03 - PINK
Whenever she dreams, it is always of the girl in the pink dress.
She doesn't know who the child is for years and years, but she skirts across the edges of her consciousness whenever she sleeps or shoots up a vial of silvery morphling. She hears an airy giggle and sees the too-kind smile and knows whoever this girl is, she would not have lasted long in this cruel world. Everything about her is honeyed with innocence, from the too-wide blue eyes to the dark hair twisted into pigtails by glossy pink bows. And of course there is the dress, fluttering at her ankles and covered in lace and frills, the perfect shade of pastel pink that screams purity and naivete.
She sees the girl over and over, spinning in circles as her dress twirls in the summer breeze. The sky sometimes frames her, tinged salmon by the setting sun, the rays of dying light obscuring her face. Other times it is the soft grass that pillows beneath her as she stumbles and sprawls across the ground before getting up and dancing some more. And other days, it's too dark to make out anything at all, and she only sees the dress flapping wildly over invisible arms and legs. The unknown girl dances no matter what surrounds her, even when the fuzzy dreams turn violent or too much morphling trickles into her veins and makes the world tear at the seams. Her tinkling laugh and unburdened dance are always in the periphery, even when she sees the yellow foam spilling from boys' mouths and the towering trees trying to crush her underneath their humid trunks. She sees blood and gore and terror and loneliness and death, and yet a scrap of pink fabric always flutters just out of reach. The girl forever twists out of grasp, the pink silk a siren's call that leads to nothing at all, but she never stops listening. She is always there, close enough that Indigo can feel her warmth but far enough that it's all she feels as she longs to dance and skip and twirl like the child does in her dreams.
She's given up long ago identifying the girl, knowing that no matter how high she gets or how hard she thinks, she will never see her entire face. She contents herself with watching her dip and weave and tumble for a while, letting her always be a specter to be observed but never obtained. Soon she stops being curious and stops longing for the girl's carefree happiness. She stops paying attention to her altogether as she slips further and further each year. The dress is always there, the pink fabric fluttering invitingly across the back of her closed eyelids, and Indigo learns to simply ignore it. She doesn't care who the girl is because she simply cares about almost nothing anymore. She's getting old. Her bones feel heavier than ever before, and every week her body aches for an extra ounce from the vial to blur it all together even more. As the world bubbles and smears, so does the pink dress, tattering and fading but still there, always there, never leaving. Her murals twist in every dark and cool color imaginable because she tries to run from the pink like the red and the yellow, but the pink is still there, the pink will never leave her, it will never stop taunting her, and she just wants it to go away for good and never show up again. She wants to drown in a muddle of blue and black and gray and silver, but the pink is always there. It brings the echo of a twinkling laugh thats reminds her that she is broken a hundred times over.
She should be able to laugh like that and dance like that and smile like that, but she can't. Everything was stolen from her too long ago to count, and the pink dress tells her that every day. Indigo screams and tears at her hair and shoots more silvery sludge into her veins until her breathing slows and the pink dances out of her vision for a time. In those moments of peace, she barely thinks of the pink dress; it's the least of her worries, paling in comparison to the blood and death rattles and screams for mercy she's witnessed over the years. The reason it enrages her isn't because it repulses her or triggers her; it simply reminds her of who she used to be, when she was a little girl herself, before she was torn and trampled and bruised and burnt into an unrecognizable husk of a woman.
For a while she thinks the girl is her younger self, taunting her from the distant past over how she will never be that free again. Yet she never owned a pink dress, and her father would've never wasted money on something so elaborate for the child he despised. She lets the pink dress bob in the ocean of her mind, upsetting her at times and puzzling her at others. As time grinds on she realizes that whoever the girl is, she is as much a part of her now as the Games and the Capitol and everything else.
She is much closer to the end of her life than the beginning of it when her father dies and his belongings are shipped to her home in the Victor's Village. She's tempted to give it to Greason's grandchildren to let them burn it or sell it or do whatever they want with its contents. She hasn't spoken to her father in many years, and she could care less about the grimy trinkets that he's left behind. Her curiosity gets the better of her however, so she slices open the box with the knife she always carries and opens the flaps. Her fingers pull out meaningless objects; dress shirts and dusty books and old leather shoes. She's about to throw it all away again when she sees a glint of pink at the bottom of the box that makes her breath catch in her throat.
Her eyes are already full of tears as her fingers hook around the bronze picture frame, and she lofts it close to her face to peer at the image inside. The tears spill over when she sees the picture, sees people she doesn't recognize. Two parents in fancy clothes and two children. The boy is unremarkable, older and in a dark gray suit, but the girl...the girl is in the pink dress, the girl with the same eyes and the same smile and the same hair as Indigo herself. And then Indigo knows, she knows who the girl in her dreams is. It's not her, and it's not a ghost, although that's practically what the girl was in her life. It's her mother, her mother as a little girl, and Indigo weeps as she holds the only picture of her mother she's ever seen to her chest and rocks back and forth in a futile effort to comfort herself. Still, the sobs come, and she sits in her foyer crying for what feels like hours as she clutches the innocent girl to her chest and traces the frills of the pink silk skirt with trembling fingers.
She doesn't know how or when, but she knows she's seen this picture before, probably when she wasn't supposed to as a little girl. She doesn't remember her mother beyond the shell of a person that she was when she was little, always high and slurred and waiting for death. She was ready to die but too much of a coward to get it over with, just like Indigo herself. Her father would scream and hit and kick her mother and she'd just bleat like a wounded animal and curl up deeper in the mess of blankets on her bed. Her eyes were always glazed, her skin always yellowed, her attention never focused on the little girl in her life who needed her most. Indigo hated her for many years, until she learned what real hatred was from her father and the Games. She raged over and over as a teenager about how her mother never did anything but mope and sigh before she overdosed when she was only six years old. Indigo thought if she was around that she could've saved her from her father's fists and the isolation of her life, although she knows better than that now. Her mother was the monster of her life, before her father's fists left their scars and the painted people made her dance for them and kill other kids to survive.
She is no monster to her now, however. Indigo understands her now, understands why her mother laid in bed like shackles held her there and stuck needles into her arms until she couldn't recognize her own daughter. She understands how someone can go from the little girl in the pink dress to a creature of yellowed skin and never-ending highs. She was that little girl too, even if she was too poor to have a frilly pink dress and lost hold of her innocence far earlier than her mother. She understands her now, she understands everything, and the tension releases in her shoulders and she lets herself cry until no more tears come.
When her body stops shaking with sobs, she crawls to the parlor and sets the bronze picture frame on her mantle. She stares at it until the sun starts to set outside, the sky a symphony of pinks, oranges, and reds as the sun hovers just above the horizon. Indigo stares until her eyes slip closed and sleep claims her body, and like always, flitting between the sprays of blood and the buzz of the jungle, is the girl in the pink dress. Her mother dances with her skirts spurting around her and her laugh chiming freely, always there to remind her of what she once was and what she has ultimately become.
A/N: Hope you guys enjoyed this one, sorry if it was a bit low action but I wanted to explore more of Indigo's backstory before the Games. Leave a review and let me know what you think. Thank you so much to everyone who has shown their support already! It means a lot!
Until Next Time,
Tracee