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— Five Years After the War —
Fuck it Hawthorne, keep moving forward.
The mantra that helped me survive the war, the loneliness, all the shit I went through.
And I throw it out like old trash for Madge Undersee.
I can't move past it, what I saw.
I'm enraged. Furious at Plutarch and Haymitch and Madge fucking Undersee for messing with my head, for reminding me of my past. For dragging me into their dysfunctional little orbit.
The thought of that man, his hands slithering over Madge, his eyes glittering oil slicks, manhandling her into that room like an unwieldy piece of furniture, his grin self satisfied and and triumphant. The door slamming shut. The thought of what he could have done to her. What he probably did do to her.
And Plutarch just watching, his face placid like a cow. And Haymitch stumbling and grasping her. Drugging her.
Fuck it. I can't move forward from this.
I won't get any answers from Haymitch or Plutarch.
So I do something I haven't done in years. I go to my office and type in my secure access codes and I look up Madge Undersee. I feel this strange sense of duality as I hunt for her. Like the man I was and the man I am meet and mesh over the keypad, my heart stretched tight across the years, still looking for her after all this time.
But this go around I have her real name, her city, her place of work. And I've learned something of secrets these few years. How to see what is missing, rather than what is visible. How to read lines and what is between the lines. A weekly payment from the bar, not marked with a name. An apartment suspiciously unoccupied for years. Payments equal in amount and consistency but labelled an innocuous "miscellaneous income." The pieces fit together, click into place gently in my mind, methodical as a jigsaw puzzle.
That is how you find someone who wants to hide. It is easy, I know now. Simple as looking to the night sky. Not looking at the stars, but the spaces between the stars, focusing on the darkness instead.
I look into the darkness, and I find Madge Undersee.
This time I do not hesitate.
I hear her before I see her, coming down the dark hallway of her building. She almost seems to float in her cloud of white fur, the glittering silver baubles of her dress clicking together like tapping fingernails. Her shoes gleam in the dark, tall and strappy, glittering like cages. She looks different, and I realize she's walking deliberately, not the boozy sway I've become accustomed to.
I slip from the shadowed alcove and reach to stop her, but I only catch a fistful of cream fur.
"Oh!" She starts, tense and turning, her white hands fluttering to her neck like birds. Then her eyes land on me and her shoulders relax.
"Gale, you scared me. I forgot how quiet you can be."
Gale. It startles me to hear my name, she uses it so rarely. For many years in Twelve I didn't think she even knew my name.
But then she had said it once, oh Gale, grasping my neck and relief liquid in her voice.
I harden. Damn Madge and damn my memories.
"We need to talk." My voice sounds hard as steel.
"Yes I suppose we do," her eyes on me are steady. Her fingers still touch her neck lightly, the pulse in her throat throbbing, a vestige of her surprise. " I guess you better come in."
She turns back to the door. A red light scans her retinas and the door clicks and beeps and slides open. Madge holds the door silently, her eyes hooded as she lets me in.
She turns away.
"Please excuse the mess. I'm not prepared for company."
Company. As though I've come for a tea party or a round of cocktails. Though we aren't in Twelve and I have as much money as her now, she still manages to remind me of her breeding. Excuses and company. The secret dance of the wealthy. Each word a masquerade, sliding away the truth like a dealer stacking the deck.
Her home is dark. Ahead, the shadowed outlines of a plush white rug and seating. To my left, a hallway and the sleek lines of kitchen countertops and glinting appliances. To the right, another hallway leading into shadow. The impression of silver and white and money.
The space is dominated by floor to ceiling windows at the far end, the night sky a deep blue, the ghost of neon lights from the flashing parties below pulsing weakly this high above ground, curling and unfurling like flowers of violet and yellow and pink.
It surprises me when Madge toes off her heels and sets down her beaded bag with a clatter. She glides around the room, gently flicking on lamps. Her form is reduced to velvet and the gleam of bones in the soft light.
I had forgotten how tiny Madge is, quite short without her ubiquitous heels. She looks fragile and small, her dress too long now, clicking and pooling on the floor. Her shoes must have been uncomfortable. There are red lash marks crisscrossing her toes. She curls and uncurls her toes in the fluff of the carpet.
I haven't moved from the doorway. I stand perfectly still, just watching.
"What do you want to know?" Madge asks, her gaze steady on a point above my right shoulder. I'm somehow glad she doesn't waste time with more pleasantries.
Her eyes are open and clear, her straightforward gaze startles me. I had expected the drowsy Madge from before, all cryptic words and sideways glances, face closed tight like a chest of jewels.
I'm not prepared to have my pick of questions answered.
How could you do this? How could you allow it? She is Madge Undersee, damn it. Ice queen and top of her class and too good for any of this. Better than drugs and men and above the depravity of this world. The words are on the tip of my tongue.
"Are you in trouble?" I blurt out instead, and I feel a hot flash of surprise.
"Trouble?" The word comes out in a startled puff of air, half relief and half laugh.
She turns away and walks further inside. Her fingers trail along the edge of an ivory couch.
"No. I don't think I'm in trouble," her voice is light.
The laugh in her voice is like gall. I feel my fists clench.
"All that shit last night with Haymitch and Plutarch. The drugs. That man." My voice is like a saw cutting through bone. "Explain that, if it is not trouble." My hands are shaking.
"Ah that," she says, her eyes sliding past mine. "I'm not sure I know where to start."
"How about from the beginning," I grind out. My voice sounds caustic even to me.
She plucks a slim cigarette from a silver bowl on the coffee table. She lights it with a quick flick of silver and flame and inhales deeply.
"Would you like one?" she waves her hand in offer.
"No." The word is hard. I won't be distracted.
"No, I suppose you wouldn't." Her eyes are thoughtful, staring into the distance.
"Madge." My voice is laced with warning.
"Oh would you come sit down," she says with a bit of exasperation. "I'll tell you everything, but my neck is hurting trying to stare up at you."
My steps are stiff and harsh and I can't seem to relax. I sit on the very edge of a white couch. A part of me is ashamed, afraid of dirtying the pristine fabric. I haven't been near a coal mine in years. I have money and fame and move armies with the sweep of my pen, but I'm still afraid of dirtying the Mayor's daughter's things. Some habits are hard to break.
Madge matches my movements, perching herself delicately on the other end of the couch. She is about as far from me as possible.
She speaks suddenly. "I guess it all starts with a debt."
"A debt?" I don't know what she means. She blows out a line of smoke.
"Not a real debt I think. No one would have held him to anything. I mean I certainly don't blame him." She isn't making sense.
"Blame who?" I speak slowly. I want to understand.
"Haymitch, of course." She is doing it again, looking at a point over my right shoulder.
"Haymitch?" I wish she would explain. I wish she would just look at me.
"Yes I suppose it all started with him." She looks away again. She looks at anything but me. "He was in the Hunger Games with my aunt, you see. My mother's twin sister. And she died and he lived and I guess he felt he owed us something. My mother, her family I mean."
Madge looks thoughtful, almost like she's forgotten I'm in the room.
"Haymitch and your mom?" The image is strange to me. I had only seen Mrs. Undersee a couple of times, but I remember her sickly and thin, frail and shuffling like a ghost in the back hallways of the house. I remember a wild halo of hair and high cheekbones drowned in silk and ruffles. I can't imagine her knowing Haymitch, dark and rough and coal-creased.
"Oh yes. He looked out for her. Or tried to. I wasn't around in those days but apparently he was quite good to her. And she was good to him too. Helped him set up his home in Victors Village if you can believe it. They liked to talk about Aunt Maysilee together."
She lets out another long line of smoke. I've never heard Madge speak so much.
She looks down.
"Then Haymitch discovered alcohol and mom met dad. They still looked out for each other though." Her voice hitches. "He was the one who first brought morphling to Twelve. For her headaches."
"Haymitch got your mom addicted to morphling?" My outrage is palpable. As though I couldn't hate the bastard more.
Madge shrugs. "It helped her. Made her happy. It killed me and dad though. When she was high she would forget about Maysilee. She would forget other things too, forget about m-."
Madge stops suddenly. Her eyes dart to me and then away. Her face ices over suddenly, smooth as marble, cool and unreadable. She stubs the cigarette into a glass tray on the table, the soot looks strange on her fingertips.
"Anyway Haymitch still hung around. Him and dad got along. Had similar ideas about things." She stands and walks towards the windows. She lifts silver knick knacks and sets them down without purpose, restless.
"What?" I don't believe her. I had never seen Haymitch around the Mayor's house or his office. The only time I saw them together was on stage for the Reaping. Even then the Mayor could barely look at Haymitch, his eyes roving over him and past him and through him, never at him.
"Oh they were very secretive. Dad was always a bit rebellious, you know. He was smart, smarter than Haymitch I always thought. He toed the line with the Capitol. Somehow managed to get selected Mayor. He never believed in outright rebellion, knew it would fail. But he did what he could."
She pauses for a long moment. Then, "He kept Twelve tiny and quiet and small. Eventually loosened the rules. He took down the gallows. He even bought game from poachers." She throws a sly half smile in my direction.
Her words are surprising. Deep within me though, something rings true. I always wondered about the other Districts I saw during the war. Everything was bleak and barren, so tightly controlled. Locked down with tanks and barbed wire, watch towers and sleepless peacekeeper patrols. I always thought Twelve was something of a joke, too insignificant for any real Capitol attention. But we produced coal, powered the whole damn country. Yet somehow we escaped the notice of the Capitol. The ideas are incongruous.
"Haymitch wanted to do more." Madge is still talking. She is looking at her feet. They are curling and uncurling again in the carpet, perfect pale arches and toes. Open and close. "He had more contacts in the Capitol, knew the other victors. He used to use me to help him. I thought it was a game."
I can hear the blood rushing in my ears.
She sighs. "No one suspected a child, the quiet Mayor's daughter. They thought I only cared about new ribbons and pretty dresses."
My eyes narrow, but she doesn't look at me, doesn't drive home the dig with her cool gaze.
"I'd listen at doors, rifle through papers. We'd meet up in the town square. He'd buy alcohol and I'd buy candy and no one knew the difference."
She won't turn around. Won't look at me. But I want to see her eyes, want to see if I can see truth in them.
"I thought no one knew the difference."
I will her to look at me.
She closes her eyes.
"I was such a fool," she says.
How white she looks. The shadows under her eyes are smudged purple.
I can't tell.
I can't tell where the lies end and the truths begin.
Is her weariness real? Margaret. Madge. Em. She dons and sheds personalities like dresses. Even as a child she wore a mask, playing with her dolls and listening through doors. Hiding secrets in her basket of sweets. Glassy eyes and hidden smiles, shifting behind cigarette smoke screens and distorted behind the bubble of a martini glass. Hiding under a nest of blankets, secrets and silence in a dark hospital room.
And I'm always there, trying to find the truth. Trying to pry it from her like a pearl from an oyster.
Perhaps, I think, she can't help it. Her mother, her father, her aunt. It is in her blood. Breeding and betrayal. Half truths and half lies.
"Haymitch never told me about the plan at the Quarter Quell." Her words are tired. "He didn't warn us the Capitol would attack, didn't give us a chance to run." She stops.
I can feel my frustration building, tight in my throat. Look at me.
"So Haymitch used you and betrayed you. No surprise there."
I can't unclench my fists. I want to stand up. I want to shake her.
"The question is why you are letting him do it again, Madge. Why are you letting him whore you out?"
She whips around, and finally she looks at me.
"Is that really what you think of me?" Her chest is heaving, the pulse pounding in the arc of her throat.
Yes. The thought comes unbidden. In my mind's eye I see her luscious sway. Her eyes heavy lidded and glazed. A smooth white shoulder flirtatious and exposed as her wrap slips down.
Her jaw tightens as I hesitate. Without her shoes, Madge's dress drags on the floor. With her hair ruffled and her makeup wiped off, she seems a child. A girl playing dress up in her mother's clothes.
Or perhaps a puppet, dressed up by Haymitch and tangled in strings.
"No." I say it out loud. Her eyes pin me down with their intensity.
"I don't know," I amend. "I... I don't know who you are, Madge."
She stares at me for a moment, measuring, analyzing.
"I don't know either sometimes," she says finally. Her shoulders slump.
"Why are you still with him, Madge? I don't understand."
Madge looks down. Her fingers are gripping the back of a chair. Her fingertips are white.
"He's all I have." She answers in a small voice. It's the first real sign of weakness I've seen from her, ever. I don't know how to respond.
"They came for me, before the bombing of Twelve." Her words are soft and her eyes in shadow. "Blindfolded me, put me on a train. Took me to that prison."
Her eyes squeeze shut. There is a pained expression on her face.
"You can imagine what happened there. That place where you found me."
"And your parents?" I ask. The question hangs in the air.
Outside the window, day has started to break. Pink light blushes Madge's skin. It must have started to rain. The window is jeweled with droplets.
"They kept asking me about that damned pin." Madge whispers, and her voice cracks.
"Pin?" I feel like I'm back in the mines, only seeing what my lamp lights in front of me, dim and disoriented, missing the whole picture.
"The Mockingjay pin," she says quietly. Something clicks in my brain.
"That was you?" I'm incredulous. And angry. Katniss was destroyed because of that fucking pin.
"Yes. They all thought I was so clever." Her hands spasm, almost like she is reaching for another cigarette. She stops herself. "They thought I gave her that pin on purpose, with a rebellious symbol. That maybe Haymitch supplied the pin to me."
The rain droplets on the window cast dabbled shadows across Madge's face. They bead like tears.
"I just wanted to give my friend a gift. I didn't mean for it….It didn't mean anything." Her voice is so bleak. "They wouldn't accept that it didn't mean anything." Her voice is a pained whisper.
The pinkish dawn lights up behind Madge. Her pale hair lights up like a halo. Her lashes cast long shadows along her cheeks.
"I thought of you when I was down there, you know." I can barely hear her. Maybe I'm mistaking her words. She pulls her fur around her and hunches, as though she is suddenly cold.
"You are the only person I ever saw tortured."
I remember a whistling whip, the feel of skin splitting down my back. White hot pain and black seeping into my vision.
"You never broke." She pauses. "Not like me."
The pain of that whip. I had wanted to die.
I don't know what to say. Madge talking about me this way, it makes me feel something strange my stomach. She won't look at me.
"I thought I would die down there," she says. A strange echo of my thoughts. She lets out a little laugh. "If a person can die of devastating loneliness."
Her face clears and she turns towards me. "I never thanked you by the way. For saving me."
No one has ever thanked me before. Not for anything I've done in the war. Not once.
I hear a strange ringing in my ear. I feel almost faint.
"Thank you, Gale. For saving me." The sunlight glows behind her, setting fire to her hair. I can't see her face.
I feel like I should say something. She just stands there, facing me. I want her to know it was just a job. I didn't save her on purpose. It was war, and I killed so many people, and clearing that prison was just the next thing I had to do. I want to tell her I'm not a hero, not a good guy. That there is a reason no one has ever thanked me. The thoughts stutter in my head. My lips won't move.
After a long minute, she turns back to the window. My tongue feels fat in my mouth.
Her voice turns businesslike. "Haymitch is a sort-of guardian now. He took me from the hospital, deleted my records. Helped me start over." She pauses. "And now he is helping me find the men who hurt me…and others."
My brain falters. Her words are one shock after another. I can't keep up.
Her voice hardens, her words quick and clipped, hard as bullets.
"Paylor's spies can't get near them. Even Plutarch and Haymitch can't get these guys to trust them. But a little girl, drugged and pliant…" Madge releases a bitter bark of laughter. "I give them a touch, a glance. Their arrogance makes it easy. Men like them have underestimated me my whole life."
I feel dizzy. I can't catch my breath.
"They get me alone, and I slip them some drugs. It's easy then, to go through their files. Take information from any digital devices. Like stealing candy from a baby." Her lip curls.
"So those drugs you're injecting, that's all an act?" I am still confused, my world tilting on its axis.
She stills.
"No those are just a perk of the job. I carry the antidotes with me at all times."
"So a man gets you alone. You take an antidote and then drug him instead?" My brain feels slow and stupid.
Madge nods jerkily.
The kaleidoscope in my head finally settles into place. But…
"Madge, there is no way you can get to the antidote every time. Not if you're drugged. Or what if he doesn't let you go, give you a chance…"
Horror spreads through me.
Madge paces restlessly, first one way and then the next. Finally she turns back to the coffee table and reaches for a cigarette. Her hand does not tremble.
"I'm pretty quick." Her voice is steady as she lights it. "But no, of course I can't get the antidote every time." She says it like it is nothing.
"But then what happens? Do they ra- ? Do they… hurt you?" I can barely say the words.
She is looking at the same spot, just above my right shoulder.
"It's just a body, Gale." She blows out a line of smoke. Oh, Gale.
"You can't mean that, Madge." She can't.
"Sometimes it's better that way." Her words are light and hard, perhaps meant to drive me away. "Men are always more forthcoming when they think they've conquered you. It makes them feel strong, putting their hands on you, like planting their flag in some uncharted territory."
There is lead in my stomach. I can't swallow.
"They love to talk after. Tell you about all of their other conquests."
Perhaps she is trying to regain some kind of control, sliding into the comfort of insults and cruelty. For a girl made of masks, she revealed a lot this evening. The way she can change, it makes me dizzy. Her face switching personae, a gleam of one and then another, flashing like the facets of a gem.
"And you. You're just like them. You think I'm helpless, weak. And right when they think they've possessed me, I destroy them."
Her smile is vicious.
"You asked me why I do this. Well, the drugs are nice. But revenge…" Her smile is all teeth, savage and bright. "Revenge is divine."
"I don't think you're weak." The words slip out, formed before the thought.
Madge tenses.
I remember my words, was it only a few nights ago? Just like every other Townie…fucking weak.
I stand up and take a step toward her.
"Madge, I don't think you're weak." My words are honest. I reach a hand toward her, just as a reflex, to reassure her.
She turns from me suddenly and inhales deeply.
"Anything else you want to ask me?" Her voice is leaden. "Or are we done?"
There are so many questions, rattling like dice in my head. Which should I fling out, hoping for truth, hoping for luck.
A pause.
"Why did you disappear?" My voice cracks.
I watch her face, a distorted reflection in the window. Her brow furrows.
"I told you. I wanted to start over." Her answer is laced with a question.
"But why didn't you tell me?" I have to know. My voice sounds desperate, even to me. "I searched for months, maybe years. I looked everywhere."
The shock blazes on her face for only an instant, but it is enough. Later I would not be able to erase it from my mind, the perfect O of her mouth, the mask shed and the truth behind it revealed.
"I… I didn't think." She stutters. "I didn't think to tell you. I didn't think you cared."
…
Comments and criticisms always appreciated!
-Fly