The train ride back, I find myself choking on my own breath at the Presidents last words. Lavinia brings me tea and biscuits, even chunks of chocolate and fudge in attempt to comfort me but all that does is make me throw up. In the end she resorts to wrapping me up in a blanket and her arms. She rocks slowly and hums as if I'm a small child and right there I feel it. I'm a petulant, selfish child. So wrapped up in myself, my grief and a romance that I've forgotten about everyone else. How many times have I visited my mother since returning from the games? How often would I see my father if he didn't visit? I haven't been to HQ. I haven't been there for Peeta like I once was. I haven't thought about the boy who died for me. For months I've told myself it was for the sake of my sanity but how could I have neglected his memory like that?
At some point I started shaking … and sobbing it would seem, Lavinia tightens her hold and continues to hum. That's how I fall asleep.
I'm laughing gleefully, smiling ear to ear as Gale and I slide around the polished floors of the mayoral mansion I grew up in. We glide from room to room, the surfaces slick with blood beneath our feet. When I slip and land in a puddle of the stuff, my face is splattered in warmth … and I laugh, falling in to a pile of giggles at the foot of the main staircase.
That's where the blood is coming from, dribbling over the edge of each step like a slow moving waterfall before joining the pool where I'm sitting. I scramble up the staircase, Gale hot on my heels, the two of us in hysterics and me squealing as he tries to catch me. I let him when we reach the summit and I catch a glimpse of sharpened teeth and a serpent tongue before he kisses me. When I roll us, blood drips from the permeated strands of my hair and lands with silent splashes on his throat and jaw. I kiss him again.
Gale pins me beneath him and settles his hips between mine, before moving my head to one side to nip at my throat and I catch sight of a trail of yet more blood. It leads to a door, a door I always dreaded opening but hated leaving even more. Behind it lays bloody scraps of what was once my mother and more blood than one body would account for
"What happened?" I whisper, Gale smiles and lets out a confused sort of chuckle
"You Madge, you happened".
Lavinia can't console me and though I'm conscientious again I can't stop shaking. I try drinking but that makes me drowsy and I don't want to sleep again so I opt for lying face down on a chaise longue and counting. I've reached 7,682 when Lavinia folds my hand around something small. I realise how desperate she must be when I see what it is. Something that could have very easily made me throw myself from the train, somehow seems to dull the ache. Not enough to help but enough to distract me. I roll the small die between my hands for the remainder of the trip, I dare not think about the last time the two were together, or where the other might be but the distraction of distracting myself is better than the alternative.
Katniss
Madge is not Madge when she returns, not like when she come back from the games, not after her meetings with Snow, she is someone, something else entirely. Gale is the first to go after her, sprinting from the train station faster than I've ever seen him move but he can't catch Madge. When the Mellark's and I reach the Mayor's mansion the front door is swinging on its hinges and there's shouting from inside so I follow the Mellark's in.
Madge has an axe and she's raised it. If she was to bring it down now it'd slice Gale's skull in two and the way she looks, I think she might do it. This is not Madge, this is something we didn't even see in the games. I'm wondering what Snow did to her in the Capitol when she swings, missing Gale and shattering the polished ivory keys of her piano. She brings the axe down again and again on the instrument, grunting and cursing until it's scrap wood on legs and then she takes those out too
"Get out"
"Madge?" Gale steps forward and she changes her grip on the axe, not lifting it to him but it's definitely a warning
"Get out. Leave now" Gale is breathing strangely when he tries to move closer again and Madge chucks the axe into the wood pile that was her piano "leave" she shoves him in the chest "all of you, leave" she's not shouting, just demanding it
"Madge just tell us what's wrong" Peeta tries
"Did they hurt you?" Bannock adds, Gale's breathing changes again
"I'm not going to say it again" Madge mutters, pushing past us and disappearing somewhere in the mansion
"Do we go after her?" Rye wonders aloud
"No" Gale grunts, leaving in more of a hurry than Madge had.
I go to Darius, hoping he knows something or at least knows what to do. When I explain what happened he goes to the mayor's mansion and returns with a busted lip
"I deserved it" he shrugs, holding a rag to his mouth to catch the blood
"She hit you?!"
"She kicked my ass"
"Why?"
"She's unstable and I pushed her. Thought it might break her out of it but just made things worse"
"You need stitches in that" I tell him, pointing at the gash in his swollen lip
"Nah" he waves me off "Lavinia's given me a salve that'll patch it up in no time"
"The avox?"
"Madge bought her"
"I didn't know you could do that"
"You can't. Snow is playing her game for now but it's only a matter of time before it all comes to blows"
"The message Madge left? About the plans in District 8, what does that mean for us?"
"If it goes according to plan, war. If it doesn't, war"
"That's it? Something that big has been decided by a handful of people?"
"A handful of people?! Katniss the other districts, they're already at war. There's rioting in the streets, peacekeepers being run out"
"And that's what'll happen here?"
"No, with such a small population we have to be smarter than that. We're going to take the jailhouse, lock up the peacekeepers. The Capitol won't even know anything's wrong"
"What you're going to handle all that on your own?!"
"Of course not!" Darius laughs "it would have been Madge, Haymitch and I but considering Madge has suffered some sort of mental break I doubt she'll be joining us"
"You're mad! Two of you against every peacekeeper in District 12"
"Don't be silly Katniss. You're coming along as well".
