Disclaimer: The Hunger Games is not mine.
The man stepped a little bit closer, and Katniss instinctively shifted her weight in preparation to run. The pain that radiated up her leg when she did so quickly brought the fact that running was not an option to the forefront of her mind again. He noticed and stopped where he was.
"I'm Aiden Donner," he told them tilting his head to the side as if waiting to see what they might do with the offered information. When they simply waited in turn, he raised an eyebrow and continued. "This would be the part where you tell me that you are Primrose and Katniss," he prompted. If that was supposed to make Katniss decide that he was somehow more trustworthy, then it failed. She felt her eyes narrowing without her making a conscious effort to make them do so.
"How do you know that?" She glared at him. She was feeling helpless and all of her anger over the circumstances was manifesting itself in hostility. What use was there in being polite? They had already been caught. There was no explaining away being this far outside the fence for as long as they had been gone.
He smiled - a genuine looking smile that felt all out of place for the conversation they were having and where they were having it.
"A little birdie told me," he replied as if something about the words was deeply amusing. "Look," he said taking another couple of steps forward and freezing again when he saw how they tensed in response. "We could stand still staring each other down all day, or I could offer you some information that you might find interesting given the way things currently appear to be playing out." He glanced around and made his way toward a rock that placed him out of the girls' immediate vicinity but gave him a place to sit without being directly on the ground. "This could take a while," he told them. "It might be a good idea to rest that ankle. Why don't the two of you have a seat?"
Prim looked up as if checking for her sister's approval, but Katniss was already shaking her head. "We'll stand."
"Of course they'll stand," the man muttered to himself (but still very much audibly). "If they were compliant children, then they wouldn't be out here in the first place." He shook his head, but there was still a hint of a smile visible on his face. "I'm going to start this story with the rebellion," he told them seeming oblivious to the fact that Katniss had zero interest in anything that he was about to say. "It really begins long before that - all the way in the time before Panem was Panem. That would be rather more than we could comfortably tackle at present, however, so we will skip ahead and only cover the most pertinent parts to our current predicament. I imagine the two of you have heard the Treaty read enough times by now that you are passingly familiar with the gist of it." He paused there as if offering them a chance to make a response. He got none from Katniss, but Prim did give a small nod of her head (looking immediately at her sister's face in apology as if she had made the gesture without thinking and was afraid that the other girl wouldn't like it). Katniss was still too busy glaring at the intruder to notice.
"I don't know if you've ever given much thought to what went into that paper. The two of you are a bit on the young side for that. The people who signed it all had their reasons. I would say some of them more well-reasoned than others, but I wasn't actually there to know all of the details. What I do know is that not everyone was willing to sign. They had their reasons as well, and I'm fully willing to admit to a bias because I am firmly on their side. Of course, I grew up outside of the fence, so my perspective might be just a tad different."
"Outside of the fence," Katniss repeated (doing something other than glaring for the first time in several minutes) as if tasting the words out on her tongue and not being quite able to determine how she felt about them.
"I'm getting a bit ahead of myself," Aiden said by way of a response. "Let me back up again to that Treaty. And," he added, "I'm still very certain that it would be a better idea for you to sit down."
Katniss and Prim didn't move.
"Fine," he said with a shrug of his shoulders. "Have it your way."
The Mayor's wife disappeared into the Apothecary's Shop at a quarter after six one evening and did not reappear until nearly nine thirty. It was an established fact in the interested quarters of the District that the woman had been developing a series of health problems so concerning that the District Doctor had been called in and a consultation with a specialist from outside of the District had been arranged. Such an accommodation as the second event was without precedent in the memory of the vast majority of the exchangers of gossip (and not a small amount of grumbling about the privileges of officials had ensued). This bit of common knowledge, however, meant that not a single person thought twice about what the former Miss Donner might have been doing spending more than three hours with the parents of her childhood friend (with whom she was not at all in the habit of visiting). As a matter of fact, most people did not even think about the fact that she had been a childhood friend of the couple's daughter. They merely thought that she was looking for further options for dealing with whatever health crisis she was having (details were sketchy despite the best efforts of subtle and not so subtle questions being posed to the servants of the household).
If anyone who knew her well enough to read her expressions had been around to see when she emerged, then they would have noticed that she looked very pleased about something. There was, however, no one fitting that description available to notice anything. She made her way home in the quiet of the District at night and made her way directly to the room upstairs where her daughter was sleeping.
She kicked her shoes off by the end of the bed and climbed in next to the little girl who stirred in response.
"Mama?" She asked in that tone universally used by children who are not completely awake.
"Shh, sweetheart," her mother replied wrapping an arm around her and pulling her close. "Just go back to sleep."
The little girl did as she was told and did not even remember the incident in the morning. Her mother, however, did not drift off to sleep for a very long time. She, instead, savored the moment of being close to her child still following Haymitch's earlier implied advice about while she still could.
The couple from the Apothecary made a trip to the Seam the next day. Before anyone had much in the way of time to speculate about what it was that they might be doing, their widowed and newly childless daughter had been packed up and reinstalled into her childhood bedroom.
Stories of how a broken down Townie woman may have done away with her Seam born children became a fall back upon staple of the District's gossip for years to come.