Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine.

Alone

A/N: Okay, just as a warning to people, this story alludes to Madge's poor mom having some pretty significant depression. Depression is hard on those with it and their families, I've been on one side and had friends on the other. In this story Madge is about 8/9, so she's aware her mother is sick, and she understands it to an extent, but she feels a little abandoned anyway. Okay, I'll be quiet now.

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Mrs. Oberst made liver again. Madge hates liver, but Mrs. Oberst insists it's good for the blood, which Madge is certain is completely made up, and she makes it at least once a week, probably just to annoy Madge.

Madge stared at her lumpy potatoes and cold meat. She'd been waiting nearly an hour at the small table in the breakfast nook for her father to come back, he'd rushed off after a call came from the Capitol about business they apparently felt was more important to deal with than dinner with her. His plate sat, barely touched, across from her.

Her mother's plate, equally cold, was completely untouched. She just didn't feel well enough to come to the table, was still in bed with the curtains drawn and a cool rag on her head. She'd probably taken another dose of her medicine.

Mrs. Oberst clomped in, she was annoyed at having to stay late to watch Madge until she went to bed, snatched up the untouched plate and took it to the still warm oven. She shoved it in before coming back to the table and taking Madge's father's plate as well.

"What're you doing?"

"Heating up your poor mother's dinner," she glared at Madge, as though it was her fault the food had gone cold.

Her mother wasn't coming down, apparently, and judging by the way the old woman was wrapping her father's plate, he wouldn't be making dinner either. Madge sighed.

"Will you heat my plate up too?"

It was a hopeless question, she already knew the answer.

"You let yours get cold, missy. You'll eat it just as it is."

Madge opens her mouth to say her mother had let her plate go cold too, by being too pathetic to get out of bed and have dinner with her child like a normal person, but holds her tongue. Mrs. Oberst would probably just take her plate away and send her to bed hungry for talking back. At least if she stayed at the table with her plate, moving her food around, she might be able to stay up until her father came home.

Not that she wasn't just a little bit angry with him, but she might be able to guilt him into letting her have some ice cream to make up for the disappointing dinner. At least he had a real excuse for abandoning her.

The old woman banged around in the kitchen, finishing cleaning the few utensils still left, before turning back to the oven, donning a glove, and pulling the plate out.

She sent one last hard look Madge's way, before stomping up the stairs, yelling back at her, "There are starving children in the Seam! Don't be ungrateful!"

Madge wrinkled her nose. She wasn't ungrateful, she was just annoyed. Why did she always end up eating alone?

With a huff, she sat back, took her fork and began pushing the disgusting organ meat, smothered in a nasty sauce, around, hoping it would look like she was making headway on it.

The back door, just to her left, clanged open and a tall, haggard looking figure stumbled in.

Knocking, it seemed, was beyond this visitor.

Mr. Abernathy scratched his side, surveying the empty kitchen, then turning to Madge alone in the breakfast nook.

"Table for one tonight, huh, kid?"

She scowled at him, thought about flinging a forkful of her cold, lumpy potatoes at him, but decided against it. It just wasn't worth Mrs. Oberst's wrath.

Instead she puts her elbows to the table, looking forlornly down at the plate and hoping Mr. Abernathy would take the hint she wasn't in the mood for him or his teasing and go raid her father's liquor cabinet or stumble up to have an incoherent conversation with her mother. That's why he was there, no doubt.

He doesn't seem to sense her need to be alone, or doesn't care, and flops into the seat beside her. He mimics her slouch, elbows to the table, and grins over at her. When he opens his mouth to talk she can smell the alcohol on his breath.

"Why the ugly mood, Pearl? Pretty girl like you ought to be all smiles."

That only serves to make her frown deeper. She looks away from him. He doesn't like the look of the back of her head, though, and pokes her in the side.

"What's stuck in your craw?"

When she doesn't answer, he makes a noise, then she hears him shift in his seat. She thinks he's taken the hint, is getting up to leave, but then something pinches her side.

"Ow!" She turns and glares at him. "Stop that!"

He grins, then does it again.

"I said stop!" She bats his hand away. It doesn't really hurt so much as it tickles.

He doesn't stop though, he does it again and again until she's dissolved into giggles.

"There's your smile." He pokes her cheek. "Just as I suspected, stuck in your side."

She tries to glare at him, but her face won't respond, still too wound up from the tickling.

"Now," he sits back, pulling a flask from his pocket and taking a long swig, "what's got you so down, sweetheart?"

It isn't like he really cares, she knows that, but he's willing to listen, and that's more than most.

"Dad had to go into work," she makes an irritated face, "and mom won't come down."

He puts one of his elbows to the table, props his chin in his hand and frowns at her. "Your mom's sick."

Don't you defend her too. He would though. He was her mother's friend, not Madge's.

She sniffles, goes back to slapping the potatoes with her fork. "She just doesn't want to."

Mr. Abernathy gave her ponytail a little tug, smiled sadly.

"I'm sure she wants to-"

"No she doesn't," Madge snaps. "If she wanted to she would, but she doesn't. She doesn't lo-" Her voice catches, she swallows back her angry words and looks down at her plate.

If she wanted to, really wanted to, she could get out of bed. She did it sometimes, why not all the time? No one else's mother spent half their life crying in bed and the other half living in their own hazy reality. No one else's mother ignored them.

Mr. Abernathy's big hand comes to a rest on her head, smoothing down her hair a little. He reaches down and takes her chin in his hand, makes her look at him.

"Your mother loves you very much. Don't you ever forget that."

"No. She doesn't." If she did she would at least do her the simple courtesy of having dinner with her, help her get ready for school in the morning, pick out clothes, comb her hair, pack her lunch…

Her mother loved her morphling and her bed and her sadness over her long dead sister more than she would ever love Madge.

Hot tears begin stinging the backs of Madge's eyes and she blinks to fight them off.

"Mrs. Oberst said I make her worse." She tells him, remembering the old woman grumbling to one of her old hen friends about how much more exhausted and withdrawn Madge's mother had gotten after her daughter's birth.

"-couldn't even get out of bed. She was depressed before, but ever since she had the girl she's just wasted away, doesn't have the energy for anything. Couldn't even get her to feed the thing, kept crying, like she was going to break it…"

When she'd heard the words they hadn't made much sense, she'd taken it as nothing but more of Mrs. Oberst's irritated grumbling against her, but as she grew up, let a few years pass, what the housekeeper had meant hit her.

"I was such a bad baby I made her more sad than she already was."

Mr. Abernathy made a harsh noise and she looked at him, "You were a very good baby."

She rolled her eyes, "How would you know?"

"I know a lot, kid." He glared up the stairs, where Mrs. Oberst and Madge's mother were. "Whenever I'd see you with Danny boy, you were always the quietest, most well behaved baby I ever saw. Didn't even stink like all those other brats."

Madge thought it was a little rich off him to say babies stank, when he reeked of alcohol, but she supposed he didn't rank the two smells in the same class.

She couldn't have been as wonderful a baby as Mr. Abernathy claimed, or she would've made her mother happy, she would've wanted more children even.

It was the only explanation. Madge must've been such a disappointment her mother and father didn't even want another. "I wasn't good, Mr. Abernathy. That's why I'm alone. Mrs. Oberst-"

"The old hag doesn't know what she's talking about. You are the best thing in your mother's life, she told me so herself."

She didn't really believe him, he and her mother had a falling out sometime before Madge was born. He spoke with some drunken regularity to her father, but had only recently begun talking to her mother again, so when she would've told him such a thing was a mystery, probably a lie.

Still, it's kind of him to try and make her feel a little better.

Her voice creeps up, a little too high, "Then shouldn't I have made her happy?"

It seemed like such a joyous thing for everyone else. Why had Madge's birth not made a dent in her mother's mood?

"She's been real sad for a real long time, Pearl. You don't have a thing to do with it."

It was the stupid Game's fault, her stupid dead aunt, the stupid Capitol, and her mother's own stupid weakness. It was her father's fault for getting the morphling to fix the headaches. It was Madge's fault for not being good enough to make her mother want to be happy, no matter what Mr. Abernathy said.

Madge rubbed her eyes, squishing out a few tears and trying to smear them so Mr. Abernathy wouldn't notice.

He does though, sighs and takes her hand.

"Aw, kiddo, don't cry."

She can't stop herself, she's her mother's daughter after all, and the tears begin spilling out, down her cheeks and off her chin. Madge falls over to him and he pulls her onto his lap like her Poppa often did. She begins crying into his shirt. "I'm just tired of being alone all the time."

At home, at school, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, always alone.

The kids at school hated her, she'd come to grips with that long ago, but she kept foolishly hoping her mother would come around, want to spend more time with Madge than whatever kept her in her room.

He sighs, "I know the feeling."

Awkwardly, he pats her head. After a moment or two, he wraps his arms around her, pats her head, murmurs comforting nonsense into her hair with his liquored up breath.

A clomping comes down the stairs, Mrs. Oberst stops and glares with great dislike at Mr. Abernathy.

"What're you doing here?" She wrinkles her nose. "Smell like a cheap whore."

"Takes one to know one," he mutters to himself.

Mrs. Oberst eyes Madge's messy plate, narrows her gaze on her. "If you aren't going to eat then get to bed. I have a family of my own to tend to you know."

Deflating a little, Madge starts to get up, resigned to not seeing her father before bed, but Mr. Abernathy catches her by the shoulder.

"Why don't you go back to whatever level of hell you crawled out of, and I'll keep an eye on the kid until Danny boy gets home."

Madge expects a fight. Mrs. Oberst hates Mr. Abernathy more than she hates Madge, she won't leave him in her place of work alone.

To her great shock, though, the housekeeper smiles, "Fine."

She takes off her apron and hangs it on the hook by the door.

"She's your problem. You deal with her, explain to the boss why she hasn't eaten her dinner and is up past her bedtime."

With that and a dark look, she leaves, letting the back door bang behind her.

"Witch."

Madge gives Mr. Abernathy a stern look. "She's just doing her job."

Even if she is a little hateful about it.

He shakes his head, looks at the dinner plate and frowns. "Don't like liver, huh?"

Madge shudders.

"I'm not real fond of it either."

Mr. Abernathy dumps her cold dinner in the trash, leaves the dirty dish in the sink and forbids Madge from cleaning it.

"Tell her I licked it clean, she'll probably just throw it out."

He digs in the icebox and pulls out the ice cream, dips them both healthy portions out, and takes her to sit on the back swing.

"Feeling better?"

She grins. She does, a little bit at least.

He swallows a large spoonful of ice cream, frowns, "Listen, I know it's hard to understand, but grown ups are stupid sometimes. We don't always make good decisions, for ourselves and the people we care about, even if we mean well."

"Your mother, she hasn't had it easy, with her sister dying, being twins made it harder I suppose, then me being here…" He runs his hand over his face, "You are one of the few really good things she's had. Don't ever think any different."

She does think different, but she keeps quiet and nods. He thinks he's helping, she doesn't want to hurt his feelings.

"As for being alone, screw 'em all. If they're all too stupid to see how amazing you are, you don't need them." He grins at her, "I like you, and I don't care much for anyone, so that's a high compliment."

Madge snorts. He would think that.

He takes out his flask, uncaps it, then offers it to her before pulling it back with a grin, "Bad stuff, never touch it."

Her nose wrinkles, "Not a problem."

Laughing he wraps his arm around her shoulder, making the swing rock a little more. She points out a few constellations, just barely visible, to him, promises she'll teach him them someday then they finish the ice cream and Madge lets the buzzing bugs and the sway of the swing lull her to sleep.

At least she hadn't had dessert alone.