Disclaimer: All Hunger Games characters and uses of the original sentences or paragraphs are the property of Suzanne Collins. I own nothing, nor do I plan on profiting from using her work. No copyright infringement is intended.

A/N: I just couldn't let her go. And I hope she's not OC, but I thought I got her down well enough, considering things. I think this chapter is very important for Katniss. Thank you everyone who has been feeding me all this wonderful feedback. It's what keeps me writing you new chapters. Thanks for you reading everyone. Sorry for typos. Reviews make the world go around. -Taryn(:


Chapter Four

"Make it quick," the female Peacekeeper says as I step into the shower. I hurriedly peel off my dress, slip my feet out of the shoes, and hand the pile out to the Peacekeeper. Shivering against the cold, I slip toward the silver knobs. This is the absolutely least fancy shower I've ever seen in the Capitol, with its dank feel and concrete surroundings. Peeta said something about their showers once, I remember.

I already miss the covering the dress had served to me. My hands rest against my bump. Skin feeling clammy. Aside from the anticipation of the coming days, for the ugly means of my obedience, and Head Peacekeeper Brock, I marvel at the feel of the water. Warm and clean as it rushes over my grimy skin. It's been a long time since they've let me shower. There are no fancy, confusing buttons. Just a bottle of soap that foams in my hair and leaves my skin feeling slippery. It was that Head Peacekeeper who ordered this for me? Why? Such a luxury as this in a prison is beyond my wildest imaginings, or is he just trying to soften me? Just like Leon? Or am I getting more paranoid the longer I stay in the Capitol?

"Out!" calls the Peacekeeper, and passes in a cloth towel, followed by underclothes and a pair of cotton pants with a matching shirt. My skin tingles under the clean fabric of the garment and my fingers fumble with the string of the waistband, pained to find a comfortable fit. Quickly, I wring out my hair, then braid it with effortlessly fingers, tossing the wet mass behind my back.

As I push open the glass-planed door that served as an entrance to the shower, I stare into its foggy, morphed, shimmering surface, recognizing a pair of gray eyes. The rest, unfortunately, I don't recognize at all.

The Peacekeeper looks at me skeptically once I step out, clean and dressed. When I reach for the shoes that the prep team had given me, the Peacekeeper points to a pair of worn loafers instead. I slip my feet in, discovering they're nearly three sizes too big. "You shouldn't have wasted so much time on your hair," the Peacekeeper says. "It's likely they'll just cut it all off."

I'm not entirely upset about losing hair, not if it's in comparison to losing a limb. "Until then, I might as well keep it tame," I reply, surprising even myself when my tone comes out without shaking. It's been beyond twelve hours since my last dose of morphine and though I crave a little, I'm not about to break down.

The female Peacekeeper, an elderly woman with muscular arms and a hard jaw, squints at me. She grunts, turns away, and for an instant I think she's assenting. Then the Peacekeeper turns rapidly and backhands me hard across my cheek, hitting me with such force my neck painful snaps to the right. My face stinging, she grabs me by the hair at the crown of my head. The floor rushes up to meet my knees as the woman pulls me over to a table set near the shower and she takes a pair of rusted scissors and haphazardly snips away the base of my braid. My useless black hair, still weaved together as one, falls to the concrete and all I can think is that it's only the first piece of myself that I'm going to lose.

"You'll learn to hold that tongue of yours," the Peacekeeper says as she drop me to the ground. I bite back a reply, pressing a palm to the throbbing cheek. I watch as she flicks my braid into a trash bin nearby and with it goes the fancy dress and flats.

To regain some of my dignity I get awkwardly to my feet. "Come get her!" the female Peacekeeper yells and I watch the familiar escort of Peacekeepers reappear as if they'd been waiting just outside the door.

I shove away their hands. This is something I can do on my own. Control, of some measure. It isn't much, not when I have a hand print searing across my face and new hair, with jagged uneven edges that drip water along the very edge of my jaw. The men don't object though and form around me as they lead me out into the hall once more. We pass several corridors. A few more flights of stairs until the place begins to smell musty, as if fresh air rarely penetrated this far within the walls. That, or we're underground again. After about three or four floors, we've met a place of only blank white walls and floors. No doorways. Nothing but white.

They stop me at the end of the last hallway. One of the Peacekeepers steps before the smooth white wall and we wait for about three seconds before it slips open, seamlessly, as if there has always been a door there. It reveals a wide room just the same white as the hall behind us. There is no furniture, but two or three benches, a bucket in the corner, and harsh, bright lights overhead.

"I'm supposed to be fed," I remind the Peacekeeper near my right.

"Funny that," he says coolly, and gives me a shove inside the room.

Before the wall shuts at my back I turn and lock eyes with one of the other men out there. "Is this the right cell?" I ask. They turn away. "Where are the others?" The wall falls back into place, leaving me in this cell all alone. Nothing but white walls staring me in the face. Panicked, I throw myself into the wall that has replaced the door's opening. "When will I see Leon again!" I shout, futilely. My hollow, sad voice echoing back at me. "Where's Snow!"

I hear a laugh. I whip around leaning into the fragment of the wall that I know to be a doorway. It's not a laugh I recognize. I thought when Head Peacekeeper Brock said others he meant people I knew. The laughter comes from my left. I stand, listening intently as it turns into hacking, and wait for my eyes to adjust to the brightness of the room. My cheek throbs dully when I press a finger to it.

The sounds are coming from a shadowed figure laying underneath one of the benches.

With my fingertips reluctantly pulling away from the wall, I progress toward the man.

The hoarse cackling from earlier starts up again among his coughing. Two feet away, I crouch. Hair falls in front of my eyes and I flick it away, annoyed. It only falls back in place. The man I find has hair as equally gone as Johanna. Face so battered that even if I did know him, I could never be capable of finding his true identity underneath the numerous oozing gashes, swollen eyes, and bruises covering him from chin to hairline.

"Hello?" I say.

The man stops laughing all of sudden, wheezing. His eyes find mine and he sits up so fast his forehead cracks against the bottom of the bench. It is then that I decide it's safe to approach him. I help him out from underneath there, though he's about three times my size. Once sitting on top of the bench, out of the shadow, I realize I do know this man. "Mayor Undersee?"

When he smiles I see he's missing multiple teeth as well. Though in District 12 I'd always thought Mayor Undersee on the rounder side than most people, he's frightfully frail, now.

I let myself fall to the bench at his side. I touch the lash marks visible on his shoulder through his shirt. "I thought you had died in District 12," I murmur. "With your family.."

Mayor Undersee's wheezing turns into laughter again. A broken, insane mirth that makes me cringe. I turn away from him, elbows on my inner thighs, hunched. My eyes trace the ceiling. Already I know that four months living in this cell, receiving all the torture that he has, this is not truly Mayor Undersee as I remember him. He's been broken. He let President Snow break him. Possibly it was the weakness the mayor felt once he'd lost his home, his district, his people.

The same grief I am feeling.

With a bark and cough Mayor Undersee topples backward off the bench. I try to catch him, my reflexes fast enough to get a good hold of his shirt, but he's too heavy for me. I wince, but the man goes on hacking, rolling around, until once more he's underneath the bench. Feet kicking mine. It takes me a moment to realize he's hiding under there. On purpose.

He's weeping, too. Tears for Madge? For his wife? Afraid that maybe I'm here to cause him and his own more pain than my escape from the arena has already done?

"Mr. Undersee," I start, voice cracking. I pull myself off the bench onto my knees, bent over at the waist to peer at him underneath the bench. "I'm sorry." The man doesn't react to my words. Shows no sign of understanding or appreciating how much I ache right along with him. Nothing. But I have to satisfy myself with it.

Sleep draws at me sometime later. Hours? Minutes? All I know is that I've been up all night filming that interview. That is possibly being aired at this very moment, and that the day before this one I had spent it walking among the ashes of my home. There are no beds, only the benches and since it seems Mayor Undersee has claimed the first one, I choose the one right next to it, stretching out across its surface and slipping easily into fitful sleep.

I dream of Prim. Buttercup is with her and Lady, all of them in the Meadow. She's made both of them crowns of flowers. Bright red poppy flowers that Buttercup kneads to compost and Lady munches on gratefully. Her laughter rings out when I step up to the edge of the swaying meadow grass. I want to go to her, but for some reason, in a dream-like way, I know I shouldn't disturb her happiness.

I choose to sit at the edge of the meadow, watching her silently. Then the earth slides away and I'm in the arena, lost within the tunnels. The sound of Peeta's torturous screams mirroring an insane, loud, thundering laughter. Hacking laughter that makes me jerk from sleep in an instant, sweating, very nearly falling over the side of the bench.

Sure enough Mayor Undersee is laughing. What is so funny? I almost snap. Instead I roll off the bench, catching myself at the very last moment, then stand straight. I have to pee, badly. And my stomach is gurgling hungrily. I pace next to the place in the wall where I know there a door to be, for what seems like hours.

Do they not feed prisoners? A panic rises in me. The kid needs to eat just as much as me, I think. Doesn't Snow realize he'd lose everything he holds over my head if he no longer has the baby? My life against me isn't enough. I'm too stubborn. If he chooses to let the baby slip from his hands, than he has nothing. Surely he knows that?

For what it's worth Mayor Undersee does get some rest time. I'm relieved for the silence. I find my way back to my bench, laying on my back to stare at the ceiling. Unfortunately that proves to be an uncomfortable position. I turn to my right, staring at the blank white walls.

I have to stop blaming myself. I know it's true. The fact that Mayor Undersee sits broken nearby only strengthens that resolve. Recent tragedy can't make me breakable. I must accept that District 12 is gone. Partly my fault, yes, but not entirely. And concerning Mayor Undersee, I must take responsibility for his unhinged mind as well. All the bruises Johanna endures. Maybe she'd have been better off without her sharp wit, but I won't completely absolve my blame in that either.

All of it; accept it. And move on. Rise from it smarter, harder and unbreakable.

Why does that seem so hard? To say and think it is easy. How could I ever truly accept it? In time, I suppose the pain of it would fade, just like the loss of Rue has faded. I just need to know it will fade. District 12 is lost, I'm not. The baby isn't. Peeta and Prim aren't. There are still things to fight for.

And I won't stop fighting. Not ever.

I'm so lost in my focus of forgiving myself that I almost miss the sound of the door opening. I sit up in a whirl. At the door is two Peacekeepers holding a plate of food and pills. They place it on the floor, close the door and are gone. Eagerly I go to the food, scarfing down the first hot roll my fingers find, not bothering with the melted butter in the dish beside it. There is a good amount of food here. Delectable food.

Without thinking about it I turn to the sleeping Mayor Undersee and shake him awake. "Madge?" is a soft, nearly inaudible hack from him immediately after waking. Then he seems to fall away again, completely, and his hands shake when I offer him the soup on my tray.

We sit and eat together, licking our fingers, drinking every last drop of orange juice given to us. Nothing but the pills remain on the tray when we're done and I poke through them suspiciously. None of them seem dangerous. At District 3 I once refused to take any medicine for four days, until a doctor came in and gave me a very long, very severe speech about the proper vitamins and minerals for pregnancy. After that I'd never refused a pill or needle. Now, I am cautious, but I figure they can't do anything to harm the kid, so I take them.

Mr. Undersee is content to lay in the middle of the room, spread eagle, staring at the ceiling. I retreat to my bench, curling on my side as much as my abdomen allows. Again, I think of District 12. I must forgive. Forget. Forgetting sounds easier than forgiving. And maybe if I wasn't reminded by it by Mayor Undersee and President Snow so often, I could forget it quite easily in the light of other trouble. Too bad, they are here.

In an effort to remember it in one go and let it free the next, I recall everything I can about District 12. The Seam where I grew up, where my father grew up. A place that seemed more home than the Victor Village ever was. Greasy Sae at the Hob. The Hob. The walk to school, a school I've never really enjoyed, but most of my memories of Peeta come from there before the Hunger Games got involved. The back porch of Madge's house, selling her strawberries, seeing her pretty, frivolous dresses. Laughs I've shared with Gale when trading among the district as a whole. Let it go. All of it. And for a moment, I don't want to. I should hold onto happy memories, shouldn't I? No, not if I want to be unbreakable.

By the time the door opens a second time I decide not to react. I remember the shell I put myself in after I thought Prim was dead during the Hunger Games. The one Peeta stripped away effortlessly. Well I throw it back up quickly, when I hear footsteps tumble into the room. I turn, expecting to meet a Peacekeeper taking me to the torture chamber, but instead, it's not a Peacekeeper at all.

"Katniss?"

"Madge?"

Mayor Undersee roars up with laughter at the sound of his daughter's name. In fact his hand reaches vaguely at the girl's shoes, standing some two paces from the closed doorway. I don't know what to say. I sit up slowly, staring as much as she stares at me. Her eyes drop to the bulge of my abdomen. I can see the confusion in her bright blue eyes, the wisps of blonde hair falling over her forehead in matted tangles. Sweat pours down her face and neck. The only thing I see wrong with her is the burn scars running up the length of her hands and arms; they are old though, and healing.

"I thought... you were dead."

"I thought you were dead!" she says, and is smiling softly. In a slow, limping way she moves to her father who is laid across the floor and Madge nudges him softly. "It's okay, dad. I'm back." Mayor Undersee pays as much attention to his daughter as he did me, but he's no less resisting with her as she helps him to his bench. She sits heavily next to him, wincing, drawing her knee to her chest and rubbing her ankle.

I'm too surprised to find the right words. "You thought I..?"

"Well we didn't know," Madge's soft, intelligent voice breathes. She pulls the leg of her pants up a little to reveal a purplish ankle, swollen three times the size it should be. I'm surprised she can even walk on it. "You see," she explains, finally tearing her eyes from the limb and meeting my gaze, "they came to get us at the last moment. The Capitol I mean, because President Snow had suspicions about my family. He thought my father was apart of the undercover plans behind his back. Since Heavensbee and his associates have either been killed or killed themselves to keep their secrets, he needed my father, to get the answers from.."

"But he wouldn't tell." There is no question in my voice. I know that disobedience had its costs but looking at Madge's father as he is now seems like the mayor, the man I'd once revered as a child as a powerful adult, is nothing but a thrall. An empty.. dog, or some other animal easy to domesticate. "Was he?" I ask. "Apart of Heavensbee's group of rebels within the Capitol?"

Madge gnaws on her chapped and cracked lip. "My father used to call me Magpie, did you know?"

Yes, I can hear her saying. As if agreeing with my assumption Mayor Undersee bursts into a new fit of coughing and laughter. Madge cringes. I feel bad for her. Awful, really, for her to go through this. To have to watch her father crumble into something unrecognizable. I know what it is like to have to care for a parent that is incapable. That is there, in reach, touchable, but infuriatingly not there.

Another reason not to let them take my sanity, I think, a hand pressing into my abdomen. I won't be a mother like my own. Can't let the kid feel what I have or Madge has. I want to be like Hazelle, for one moment, a mother I can look up to. A woman who was there, even when she lost her husband and had more than just one mouth to feed. Even Cecelia I find myself remembering. She couldn't have possibly agreed to die for me because she simply hates the Capitol; it must have been because underneath she was hoping I'd find a way to make this country into a place where her three sweet sons could live happily.

Madge has noticed my distraction. And just like everything I've ever shared with Madge it is in a thankfully silent understanding acknowledgment. Just as we sat at a lunch table for years in school, ignoring the fact when other girls ask if Gale and I are more than friends, shrugging off the rude things they say about her when they're jealous of her money. Those few times I sat in her house at the piano or in her room during my one year as victor before the Victory Tour, voided of questions about Peeta and I and without comment on her sickly mother in the other room. Or those times when I'd think of a Mockingjay and she'd come to mind, because of the gift she gave me.

Without word, in only the way Madge Undersee can, she gets up from her father's side, joins me on my bench and sits at my side. Our shoulders barely touching, silent. A comforting, undemanding silence, where in a matter of a few minutes, I find she's silently crying. I'm hugging her. And then tears start to fall from my own eyes. All the tears I've been holding in for four long, long months.

By the time we are both cried out, I'm left feeling better. The guilt and built up emotions in me, gone. Madge's hand momentarily rests on my stomach, before wiping at her face. And just like that, I find it's easy to let go. The tears are my goodbye to all those memories and the painful ones, too; of Gale's whipping, the day in the school yard with Peeta's ugly face, when Prim was reaped. All the good and bad, leaving me empty. I have never been happier to feel that way.

Exhausted already, Madge curls up on the third bench in the room falling asleep immediately. I lay out as well, listening to her father's hazy gasps for air and her calm, soothing breaths. Eventually, I slip into dream, thinking, she really has been a friend all along.

When I wake it's because of the sound of the door opening. I'd dreamed of the time Chaff had been thrown into the fountain of acid, so when I hear the door, for some reason it resembles the spiders clicking. I throw myself onto my feet, dizzy by the movement, falling back against the bench immediately. Head level again, I see that they've brought me the same tray of food and pills. This time I wait to devour it by waking Madge and Mr. Undersee first. There's enough to split, but not as much as these two starving prisoners need, nor me the pregnant one, either.

We eat sparingly. They eat the easy to digest food; soup, vegetables, liquids. I take the few morsels of meat, bread and nuts that are there. The pills I eat with one scoop of my hand and a sip of water. Madge gives me a questioning glance, but does not speak out on her uncertainties.

The day passes slow. I begin to wonder if they just want me to sit here for the rest of my life. Is this me learning my lesson? Them trying to break me by reintroducing these old friends into my life? It comes to a point that I'm so unsure of what's going on that I turn to Madge, inquiring where they had taken her before she got here.

"Oh," she says. I can hear a slightly dimmer chime in her voice than before. Like the memories have just added a weight of a hundred pounds onto her chest. "I was with Head Peacekeeper Brock."

"You know him?" I ask.

She nods. I can see she doesn't like him. Fears him. "Johanna... she usually never comes back for more than an hour and leaves for days. Head Peacekeeper Brock has a special hatred for her. She says it's because she spit in his face. I-I rarely go. Mostly it's just my father... and after my mother, when she stopped coming back.." Madge's eyes find the ceiling more interesting than my face. "They take you to this room. It has a one-way mirror in it, and you know there's others watching.. as he interrogates you. Head Peacekeeper Brock, that is. I never have the right answers, but he's only.." she gestures to her ankle.

"The burns..?"

"From District 12, the firebombs. The hovercrafts that dropped them came to get us, like I said. Except I had already tried running.." to where? "...the flames in the streets got at me before one of them pulled me back. We were flown here immediately. Unable to know what was going on, what had happened when the screen grew black during your Games."

"I'm sorry," I breathe, remembering what had happened; the snakes, Gloss' face and the axe, Enorbaria's blood bubbling lips. My head starts to ache a little.

"I don't blame you."

My eyes find her face. "You don't?"

"No. Why would I? You didn't drop those bombs. Snow did."

"But he did it because of me," I say. "Because I broke his rules."

"I don't blame you," she says again, end of discussion.

I'm perplexed a little by that, but I guess that maybe it's possible. Others might not blame me either.. I begin to logically think. All the guilt I'd felt previously seems ridiculous now. Would anyone from District 12 blame me? Knowing how much I loved my home.. no. Not really. I can blame myself plenty, but I've already let it go. Suddenly returning to my family and to other survivors of District 12, if there are any, doesn't seem so unbearable.

What does sound unbearable is being taken to this room Madge is speaking of. To be interrogated by Head Peacekeeper Brock. President Snow or doctors or Gamemakers, even other Peacekeepers observing it from the other side of that mirror.

I'm surprised to hear Madge speak of Johanna by name. I wonder if they've been spending all this useless, endless time together in this cell for the past month that I've spent laying in hospital beds. Knowing Johanna they wouldn't be on friendly terms, but I suppose mutual torture is enough to entitle a first name basis. For a minute, my mind snags on the fact that it seems a common thing for people to be coming and going. "Madge," I ask, "is there anyone else? That stays in here sometimes?"

"Yes," she says.

"Who?"

"I don't know their names, except, Darius." Madge sees my surprise and nods; showing she'd been equally displeased by it as myself. "There is another Avox always with him. Red haired too and she's tall."

"The Avox girl," the words slip out. Of course them. The two people who had severed both Peeta and I before the Quarter Quell even began. I don't know the Avox girl's name still, and that just seems to make it worse. I can't help but think this woman's always been at my expense. First, I don't help her when she begged for me. I stand and watch the Capitol kill the boy that was no doubt her lover and I let her wait on me throughout my Hunger Games. Now she's in here, somewhere, in a cell, all because Snow knows there's some sort of connection between us. And the connection is only the feeble lack of my compassion towards her.

Darius of course comes from an ugly memory. He did nothing but stand up for Gale and now he's here, too. Avox and prisoner. Not because he's such a spectacularly lacking Peacekeeper. It is because of me. For my insanity, just like his presence before the Games meant to be.

With that in thought, I begin to wonder if the Undersee's actually have anything to do with undercover rebel groups or are here, too, to punish me.

"There is someone else," Madge continues to say quietly, after my outburst. "The stylist. Cinna."

"Cinna's here?" I repeat. "Alive?"

"About a week ago, yes. I have not seen him since then."

"When will he come back?"

"There's no way to know," says Madge.

Once more, with that hopeful note, we let the silence of the white cell close around us. Lunch comes and goes. Madge's father starts cackling madly when we try to get him to speak. She spends a little time with him, holding his hand, saying things about her mother. I'm nodding off on my bench when she starts to hum under her breath.

I open my eyes, wide awake. "I know that song."

"You do?"

"I think.. will you sing it?"

"I don't know the words," Madge admits. "My mother used to hum it sometimes before she'd fall asleep or right after a dose of morphine. My father told me it was from her childhood.. that my aunt used to love the song. It used to soothe my mother when I'd hum it back, I thought it might help him, too."

"Oh," I say. I know the song from my own childhood, though. Madge starts up again and every tone makes me more sure it is the same one my mother loathed. A necklace of rope... I think vaguely to myself. I can't remember the other lyrics.

Dinner comes and goes. I can see some strength returning to Madge because of all the food provided to her. Though she's still too thin and her ankle worsening. Mayor Undersee is laughing so loudly that it's impossible to fall asleep afterward, even with a full stomach. I take to tapping my fingernails against the bench.

I think of Peeta. District 13. No doubt they've seen the interview by now. They know I'm pregnant. He knows. There are so many different things he could do and feel and say, that I'm unable to be sure how he will react. All I know is he must have loved and adored the child, instantly. Would have done the exact things that Caesar had acted out in humor. Fawned over me. Wanted to touch, feel the movements, everything Snow does.. I miss him so much, that I decide it is less painful not to think about him.

The sound of the door opening is swallowed by Mr. Undersee's laughter. The Peacekeepers footsteps somehow can be felt at the base of the bench I'm on, though, so I turn my eyes to them. "Come with us, Miss Everdeen," the bearded one says, voice muffled by the plate of plastic in front of his face.

I get up wordlessly, and Madge's hand finds mine, squeezing it momentarily, before I am out of reach. "Where are we going?" I ask.

"That is not for you to question."

"But I did."

The other Peacekeeper reaches out and roughly takes me by the arm. "We won't have any of your lip," he snaps.

Together the two drag me from the cell, out into the equally bright hallway. Aside the sounds of the Peacekeeper's footsteps and my dragging feet, I can hear the hollow, broken sound of Mayor Undersee's laughter ringing through the wall behind me. Reminding me. Don't break.