludgeon that had been all too common in a time before my daughter was born.
My audience with the President did not last long. The man strikes me as someone who is never inclined to dither. (That only cements my belief that we will be hit with a carefully constructed punishment, and his words did nothing to change my mind.) I noticed that he took a long look at the framed picture of Madge that sits on my desk before he left. It was intended that I notice. I've never before regretted having that decoration. I had to bite back the bile rising up in my throat as he left the room. The picture doesn't really matter. It is not as if he doesn't already know that Madge is my weakest point. The man is, after all, a father himself.
I think the strain of the waiting and watching and wondering of the seemingly endless previous months in combination with the lack of sleep and the shock of being forced to make double edged small talk with a man who could erase my family with a snap of his fingers all became more than my nerves could handle at that point. I managed to maintain control until I was sure that both he and his security had truly gone. Then, I sank into my chair and laughed.
It wasn't an occasion for laughing. I was in trouble. My District was in trouble. My family was in trouble. Worse things were coming. I still laughed. I couldn't seem to help myself. Two teenagers had managed to upend the status quo of life throughout all 12 Districts and the Capitol itself. They had people scrambling to realign the balance of power. They had the normally calm and unflappable President Snow, the single most powerful man in our world, disquieted enough that he was stepping in to handle the situation personally. They had caused so much turmoil, and they hadn't even done so on purpose.
It would be beautifully poetic if I didn't know that we were all going to suffer for it.
(Hazelle)
Two children left the District on Reaping Day, and two children came home. This year, however, they didn't come home in boxes. There were parties and interviews and chaos and a complete lack of privacy. There were reporters and camera people and Capitol escorts everywhere that we turned. My children were photographed hugging their "cousin," eating at banquets with her, and opening packages on Parcel Day. We answered question after question about how we felt and if we were proud and found way after way around answering the question of what we thought about the rule change that had allowed them both to come home.
Then, they (the Capitol invaders as Vick called them when he was sure no one else could hear) were gone, and things were supposed to settle back to normal. I've dealt with enough life changes to know that things never settle back to normal; they fall into a new pattern that becomes what normal is now. This time, this change is no different. Our lives can't go back to what they were before. Some of the details that made up our lives before don't exist anymore. My family has too many ties to the Everdeens for it to be any other way.
Still, some things remain the same. I still have four children (although at least one of them would object to that label) to feed and clothe and get through winter chills and summer fevers. I still have laundry to collect and scrub and dry and return. I still have boys who are growing up and questioning their boundaries with me and with their brothers. I still have a baby girl who wants to be told stories and tucked into bed at night. I still have them. I still have all four of them. Other changes are easily weathered with that in mind.
I wasn't sure that it was going to be that way. I waited for something to happen when the cameras went away, and I worried that my family would be included what with the newly discovered kinship and all. Nothing like what I was waiting for came to be. The Everdeens (unlike the Abernathys) are still alive in their new home in the Victor's Village, and I shrugged off the waiting for more damage to be done. I've dealt with enough life changes to know that you shouldn't waste days. So, we've settled into our new normal where two children were allowed to leave the Games and left to struggle with what they've seen and done.
I can't imagine it's easy to find your way. It isn't as though they are likely to get much in the way of good advice from their mentor. I'm not sure the Hob could supply enough liquor to support three of them if they decided to go down that path. Besides, Prim ought to be enough to keep Katniss sober, and the boy doesn't strike me as the type. They, neither of them, have taken quite the same type of beating that Abernathy did. I don't know what the boy does, but my Vick reports the things he hears on his rounds. Whatever he is doing in that big house to cope, he is doing it on his own. The rest of the baker's family doesn't spend their time there.
Ari Everdeen still sees patients (more often than not with an observing and aiding Prim attached to her side); she's just doing it from a different location. She seems the same as ever, but I wouldn't really know. I've never understood that woman, and I'm not likely to start now. That a fairly large chunk of Katniss's now free time is spent lingering in my kitchen drinking tea and talking over the merits of stew meat tells me that she doesn't understand much about her mother either (and more to the point, her mother isn't much use at understanding her).
I'm not meddling. If the girl wants to try to forget, I'm not going to be the one to remind her. If she and her mother don't have much in the way of being mother and daughter, that's their business. It isn't mine. And the baker's boy and his family certainly aren't mine. I have my own brood to manage.
Posy is, of course, the easiest. It's all a benefit of still being so young. To her, the scary parts have all faded away with Katniss's return. It's all pretty dresses and fires that don't burn and pretty cookies with flowers that she eats with Prim. My boys aren't nearly so easy.
Rory is perhaps the easiest of the three. He's twelve now, and he just wants to be like Gale. He misses his brother now that he is in the mines. There is no more time together walking back and forth to and from school. There are no evenings spent playing games together the way there used to be after Gale had finished his routine of snare runs and visits to the Hob. Rory is feeling the lack whether he will admit it out loud or not. He wants recognition from Gale that he is old enough to do more to help, but Gale isn't inclined to give it. It isn't so strange (this balancing act of growing up that he is doing). I understand it; I even expected it. I think I can manage to handle most of the potential pit falls along the way.
Vick is different than Rory. He doesn't ever seem to expect much in the way of attention from Gale. It's not that his brother has ever ignored him. He is just different than my other children. He is less intense somehow. He takes what Gale (and I) can give him when he can get it, but he seems to shrug off the lack when it doesn't materialize. It hurts my heart sometimes to think that I've raised a child who seems to expect to fade into the background, but he and I have talked. He doesn't see it that way.
There is an awful lot going on inside that little head of his, and I've come to learn that he doesn't share the majority of it with anyone in this house. His laundry runs got longer again after the people from the Capitol had left us alone, so I have my suspicions that he doesn't always bottle everything up inside. Still, it worries me to know that he has to go to someone outside our family to spill his secrets. I also wonder what kind of trouble he may be getting into (some of the phrases he uses didn't come from anyone in this house any more than they came from the District school). I keep waiting for a message from the Mayor's house requesting that my child cease loitering on their property, but it never comes.
My Gale is hurting, and I can't fix that. My grandmother used to say that if life didn't bruise you, it wouldn't be living. I'm not denying the accuracy of her wisdom, but it isn't overly comforting when you are watching life bruise your child. It isn't all from the Games; it isn't all from Katniss, but that supplies an addition that doesn't help matters any. I know my boy and going to the mines was never going to be an easy experience for him no matter what circumstances were when the time came.
He never complains. He never comments. He doesn't talk about the mines at all. I wish he would. I wish that one day he would just take a few minutes and rant and rave about everything that he hates about the mines. I wish he would come out and say that his father died there and he has to think about that every time that he takes the elevator down into its depths. I wish he would say that he misses the woods and the air and the lack of confinement. I think it would help just to say it all out loud just once. If he would admit that it isn't what he would have chosen if he would ever have been allowed a choice, I think it would make it better.
Instead, he pretends. There is never a discussion of the mines. There is only the talk of what our priorities are for the paycheck. There is never a mention of missing being able to spend time in the woods. There is only the talk of how quickly he will have to move on Sunday to squeeze in everything that he thinks he needs to do. His twelve hour shifts leave him exhausted, and he sits with Posy cuddled on his lap for a few minutes at night before she goes to bed as the only sibling interaction that he has any energy for. That, experience tells me, will get better. He'll get more used to the hours (even if he never recovers from being shut out of the air). He'll have more to give his brothers in the way of attention after he has adjusted.
For now though, he just doesn't have anything else to give. And he shouldn't have to; giving to them is all he does. He doesn't question where supper comes from on most days. We don't talk about the fact that it comes from Katniss. It bothers him. It hurts his sense of responsibility even though we both know that were things different, the Everdeens would be receiving the same from him. We don't mention Katniss. We haven't since the first Sunday that she rejoined him in the woods. He came home muttering about change and differences and an awful lot of use of the word can't. He looked at me and said straight out that it wasn't fair, and we haven't spoken of it again. My hates change boy has had far too much in the way of changes. I let him have his space for now.
That will eventually have to change. He can't go on like this forever - pretending that the mines don't bother him, using his Sundays to pretend that it's just him and the same Katniss going to the woods like always, pretending that Rory is still young enough that he'll get around to teaching him how to help someday. It will have to change, but it won't have to change today. Today she is going away again, and I won't add on to his reminders that things won't ever be the same. Today I will cook beaver stew and not mention who brought it over. I will plan for the days ahead when she won't be around to run the snare lines, and I will decide which of the carefully hoarded items from Parcel Days to break into first without mentioning why we have them. It's not the same, but I'll let him cope with that in his time for as long as I can.