True North, a hunger games fanfic

A/N: I have a fierce, completely unfounded headcanon that Jack and Raisa actually happened upon each other one particular New Year's night on their respective ways to see Alys and Janek and something like this ensued.

Title inspired by Owl City's "If My Heart Was a House":
Circle me and the needle moves gracefully
Back and forth
If my heart was a compass you'd be north

Chapter One: Gumdrops and Acorn Cake

It only happened once. It was fast and unexpected, but it did happen.
- Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

They met in the place where their hopes intersected: the narrow alley between the bakery and the apothecary.

She wore a neat, warm dress of festive red-and-green plaid; cheap cotton flannel, not wool, her ruddy fair hair loose and curling and a coarse brown shawl wrapped around her shoulders.

It was a short walk from the butcher's, even on New Year's night.

He had much further to come and was dressed accordingly in a long coat of what had once been very fine deep gray wool with a curiously elegant cut, as though it had belonged some decades ago to a high-ranking official. The ends of his black hair just peeped out from beneath a cheery red cap, but his heavy winter beard sprouted proudly over the rabbit fur that enclosed his throat.

Like a figure and its reflection, they each bore a gift in gloved hands, tied with a single red ribbon, and like that figure and its reflection, their steps faltered simultaneously at a sight and a sound from within the apothecary's shopfront.

Alyssum Ebberfield's laughter, tasting of candied violets and every bit as rare in this season, followed by a hasty switching off of the light overhead – but not before the mismatched pair outside caught an indelible glimpse of the apothecary's daughter pressed against the counter by the baker's eldest son, her merry mouth silenced by his own.

This relationship was hardly new, but the laughter and kisses had been gone from it these six months, since the loss of the pair's mutual friend, Maysilee Donner, to the Games. Alyssum's parents had tirelessly ladled concoction after decoction down her throat and Janek had attended her with silent, patient affection, but nothing could break through her silent listlessness of grief.

It had seemed, for one brief bittersweet moment, that the romance of Janek Mellark and Alyssum Ebberfield – the dream of their respective parents from the moment the latter was born – might truly be at an end, and this had been enough to grant a faint, shining sliver of hope to the pair who had loved them without it for too many years to count.

"Well," Jack Everdeen said to the snow and the stars and the young woman gazing, heartbroken, at the window from which the image of the lovers had been snuffed, "I suppose that's that."

Raisa Brognar released her caught breath with a ragged sound, more sob than sigh. "I thought…" she began helplessly, and Jack nodded, dismissing the need for further explanation.

"Everyone thought," he agreed, with a trace of hoarseness slipping through his composure. "I never would have come, let alone tonight, let alone with a sweetheart's token, if there seemed the slimmest chance they might rekindle."

His voice was beautiful; melodious and articulate at once, as though he went about as the main character in a play no one but him knew their roles in – nor, indeed, realized they were a part of. It made you want to drop whatever you were doing and listen to every word with all your might.

"Nor I," admitted Raisa, who was not immune to this effect, and her eyes shifted from the dark window to Jack's face, which was every bit as beautiful as his voice, though this was not the sort of thing a Merchant girl should ruminate upon – save for Rooba, and of course, Rooba made no secret of anything she found appealing.

Jack's mother had been extraordinarily beautiful, lovelier than every other girl in the district – Merchant and Seam alike – but somehow no one quite knew where she'd come from. Oh, they knew her kin, the dirt-poor Greenbriers, and even her mother, tiny, delicate Elspeth, who died bringing the babe into the world, but no one could begin to recall Ashpet's father: the man who had given her those mysterious green-gold eyes, shared by no one else in all of Twelve. It was almost as if Elspeth had found a fairy lover in the woods when she went foraging for her mushrooms and acorns and he had filled her with a fairy child, who in her turn had married the weak, plain, utterly unremarkable Asa Everdeen and given him the fine-featured fairy child who now stood between the bakery and the apothecary, gazing thoughtfully down at Raisa.

"And what gift did you bring to accompany your heart?" fey Jack wondered, nodding toward the gaily patterned sweet-shop parcel in her hands.

Raisa scowled and looked away, galled that a Seam man would dare to mock her in the thick of their mutual heartbreak, but he continued, so very gently that her eyes were drawn to him once more. "Please, I do not make light," he said. "I too carried my heart here, wrapped up in a gift far paltrier than your own. Indeed, I have far more to be ashamed of in this moment than you ever could."

"For supposing that the apothecary's pretty, petted daughter might love you?" she wondered, and more hotly than she intended. "You attended her as well, in her grief and long before, with wild fruits and flowers from the heart of the woods. She might just as easily have chosen your heart over Janek's."

"On the contrary," he said patiently, "Janek Mellark was welcome at her table, in her parlor, and even at her bedside, while her parents would scarcely admit me beyond their back stoop. It's little wonder that she should choose the boy whose arms have been her shelter these six months, even if she temporarily forsook his lips."

"You are not a boy," she snapped, and he raised a curious brow, making her flush.

Jack was six years older than the lot of them: a man grown, twenty-two and free from the Reaping that would hold their lives in the balance twice more before it was quit with them. For four years he had done a man's work in the coal mines, but unlike so many of his peers, he had not promptly sought a wife to keep house for him on the ragged edge of the Seam but instead kept a quiet bachelor's existence, split between six twelve-hour shifts in the mine and his forbidden, fairytale life of hunting and foraging in the woods.

More than a few believed he never returned to his empty Seam house at all but overnighted in the woods after his mining shifts, bathing in the mysterious lake no one had ever seen but which yielded the plump delicious fish he sold to the butcher every Sunday and sharing a hollow tree with an owl or a den of earth with a pair of foxes. He was cleaner than any miner had a right to be and smelled perpetually of sweet pine fires, brisk air, and earth – the rich, pure loam that sent up wildflowers and vegetables and tall fruiting trees, not the poisoned soil that was steadily swallowing up his youth, airless and veined with coal.

In truth, the only coal dust clinging to him this evening was flecks in the snow caking his boots, lending more than a little credence to this theory.

"No, I suppose I am not," he conceded, perhaps a little sadly. "But you are a girl, and lovely to behold, and Janek could have chosen no better sweetheart."

Her flush burned hotter still. "Don't make fun of me," she retorted, though she knew full well he intended nothing of the kind. "Janek Mellark would no sooner look at me than…than a half-rotted turnip at the bottom of the grocer's trash bin."

"I wish your father's words had died with him," Jack said softly, "that the memories were as easily laid to rest as his body," and she flinched.

When Vanya Brognar was finally silenced, first by a punishing blow from Rooba's sturdy fist and forever by a burst blood vessel in his brain, the entire district had doffed their caps in cursory condolence before hurling them in the air in jubilation, and only Jack, then fifteen, and his beautiful fey mother had thought to look in on the butcher's browbeaten family, to see how they fared without the brute who, for all his cruelties, knew better than any of them how to carve and portion a carcass and manage the funds it brought in. Jack had always tried to slip the children a little wild toy or treat that might be quickly consumed or concealed if Vanya was in one of his rages, and when the butcher finally died of that rage, seven years ago, Jack brought Luka an exquisitely carved wooden whistle on a string and Raisa a family of stick dollies with a set of tiny acorn dishes.

Luka never found the patience to coax beautiful birdsongs from the whistle the way Jack had demonstrated and finally hurled it into the fire as "a useless scrap of wood," but the stick dollies still sat proudly around their invisible feast on Raisa's dresser, where she greeted them every morning and night.

"Thank you," she blurted, suddenly and stilted. "For – singing at Luka's burial."

Jack Everdeen had been the sum total of mourners for Raisa's brutal, beautiful twin brother, killed in a knife fight that summer, not long after Twelve won its first Games in time out of mind. There was no doubt in anyone's mind, not even Raisa's, that it was Luka who had started the fight, nor that he was the one who'd driven it to a life-or-death altercation, but the knife that cut his throat had been wielded by a miner, and Raisa had sworn enmity against all Seam folk as a result.

Jack arrived at the butcher's on the heels of the Peacekeepers delivering Luka's body, having witnessed the bitter end of the fight and frantically attempted to save the dying boy – an act attested to by the bloodstains on his long fingers as well as the Peacekeepers' own accounts – but Raisa refused even to enter the room with him. Overcome with shock and grief and rage as she was, she clung to Luka's lifeless body and pressed the bloody rag of Jack's handkerchief to the wound in his throat while Rooba and their mother accepted Jack's account and repeated sympathies, particularly on her behalf. When she finally heard the door close behind him, she ran out to the front stoop and screamed after his departing form that she would tear out the throat of the next Seam man she saw, never mind that the miner who had wielded the knife in self-defense had been shot on the scene by Peacekeepers, and she insisted they pay the double rate to hire Merchant boys rather than Seam ones to dig Luka's grave.

Burials in Twelve were simply that: laying the sheet-wrapped body – more often than not, stripped of every useful item; sometimes even of clothing – in a crude slot in the ground and covering it with earth while onlookers uttered a sentence or two in recollection of the deceased, if they wished. No ceremony was called for or observed, and the only marker to distinguish one grave from the next was a concrete slab provided by the Justice Building before sunset to prevent animals – or anyone equally desperate – from digging up the corpse for food.

No one mourned Luka, least of all the countless girls who had served as his lovers, willingly or less so, and when it came time to lay him in the earth, only Jack was there to bear witness: uninvited and unwelcome; dressed in his one good suit, with a bouquet of wild poppies for the family and a crisp black ribbon tied around his left arm. Raisa shrieked and howled like a madwoman that any Seam man would dare to show his face at her twin's burial, let alone stand at the graveside wearing a mourner's ribbon, as though he grieved the loss in some way. Even the red-faced Cartwright boys – Luka's neighbors and classmates, just days before – had not bothered with that pretense but heaped the dirt quick and heavily over the stiff, sheet-wrapped body, desperate to escape the sweltering heat and Raisa's sobs and put the whole wretched scene behind them.

And then Jack began to sing, his voice high and bright and shimmering like stars on the coldest night you can imagine, and the tears on Raisa's cheeks dried to moondust.

I am stretched on your grave
And I'll lie here forever
If your hands were in mine
I'd be sure they would not sever
My apple tree, my brightness,
It's time we were together
For I smell of the earth
And I'm worn by the weather.

When my family think
That I'm safely in my bed
Oh, from morn until night
I am stretched out at your head
Calling out unto the earth
With tears hot and wild
For the loss of a boy
That I loved as a child.

Oh, the priests and the friars
They approach me in dread
Oh, for I love you still
Oh, my life, and you're dead
I still will be your shelter
Through rain and through storm
And with you in your cold grave
I cannot sleep warm.

Raisa had never heard – never even dreamt – of such a song, and her breath caught over and over again at the beauty of the lyrics: fairy-poetry in truth, borne through the still, muggy air in the cool sweet honey of Jack's voice, swirling through her ears and brain and nestling, bittersweet but gentle, in her heart. How could a Seam man sing so eloquently of the heartbreak of the bereaved lover, let alone over a callous Merchant boy who had loved no one but himself and, in a vague, thoughtless, inevitable sort of fashion, his twin sister? Jack knew death better than most, she supposed, having lost his entire family by the age of eighteen, but how could he know that the love she carried for her cruel twin, and the devastation she felt at Luka's death, was tantamount to a sweetheart's? That Luka had been her life, whether or not he chose to see it, and that she wanted nothing more than to lie over that cold slot of freshly turned earth till wind and rain peeled the last scrap of flesh from her bones and the sun dried what remained of her to dust?

She had heard Jack sing before, of course; everyone had. Possessing the finest voice in the district, he was pressed to sing at even the smallest social gatherings, and it was not at all uncommon for him to perch cross-legged in the Meadow on warm days or in the Hob on cold ones and sing along to his dulcimer, songs both plaintive and merry, his cap good-naturedly laid out in case anyone should wish to give a coin or two in appreciation of the tune.

Rooba was inclined to leave handfuls of coins, and not pennies only, in appreciation of his face and his long-fingered hands and his lithe body, but Raisa caught her with a scowl and dragged her away at every opportunity.

Lusty, busty Rooba had always been brazen in her admiration of attractive males, but something about her interest in Jack Everdeen rankled, like a burr in your stocking. She and Jack had enjoyed a natural friendship from their earliest days as butcher's daughter and huntress's son; a friendship that had not yet evolved into anything resembling courtship, and not for lack of interest on Rooba's side. She enjoyed boys far too much to sit about pining after a single oblivious one, and of course Jack had been taken with Alyssum Ebberfeld from the day she was born, but Rooba was more than happy to walk out, and more, with dark, lean Seam boys and had more than once remarked that she would not be above choosing a husband from among them, should the right one express interest in the role.

There was no doubt in Raisa's mind that Jack Everdeen was the right one of whom her sister spoke, and as he appeared to be cut loose at last from his hopeless devotion to the apothecary's daughter, there was equal certainty that Rooba would march out to make Jack her bridegroom the moment the news of Janek and Alyssum's rekindled romance reached her ears.

"I knew how you loved him," Jack said, jarring Raisa back to her brother's graveside once more. "His death required a sweetheart's lament."

"It wasn't like that," she tried to dismiss, but she suspected that, here again, Jack understood better than anyone. Unrequited love tends to recognize itself in others, after all, and right or wrong, she would have given Luka anything and everything in exchange for a kind word, a gentle touch, or even five minutes of his undivided attention.

It was well indeed, she could see now, that her self-absorbed twin had never offered her anything of the kind.

"You shared one essence, whether or not he acknowledged as much, and now that is broken forever," Jack said gently. "Again, I am so very sorry for your loss."

"And I am sorry," she answered quietly, "for how I treated you then. You went out of your way to honor my brother – the only one in the district who could spare a moment to stand at his grave, to say nothing of offering your beautiful song – and I thanked you with threats and curses and screams."

"No one should be blamed for words spoken in the throes of grief," he assured her. "And it was not merely Luka I wished to honor."

She could not guess what he meant by this, but his words made her cheeks warm and she ducked her face to hide it. "Rooba wants to marry you," she blurted, at a loss for anything else to say at this moment, and Jack laughed; a glorious, merry sound that had no business coming from a man who'd just witnessed the trampling of his heart.

"I'm well aware," he replied. "She's needled me about it for some time now, but I have neither the interest nor the stamina for such a union."

Raisa laughed at this in turn, for as little as she understood of what transpired between a man and a woman in the bedroom, she knew that stout, lusty Rooba could wear a lover thin with her exuberance, and Jack was lean already. "But you would be a butcher's bridegroom," she reminded him in a burst of unexpected playfulness. "You could eat your own game, every last morsel, and grow fat and sleek on it; a fit match for my sister."

"But would you welcome a Seam man behind the counter?" he asked, light but pointedly, and her flush deepened.

"I don't want you for my brother-in-law," she answered, plainly but without spite. "You should have a finer bride than Rooba."

"And whom would you recommend?" he wondered softly. "The apothecary's daughter does not want me, and now you say I am not cut out for the butcher's girl."

"What gift did you bring for your sweetheart?" she asked instead, bristling and malcontent at this new subject, and nodded at the parcel in his hands.

"A little acorn cake," he replied. "Humble but precious. I thought I could take it home and eat it myself, but I'm not sure I can bring myself to break the sweetheart's tie around it."

"New Year's night is far from over," she pointed out. "There's time and plenty to offer it to another girl. Your acorn cake is not to be sneered at."

She knew the taste of acorn cake better than most – indeed, even dreamt of it sometimes on lonely nights – for Jack and his mother had given one each to her and to Luka after their father's death, along with the handcrafted toys. Scrawny nine-year-old Raisa had devoured the dense, hearty treat by the fistful with tears in her eyes and licked her palms clean of honeyed crumbs afterward.

"That I would, and gladly," he said. "But I should hate to obligate the recipient to the kiss that comes attached."

"It's New Year's night," she reminded him. "When kisses fly like snowflakes from one end of town to the other, and it's considered bad luck to refuse. If you rang the bell, you might yet claim a kiss from your apothecary's daughter," she added hesitantly.

"From lips swollen with Janek's kisses?" he said, with a bitter sort of humor. "I should rather have no kiss at all than that one tonight – though ringing the bell would probably bring your sweetheart to the door as well," he admitted. "Shall we try?"

She shook her head. New Year's night might be a time of ribbons and kisses exchanged almost without hesitation, but someone was always a little too late. They might not be denied, but there was no pleasure in kissing or being kissed by a boy who was already flushed and tousled by rounds of real, ardent kissing with his sweetheart.

"Janek doesn't even like gumdrops," she remarked, turning the sweet-shop parcel in her hands. "Toffee buttons are his favorite."

"The more fool he," Jack replied with a smile. "So why did you buy them?"

She raised her eyes to his. "They're more festive," she insisted, but her breath stumbled a little through the words, and Jack took a curious half-step closer.

"Most Merchant boys prefer toffee buttons, I understand," he ventured.

"And most Merchant girls would turn up their noses at acorn cake," she answered smartly, but trembling, because Jack Everdeen – lithe, lovely, fey-born Jack Everdeen, whose breath smelled of gumdrops when there were enough pennies in his cap – was less than an arm's length from her now, gazing down into her eyes with something that cautiously resembled hope.

"Raisa," he murmured, and her name on his lips was poetry and magic, pine smoke and stardust and birdsong. "I don't believe my sweetheart is in the apothecary tonight," he said, so softly that the words shivered down her back, like tangible motes of bliss. "And I dearly hope yours isn't either."

"What do you mean?" she said, because she knew and she didn't – or rather, couldn't begin to process, let alone accept, what some mad corner of her mind thought he might, perhaps, be implying – and he proffered his parcel with both hands.

"I want you to have this gift, and the ribbon wrapped around it," he replied, his eyes somber and silvered by snow-light. "And then, if you're willing, I'd like you to kiss me."

"Don't make fun of me," she snarled, like a wounded thing in a cage, taunted by laughing onlookers with a sharp stick. "Not here. Not tonight."

"I don't, and would never," he swore, but tenderly; patiently, the way one might soothe a wild thing. "I'm offering you a gift made by my own hands and the sweetheart's token that comes affixed."

"And is that all you're offering?" she wondered, because all at once the treasure of acorn cake – a tiny precious cake crafted from the very essence of the wild woods, the likes of which Janek Mellark had surely never prepared – and a kiss and that very pennant of pride, the sweetheart ribbon, felt strangely hollow.

"Why did you buy gumdrops for the baker's son who loves toffee buttons?" he asked by way of reply, so softly; a swirl of breath in the frosty air between them that carried whispers of sugared anise and ginger in its wake.

"You know why," she whispered, and he took a step nearer.

"Alyssum would have liked the acorn cake, after a fashion," he told her. "She has a love for old tales and would have laughed as she proclaimed it 'fairy food.'"

"Prepared by your hands, what else could it be?" she challenged, but breathlessly, for suddenly there seemed to be no air to draw in from the narrowing space between them.

"I am just a man, Raisa," he said, "and a very poor one," but these words were feeble argument against the raw magic simmering in his golden voice and silver eyes. "And more to the point, I am Seam-born, which I know is of no small consequence to you."

"You were born in the woods," she averred in a hush, "like a fawn," and hoped with all her might that this particular legend was rooted in truth.

Jack smiled faintly, all the confirmation required. "And is that sufficient to make you forgive my heritage?" he wondered. "The place where I have lived all my life, and among whose folk I am numbered?"

"Why did you make an acorn cake for a girl who would laugh at it?" she countered, and suddenly both gifts were in her grasp and Jack's gloved hands hovered a hairsbreadth from her cheeks.

"Tell me I can touch you," he begged, his spun-silver eyes darkening to storm clouds, and she loved him all the more for it.

"Please touch me," she whispered, and Jack groaned softly as he cradled her face in his hands.

His touch was heaven: firm and warm and so tender, despite the thin layer of leather that lay between them. Raisa had never been on the receiving end of any such gesture, let alone on her delicate face, and she fought the instinct to flinch or cry out in response.

"Oh Raisa," he breathed, "Your twin was a brute and Janek is blind to everything but Alyssum, but I have been an even greater fool, for I saw your qualities from the first and yet looked past them again and again."

"I have no qualities," she protested in a feeble rasp, and he shook his head with a sad smile.

"It would be my greatest privilege to demonstrate otherwise," he told her. "But I fear I'm getting ahead of myself. Will you accept my gift, and the sweetheart's token affixed?"

In answer, she leaned up on her toes and kissed his mouth; a fierce, artless, clumsy offering, half lost in the exquisite bristle of his beard, but it clearly pleased him beyond measure, for he made a sound that was joy and pain all at once and held her close, keeping her mouth against his till they were forced to part to draw breath.

"Will you accept my gift?" she asked raggedly, an ardent pant of breath across his parted lips. "The gumdrops, and the sweetheart's token affixed?"

"Gladly," he sighed, and drew her in for a kiss of his own; slower and gentler than hers but no less uncertain, and she whimpered with joy to think that this beautiful fey man with his sweet spiced breath had never kissed anyone either. Not Rooba, not Alyssum; not even the dark and lovely Seam girls he lived among.

"I'll do better next time," he promised when at last he drew back; all the confirmation required, and foolish happy tears burned in her eyes.

"We need to exchange ribbons," she insisted with a broken laugh, wiping furiously at her eyes. "To-To tie them on each other," and Jack affirmed this with a tremulous chuckle of his own.

"Indeed we must," he agreed, pocketing his gloves and taking back his parcel, but only till the ribbon could be freed, then they traded gifts once more as they eyed one another with ribbons in hand, both flushed and radiant.

"You should wear it as a crown," he declared, and stepped behind her to draw his precious ribbon gently against her brow and tie it behind her head. No girl Raisa had even seen, neither Seam nor Merchant, wore her sweetheart's token in such a fashion and she wondered if Jack's fey mother had done so in her youth, perhaps in some distant fairy court.

"And you must wear it on your left arm," she replied, a little wildly, threading the ribbon around the fine wool of his sleeve and looping its ends in a snug bow. "The heart side, like wedding rings," she added by rote, then looked up at him in horror, for in all their exchange of ribbons and kisses, neither promise nor even interest had been spoken, let alone of the sort she had thoughtlessly implied. They might be sweethearts for this hour and they would smile at each other on the morrow, should they pass, adorned with each other's tokens, but there was little more commitment required or implied by the exchange. In all likelihood they would be longing after Janek and Alyssum again, albeit more hopelessly than ever, before the night was over.

Jack gazed down at her with neither shock nor distress but rather a grave sort of tenderness, and brushed his dusky fingers against the ribbon tied round his arm. "Upon your arm and upon your heart," he quoted softly, then, securing the sweet-shop pouch in his pocket, he took her hands, and the acorn cake parcel between them, in his.

"Raisa Brognar," he said, "will you marry me?"

A/N: Here endeth the headcanon - but not the story! ;) I've considered writing the next part in a sort of "Sliding Doors" fashion (i.e., here's what happened when she said no, here's what happened when she said yes), but I'm not sure how that will pan out. I also want to sneak in a few alternate scenario oneshots (ex. what if Jack and Ashpet took in Raisa for a while after her father died) but I haven't decided whether to make those into actual chapters or just turn this into a series with multiple installments.

The song Jack sings at Luka's burial is "I am Stretched on Your Grave," a 17th century Irish poem translated into English (in this case) by Frank O'Connor. I tweaked it very slightly for the context, changing "girl" to "boy" in the second verse and leaving out the third verse entirely (about how the lovers were lost in the woods one night but didn't sleep together), which has intriguing potential for another day/fic/universe, but I didn't want this story drifting too suggestively down the twincest stream. I really don't envision Raisa and her twin brother as lovers outside of a mythological context (ex. The Huntress and the Honey-God), but I think she had a certain attachment to him that might have brought more grief if he had lived long enough to exploit it.

Finally, I hope no one is too offended by me using that Catching Fire quote to introduce this chapter. As stated in the notes at the beginning, I have a (completely unfounded) headcanon that something resembling this scene actually took place between young Mr. Everdeen and the future Mrs. Mellark and the quote was irresistibly fitting in that respect.