"Who decided to plant so many zucchinis?" Stone grumbled as he lifted the large leaves. "We'll never be done with them at this rate."
Donna cut through a stem with a saw, wiped the hair-like spiky prickles from the zucchini with the dull edge, and picked it up. "They'll be back soon," she said. Theodosius, as well as seven others, were still inside, mopping the corridors. She walked over to the wheelbarrow and put the vegetable inside. The weather was nice, so nearly everyone was working.
"Actually," Stone said quietly, "I've been meaning to ask you something."
"What is it?"
Stone straightened up and moved towards her. "From what I can tell, you're a pretty smart person. You're not afraid to talk about the past. But you didn't grow up with the slogans, like Coll."
The unasked question was obvious. "You're asking why an apolitical teenager would get into her head that she wanted to work in the Hunger Games."
"Exactly." Stone bent down and moved a few leaves aside, revealing a zucchini nearly a metre long. "You met Snow. How couldn't you realize who he was?"
Donna remembered a quote Dr. Chu had offered her as an explanation. "One doesn't recognize the devil when they're putting a hand on your shoulder," she said, remembering the times that Snow had done just that. Whenever she had reported about how progress was going, he had looked at her like a proud grandfather, smiling happily and saying how glad he was to have her around.
"Huh." Stone sawed off the zucchine, wiped off the prickles, and picked it up. "Then when did you recognize it?"
It hadn't been a single point, more of a lengthy process that had taken more time than it should have. "On some level, I think I always knew that there was something rotten in the state of Panem." The corner of Stone's mouth flicked upwards in recognition of the reference. "When I saw the forced labourers for the first time - I tried to improve their lot, but it should have made me realize what things were like."
Stone walked over to the wheelbarrow and put away the zucchini as Donna bent down to harvest yet another one. What the administration was planning to do with so many zucchinis was a mystery. Some had already been harvested as they matured, but most had attained ripeness around the same time. "I get it," he said. "You weren't taught to think of us as people. We, too, were taught to think of the people we watched over as somehow lesser - but we were still not quite human in the government's eyes." He spoke in an even tone, as if he had made peace with that.
"Well, yes," Donna admitted, getting to one knee to be able to reach a zucchini. "My parents were anti-Games, but they still didn't like the Districts much. It's not like they succeeded in making me anti-Games, though, so I still don't know how much they influenced me." With one hand, she sawed at the tough stem, trying to keep the saw from going into the ground.
It was the supreme irony of her life to her that her onetime wastrel brother had turned out to be the helpful one who would take care of their parents in their old age. He would be moving back to the Capitol after retirement, which was in just a few years. While he had never had an anti-government thought in his life, neither had he hurt anyone with his partying. Alex had rebelled against their parents' high expectations, and Donna had knuckled under and exceeded them - to the point where they thought she had gone too far. It still hurt that she had worked so hard to make them proud and ended up dishonouring the name forever.
"But when did you really realize what the regime was?" Stone asked, sunken eyes focused on her.
Donna wasn't sure. She had seen the propos during the Rebellion, of course, but a part of her had simply dismissed it as typical propaganda. "During the trial," she said, naming the one event she was certain of. "Those movies - they made me understand what was really going on."
The zucchini in Stone's hands was twisted into a spiral. He held it up into the air, studying it carefully. "And the Games?" he asked.
"I always knew, on some level, that they were wrong," Donna said uncertainly. "Especially as my children got older. When everything collapsed, though, that let me think without being blinded by my ambitions for the first time." She wondered why Stone was asking her about this. While he himself was quite honest about his past, he hadn't killed nearly as many people as Donna.
Stone placed the oddly shaped zucchini into the wheelbarrow. They had received a new tyre for it recently, and now it almost flew over the cracked ground and yellowed grass. "So you're saying that you only understood what had been happening during the trial?"
When a witness had been testifying, they had wished for the dryness of the documents, and when documents had been read into evidence, they had wished for the limited and more easily disprovable testimony of the witnesses. "It was all dumped on me at once." Donna tore off a dry leaf and tossed it into the bucket. "The flood of evidence was undeniable. Especially the movies." Stone looked at her sympathetically. They, too, had been shown movies. "Those scenes - they ended my life. My sentence will end, but they will outlast my punishment."
"I see why you think that," Stone said. They worked in silence for a while, finding zucchinis, cutting them off the stems, and placing them into the wheelbarrow. Once again, Donna wondered what the plan for them was. That week, the director from Eight would be chairing, and Donna wasn't sure if there were traditional Eight dishes with zucchini. Maybe the cooks would have to improvise.
The zucchini patch was massive, but most of the yard was fruit trees and berry bushes at this point, as few of them were willing to put in the effort to actually grow something. Oldsmith had tried to get permission to grow flowers (though he was still very fond of his ferns), and had been allowed to plant a few sunflowers, all of whose seeds had been stolen overnight by the guards.
Stone got to one knee and lifted a few leaves, looking for zucchinis. "What do you mean, they ended your life?" he asked.
"They ended my normal civilian life," Donna explained, scraping the prickles off a zucchini. "You can't spend a quarter of a century in prison and get back to whatever you had been doing before." That had been her plan, even as she had hoped for early release.
"Huh." He fell silent again, and the two of them harvested zucchinis side by side until Theodosius emerged from the door, looked around the yard, and walked towards them.
"How's the harvesting going?" he asked.
"Good," Donna replied. "How was washing the floor?"
Theodosius smiled slightly. "Something funny happened."
Stone put down his saw. "Do tell," he said, stepping closer.
"The director from Eight showed up," he said, "and pulled me aside. He said that he noticed that I seem to know what I'm doing in the yard, and asked if I know of any herbal cures for baldness."
Donna chuckled. Theodosius was in need of one himself. "What did you say?"
"Pointed to my head. His face fell so instantaneously, I felt sorry for him." He took off his cap and ran a hand through his mostly nonexistent hair.
Stone chuckled. "Put it back on. You don't want to get a sunburn on your head."
Sighing, Theodosius jammed his cap on his head. "Says you."
"I am eighty-three years old," Stone pointed out. "You're not even sixty." He used his saw to raise leaves and check if there were any zucchinis hiding under them.
Donna noticed a zucchini hiding nearby and crouched down to harvest it. "I'm glad I don't have a Y chromosome," she said.
Stone snorted. "I distinctly recall someone complaining about menopause."
"Well, yes." A few quick swipes of the saw, and the zucchini was in her hands. "At least that's over and done with."
Theodosius walked over to the wheelbarrow and looked inside. "I guess we're just old."
"Don't amuse my slippers, you're not even at retirement age!" Stone shook his head and went back to looking for zucchinis.
"Most of the guards are younger than my eldest kids," Donna pointed out. Even her granddaughter was as old as her eldest daughter had been when Donna had been arrested.
"Could be worse," Stone said, nodding in the direction of Melton, who had grandchildren older than the guards.
While Stone was right, it could have also been better. Donna picked up a zucchini with each hand and went to the wheelbarrow, wondering for how long her body would be able to do something as simple as that.
After lunch, Theodosius went for a walk by himself. Donna decided to go help out with the apples, but got pulled over by Koy, who was sitting on a bench and reading a book.
"I think you might find this interesting," he said, "since your son is an anti and all."
Donna winced at the phrasing. The word 'anti' was short for 'anti-revanchist', which Aulus definitely was, but the short form carried connotations of angry young people punching other angry young people who dyed their hair, waved the red-and-gold, and sang Gem of Panem. Aulus wasn't the sort to punch people, he was the sort to defend in court those that did. "What's it about?"
"It's about reconstruction after the nineteenth-century civil war, but through some sort of special lens." He huffed, motioning for her to sit down next to him. On his other side, Xu was working on a crossword from a thick book of puzzles. "All these academic terms drive me insane. Can't they just say that this book draws parallels between Reconstruction and Depuration, instead of talking about lenses or modes of thought or whatever?"
Donna had used to be annoyed by it, as she had never been interested in the humanities and wasn't familiar with the jargon, but by now she was used to 'District-centric interpretations' and similar concepts. "Reconstruction?" she asked. She knew the basics of nineteenth-century United States history. "The one they looked at to decide what not to do?" Reading about that made Donna feel better about the past two decades - at least they hadn't ended up with massive terrorist bands roaming the countryside murdering people.
"Yeah."
"Did you get the book officially?"
Smiling, Koy nodded. "They allowed it. It never actually mentions anything forbidden." He held up the book. "It's called The First Depuration, but that's just bait."
"What's the densest element?" Xu asked.
"Osmium."
Xu wrote that down. "Is it used in anything?"
Donna shook her head. "In alloys, yes, but not by itself. Osmium powder forms a toxic compound when exposed to air. Plus, it's extremely rare. Osmium alloys are used in small things like instrument tips, where durability is needed."
"How do you know that?" Koy said, sounding impressed.
"Same way that you know who was the president of Uruguay in 1950. Or about this stuff." She gestured at the book.
Koy shook his head. "That stuff's easy, though. I never understood science. I was a bureaucrat, not an engineer." He had been the Steelworks head of construction in Two. In that way, he had been her opposite - he had known nothing about the technical side of things, and she had struggled with dealing with people. "And a historian now, I suppose."
"What did you think of that article in the Capitol Daily yesterday?" It had been blacked out, as it had directly stated that the Games regime had only gone on for so long thanks to overwhelming support in the Capitol.
"Utter nonsense. Wasn't it made clear at the trial how great a reach the NCIA had?"
Koy had a point there, but Donna remembered Games viewing parties. "You've got to admit, though, most people were willing to go along with things."
"And? People are always willing to go along with things," Xu said, writing down another word. "The elites in the Districts weren't exactly itching for a rebellion, either."
That was the wrong thing to say. Xu had been the Steelworks' representative when it came to Arena construction, but she had never been to the Districts. Koy, however, considered himself an expert in the District psyche. As he began to rant about who had and had not been pro-Rebellion in Two, Donna got up from the bench and headed towards an apple tree where Gold and Hope were already busy at work. Hope held a large stepladder steady as Gold picked apples and placed them into a bucket, which was tied to the top rung.
"Good afternoon!" Gold called down. "Are you here to join us?" Donna nodded, and Gold began to climb down carefully. His sense of balance wasn't the best, so he only moved one limb at a time. Hand, hand, foot, foot. When Donna climbed up, she was a little bit faster, but she was still careful. A fall from such a height would break something she didn't want broken.
"You good?" Hope asked as Donna reached the highest rung she was willing to stand on. Her waist was level with the top, and she could see that the bucket was mostly full.
"Good!" If her voice was unsteady, the two former Peacekeepers didn't call her out on it. Both of them stood holding the ladder in place, but it still shook slightly as Donna reached out a hand and plucked an apple from a branch with a sweaty hand.
The tree was completely covered in apples, so she didn't have to reach much to finish filling the bucket, which was quite small on top of that. Donna picked it up by the rope with one hand, held it over the side as she clung onto the top with her other hand, and slowly lowered it, leaning against the ladder as much as she could. Hope took the bucket, emptied it into the wheelbarrow that was still dirty from the zucchinis, and let it dangle by the side of the ladder. Gritting her teeth, Donna pulled up the bucket, fighting the feeling that she was going to fall off.
Below her, Hope and Gold were arguing over whether a tomato was a fruit or a vegetable. Technically speaking, Hope was right, but Gold had a point when he said that nobody ever put a tomato in a fruit salad. As they argued, Donna picked apples, stretching her hand out more and more. She wasn't willing to risk stepping up another rung, that would have left her bracing her knees against the top. "We need to move the ladder," she called down as she lowered the bucket. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest.
"Sure," Gold said, before going back to the debate. "It doesn't matter what the official definition is! Colloquial usage of these terms is a social construction. It is what people say it is, because they all agree on it."
Donna climbed down, matching her hands and feet before making another move down.
"Everything is a social construction," Hope shot back as they moved the ladder. "That doesn't automatically make it right or wrong." Donna climbed back up, moving the bucket up rung by rung as she went.
As Hope and Gold continued to argue like they had just read a Sociology 100 textbook, Donna filled another bucket with apples and paused for a break. She picked an apple, inspected it for wormholes, and ate it. The skin was tough, but the inside was juicy and soft, almost mushy. The sweet-and-sour taste was bright and vivid. The first mouthful, however, was the best one. Donna had no idea how Theodosius could eat apples until he made himself sick.
Once the apple was eaten, Donna tossed down the seeds and stem, all that remained of the little fruit. Wiping her hand clean on her trousers, she looked around the yard, enjoying the view. The tree was at the edge of a cluster of trees, so she could see more or less clearly.
Theodosius was still walking around. Hryb was gathering walnuts, though he was more interested in munching on the nuts than putting them in the bucket. Donna had been meaning to ask him about his son - now that she had a grandchild with a learning disability (though the learning per se wasn't affected), she found it easier to talk to the younger man, even though his son and her grandson had completely different issues.
Thinking about that made her think about the upcoming visit from Sooyen. Her granddaughter had started middle school already, and it was impossible to believe how much time had passed. Donna remembered seeing Sooyen as an infant. She had been a tiny little thing back then, but now she was nearly twelve years old and as smart as her parents, even if she was fonder of running around the streets with her friends than Donna could have wished.
Donna stretched out and plucked an apple from a branch, other hand holding the ladder in a white-knuckled grip. The bucket was full, so she lowered it down, slowly turning one hundred and eighty degrees before using both hands to lower the rope. Hope emptied the bucket, and Donna pulled it back up. She put it on top of the ladder and turned back around, feeling the ladder shake as she did so. Taking a deep breath, Donna wiped her hands on her trousers and continued picking apples, planning what she'd say to her granddaughter.
Walking into the visiting room was a shock. Donna had seen the photo on her wall many times, but it was still a surprise to see the tall girl who looked mostly grown already. "I can't believe how tall you are!" Donna exclaimed, feeling tears well up in her eyes. Could this really be the same Sooyen whom Donna had last seen as a tiny baby strapped to her father's chest?
"Everyone says that," Sooyen said, rolling her eyes. Her skin was the same as Dem's, the eyes were Daeho's, and the hair could have come from both sides of the family, but her facial features and voice were harder to pinpoint. "I'm not even that tall. Only a metre sixty-three." She avoided meeting Donna's eyes.
Donna smiled. "When I last saw you, you were this big." She held up her hands about half a metre apart. "You were the cutest little thing. Just like your mother at that age."
"Uh-huh," Sooyen muttered, glancing at the guards, who were much more interested in the cracks in the ceiling. "Great-Grandpa showed me a photo. It's kinda cool that you look just like back then." She studied Donna carefully. The only recent photographs of Donna were courtesy of the guards, and were often not of the highest quality.
"I do?"
Sooyen nodded. "Well, with black hair, but yes."
Self-consciously, Donna reached up to touch her hair, which was almost completely white. She doubted Sooyen was being completely honest - during the haircut, she had been struck by how old she looked, even though the hairdresser had reassured her that she didn't look her age - but she did look rather different than she had before her arrest. "I'm sure I looked rather different when your Mom was your age," she said, trying for a joke.
It worked. Sooyen giggled slightly and seemed to relax. "Well, yeah."
Donna seized the opportunity. "Moral of the story - don't live off snack cakes and lead a sedentary lifestyle after giving birth five times. Bad for the figure."
Even the guards laughed at that one, especially the oldest one, a middle-aged woman from Nine who had six children herself. Sooyen didn't say anything, though, so Donna tried to keep the conversation going.
"How's school?" she asked.
"Fine." Sooyen shrugged in a way that was universal in the family. "It's alright."
"How's your cousin?" Joel got in more trouble than Donna had ever thought a child in grade five could get into. His most recent escapade had consisted of running away for a few days. Lars still had no idea what he had gotten up to.
"He got an A on an English test."
Despite his tendency to not pay attention in class, Joel did like to read, which explained how he knew good grammar. "If only he could apply himself," Donna sighed. "He's like the opposite of your mother. She stopped trying for a few years, but never got into trouble. Your cousin gets good marks, but-" She sighed again.
Sooyen nodded, but said nothing. Donna tried to think of something to say, but the only thing that came to mind was the recent scandal in the army, where several revanchists had gotten visible tattoos of the gold eagle. Now that every scandal was written about, it seemed like the armed forces had a person whose job was just apologizing to the nation. "Have you read the news recently?" she asked.
"The historians' dispute is interesting," Sooyen said hesitantly. "Especially given how old they are."
The idea of Capitolian historians arguing over how guilty the average person had been of the Hunger Games was already absurd, but most of these historians were at least in their forties. The dispute could be properly summarized as one group of onetime Games fans telling another that they had aided and abetted a criminal regime.
The issue of 'consent or coercion?' was the main focal point of the discussion. Had the majority of the Capitol approved of the Games? Disapproved? Not cared at all? Had the regime in its day-to-day operations relied on constant coercion in every facet of life or on hesitant but sincere acceptance, even among oppressed groups? These articles were always censored, but they always found their way to Donna's hands. She hated reading them. Every single one was a reminder of the guilt she bore for the Games. All of the left-wing historians put together hadn't done as much damage as her.
"That it is," Donna said. "Are you talking about this in history class?"
Sooyen nodded enthusiastically. "Mom told me how, in her day, they always stopped just before the Dark Days and said there was no more time. But we get to actually learn about that stuff!" She then went on a brief rant about McCollum's early days in power. Donna listened closely, impressed by her granddaughter's depth of knowledge. This wasn't a forbidden topic, but it was hard to find a book on it that didn't go into what they weren't allowed to read.
"You know so much," Donna praised her. Sooyen shrugged, but Donna could tell that she was pleased by the compliment. "Do you want to be a historian?" Octavius had told her about the career prospects, and it wasn't as bad as she had feared. Being a museum guide or an archivist was a perfectly respectable job, and according to Laelia, teaching was considered quite prestigious now that a teacher's main job wasn't indoctrination.
Sooyen shook her head. "No, I just want to do this for fun. I want to be an engineer, like Mom and Great-Grandpa."
"And me," Donna reminded her, though she couldn't fault her granddaughter for not wanting to think about that.
"Uh, yes." She adjusted her short fringe. "Joel also wants to be an engineer."
With how interested in academic excellence Joel was, Donna wouldn't have been more surprised if Alex had suddenly decided to become one, or Inky. "What?" she asked, taken aback. "He does know that you can't skate through university on talent alone, does he?"
"He doesn't get it," Sooyen explained, serious expression on her face. "He's so used to showing up half the time and still doing well, he's not going to know what to do when it gets harder." Hryb would be happy to hear that. He was already envious, because his son had had to struggle for good marks even in grade one. "I think he heard Great-Grandpa praising Mom to the skies one too many times, and decided that was the key to his approval."
Donna chuckled. Academic success was indeed the key to approval from her parents, and becoming an engineer was the cherry on top. "Tell him he needs to keep his marks up if he doesn't want to go the way of Great-Uncle Alex," she said. Sooyen nodded somberly. "And how's everyone else?"
"Grandpa baked a giant cake for my birthday. It was still barely enough for everyone."
If Dem's cooking had been barely enough for everyone, Donna shuddered to imagine how many guests had been crammed into the house. "I forgot to tell you - happy birthday!"
"You already congratulated me through the letter."
"Yes, but this is in-person. I rarely get to wish anyone happy birthday in person at the right time," Donna said self-pityingly.
"Oh." Sooyen twisted around in the chair, looking at the floor. "Uh, thanks."
"You're twelve now." Donna tapped her fingers against the table, wishing she could reach out and hug her granddaughter. "An important age."
Sooyen furrowed her eyebrows. "Not really. I'm not even a teenager yet, technically." Donna suspected she wasn't being truthful, but didn't push it.
"How are your aunt and uncles?" she asked.
"Everyone's fine."
"Are you doing anything interesting right now?"
Sooyen shook her head. "Not really. Just normal stuff. I'm going to hang out with my friends later today. We're going to the mall."
Donna hoped that this wouldn't culminate with them climbing up to the roof of the mall. Her granddaughter's choice in friends was not one that she supported, but at least Sooyen did her homework before going to run around the neighbourhood. And in any case, Donna could only dream of being able to hop on a bike and go to the mall. "And Joel? Do you know what he does?"
"No. He hangs out with some seriously sketchy people." To Donna's skeptical gaze, she replied, "What, you think my friends are sketchy? They're not. They don't steal stuff or do drugs or anything. We just chill and eat candy."
"I believe you," Donna said hastily. It was uncomfortable to argue with someone whom she only knew through a few lines of writing weekly, and in any case, Lars lived in Two. There wasn't much Sooyen could find out on her own. "How are my parents?"
"Mom makes me visit them several times a week." She rolled her eyes. "The house is some sort of shrine to everyone's accomplishments. They've even got Uncle Lars' and Aunt Laelia's 'Most Valuable Benchwarmer' trophies from highschool." Donna smiled, remembering how her kids had dubbed the awards they had received. "By the way, I'm going to do wrestling in the winter."
Sooyen's weight still hadn't caught up with her height, so that could be a problem. "Have fun."
"I'll try!"
Donna tried to remember what they had just been talking about, and failed. "Uh, how's your Great-Uncle Alex?" she asked.
"Fine."
One of these days, Alex would have both feet in the grave, and he'd still insist that everything was fine.
Donna finished reading the book on Reconstruction and put it aside. This part of history was always hard to read. With this in the back of their minds, no wonder the legal historians had been so afraid of revanchism during the trial.
It was strange, that she had read the book cheering for the Reconstruction and being completely and utterly outraged by the horrific acts of the revanchism of the time, but when it came to her own situation, she was still on some level unsure of the entire idea. Not wanting Dr. Chu to consider her a hypocrite, she tried to figure out a way to think about it in a consistent way.
Both regimes had been equally destructive, in Donna's opinion. Having people be property and the Hunger Games both seemed like different variants of rock bottom to her. She reached for paper and pen to jot down some ideas. Maybe she was still subconsciously biased against the Districts? That couldn't be the full answer, but she still wrote that down. Admitting that to Dr. Chu would be embarrassing, but it would be worse if she got out and unthinkingly said hateful things in an interview.
Maybe it was just because she was angry at how long her sentence had been? Her sentence had been just, but she still wished she could be released the next day. Logically, she knew that what had happened to them was the best option of many, but she was still unhappy with how there was no sign of the lifers being released early. It wasn't fair that the people sentenced after the collapse of the IDC would be allowed to die at home, but Best was coming up on one hundred years, and all the administration had done was order the guards to help him go up and down stairs.
Donna tried to focus on the issue at hand. Maybe she was just outraged that, had they lived back then, Dem could have been treated as a thing that could be bought and sold? And people that looked like her had been treated terribly as well. Maybe it was just personal.
Unable to think of anything better, Donna set the paper aside for now and took out another piece of paper. A note from Livia saying that she couldn't find any documentation of her saying something blatantly anti-District. Donna wasn't sure why Livia was so worried about that all of a sudden, and in any case such documentation didn't exist - the prosecution had been disappointed, but her actions had spoken louder than her words. She adjusted her glasses, feeling the irony of receiving this message at the same time as she had read the book. After some consideration, Donna put the message back, unable to think of a reply other than the Good she had already written.
The sudoku she was currently working on was the hardest one she had ever tried, but it was still easier than trying to think about herself critically, as Dr. Chu wanted her to. Donna filled in the numbers slowly, wishing that her own thinking could be understood so easily, step by careful step.
A/N: The historians' dispute is, of course, the Historikerstreit that rocked German academia in the late 1980s (so we're a bit ahead of schedule here). That was about how "to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography, and more generally into the German people's view of themselves." (Wikipedia) Many of those historians had fought in WW2, which meant they were arguing about very personal issues at times. The issue of 'consent or coercion' and how much the regime was accepted is an area of debate in the study of any dictatorship.
The scandal with the soldiers getting revanchist tattoos is also inspired by the constant scandals in the German armed forces, where soldiers are caught giving the Nazi salute, getting tattoos, and owning memorabilia.
"One doesn't recognize the devil when he's putting his hand on your shoulder" is a quote from Albert Speer. Dr. Chu thought Donna would be able to relate.