Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine.
Horns of a Dilemma
A/N: This is the sequel for Endgame, so I guess that makes it a two shot. Sorry.
#######
Madge had survived her post-game interview, watching the review of the game, each painful death recounted in high-definition detail, but none of that even came close to the terror that came with the train ride home.
Mr. Abernathy had stayed with her through each agonizing moment, held her hand and told her it was going to be okay. It wouldn't be though.
Tears had come cascading down her cheeks, off her chin and onto her chest as she shook her head, blubbered almost incoherently.
"It won't-t b-be!"
She was going to be so completely alone. More so than she had been. No one was going to want to associate with a killer, even if that killer had brought them food, and with that a small sense of security for at least a year.
The thought of the isolation, not even school to break the monotony of her empty days, was more frightening than the snapping of the cameras and the jewel colored people. More frightening to her than her nightmares of the Games.
But that's the only choice.
How he understood her spit sputtering mess, she'd never know, but he had.
"Shhh, calm down, Pearl. I'm taking care of it."
He pulled her into a hug, kept telling her 'it'll be okay' and 'I'm taking care of it', until she fell into an exhausted sleep.
When she woke Mr. Abernathy was still at her bedside, slumped in a chair in his Capitol finery.
Madge supposed, after her long, restless night, that at the very least, she and Mr. Abernathy had each other. After all, that had been her reasoning for him wanting her to come home in the first place. She was as close to a friend as he had and if Madge won they would be trapped in their gilded cages together. Side by side until the very bitter end.
Which in his case, if he didn't get his drinking under control, wouldn't be far off.
They shared a silent breakfast, sat at the table for far too long, until floor under their feet swayed, the scenery slowed, and the train came to a stop.
They were home.
Now, in the bright sunlight, Madge squints at the crowd. They had to have been organized. There's no way this many people came to welcome her home.
It's another illusion, another photo op for the Capitol.
"Just smile and wave, sweetheart," Mr. Abernathy tells her as he gives her a one last look over. He makes her tug the neck line of her blouse up, has her change skirts twice before he's happy with her appearance.
She doesn't pay the crowd much attention, just does as he says-smiles and waves and accepts their practiced cheers of elation. They don't mean any of it. Madge is still just the Mayor's brat, a spoiled child to them. She can hear it in each clap, each cheer, each false smile.
It's a relief to get home, to her old room, even though it won't be hers for long.
She's old enough to live in the Victors' Village by herself, not that she wants to.
Mr. Abernathy hands her off, straight into the arms of her airily smiling mother and fearfully watching father.
"I've missed you so much, love."
Madge wonders if her mother even knows where Madge has been, what she's done, who she is now.
When her father pulls her close, lets a few tears slip from his eyes, she nearly loses her last layers of composure.
"I'm so scared, daddy."
It's stupid. She hasn't called him daddy in many years and doing so now makes her seem so childish, and if there's one thing Madge isn't anymore, it's a child.
But she is scared. She feels so small and helpless. At least in the Arena she knew who the enemy was, she knew what she needed to do. Here, now, in her parents' living room, the path ahead of her is murky. While she has a pretty good, unfortunately good, idea what awaits her, the anticipation of it is slowly driving her mad.
"I know, Pearl." He gives her a small kiss in her hair. "It's going to be okay, though. Haymitch is taking care of it."
She nearly screams at him.
If she can survive the Hunger Games then she deserves the courtesy of knowing what it is that Mr. Abernathy has done that is 'taking care of' the mess of Victory Madge has gotten herself into.
Instead of having a fit, collapsing to the ground and crying herself to sleep, Madge hugs them tighter. She doesn't know how many more hugs she has left with them.
That night she takes a shower in her bathroom, washes away the perfume and smog of the Capitol from her skin and hair, puts on her own night gown, sleeps one last time in her own bed before the last vestiges of her childhood are taken from her.
Mrs. Oberst is given the day of Madge's move to the Victors' Village off. A small gift, better than all the little pots with silver parachutes could ever provide.
Her father makes her breakfast, waffles with strawberries and cream.
Madge doesn't touch the strawberries. She's lost her taste for them.
They pack up her room, carefully placing her books, toiletries, and clothes in a few boxes, before stacking them in the government car her father has been provided with for the occasion.
The drive isn't far, but it seems to stretch on into eternity, like the last walk of a dead man.
Mr. Abernathy is there, sitting on her new front porch, cleaning under his nails with his ever present knife.
He nods at her father, eyes searching around for her mother. She isn't there though. All the packing upset her and so Madge and her father had put her to bed, eased her frayed nerves with a dose of her morphling.
His gray eyes fall on Madge. She's carrying her pillow, clutching it to her chest, fighting off sobs.
Before she can stop them, a few tear finally escape, blink off her face and onto the pillowcase.
"I don't want to live here."
She wants to go home. Isn't she a Victor? Doesn't that mean she has the right to pick her residence? Why can't she stay with her parents?
"I know you don't," Mr. Abernathy tells her. He doesn't look like he wants to live here either.
Her father brushes a few tears from her cheeks, gives her a pat on her back, "I'm sorry, Pearl. It isn't a choice though." He swallows, his voice breaks a little, "Haymitch will be near if you need anything."
I don't want Haymitch!
Haymitch Abernathy is the reason she's in this mess. He tricked her, made her feel guilty, and now she's being killed. It's slower than it would have been in the Arena, but it's just as certain.
Without a word, not even a grunt or a sigh, Madge walks past them, eyes cast down to the recently manicured lawn. Her lawn.
Her father stays until nightfall, which is longer than he should have. Her mother can't always be trusted to be safe without someone being with her.
A final kiss on the cheek, a quick hug, and then he's gone.
Despite Mr. Abernathy being there, Madge can already feel the chill of loneliness creeping in on her.
"I can stay on the couch, if you, uh, are scared of being by yourself," he tells her, forcing her to tear her eyes from the door. She'd been staring at it since her father had walked out.
Madge lets her sore eyes flicker to him, settle on his world weary form.
It isn't his fault she won. She'd made a conscious decision to follow his advice, despite knowing full well the consequences. It's unfair to be angry with him, and she knows it.
"I'll be fine, Mr. Abernathy."
She's going to be alone, she might as well get used to it.
Her voice is weak, watery and pathetic, but she forces a smile for him.
It almost looks like he wants to argue. His graying eyebrows scrunch together and his lips press into a thin line. Then he sighs.
"I'll be right next door." He takes her by the shoulder, "Anytime, day, night, it doesn't matter. You need me and I'm here. Understand, Pearl?"
A sloppy sounding chuckle bubbles out of her.
"You'll be drunk."
He's always drunk.
"I won't be," he frowns. "I'm gonna take care of you. From here on out, okay?"
#######
Her mother and Mr. Abernathy are at her house daily, keeping her company for the first few weeks. They have nothing else to do.
On the weekends though, her father comes with them.
It's always early, so he can spend as much time with her as possible.
It's more time with her parents than she's had in her entire life, but she's grateful for it. Like her hugs, she doesn't know how much more time, how many more lazy conversations she has left with them.
Despite the fact that it's an almost unbearably tense existence, Madge settles into it. She doesn't need sleep. She doesn't need food. She just needs to keep using her head.
She just needs to stay alive.
On a lazy Sunday, a knock comes on her back door.
Why are they coming in the back? Why are they knocking?
Madge has nothing to hide from them. Normally they just come in, make themselves comfortable in her kitchen and start breakfast.
She bounds down the stairs, skids into the kitchen, stopping just short of the door.
There's a white curtain up, obscuring the view of the back porch, but Madge can tell the figures aren't her parents or Mr. Abernathy.
Both are a little taller than her, dark, unmoving.
Slowly, she reaches for the paring knife she'd left on the kitchen table the night before, clutches it in her white knuckled hand before swinging the door open.
With the door out of the way Madge sees it isn't a pair of government thugs come to drag her off to a more miserable fate.
Katniss and Gale.
They stare at her, watch her warily. Probably because she's still holding a knife out at them. She doesn't lower it though.
They aren't her friends. They can't be anymore.
For several minutes they stand in her doorway, staring at her, like she's some animal in the Capitol's menagerie, before Katniss clears her throat.
"We brought strawberries."
She holds out the pail, filled to the brim with red berries.
"I don't want any."
Madge doesn't need anything from them. Either of them.
"Take them," Katniss says again, holds the pail out a little further. "It's a…gift."
Suddenly she isn't in her too bright kitchen in her hatefully cold house. She's in the Arena, tricking the boy with her little pot of nightlock.
They're trying to kill her.
Katniss and Gale are trying to kill her.
She hadn't hurt them, but they'd seen her on the television. Her mind is frantic. They'd seen her kill people. Now they're trying to rid the world of her.
Maybe she should let them.
Instead of eating their berries, probably laced with nightlock, she knocks them from Katniss' hand. They fall, hit the wood on the porch like the stones had hit the upturned earth around the Careers' pyramid. The bucket makes a harsh noise as it slams into the wood, rolls emptily off and into the bushes.
"You're trying to kill me." Even to her own ears it sounds ridiculous, but her mind keeps twisting it, making it true.
Katniss takes a step back when Madge juts the knife at her.
"We aren't trying to kill you," Gale says. He's stepped between Katniss and Madge, ready to take the blade for her if Madge completely looses it.
He looks nothing like her District partner, but for a second, he does. It isn't Gale's angry glare that blazes at her, but the boy she failed to ally with. There's a stern accusation in his dead eyes, blaming Madge for his death.
Madge's hand goes limp. When the knife clatters to the ground, bounces off the unblemished tile of her kitchen and onto the porch by Gale's boot, she snaps back to herself.
Shaking, barely able to stand, she swallows down bile.
"I-I'm sorry." She grabs the door, she needs to close it, protect them from her. "I don't want to hurt anyone."
The door slams, shakes the entire house, and Madge slumps to the ground behind it.
#######
Mr. Abernathy comes a few minutes after. Madge thinks maybe Katniss and Gale ran into him and warned him she'd lost her mind because he finds her instantaneously.
He and her parents make sure one of them stays with her after that for several days. She's a small child, not trusted to be alone.
They start forcing food down her because everything has lost its taste. Then they threaten her with morphling to make her sleep when they realize she's been up for far too long.
She can't sleep though. Her nightmares only intensify after the debacle with Katniss and Gale.
Her nights are spent reading, filling her mind with realities better than the one she's trapped in. When she isn't reading, she's practicing the piano.
"You have to be top-notch, Pearl," Mr. Abernathy had told her when they'd moved it to her house. He never explains why and she's grown too tired to ask.
It's almost two weeks later, in the earliest part of the evening twilight, when Gale comes again.
Mr. Abernathy has fallen asleep on the sofa, listening to Madge's playing, and she's just closed the cover on the keys when she hears the knock.
He's on her front porch this time, in his mining uniform, covered in gray dust from head to toe.
They stare at each other, he might be afraid to talk to her again, especially after her meltdown last time. His eyes glance down at her hands, see she hasn't got a weapon in them, then up to her face.
"I, uh, came by to tell you I'm sorry," he finally says.
Madge shakes her head, "No, I'm sorry. I-I just-I get confused sometimes."
All the time. She isn't even sure if the moment she's in right now is real.
"Not about that." He taps his helmet on his thigh. "I meant about saying you wouldn't be going to the Capitol. That wasn't fair."
He wouldn't be saying that if she hadn't been Reaped. Would he be saying it if she'd died?
Madge wonders if Gale would apologize at her grave, put flowers on her stone, would he whisper an 'I'm sorry' to a dead girl?
Maybe he already is. Madge increasingly feels like she's being sealed in a casket.
"You don't mean it," finally tells him as she starts to close the door.
He catches it, his palm leaving a sweat and coal dust handprint on the white paint and etched glass. "I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it."
"People say things they don't mean all the time," she gives the door a push. He doesn't budge though.
His gray eyes squint in at her, dance over the dark circles under her eyes, the increasing sharpness of her features, and frowns, "Are you okay?"
Madge gives him a small smile, gives the door a final push, quickly locks it behind her.
He might not say things he doesn't mean, but she certainly does, she would, and she can't bare it.
#######
Gale comes by every evening after that.
He feels guilty, she knows that.
Madge is broken, shattered into a million little pieces, and he feels guilty for having made light of the possibility of that happening.
It's nice, though, to have someone other than her parents and Mr. Abernathy around, even if she hates him just a little. Even if he's only there out of guilt.
He tells her about things in Town, gossip really, stuff she had never had interest in before. She doesn't leave the house, doesn't venture any further than the picket fence outlining her yard, so hearing about happenings is like hearing tales of a far off land now.
"Mellark and Katniss are, uh, dating, I guess." He picks at the coal dust under his nails, sighs. "He said something about not putting things off after you were Reaped. Asked her out the next day."
They're on the porch. She won't let him in, he isn't her friend, she can't have friends, she knows that, but the porch is fine. The porch is where they'd always made transactions before things had gone so terribly wrong, it's a place of business.
Madge reclines lazily on the swing, lets it rock her gently.
"Were you upset?" She asks.
He loved Katniss, Madge had sensed it, known it was coming ages ago. Surely he'd been upset.
She watches as he makes a face, begins rubbing at the stubble on his chin, "I was, a lot actually, but I think she's better off with him." He frowns over at her, "She and me are too much alike. We'd exhaust each other."
That was true, though she never thought he'd have noticed that.
"She hasn't been back to see me." Madge rolls onto her stomach. It isn't any wonder Katniss doesn't want to see her, though, Madge had tried to flay her last time. It's for the best.
Peeta has come though. Never breathed a word of it, just smiled and told her how much better she looked each time he saw her. Brought her cookies and cakes, which all went to waste. Madge has an entire box of iced lemon cookies on her counter, actually, just waiting to get stale and be tossed out.
Sitting up, Madge gestures for Gale to follow her.
For the first time, she lets him in the door, takes him down the little hall, to her kitchen. She scoops the box from the counter and pushes it into his hands. "Give this to your siblings."
He eyes the box, looks skeptical.
"They'll just be thrown away." She feels tears coming to her eyes. It's so stupid. Why is she crying over cookies?
Gale pulls her into a hug, rubs his filthy hands up and down her back to soothe her, mumbling soft things into her hair.
#######
She wakes on the couch, more rested than she has been in months.
There's salt on her face, the last traces of exhausted tears. When she tries to set up, something holds her in place.
She recognizes the hands, stained fingers, broken nails and rough skin, clamped at her waist. Gale is still softly snoring behind her, keeping her held close with a powerful grip.
It almost startles her into screaming, but she doesn't.
Instead, she rolls around, presses herself closer to him, and closes her eyes again.
#######
A couple of days before her Victory Tour, during the coldest of the winter, Madge comes down from her room.
Gale will be coming soon.
He's her security. She can't sleep anymore without his warmth beside her.
His guilt may have been the reason he originally came to her, to assuage his conscience, but Madge will take it. She shouldn't, it's a danger to both of them, she can't have friends, but she selfishly needs the small sliver of human contact he gives her.
When she bounces down the last step, turns the corner into the living room to practice her piano, she finds a girl sitting on her long bench, tapping out chopsticks on the keys.
"Who are you?" Madge's voice cuts the silence, echoes across the nearly empty room.
The girl, all doused in green, from her hair to her finger nails, turns, tilts her head, gives Madge a little smile.
She stands, moves to the winged back chair by the fireplace.
"Phoebe Alameda, Victor, just like you." She pushes one of her large curls over her shoulder. "You can call me Birdy though."
Madge keeps the sofa between them, narrows her eyes at her, "Why are you here?"
"Just full of questions aren't you?" Miss Alameda checks her appearance in a little compact. With a snap, she closes it. "I'm here to give you your options."
Madge squints, not really understanding. Her options for what?
Miss Alameda crosses her legs, "Your 'Victory' Tour is in a few days, so you need to know what your choices are."
After a second of thought, Madge circles the couch, sits at the end farthest from the strange little woman. "I have options?"
Shifting in her seat, Miss Alameda gestures with one hand, "You're a pretty enough girl, and smart. You can guess what the first option is."
She can. To be sold off, like a piece of meat, to the highest bidder, to pay back the favors the Capitol citizens had paid her during her Game. It's the only option she's aware of, other than upsetting the Capitol in monumental fashion, like Mr. Abernathy had done, and getting everyone she loves killed.
Though she's afraid to ask, she does. "And…what's the other?"
Green lips stretch, a grim expression as Miss Alameda lets out a long breath.
"The other option is to work. Earn your keep. You'll scout out the Tributes, their families, their friends." She wrinkles her nose. "The other Victors will understand your choice, respect it, but they won't like you. You won't lose your body, but you'll lose something else."
Madge frowns down at her hands in her lap, picks at her nails. "Which did you choose?"
She shrugs, "The wrong one."
"Which is that?"
Her green lips twitch up, "Oh honey, this is one of those times when there's no right one."
#######
Madge gives concerts, plays her piano for the most elite crowd in the Capitol.
Then she goes home. Back to District Twelve, to her increasingly dusty house in the Victors' Village. Back to Gale and the comfort only he can provide.
Her price, as Miss Alameda puts it, is her soul.
The other Victors, except Mr. Abernathy and the others like her, don't speak to her. She's as good as invisible.
Except when they want something.
"We need you to get them to donate to the girl from Four."
"-only need a few hundred more for a mace."
"Get me some dirt on the boy from Seven."
I need. I want. Get me this.
Information is a commodity, the ability to twist the minds of the already warped Capitol citizens is a gift, and Madge and the others like her are the wielders of that dangerous power. They gather secrets and information, from other Victors, from the Districts, from the Capitol citizens and use it as a means to an end.
And that end, more often than not, was a victory, or something like it.
"This is what you meant, isn't it?" Madge asks Mr. Abernathy during the Quell that sees everyone's name, Reaping age or not, placed in the bowl. Their Tributes, a man from the Seam and Mr. Abernathy's friend, Ripper who'd sold him liquor, are dead. Killed brutally during the bloodbath.
Madge is about to be sent out to District Five, to help Birdy prep the female Tributes family. She's about to learn to pick a person apart, patch them together, create something the Capitol will eat up. She's going to learn to create something that the Capitol can control.
"When you said you were taking care of it. You meant you were keeping me from being sold off. You made a deal with Birdy, didn't you?"
He'd made a pact with one of the outsiders of the Victors' exclusive club to save Madge.
Mr. Abernathy nods.
Madge isn't sure if he's made a good deal or not.
Time, she supposes, will tell.
For the time being, she gives him a hug and a kiss on the cheek before picking up her luggage and heading for the elevator.
It slides open and Birdy is waiting on her, dressed in black from head to stiletto.
Just like the train ride home, the ride to District Five is terrifying, but not because she knows she'll be alone.
She's part of a group of isolate individuals now. A troop of the broken amide the broken.
Like she and Mr. Abernathy, they have each other, if no one else. Side by side in cages of their own making for eternity.
She's alone, isolated in a sea of humanity now, and it terrifies her more than the cameras and the lights, just as it had nearly a year earlier.
Madge has made a deal to save herself, make people that she plans on tricking trust her, then sell them out to keep herself comfortable, and she isn't quite sure it's the right choice.
"Smile, Magdalene," Birdy tells her.
"I just wish I knew how this is all going to be." Madge frowns at her feet. She wants to know how this choice will play out. "You know, in the end."
Birdy's black liquorish lips tug up into a sad sort of smile. "No. You want to know if it'll be okay."
Madge nods.
Midnight hair shifts, blue black in the florescent light of the elevator.
"It won't be." She shrugs, "But that's the only choice."