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There are words he thinks, over and over again, thinking of his brother in the Arena.
Sacrifice.
And Rory’s grimace has a strained sort of smile underneath. Without someone to hunt someone else would have to take tesserae. Rory can’t hunt, and then the odds…
Odds.
Funny thing, cruel thing.
And Rory knows, and for a moment Gale forgets about everything except the fact that it’s his brother's name that's been spoken out loud.
But Rory doesn’t forget and even when Gale’s stepping forward Rory’s slicing his head to the side in a silent negation.
Odds make martyrs.
Gale deserved to be the favored one.
“Girl on fire,” someone mutters, a hand on her raw scalp.
“No. The Burned Girl. Understand?” And that voice she knows, that voice she will hear until she dies, and that cloying scent underneath the char of her ruined body, underneath the roses, is blood.
“The Burned Girl,” someone repeats, and the scratch of a note taken down.
And then nothing.
He’s being held by someone, he barely knows why, a voice at his temple speaking under the water he’s been tossed below.
“Don’t look at it, don’t look,” in a hushed urgent whisper at his temple.
He’s drowning.
“Shhhh, I know. I know,” the same voice says.
But, he has to look, he has to see, the first time and the replay and all the sounds of it.
And, there are words he says against Katniss’ hair that fill him up, water and blood and guilt so thick and deep he can no longer breathe, his whisper like the slash of a hateful fucking knife.
“When it happened, I was just glad it wasn’t you,” he admits to her.
He deserves this for that.
“She won,” someone says, surprised, horrified, but no one more so than him.
The screens go dark.
Madge Undersee is the Victor of the seventy-forth Hunger Games and his brother is dead.
The surface was ink black.
And, she decided it was because of the dark and the glare of liquid shine from the wet forest reflecting on the ground she’d been treading.
There’d been no weight or scent to it but it hadn't been water she learned once it was already too late for caution.
She could tell when fire came streaking by, suddenly realizing she'd been unable to see her feet like she would if she was standing in water. She ran and stripped off layers before she was free of the fuel, and when she was out she was already rolling across the ground to smother whatever had painted her skin black, still clawing at her clothes.
There was a sense of accomplishment and superiority until she ignited, too close to fumes it seared what she was still wearing to her skin, melding into it and she screamed, scrapping off fabric and skin against the bark of fallen trees.
When it was over she was sticky raw nerves and a slower target. She wasn't dead but she wouldn't be alive for long, she'd known and when the parachute came down it wasn't salve, just a syringe filled with something that might make the pain stop, or not matter, she couldn’t tell after it turned her thoughts into fire instead.
She only hoped the burn would last long enough so she still had a chance.
It could have been killing her but she couldn’t feel death coming then so she stood up and ran because something had begun to howl from beyond the trees.
They fix her.
They remake her.
Her beauty is the kind a person can feel the smoothness of by looking at her.
The truth is she can no longer feel her own smile, the damage down low in her skin where it can never be mended.
She’s a beauty, whole and perfect again, but it’s not real.
Nothing that came as a gift from the sky has only ever been that.
Nothing from the Capitol is free.
Not even when you've won.
They are the final three, chased by fire from the trees and the woods, ringed by beasts made of the fallen.
Gale is sure he knows what will happen, watching it with the rest of Twelve. He’s sure he knows who’s going to die, Madge had always been kindhearted, but she lacks the strength to push Cato from the Cornucopia.
He’s proud of Rory then, quick and small and holding a knife just the right way and the bigger tribute falls and fights and dies badly below.
It takes a long time.
It's harder for him then, for everyone in Twelve, to watch, everyone waiting for some small measure of mercy to be given, ‘for Madge,’ he’ll assure Rory when his little brother comes home, ‘you did it for Madge, you did what you had to do for her.’
He no longer feels real when the Mayor cries out, wracked with the wretched sobbing of a man whose heart is breaking. Gale makes himself watch Rory with his small broken knife stand over the girl who wore her prettiest dress that last day just in case she was Reaped.
He’s watching when Madge’s eyes open and she pushes his brother into the sea of fur and gnashing teeth below.
She comes home and she’s more beautiful than any girl he's seen before.
But he knows what she is.
She’s not a girl anymore, she’s a thing the Capitol made.
New and pretty and whole again.
Everyone knows what his brother looked like.
Madge Undersee is a Victor now.
There are things they ask her before she leaves, things she says she needs time to think about.
Things she intends never to think about, alone, in Victors' Village, her house empty and filled with things as artificial as her new skin.
She learns why they’ve spent the effort to make her herself again, to make her better.
She declines their invitation, rebukes the kindness of sponsors, and waits for her world to feel real again.
She's still waiting when the fire starts in District Twelve and burns for two days.
She tries to reach her paretns but it’s too hot, and after, when her mother and father and the only home she has ever really known is ash she wonders if her mother had even felt it or if the morphling left her sleeping.
Nothing about that makes the world real again either, this time the Capitol lets her keep her scars.
She looks at her own face.
Real.
“I told you what would happen,” Haymitch tells her, drunk, or maybe just pretending.
She plays the piano all night because she knows he can hear it, she knows it keeps him awake because she can hear the bottle he throws at her house break.
Her parents were just people.
They died.
Her house, a thing.
The dead are real too, but only just barely.
He can see her through the curtains lying on the empty floor so stilly she might be dead.
He leaves not knowing why he’s come.
Beyond the fence Katniss is eager enough to hunt, careful in ways she never has been before, tender with his feelings like he’s a child on the cusp of perpetual tears.
One brother is dead but the rest of them still need meat.
He walks past Katniss and thinks of the animals he kills as Tributes. He could have won, he knows.
He looks at Katniss and wonders.
A question he doesn’t ask rises, there's an answer to it that he doesn't think about for very long.
Yes, he could have won.
She remembers a time when she might have wanted to kiss him, when she might have wanted to go with him into the woods to discover what he really did out there with Katniss Everdeen, if it was hunting like some say or what everyone else thinks happens but doesn’t even whisper about.
She considers the past and all the things she might have done once.
She’s lonely.
But at least she’s never had many people to lose.
He grabs her by the nape of her neck, her long hair gone, by choice this time, scattered on Haymitch’s kitchen floor, uneven because of course Haymitch had been drunk.
The short brush of it against his wrist is grounding. He pushes his mouth onto hers and tells her he hates her.
“I didn’t want to die,” she tells him when he asks why his brother never came home, why she couldn't just let him do it.
Haymitch has never looked so hateful before, he’d blame her if he had the words and wasn’t so far past stinking drunk.
The bombs go off under the stage but not before the audible hiss of them sounds out the second before they ignite, and for a man whose never sober he moves fast, latching onto her wrist and throwing them both from the stage.
She covers his body with her own because even though she's a little worse for wear than other Capitol made girls she still made of tougher stuff beneath it.
She’d lasted ten minutes searching for her parents.
She’d even found them.
It hadn’t been fire. Fire doesn't ruin people skulls. People escape fires much too often and Snow deals in surety.
Though, as more bomb go off she wonders how sure he really is.
She doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t have anything she’s really leaving behind.
Gale Hawthorne tells her that they’re going to fight but she can’t take his hand, Katniss Everdeen stands behind him, waiting with with a bow and a Peackeeper's gun.
Madge wonders exactly how many 'they' are.
“If I go I can’t help you when they come,” she answers instead.
And Snow will come.
And she could be the face of a Victor condemning the uprising, made camera ready and perfect under Cinna’s hands.
‘Help’ is a word she doesn’t mean, not quite a lie but the truth is still only that she doesn’t want to die.
She wonders how far 'they' will make it.
She wonders how many Snow will kill before he’s satisfied that they're all afraid again.
They never do remake her a second time.
Snow tells her the ruin of her is too powerful a visual, a standard of violence against the other violence that threatens to topple everything, the tenuous peace and slaughter of children, the entertainment and the appeasement of some new old order to a dying regime.
She knows all the words they'll use and she’s a body of propaganda.
The Capitol burns.
She’s done it enough already.
There’s nothing left when they come, some thank her, some say nothing, she’s nothing really, not the great peace or the hero they want to make her.
She’s just someone who fed a little boy to mutts so she could survive, someone unwilling to settle or sell her body who killed her parents with the same: ‘No, thank you. President Snow,’ she gave as an answer.
She’s just a Victor.
Too many people have died from bombs. Katniss Everdeen leaves, somewhere, mourning the dead the same way she's always ignored the living.
Gale Hawthorne says he’d seen her on the screens, fighting, killing, rallying, words for actions she can’t classify as anything besides the marketing of a revolution.
He looks at her scars and if he won’t say ‘thank you’ for what she’s done to help them win, to help them set it all on fire, just like he’s always wanted, then that’s alright.
She knows he’s grateful but she wonders if he thinks it was worth it.
There are no more games, no more capitol, no more districts and he can hunt and fuck and be whatever he wants to be now.
She wonders if his life was worth his brother’s death.
She’s thinks it is.
She wonders if he wants to be anything anyway.
It’s not easy work but it is not hard either.
He can hear the tinny piano tinkling in the open hall below the stairwell.
His building isn’t luxurious but it’s warm and clean and people smile instead of starve.
Madge plays as best she can with broken keys. A few men and woman smoke around the corners of the room, some drink, others sit and stare, done with the day and its work.
He waits and asks if she wants to have a drink.
She shrugs and her shiny pink scar tissue and eternally smirking mouth do not move much from her usually placid expression.
He kisses her and doesn’t ask her any questions.
They go back to his unadorned room and she fucks him, tiny hands pressed to the wall above his small, creaking bed, her body milk white and the many different shades of pink.
He’s sure she’d cared about how pretty she was once, about being told it but he knows too that that’s not what she cares about anymore, he holds her by the hips and grunts because it feels so fucking good.
“Come on,” she says, moving her hips forward harder.
Her eyes are closed and she’s breaking herself on top of him.
He knows what she wants.
She wants him to be angry, to do what he wants so he can make her feel it too.
He hasn’t been angry about her in a long time but he sits up and forces her to her back anyway, pushes himself deep, and ruts his hips with more force than he’d usually dare with a girl as small as her.
She’s hot inside, slick and vulgar in a way he’s never expected, not from her, a pretty merch girl not meant to be touched by dirty hands with coal under the nails, sooting up her skin with smudgy fingertips and sweat.
He wonders if she’s thought of him before, if they ever thought of each other before she was Reaped, before he was about to climb up those same fucking stairs.
Rory shouting, 'I volunteer as tribute!'
He pushes her body up the bed with the force of his thrusts, the inside of her thighs pummeled by his hips blush pink and he comes like he’s bleeding out, spine white hot and melting, he never wants to move and she holds him for as long as he keeps still on top of her, until he lifts up, looking down at her damp, placid face.
Her hands fall back beside her head, where her hair fans, grown again and almost white against the dark grey of the rough blankets.
He touches her slowly, carefully, tastes himself inside of her, tongue pushing through the mess he’s made and she’s alive again, keening and arching, twisting like fire beneath his fingers and mouth.
The sun rises like a forest fire and she pulls the blinds down on it and pads softly back to a bed that's not hers and isn't empty.
The naked curve of him lying on his stomach is something real.
He mumbles into his arm, eyes open and watching her. "Come back to bed," he says.
She does.