Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine. Any lines from the books are hers too.
Chapter 11
AN: Thanks to Fortunefaded2012 and Nursekelly0429 for all the help. Also, warning, there's mentions of rape and suicide in this chapter. Sorry.
#######
District Four isn't as hot as Madge thought it would be.
Madge expected it to be unbearable, sultry and sticky, just like the Capitol programs depict it as. That, she quickly, realizes was just another Capitol illusion.
"The ocean moderates the temperature," Anton Del Mar explained to her when she voiced her confusion about the temperature. "We have fairly nice weather year round, just not always as hot as the Capitol paints it."
"They have boring weather year round," Birdy countered tartly. "If they didn't have calendars then they wouldn't know what season it should be."
Anton had laughed at her attitude.
"She's just jealous," he assured Madge. "Her District has all the shitty weather."
Madge had laughed at the affronted looks on both Birdy and Katy-Jo Lewes' faces at the insult, not because she agreed with it, but because it was hard not to at the very least smile when Anton was around.
He was witty and warm despite the fact that Birdy had confirmed that he, and most of District Four's Victors over the years with the exception of Annie Cresta, had been bought and sold, passed around the Capitol since his victory.
"He's not like Finnick though," Madgepointed out.
Birdy just shrugged. "No, but everyone deals differently don't they? Everyone copes differently."
After that Madge had watched a little closer, not just Anton, but Birdy too.
They're very deliberate in their approach to things, different, but with a common thread. There's a safeguard in them that Madge isn't sure they even realize is there.
That, she supposes, is why they gravitate toward one another. Like Katy-Jo Lewes, she thinks they might like one another more than they let on, but she brushes that thought aside as projecting her own hopeless romance onto someone else.
Both are broken, just like Finnick and Annie, like Katniss, Peeta, and even Mr. Abernathy, but they've glued themselves together differently. Madge has seen the cracks in the other Victors' veneer, maybe simply because she's been around them more. Time, she supposes, will tell if she ever finds the seams holding Birdy and Anton together.
"Calamari?" He offers Madge a bit of strange meat, something fried and unappetizing.
Wrinkling her nose, she shakes her head. "What's Calamari?"
It sounds familiar, though she isn't sure why. She's certain District Twelve didn't have whatever it is.
"Fried squid," he tells her with a smile, dazzling white teeth flashing before he pops it in his mouth and lets his face shift into an uplifted expression. "It's divine, you really should try it."
Continuing to pull a face, Madge goes back to her assignment, tracing troop lines on a map of District Seven and trying to help determine where the next food drop should come from.
After a few minutes, she looks up and glances over, spotting a little white container and frowning.
It finally hits her where she's seen calamari before.
"You sent the chairs to Twelve when the Seventy-Fourth Games were ending!"
He takes a bow. "That I did. Well, me and a few others."
Popping another fried bit of squid into his mouth, he holds it out to her again, giving the container a shake and causing the food to rattle dryly.
"Why?"
"Did you want to stand the whole time?"
She shakes her head. It still didn't make sense, not really, but he's as vague as Birdy. There'll be no answers from him.
"You sent Birdy calamari then, too," she adds, remembering being offered the unappealing snack then as well.
"She likes it," he shrugs.
A little smile twitches up on Madge's lips. "You like her, don't you?"
He doesn't answer, just grins and pops another piece of fried squid in his mouth.
His smile is infectious and Madge grins back. "She liked it."
"I know."
Giving him a scrutinizing look, Madge crosses her arms over her chest. "Does she like you?"
That causes the grin to slip from his face. "That is a complicated question."
Madge feels the easy mood shift. She hates complicated questions and complicated emotions. She's got too many of those issues in her own life. At the least she'd like her sort-of-friend to have an easier love life than her own.
"Is it because of…" She isn't sure how to ask if it's because of what the Capitol did to him, that doesn't seem like something Birdy would hold against him, but she isn't sure about much of anything anymore.
He snorts. "No." His mouth twitches back up. "She's got, if you can imagine, some pretty spectacular trust issues."
Madge battles down a laugh. "You don't say."
Turning, he settles against the table and takes another bite of his snack.
"It's the joy of Victory," he tells her, chewing thoughtfully.
Nodding, Madge sighs. "I don't know what I'd do." She glances over at him. "If I were a Victor, I mean."
She isn't sure she'd survive half as well as him or Finnick, but she doubts she could hurt families like Birdy had. There'd be no place for her.
"You'd do what you'd need to do," he answers. "You're certainly pretty enough for them to have wanted you, but you're also pretty sharp, so Birdy and Beetee'd probably try to snatch you up."
That isn't a comfort, but she nods somberly anyway. "I don't think I could do either, though."
"You've got to understand our perspectives," he tells her softly. "I did what I did to keep my family safe. I only hurt myself. Birdy and the others, though, they stayed alive by breaking other people and convincing themselves they were helping them by giving them options and building the lies they needed to survive the Capitol. Created a little cognitive dissonance. As messed up as the Capitol made me, Finnick, and the others, I'd take what they did to us over what they made the others do any day." He bites his lip and sighs. "You pick your poison. Whichever fate you think you can stomach. In the end though, we all needed each other to survive. A kind of strange, symbiotic relationship."
Neither fate seems to be survivable to Madge, but she keeps that to herself.
"Birdy's lucky she's smart," he tells her. "She wouldn't've survived any other way."
"No?" Madge asks.
Anton shakes his head, his forehead wrinkling. "She tell you about her sister?"
When her silence answers for her, he takes a long breath.
"When Birdy was about ten, I think, some Peacekeepers caught her and her older sister on the way back to the house." He stops, his face pulled in disgust before continuing. "Raped her sister. Birdy said she could hear her screaming from where they made her wait by the road. Had to drag her back to the house after, and two days later, sister hung herself in the barn."
The pencil drops from Madge's hand and she feels her mouth drop open.
"Oh," is all she manages to say.
Anton nods, continuing, his nose wrinkled up. "Her brother, tracked the bastards down after that, with a couple of friends, drug them to death behind a couple of horses. When the other Peacekeepers caught him, they took him and the other boys to the middle of town and lynched them. It was apparently required public viewing."
Madge's stomach rolls.
"She has no one to rescue, so making other people protect their family at their own cost, and keeping them alive, that makes sense to her."
Suddenly her calling Gale selfish for running off into war while his brothers and sister are being cared for in Thirteen makes a little more sense.
Nodding, Madge stares at the ground for a moment, still unsure what she'd do in their place.
Finally, she holds out her hand. "Can I still have some calamari?"
#######
Training with the guns continues for Madge, though she thinks she may have hit a plateau.
It doesn't matter though, she's more interested in the plans to get into the Capitol.
"We've taken control of most of the railways," Birdy explained to Madge and Katy-Jo Lewes. That, she told them, gave them an artery to at least the outer edges of the Capitol.
The Capitol had been designed as a giant circle.
"Bit like a pie, if you ask me," she added, her nose wrinkling. "Anyway, it was constructed to mimic the Capitol of the country that was here before Panem, which was supposedly designed similar to some Capitol across the ocean-"
"Is there a point to any of this?" Katy-Jo Lewes asked. "Because I don't really need a speculative history lesson."
Madge just nodded.
Birdy actually looked somewhat annoyed that neither of them found her information as interesting as she did, but after a moment of rolling her eyes skyward and mumbling, she carried on.
Like spokes into a wheel, each District had a railway directly into the heart of the Capitol. Mostly, Birdy told them, because it was dramatic for when the Tributes arrived each year, and not because it was particularly practical. Each of the rails had been more or less secured, granting them a way to move troops in, but not until reconnaissance had been done.
"We can't just send people in blind," she added.
So men and women who had knowledge of the Capitol's street layout and what might be waiting for them had been asked to make the journey in and send back reports on what they found to help create the plan of action.
"We've already told them what we know," Birdy explained. "There are a lot of wide boulevards and open spaces, which as far as I can tell, will be bad for us and good for them."
Large streets meant the Capitol could move its troops easier while making it difficult for the rebels' smaller groups to move around.
"Especially if they put out goodies for us."
"Goodies?" Both Madge and Katy-Jo Lewes had frowned.
Birdy nodded. "We have one Gamemaker, they have dozens of them. They may have been waiting their turn to step into the big boy chair, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous."
It was clear what she thought, even if she didn't say it. The Capitol and all its streets are going to be turned into their own kind of Arena.
After an afternoon of mediocre training with her gun, Madge and Katy-Jo Lewes end up back in their little bunk, pouring over maps of the Capitol.
They're leaving from Four, though when is anyone's guess, and heading into the section of the city labeled with a large 'I' before venturing further into the city.
"For 'Idiot'," Birdy told them. "Because that's what the person in charge of labeling is."
The 'I' sector is filled with libraries and museums as well as the sprawling university.
Madge won't admit it, but she's curious about what they'll find. From Birdy's descriptions and what little she remembers from a trip a lifetime ago, it's a wonderland.
"But just like wonderland, it's twisted and frightening," Birdy said bitterly.
"Do you think they'll have guards around them?" Katy-Jo Lewes asks, her voice soft with wonder as her golden eyes scan over the names of museums and libraries on the map, memorizing it.
The only answer Madge can give her is a shrug. It depends on how much of their history the Capitol, President Snow, wants to retain. The libraries and museums hold proof of the Games, from the first right up until the most recent Quarter Quell, they're documentation of the Capitol's glory and the Districts' weakness.
Other than the warm and fuzzies they probably provide those in the Capitol, though, Madge can't see much strategic value in them. She can't imagine guards being sacrificed to protect relics and books when they could be used to protect the President.
Katy-Jo Lewes sighs. "We're gonna die."
"Probably," an even voice cuts through the dark.
They both look over, to the dark doorway leading out to the empty beach and the cloud dimmed moonlight.
"But at least we'll be in the right place to be preserved for posterity," Birdy adds, probably with a grin, though it's impossible to tell in the dark. Death only seems to bother her if it isn't caused by her own choices it seems.
"You have a very strange sense of humor," Katy-Jo Lewes says, her lips tugged down into a deep frown.
Birdy just shrugs then turns, walks back out and onto the beach.
Sighing, Katy-Jo Lewes crawls onto the top bunk and flops over. "'Night, Madgie."
Madge folds up the maps, carefully places them in Birdy's patched and filthy gray bag and tosses it under the bed before trying to go to sleep herself.
Sleep refuses to come though.
For an hour she rolls, one side to the other, then to her back, stomach, until she finally sits up and crawls to the end of the bed and puts her arms to the windowsill, resting her chin on them as she gazes out at the sea.
It glitters silvers, whites, and purple-black under the moon, which has finally escaped from behind the clouds. In the distance she can see the lights of fishing vessels, out trying to catch enough food that the District can keep not just itself, but others, alive through the rest of the war.
There's something settling about the gentle noises the water makes as it splashes up onto the shore, a rhythmic, breathing quality to it that almost lulls Madge to sleep, but she catches sight of a pair of small figures sitting at the water's edge, apparently deep in a heated discussion, and her mind wakes again.
Quietly, so she doesn't wake Katy-Jo Lewes, Madge crawls out of bed and softly pads out the door.
Her feet sink into the cool sand and she wiggles her toes. It's a sensation she's still getting used to. In Twelve there was no sand like this, nothing as wonderfully strange as the shifting earth that pushed up against the sea, and she wonders what Katniss and Peeta had made of it when they'd visited.
As quickly as the thought forms she pushes it away. It's too hard to think of them as they were when they're both so broken now. It's a distraction she can't afford, heartache she can't deal with, not now anyway.
Feet kicking the sand, Madge treads across the stretch of beach and out to where the pair sit.
They both turn, having felt her infringing on their spot.
Birdy's expression is still tinged with anxiety, but there's relief in her eyes when she realizes it's Madge.
"Magdalene, is something wrong? Come sit with us." She scoots away from the man, who Madge realizes is Anton, and pats the ground between them.
Unlike Birdy, he doesn't look relieved, but a little disappointed. His dark eyebrows scrunch together and he gives Birdy a pointed look.
"We still have some things to discuss, Birdy," he says, his voice straining a bit.
"That can wait," she waves it off. "What's the matter, Madge?"
She's being entirely too nice, too concerned, and Madge gets the feeling she's interrupted something a little personal. Something Birdy clearly is eager to avoid.
"Nothing," Madge mutters. "I was just taking a walk-"
"I'll walk with you," Birdy says, jumping up and dusting sand from her pants.
Anton's mouth turns down more, but he doesn't say anything, just watches sadly as Birdy links her arm with Madge's and gives him a bright smile.
"I'll see you in the morning, Anton."
With a tug, she pulls Madge along the shore, water lapping at their bare feet.
"Did I interrupt something?" Madge finally asks, once Anton is well behind them.
Birdy shakes her head. "No, just discussing the push, recon and all. Boring stuff."
Glancing behind her and finding Anton shrinking, walking in the opposite direction, shoulders hunched and head down. Madge frowns. "He seemed a little upset just for talking about recon."
Waving her hand, Birdy rolls her eyes. "He'll get over it." When she notices Madge's scowl at the dismissal, she sighs. "Oh, don't look at me like that."
They walk for several minutes, finally stopping where the open beach sinks and the seawall protecting the village above starts.
Deciding she isn't going to get to the truth of whatever Birdy and Anton were talking about, Madge crosses her arms and stares out at the waves, studying the crests as they crash down on one another.
"Do you really think we're going to die?" Madge asks as a brisk breeze blows in, ruffles her hair and her nightclothes.
"Oh, probably," Birdy answers sounding completely unbothered by the thought of her own impending death. "But I'm tired. Death might not be so bad."
"You don't mean that," Madge insists. "You want to be part of the new country, don't you? Make it better than what you're helping take apart?"
She laughs, a sad, broken sounding thing. "Madge, people like me, like all the Victors, even our precious Mockingjay, we don't need our fingerprints anywhere on whatever may come after." Her eyes close. "Besides, who said we're going to win this thing?"
A chill runs up Madge's back. "You don't think we're going to win?"
Birdy shrugs. "Maybe, maybe not."
She's being evasive, playing games and talking in circles, and Madge groans before turning away from her and heading back to the bunk.
"Madge!" Birdy calls after her once she's several yards away.
Turning, she finds Birdy, grease hair fluttering behind her as she runs to catch up.
Her feet sink into the ground as she stops, catches her breath, and smiles weakly.
"Listen," she finally says as her breathing levels out, "you and everyone else thinks they're the hero in this story, but you aren't, they aren't, and I'm sure as hell not. This story doesn't have heroes, just people who are less awful than others."
"Then why are you bothering to fight?" Madge snaps. If everything is hopeless, even if they win, then why is she wasting her time trying to change things at all? Isn't that essentially what she'd told Gale?
"Because it's what I do," Birdy's voice is strained. She looks out at the water, her eyes shining with moonlight. "Fighting is what I do, it's what all of us do, but being the best at not dying? That doesn't give us the right to lead."
Feeling a little deflated, Madge crosses her arms again, shielding herself from the night air.
"Everyone in this thing, from me to Haymitch to Alma Coin, is knee deep in blood. We aren't fit to create, only destroy."
Her words sink in as the sea crashes on itself, rolls and recedes, slowing the night to a crawl.
"That's just what they made you, though," Madge finally says. "You can be whoever you want once this is all over."
If they win.
"Some things can't be changed," Birdy mutters. "Not everything that's broken can be put back together. Even if we win, that doesn't mean we can rewrite who we are. Because none of us are good people, and even if we rewrite history to make it look like we are, there will still be people who know the truth."
Somewhere deep in her soul, Madge knows there's at least a little truth in Birdy's words. The Capitol has painted the Rebels, those brave souls that had fought it in the Dark Days, as monsters, idiots that charged into a battle they had no hope of winning, but that hadn't killed their ideals. Even if their names and faces have been wiped from the history books, turned into a grotesque caricature, and their sins revisited on the Districts in the shape of the Games, what they were is still in the collective consciousness of the people they fought for, just like what the Victors had been forced to be would live on past the Capitol's fall.
For better or worse, the truth and memories, good and bad, would carry on, despite, or in spite of, the efforts of those in control.
"The kindest thing I could ever hope for, win or lose, is that I'm allowed to be blotted out of existence." Birdy smiles sadly. "But mercy has never really favored me."
#######
The sun is just barely peeking over the edge of the horizon, making the water glitter and glisten as it bounces off it and filters through the thin curtain that covers the open window of the bunk, when someone pokes Madge in the side.
"Get up or I throw you off," Birdy's voice says, very close and mixing with the squawks of the horrible white birds outside.
Madge's eyes pop open. Despite being tired from her late night stroll on the beach, she's had a little too much experience with Birdy's preferred method of waking people, up she'll get.
"What?" She grumbles, holding her hand up to blot out the early rays of obnoxious morning.
Birdy is out of her normal attire, dark pants, buttoned up shirt, and heavy boots, and into something much less rugged but no less practical.
She's in dark pants and shirt made of smooth, tight material, boots that look much less bulky and a set of large goggles with strange glass in them. Over her arm is a bundle of what looks to be more dark clothing and dangling from one hand are a couple pairs of goggles.
"Upsy-daisy, ladies, it's time to test out our railway."
#######
The train starts at the station on the far edge of District Four, with the little village Madge, Katy-Jo Lewes, and Birdy have been staying in. It follows along the shore, twisting and turning for hours, clicking along happily. Madge supposes it's a blessing the train is there, by car or horseback, the trip would take hours, maybe days considering some of the cliffs they pass by.
There, they pick up another pair, a man and woman, apparently professors that had abandoned the Capitol in favor of the rebels. The next town had a woman a little older than Birdy and Katy-Jo Lewes, though painfully Capitol with scarlet hair and pink skin.
"I'm a librarian," she told them.
Katy-Jo Lewes and Madge exchange a look at that, but then shrug. She's a librarian, of course.
It goes on like that for the better part of the morning, starting and stopping at little fishing villages dotted along the edge of District Four, picking up others who would be helping canvas the Capitol as well as dropping off others for new jobs, until they reach the edge of the District and head north.
"Crispy," Birdy points to a man, much older than Madge but years younger than her parents, "Sebastian, Eamon, Horace, and Jemma will each go with a group to act as a guard to them while they canvas."
They're former Peacekeepers, friends Birdy had made over the years apparently, even if she won't categorize them as such, and the best chance they have to be safe when in the Capitol.
One of the little professors, the woman with silver hair and a pinched face, raises a hand.
"Phoebe," she says as she lifts her little pez-nez glasses to the edge of her nose and tilts her head, her nose in the air, as she looks down them, "there are only four guards and five groups. Those numbers don't work, child."
Birdy stares at her flatly for a moment. "What am I, professor?"
The woman frowns and glances at the companion. Her eyebrows pinch together. "I'm not sure I understand?"
"I'm a Victor. I don't need a guard," Birdy tells her coolly. "I don't run from people, they run from me."
#######
The trip up, then along the western edge of District Ten takes less than a day. They cut across the southern edge of Seven for another half a day before finally hitting the mountains that protect the Capitol.
It feels like an eternity as they speed through the dark tunnel, the dim lights of the train flickering on and off ominously before they die completely, plunging the group into darkness.
The dark is suffocating, a tomb, and for a moment she thinks of Gale.
He'd had to spend the better part of a year in the mines of District Twelve, and if everything hadn't happened with Katniss, with the Quell, with the bombing, then he would still be dropping into them. At this very moment, if nothing had changed, then he'd be toiling away another day of his life for the Capitol instead of fighting against it.
She shakes her head and tries to focus on anything but Gale. What was and what may still be are distractions to the task at hand that she can't afford at the moment.
After an hour of trying to picture the maps she and Katy-Jo Lewes had been memorizing by the light of a small lantern, trying to picture the train station they would arrive at sooner rather than later, she drifts into a lull.
Her mind drifts to Thirteen and she wonders what her mother has been doing, probably making candy. At least she hopes so. Mr. Abernathy is probably plotting, and Madge wonders if Birdy has let him know that she's taking her right into the heart of the fight, right to the Capitol's doorstep. Unlikely, he'd have stolen a hovercraft and made his way to put a stop to that if she had told him.
Much as she tries to focus on them and only them, she can't.
Vick and Rory seep in, playing games and getting into trouble during their classes, still making their mother mad with their antics. Posy might've been allowed to start at the early entry program for school by now. Prim is probably getting more privileges in the hospital wing. Madge wonders if they ever think of her.
Then come Gale and Katniss. She tries not to think of them, but they're tangled up in the others, impossible to ignore.
They've probably grown closer, training together and spending every waking moment together, just as it should be.
A knot forms in the bottom of Madge's stomach and an all together too familiar ache fills her chest. This is why she avoids these thoughts, there are bigger things to think of than her breaking heart.
With another shake of her head, she thinks of Peeta and wonders if whatever cure those doctors of Birdy's had suggested has worked. She hopes so, even if it's just a little. Peeta, out of everyone, deserves a happy ending to this mess.
Just as Madge nods off, drifts into an uncomfortable sleep filled with unpleasant visions of Peeta screaming in agony and her mother sobbing herself to sleep at the news that Madge has died during her mission, someone shakes her awake.
"Madgie," Katy-Jo Lewes is jabbing her in the shoulder, but she isn't looking at her. Instead, her eyes are focused, wide with wonder, glowing golden, on the window across from them.
Blinking the sleep away, letting her nightmares evaporate from her mind, Madge looks to it and nearly gasps.
Despite the electricity being off in most of the Capitol, its glittering like the ocean had outside the bunk house as the setting sun bounces off the windows of the buildings that reach for the sky.
"It's actually kind of beautiful."
Madge looks to her left, where Birdy is staring out the window, her gaze settled on the city growing in the distance.
She's probably seen it a hundred times, maybe a thousand, but she still looks enchanted with the image of the glowing city hidden in the mountains. It's been a home for her, maybe even accepted her more than her own District for years, this can't be easy.
"Are you going to be okay?" Madge asks, not really thinking.
A fragile little smile ticks at the edges of her lips. "Would it matter if I weren't?"