Chapter 2 - Stewing
(During the rebellion)
Madge stands in the shadows next to what used to be the main market in District 6. If she counts to ten and doesn't hear any more shelling, she'll make a run for it to the makeshift food office across the square. At least there hasn't been any heavy bombing yet today, just scattered gunfire, and most of it is on the other side of town in the refinery sector.
She counts to 20 to be safe and still hesitates—maybe she needs to count to 30. Or 50. But then her stomach reminds her why she needs to do this and before she can second-guess herself she starts weaving through the debris to the door marked 'Delivery Entrance.' If Patty was right, this is where she can activate their ration cards. If not, and she gets caught with false identification papers… Well, hopefully she can bluff her way out of any problems. It's worth the risk.
Nervously clutching the precious papers, Madge focuses on the woman standing in front of her in the line. Like the others, and probably like Madge herself, the woman looks anxious and too skinny. Food shipments have been scattered at best since the heavy fighting started. Not that Madge knows what this district was like without the fighting. Ever since she woke up several weeks ago in the safe house on the outskirts of town, the district has faced nearly constant bombing and street battles. The safe house is far enough out of the way that most of the noise sounds distant, but every once in a while a particularly large or powerful explosion will rattle the light fixtures and send Madge running into Simon's room for reassurance that he hasn't died, too.
When she reaches the front of the line, she slides their papers across the table to the tired woman on the other side. "Two ration cards, please." She hopes her voice sounds steady, but can hear that it doesn't. Hopefully the woman attributes it to the stresses of war, not fraud. Although, in fairness, they should be entitled to rebel rations the same as anyone else.
The woman inspects the papers. "Sylvia and Melvin Wells. Natives of Six?"
Madge nods earnestly. That's what the papers say. She prays the woman doesn't ask her anything that requires in-depth knowledge of this district.
"Where's Melvin?" The woman asks with a frown, leaning out to look around Madge.
"He was injured in the bombing." True enough; Simon sure can't walk yet and he was injured by bombs. What does it matter that the bombs were dropped in 12 rather than 6—the bombs came from the Capitol. "We've only recently run out of the food we'd saved."
The sound of a distant bomb detonating momentarily silences everyone in the line; Madge knows they're all calculating where it might have fallen. A teenaged boy near the window calls out, "Stadium area," and everyone visibly relaxes. It's the decoy supply yard the rebels set up.
"Here." The ration card woman shoves two cards toward Madge. "Next building over for the packages. One per person."
Madge eagerly grabs the cards and can almost taste the food they represent. Will the rations include pancake mix? Apples? She's actually considered eating paper over the past few days she's been so hungry, and Simon will never recover if he doesn't get some proper nutrition.
"Hope your brother gets better soon," the woman tells Madge, distracting her from salivating over the ration cards.
"Thanks," Madge mumbles as she moves out of the line. She and Simon are using duplicate copies of the identification papers he'd originally forged for her and Gale. He claimed they were the best age matches amongst recent deceased citizens of District 6 in the population database, but she suspects giving them identities as a brother and sister had been his idea of a joke, a way of needling Gale from afar about being fake related to yet another girl he didn't want to be related to. It still annoys Madge on principle—she and Gale look nothing alike and could never have pulled off being related so it was a risky move, although as far as Simon knew, Madge was going to be in District 6 and Gale was going to be in District 12 for the indefinite future. But now Madge is in 6 with Simon and Gale is… Well, she's clinging to hope. In the meantime, it works out well for her to be posing as related to Simon, since they do have similar coloring and his hair is only a few shades darker than hers.
She starts walking to the building where the food packages are, restraining herself from running. This line is even longer and while they're waiting, another round of bombs land in the vicinity north of the district where the closest oil fields are located. All the oil has long since been burned—she's not sure if by the Capitol or the rebels—and her main reaction, aside from the anxiety bomb blasts always trigger, is relief that the bombs are being wasted in an area away from the population centers. Maybe the Capitol will run out of weapons… Although she supposes it's equally likely the rebels will run out first.
After she collects the two packages, she stows them carefully inside her coat so she won't be a target for thieves and begins the long walk back to the safe house. Patty will probably be worried about her. Simon, too, although he'll hide it by hassling her about how long she took on this errand.
On the walk back, she gets a better look at the damage in the district. Some areas resemble the pictures she's seen on the Capitol's news broadcasts of 12—a total wasteland. She's never been able to watch more than a few seconds of those shots before the tears blur her vision. It's only been a month since her world ended, and only a couple of weeks since she's been well enough to walk around on her own. This was her first excursion beyond the yard by herself, and she'd only worked up the courage for this one out of sheer desperation and concern for Simon.
The familiar three-story, light blue house surrounded by low shrubs comes into view as she rounds the corner with the broken flag pole, triggering Madge to run the rest of the way because she's so eager to share her success and the much-needed food.
Patty opens the door and pulls her into a hug. "You made it," she breathes.
Madge nods into Patty's shoulder, unable to speak. Patty knew her father when he worked in Six and has helped nurse both Madge and Simon back to health over the past month, though Madge avoided her kindnesses initially, preferring to be mute and miserable as she mourned her parents. Even a pat on the shoulder would send her into a flurry of crying—if she couldn't have her mother or father hugging her, she didn't want anyone. It felt like a betrayal somehow. But Patty had a cache of letters and photos her parents had sent over the years, and quietly left the pile on Madge's bed one day. In some incremental way, it's helped… Madge can at least think of Patty as a sort of like a long-lost relative now. The rest of the time, Madge convinces herself she's on a trip and will see her parents as soon as she can get out of this district. That had been her plan before the bombing—relocating to District 6 to protect them—and it's easiest to stick with it.
"I got the food," Madge says, pulling herself away and drawing the packages out from inside her coat.
"Oh thank goodness." Patty gathers the boxes in her arms. "I'll see if we can pull together a decent lunch."
"Need help?" Madge always offers, even though her best kitchen skill is eating whatever other people prepare. Occasionally they'll let her tidy up after a meal, but she can tell by the scornful looks she gets from the other refugees that she's not great at cleaning, either. But there haven't been any meals for so long now, there's been nothing to either eat or tidy.
"Why don't you go check on the Persnickety Patient," Patty suggests. "He has some news for you."
Madge nods and finishes taking her coat off and then walks back to Simon's room, hoping news of her successful excursion will catapult him into a better mood. Being bed-ridden does not agree with him, but his left leg was broken in so many places, it will be quite a while before he can put any weight on it. And then there are his arm and ribs…
She pauses in his doorway to assess his likely reaction and sees that he's scowling at the TV in the corner of the room. Knocking lightly, she enters and moves to sit in her usual chair next to his bed. But it's already occupied: a large cardboard box has taken her place.
Simon looks over at her. "Took you long enough. Did it work?"
"Sure did, Melvin," she says, tossing his ration card onto his lap.
"God, what a stupid name," he mutters, turning the card over with his free hand.
"You picked it." They've had this conversation before and any disparagement Simon has for the alternate identity he created for Gale rubs her the wrong way. He usually knows not to push it, but apparently he's in an especially bad mood today.
"What's all this?" She asks, gesturing toward the box on her chair. "Are you trying to get rid of me?" She's spent most of her waking time in District 6 in that chair, first because she didn't want to talk to anyone else until Simon woke up, and then because she wanted to make sure he was healing. After all his surgeries, he slept a lot and she'd just sit in the chair and think about her parents, Gale, and everyone else she ever knew in life who she didn't have anymore.
"The Wicked Witch was here," Simon says in a surly tone, looking even more disgruntled.
Madge feels her face slide into a similar sneer and she instantly wants to get away from the box, too. She walks to the other side of the bed and climbs up to sit next to him.
"Ow—ribs!"
"Sorry," she mutters, readjusting so she isn't putting any pressure on his torso. He can sit up now, so she thought his ribs were better, but she'll have to be careful. Simon as a patient is nothing like her mother was, which is helpful in a strange way because taking care of him doesn't remind her as acutely of all the time she spent tending to her mother at home… She adjusts his pillow delicately. "So, what did she say?"
"The usual cryptic garbage. She still isn't telling me anything more about what's going on. We worked together for a year!"
Madge glowers at the invading box. She and Simon both have developed what she acknowledges is an irrational dislike of the woman responsible for rescuing them from the burning inferno of District 12. Fiona had been a member of the team of Capitol officials from Simon's office who'd been sent to 'monitor' District 12 during the Quarter Quell. Most had left well before the bombs started raining down and the remaining few escaped with the Peacekeepers on the trains. Madge vaguely recalled Fiona as a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair who always looked pissed off and who had left 12 on the morning of the Final Eight interviews. When the power shut off in 12 after Katniss blew up the arena, Fiona had intercepted one of Simon's calls seeking an explanation for what was happening in 12 and had sent a hovercraft to extract Simon and the Undersees, hurriedly telling Simon that they would all be valuable rebel assets.
He explained later to Madge that he hadn't known she was a rebel or what to make of the comment, but figured a hovercraft ride out of a burning district was better than the alternative and then tried to get Madge and her parents to the rendezvous point. When none of them had shown up, the hovercraft team had ventured into the blazing district and found the unconscious and badly injured Simon and Madge in the Undersees' yard and dragged them back to the hovercraft for a narrow escape.
That was about as much as Madge and Simon had been able to piece together once they were both conscious at the safe house. Fiona has appeared only once before today—a couple of weeks ago, after Simon woke up—and they'd been able to get out of her during that first visit that she was part of the rebels' underground network in the Capitol and had been scouting the Undersees for recruitment. She'd discovered Simon's efforts to create two sets of false identification papers and assumed they were for Madge and Simon, that they'd fallen in love and were going to join the rebels together undercover with new identities in District 6. Madge had almost started laughing for the first time since the bombing, but Simon had pinched her to get her to shut up and she understood immediately: he didn't want to give Fiona any additional information since she wasn't sharing everything with them.
Highest on Fiona's list of current offenses is that she isn't letting them contact anyone else… Even though normal intra-district communications are totally destroyed—everything used to go through the Capitol and obviously that's not an option anymore—Simon had tried to get Fiona to connect them some other way. He hasn't been able to check on his mother and brother in the Capitol, and according to Fiona it's impossible for them to talk to anyone in 13. She did confirm that Rebel Headquarters in 13 had rescued the few souls who'd managed to get out of 12, but she didn't know who specifically was there (Gale? He survives everything, doesn't he?) other than Katniss and Haymitch. Madge saw for herself what happened to Peeta—he was in a Capitol propo recently defending Katniss. That had been tough to watch, knowing how evil the Capitol is and that Peeta was completely within their control…
Fiona had also supplied them with duplicate copies of the identification papers Simon had made, although Madge and Simon had put off using them for as long as possible. Besides the inherent risk, Madge had worried that if Gale had survived, maybe he was already using the papers Simon gave him. But conditions in 6 were so dire they finally didn't have a choice. As Simon bluntly pointed out, if Gale had even rescued his papers from the burning district, he was either dead or being cared for in District 13, so the papers weren't a life and death issue for him the way things were becoming in District 6. And with all the communications fried, any duplications wouldn't be discovered any time soon.
"Did Fiona stay long?" Madge asks. "Did she say anything about what she might need us for later?"
Simon makes a snorting noise. "What do you think? Pretty much dropped that box off and said we'd talk later. Whenever she decides to grace us with her presence again…"
Madge understands why Simon could be an 'asset' once he's functional again—he knows so much about the central administration office, he could really be disruptive working against the Capitol. If he'd had any lingering doubts about which side he was on, being nearly killed in the bombing of 12 had decided for him. But all Fiona has said about Madge is that she needs to heal and may be needed at some point in the future for an important project, which actually supplies Madge with another reason to be resentful: Fiona's purely utilitarian approach of thinking of people in terms of their value to the rebellion. Madge's parents were also potential assets for their connections to other likely rebel leaders in other districts and for their knowledge of how the Capitol operated, and therefore, were worth saving in Fiona's eyes. But since they died in 12, they don't even seem to register with Fiona anymore, like pieces of equipment that broke down and have been discarded along the side of a road. It doesn't make Madge very inclined to want to help with the vague, theoretically important mission awaiting her.
A dramatic combination of drums and trumpets blasts forth from the TV, startling Madge into almost falling off the bed. Another Capitol propo—the networks somehow increase the volume for them. It's a new one: mouth-watering images of food followed by shots of derailed trains, with brightly colored fruits and long, luscious loaves of bread spilling into a muddy mess next to the tracks. Peacekeepers are standing over the ruined shipment, shaking their heads as though it's a shame all this food was wasted.
"Traitors in our midst," a voiceover ominously states. "Sabotaging deliveries and directly causing your suffering. Report all suspicious activity to the nearest Peacekeeper authorities."
"Poor effort," Simon condemns when the propo ends. He reaches for something to throw at the TV with the hand that isn't in a cast, but the nightstand is empty and Madge notices there's already an assortment of pens, pill bottles, and his clock on the floor near the TV. She'll have to pick those up so he can have more ammunition later. Critiquing the Capitol's propos is one of his favorite pastimes, since he's stuck in bed watching them all over and over again. He slouches back against his pillows. "Everyone knows the people in that propaganda office are just putting in their time until there's an opening for a Hunger Games analyst. You'd think they could step it up during an actual war."
Madge agrees the propo wasn't very effective. People in the districts are hungry, not stupid. They know the Capitol is the reason they have no food, and the Capitol seems to forget that the districts didn't have enough food before the rebellion started, either.
But that bread in the propo looked gorgeously delicious… Thinking of food reminds Madge to check if Patty has managed to concoct something for lunch yet, so she scoots off the bed and wanders into the kitchen. She finds Patty stirring something gray in a large pot. It doesn't look edible.
"Tesserae, oil, and protein powder," Patty says grimly in response to Madge's confused expression.
"And we eat it… like that?" It looks like they should be using it to repair damage from bombs, not eating it.
Patty stands on her tiptoes and pulls a small bottle from an upper cupboard. "I can add some extracts to mask the flavor." She shrugs. "It's calories."
Madge leans against the counter and absently reaches up to twirl her hair, amazed and disturbed at the fact that she's hungry enough to eat Mysteriously Flavored Gross Plaster Stew. But her hand closes around itself, not hair, and she remembers with a jolt that she cut most of it off. Well, the parts that hadn't already been burned off. There isn't much twirling she can do with the short, messy chunks remaining—she's going to need to find a new nervous tic. And to avoid mirrors for the foreseeable future. Her refugee clothes—a mishmash of ill-fitting handoffs Patty found after Madge arrived in a bloody tank top, shorts, and broken sandals—aren't helping her appearance. At least she fits in with all the other refugees.
"Madge!" The sound of Simon shouting from his room shocks her into alertness. There's an urgency to his tone suggesting he doesn't just need to her reach for something for him.
She dashes back to his room, fighting the rising panic at the thought of anything happening to him. "Are you okay? What's wrong?"
"Look," he says, pointing to the TV screen. "Turn it up."
Madge turns the volume knob on the old television and nearly keels over when she sees the image of Katniss wearing some kind of bird costume and describing a Capitol attack on a hospital in District 8. A hospital! Full of wounded people who posed absolutely no threat! Well, it's not like Madge had any doubts about the true depths of evilness the Capitol is capable of…
And then there are action shots of the bombing and—GALE ALIVE AND FIGHTING. Madge gasps and for support grabs onto the dresser the TV is sitting on. Gale and Katniss are both taking down Capitol hoverplanes with mechanized, explosive arrows. She watches the propo in an ecstatic trance, mesmerized and more hopeful than she's felt since losing everything.
It's over too soon. The regular programming—a show about the Capitol's architectural wonders—returns, but Madge keeps staring at the TV as though it might burst back into showing Katniss and Gale again at any second.
She doesn't realize she's crying until she feels the tear detach from her chin and plummet to the floor. When the architecture show continues to drone on, she swivels to face Simon and sees him staring at the box Fiona left. He notices her looking at him and raises his eyebrows.
"Boyfriend looked good," he observes.
Madge glances back at the TV, still uncooperatively not showing Katniss and Gale, and closes her eyes briefly, remembering the fierce expression on Gale's face when he was shooting at those planes and how many times she'd seen that same expression back home. He did look good in his rebel uniform, too—natural, like wearing that uniform was what he was always meant to do. She smiles, thinking of how he's not only alive and healthy, but he's finally getting the opportunity to fight back, with real weapons. What he'd always wanted: weapons… and Katniss. She trips over her thoughts for a moment, confused about her reaction. As long as she's been friends with Gale, the two things he wanted most but didn't have were the ability to fight the Capitol and Katniss, and now he has both.
She squelches the kernel of jealousy in her stomach—it's beyond irrelevant and she's probably just hungry—and turns back to Simon. There's something in his eyes that wasn't there before: optimism. And she realizes she feels it, too. The two people she trusts most in the world to successfully fight the Capitol and survive are Katniss and Gale, and there they were, leading by example and inspiring whoever else saw this propo.
But… the Capitol completely controls the broadcasts… "Simon, how did the rebels get that on the air?"
"I have no idea, but I'm impressed." He stares at the TV for a moment, frowning in concentration. "Maybe someone on the inside in the broadcast center had a recording… But that would be a suicide mission. I guess it's possible someone on the outside knew enough to override the primary broadcast feeds…"
"Can we go to 13?" She knows she sounds like she did when she was little and would try to get her mother to take her to the sweet shop.
"Yes, let's just stroll over there tomorrow," Simon says with a roll of his eyes. Madge berates herself for asking; she knows everything he does and neither of them knows much. They can't even call 13 and Simon is immobile, so obviously going to 13 isn't going to happen any time soon. The most they can do is ask Fiona the next time she drops in to check on them.
Suddenly she's more curious about what Fiona left for them in the box, and sees that Simon is, too. They both look at the box and then he softly jerks his head, indicating for her to bring it over to his bed. She lifts it up and he scoots over so they can both inventory its contents.
Inside are several notebooks, ledgers, and papers Madge doesn't understand, and some small electronic devices. It's all meaningless to her, but Simon looks intrigued and gets more energized the deeper he delves into the papers.
"Well, Sylvia… You interested in a project?" He grins deviously and she smiles back, encouraged at the prospect of doing something more than retrieving ration cards and grousing about how frustrating it is to not know what's going on.
A/N: I'm aiming for once a week updates with this story, but wanted to get this chapter out sooner since it was ready and because I felt bad that I've left everyone hanging for so long about Madge's fate. Also, she's not finished mourning… we caught her on a good day here. And sorry this was a little info-dump-y - I wanted to get through the background and keep the story going.
Thanks for all the reviews and favoritings! I appreciate it!