A/N: Minor warning for Jack/Raisa content (no smut), which probably won't come as a surprise to anyone who's read my other stuff. Includes nods to True North/general Jack headcanon.
Raisa (Mrs. Mellark)
Waking up is rarely a pleasant experience for Raisa Mellark, but if she had to choose a best part, it would be the single gumdrop she always slips from her bedside drawer before she opens her eyes.
Gumdrops used to be everywhere when she was young, cellophane bags for 59 cents or two for a dollar at every gas station, but she has to look for them now. And she does, tirelessly.
After the divorce – the rage, grief, betrayal; the heartbreak over the pregnancy, so much worse than the affair – she quit pretending. The smell of baked goods abruptly made her nauseous, so she tried every carb-less diet she could find. She lost 30 pounds without trying, not that she had much of an appetite then anyway. She ordered acorn flour online and bought the wildest things she could find at the farmer's market: fiddleheads, ground cherries, mushrooms of all kinds. She pulled needles off pine trees in the park and steeped them for tea. She ordered venison and elk from Rooba and learned to eat lake fish, which she hated, because it reminded her of him.
She reaches around the gumdrop bag – she got anise today; purple, the very best of all – for the bottle and spritzes a cloud of bay laurel before opening her eyes at last to regard the framed picture on the nightstand.
She's made scans of this and even attempted to paint it, but nothing seems to match the perfection of one decades-old photograph.
A wedding photo, but not from hers, and not even from a particularly memorable wedding – except, perhaps, it was Rooba's happiest till now. After two dismal marriages ending in rapid widowhoods, Rooba was introduced to Micah Tolliver – a working-poor, blue-collar boy who'd been widowed himself – and thought she'd found a fairy tale come to life. The wedding was small but lavish, particularly for a third one: a veritable folk festival with rustic breads and haunches of beef and great goblets of mead, and Rooba insisted on dressing the groom and his best man accordingly in drop-sleeve blouses and vests.
Which is why Jack looks like a pirate king in the photo.
Jack Everdeen was Micah's first cousin and, to be honest, Rooba's first choice, but he was soundly married to Alyssum then, though no children had come along yet. He had presented Micah to twice-widowed Rooba as an ideal husband and, as always, Jack knew best. Rooba lost Micah too, ultimately, but their marriage was the happiest time of her life, save for recently. Maybe.
Raisa openly disliked and avoided cheerful, utterly unobjectionable Micah because the truth was too painful to acknowledge. She had been married to Janek for four years then and they had Marko, the three-year-old the size of a first grader. Janek was getting restless to start Baby #2, but it was a simple longing for progeny; for a sibling for their son. He enjoyed the sex well enough, but Raisa had rebuffed most of his attempts, for a myriad of reasons.
Jack was Micah's best man and only groomsman, and Rooba only had one sister. Which is how Raisa ended up arm-in-arm with Jack Everdeen at the front of a church.
Miserable as she was at the time, she looks pretty enough in the photo. Ribbons and roses in her hair – Rooba wore her own long then too and insisted they have ringlets – and a peach-colored peasant dress in a copy of Rooba's white one.
She's amassed plenty of pictures of Jack since, but this is the only one of them together.
Janek had Marko for the reception – Janek took charge of Marko most of the time anyway – and the awkward silence finally broke during Micah and Rooba's first dance, complete with an endearing trail of the bride's three tow-headed ducklings. Jack smiled at the sight of the children, a bitter and indulgent expression all at once, and asked quietly, Why do you hate my cousin?
Raisa stared down at the lean, beautiful hand resting beside hers on the tablecloth. I don't, she answered in a small voice. I really, really don't. I thought you of all people would see that.
His hand twitched against the linen and his pinky finger nearly brushed hers. But you didn't want her to marry him, he insisted quietly. Why not?
She gave him the same answer she had given to a remarkably similar question some six years before, then as now with the same meaning. You know why, she whispered.
We're due to join the dance, he said, still without looking at her, and turned his hand palm-up. Raisa, trembling, laid hers in his palm and let him lead her onto the dance floor, where he rested his opposite hand on her waist in the sort of modified social slow-dance appropriate for a couple married to other people.
She'd known this was forthcoming but had tried not to let herself anticipate it, since both her spouse and Jack's were guests at the wedding, and she closed her free hand around his shoulder with a soundless croon.
There's a patio, you know, he said suddenly, still not meeting her eyes. With torches for the cold.
Okay, she replied without hesitation.
There were enough couples dancing that they could slip away unnoticed, and the patio was cold, even with the merry semicircle of torches. Raisa had forgotten the fur wrap Rooba had rented for her back in the hall and Jack had no coat to offer, even had he wished to, but somehow the brutal midwinter chill didn't seem to matter.
She was alone with Jack Everdeen for the first time since that impossible New Year's night, when he kissed her and asked her to marry him and she told him in no uncertain terms that she could never do any such thing.
He didn't mean it, she'd told herself ever since, through her tears. It was a joke; a gag. He was rebounding fiercely from the girl he loved getting back together with her old boyfriend – Alyssum, now his wife of four years, then girlfriend and fiancée of Janek, now Raisa's husband of four years.
No kids, she blurted, at a loss for anything else to say. Are there…complications?
It's not complicated, he said simply, sadly. Alys doesn't want any.
Fury and sympathy roared up in her chest. Did she tell you that before you got married?
Jack tipped his head in noncommittal acknowledgement. She had reasons, but it seemed like they might change over time. I told her I was okay with whatever she wanted, and I am. Really.
She ached to kiss the weak smile from his lips, or coax it into a true one. I'm so sorry, Jack, she murmured.
His eyes – birch-silver – riveted suddenly to hers. Say that again, he told her.
I'm so sorry, she repeated in an even gentler tone, taking a half-step forward. Truly I am.
He rubbed at those stunning eyes in a gesture somewhere between frustration, exasperation, and desperation and took the half-step forward to meet her. "Jack," he said raggedly.
Jack, she whispered back.
They weren't out there long, and certainly not long enough. The kisses he covered her mouth with were more wonderful than anything she'd experienced in four years of marriage to Janek, and they clung together behind the arborvitae, her face buried in his chest.
Bay laurel, crushed roses, torch smoke, and arborvitae. She's tried all her life to recapture that scent but she never will, not without the musk of Jack's body.
There's a getaway car, you know, she told him through her tears. If you don't want to go with me, you could always just take it yourself and run.
I love her, he said, but there were tears in his voice as well, and she didn't press further, just held and held and held him.
The moment was broken by, of all people, Hazelle Hawthorne, Jack's cousin on the other side, then enormously pregnant and somehow still breathtaking in her caftan. Jackie, don't mean to intrude, but they want to do the speeches soon, she announced to the empty patio. So if you see Rooba's sister, better round her up too.
Raisa sometimes wondered whether Hazelle wasn't an even better hunter than Jack.
Can you try to be happy for her for five minutes? he entreated softly when Hazelle had gone, kissing a tear track from Raisa's cheek.
I am happy for her, she assured him. It's me that I hate, not Micah. Me that I'm crying for.
Jack closed his eyes and the distance between their mouths once more.
Janek periodically wore a beard in winter but it never felt the way Jack's did against her skin.
A long, heartbreaking kiss later, Jack tucked sprigs of arborvitae amid the roses in her hair. A winter queen, he declared her. You would've looked like this for our wedding.
Raisa painted a picture after called The Winter Queen – a miniature, really; wallet-sized, if he was so inclined, and mailed it to Jack at his workplace. She never heard a word about it, before or after his death, and liked to think sometimes that it had burned with him.
The steadfast tin soldier and the paper ballerina.
She painted that too, once, never mind Jack was hardly a soldier and she nothing like a ballerina. Painting didn't make the grief hurt any less, but it gave her a way to express it.
And of course, not all of her artwork was created out of grief.
She starts a pot of coffee – a half-pot only, since there's no one to share in it – and lingers by the mantel as it brews, looking at the photos of her precious granddaughters. A veritable rainbow of beautiful little girls, with a whisper of her in every face, and the loveliest of all – both objectively and subjectively – is the eldest, Ashpet. The daughter of Raisa's youngest son and Jack's oldest daughter, with Jack's mother's name.
People rightly say that they see equal measures of Peeta and Katniss in her black curls, but Raisa sees someone else. Micah Tolliver had curls, like his Everdeen mother, and Jack might've had them too – or at least, his daughter might.
Raisa heard once that Alyssum finds Peeta's son disarming to look at sometimes with his wavy blond hair, gray eyes, and olive skin. He is, after all, a combination of the two men she loved and bore children for. A boy named Janek with Jack's eyes.
But Raisa sees Jack in Ashpet: herself and Jack. The daughter they would have had, because Jack fathered daughters where Janek fathered sons, only there would have been hazel flecks in her blue eyes and they would've named her Elspeth, after Jack's grandmother.
Raisa paints her too, more often than she would ever admit to the counselor she still sees twice a month. Those sessions are for company and simple comfort, not for confession – and anyway, she's not interested in stopping, or ashamed of it. She's always prepared to pass off the subject of those paintings as little Ashpet if anyone asks, but of course, no one ever does.
She slips on a cardigan and steps out onto the back porch, savoring the sharp cold and the sweet tingle of star anise on her tongue as she breaks a sprig of arborvitae from the hedge and tucks it behind one ear. Her hair, once a vibrant strawberry blonde, has faded to an ashy ginger, but she can't bring herself to cut it short, like older women are supposed to, or have it dyed a more respectable shade.
She makes a breakfast of toasted acorn bread with honey, pours herself a mug of coffee, and sits at the kitchen table with her sketchbook.