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All sparkles and glitter and soft, liquid, pristine movement until it all isn't. Until the noon light is cut in half by sharp blades mimicking the faint shapes of stars up above in an electronic skyline. All witnessing, it's just a job, you were born to do this. All stillness, until the face of death shows up at the doorway and screams to be heard, dares to insinuate itself behind your cabin's mirror like the trace of a ghost still clinging to the unattainable. All fun, all music, all sparkles, until a child dies. Until you know the children will die. Until you stop, for a moment, and stare at that very mirror.
Effie cried sharp, salt, cold tears. A trace of something alkaline over the layers upon layers of makeup. A trace of something which felt like acid on her picture perfect semblance.
"I'll kill myself. You fuckers won't even get me to the Capitol. I'll kill myself before this train gets there", Ian, this year's boy from Twelve, had screamed at the door of his room many hours before on that day, as Effie froze terrified in the hall, Haymitch snarled back, and half a dozen Avoxes tried to seize Ian or calm him down.
"They don't even let you do that, kid, why do you think your room doesn't lock?" Haymitch asked, in a coarse, dragged down voice which sounded like exhaustion itself.
"You can't watch me for 24 hours, so fuck you. I'll be dead before you notice."
"Yes, they can. And yes, they do, if they feel like you might waste their time".
Effie had shot a quick glance at Haymitch, filled with more pain than terror and overflowing with questions. She dared to speak.
"Ian, dear, please calm yourself. Come into the living room."
As she was speaking an Avox tried to grab him.
"Oh, no, stop it!" Effie pleaded, as the violence with which Ian broke away from her grip threw the Avox across the corridor.
"Shit". Effie had heard Haymitch mumble under his breath. "You all get away from him. Go do whatever you have to do around here. But get out." He told the Avoxes, and Effie questioned whether it was intended for her, too.
As the servants left, it was only the three of them for a couple of seconds, standing in the corridor, as the train cut its way across miles and miles towards its dreaded destination. Absolute silence except for the faint whisper under the floor, the electricity in the rails.
Inside the car, all stillness, no music, all death.
Effie had turned half around to leave. "I'll..." She had started, and then found out she didn't know how to finish that sentence. Ian was staring at her like she was the entire Capitol itself. The brief trace of gentleness that was there before was gone for good, it seemed, and had built its own self into a hate so vast it felt like it could spread and eat her alive. But it wasn't rage in those eyes, it was fear. Hate, and fear, and most of all, disgust. And it was this final feeling that crept under her skin like dozens of sly, minuscule snakes threatening to choke her.
Ian looked at her for what she was: a soulless doll, a mannequin, a dance performance with no intention and no purpose. Empty entertainment, utter cruelty. It stung at her heart like a knife.
Effie didn't want to think. She didn't want to think about this. Haymitch's intense eyes had looked then like they were just pleading for her to leave. So she turned around and left, but stood on the other side of the car door, unseen and unheard, just long enough to hear a harsh reprimand from Haymitch, and then silence, and then Ian was sobbing, and then his sobs were muffled as if into a hug. Then Effie left.
*****************
Later that night, she couldn't sleep. It was her own reflection, dormant in the mirror, staring back at her even when she diverted her eyes away. The tears burnt her face, red and hot.
Effie could never cry too much. She couldn't cry to the point of blindness, haziness, and swollen cheeks. It was that maybe she didn't have it in her. Or was it that she was brought up in a way in which crying was never allowed, and displays of emotion were punished unless they were performative, and she never saw her mom cry, and she never saw anyone in the Capitol cry? And because it would ruin the makeup, and it would ruin her control of her own dangerous emotions. The shell cracks and its contents spill over and then what? What is something broken worth?
Yet her head today felt heavy, as if something inside threatened to escape through her ears or her nostrils down to her mouth.
All the cracks in her façade that she knew well yet dared not face.
She took off her makeup, laid down her hair and took the chance to walk out of her cabin. It was almost three in the morning, the Avoxes never interfered with anything they saw, and the chances of anyone else being awake or outside their compartments was low. Besides, she didn't intend to walk past two or three cars, anyway. She just needed a walk. A silent, dark walk in the presence of no one else, no noise, no lights.
Haymitch might be awake, though, drunk past his mind and sleeping on a couch somewhere, or stumbling about. It wouldn't be the first time they would talk in such a circumstance or he would greet her, or make some displeasing comments, flirty comments, whatever came to mind. The next morning he wouldn't remember anything, and if he did, it just drew them closer. It wouldn't be the first time, it wouldn't be the tenth time. At first she would panic if he saw her breaking conduct, walking around at improper hours, without proper makeup, or proper clothes. At first he would get a weird feeling of satisfaction from pissing her off, from trying to scare her away, from purposely bothering her, just because he was bored when, truthfully, he was desperate to be out of these trains. At first it was weird, and then some things stop mattering.
You develop a silent agreement with the people around you. You create your own narratives about what they think and feel so that it makes them more human, or you avoid thinking of it all together.
This time, though, as she was walking, she heard a sound like that of someone breathing hard, almost choking, behind the door of a small washroom mid car. It startled her, and she stopped to listen.
Confused, and suddenly very self aware, Effie thought of ignoring it, but something inside her gut stopped her and she froze in place, much to her own awe.
The water was running, something about how it all sounded was scary. She heard coughing, glass breaking.
"Haymitch...?" She asked tentatively, almost whispering.
Silence.
She opened the door gently. It slid to the side slowly and she found him leaning against the wall, drenched in sweat, and vomit, and water.
Instinctively, Effie immediately slid into the small compartment and closed the door behind her.
Somehow, as soon has her hands reached for him, he fell into her arms before any of them could even think, the loss of balance throwing both of them to the floor in that claustrophobic crushing small space, made bigger now by the presence of someone else.
Her hands felt lost, unsure of what to do around this broken, broken man so light and so heavy. They reached for his hair to uncover his face; they didn't dare reach for his face.
"Eff." He managed to mumble, in that same, tired coarse voice from earlier, (from years now). He seemed to whisper to himself I can't do this but his mouth didn't move. She couldn't be sure, but it felt like he had said something.
Then, suddenly, he looked at her.
She forgot all about herself and became very self conscious in the span of seconds.
"How the fuck are you here?" He finally said, and it snapped her fully back to reality.
"The train isn't so big." She snarked back, smiling briefly, hands still softly resting on the back of his neck.
"You look normal." He said as it was always easier to let the conversation slide into comedy.
At the same time her words:
"I'm sorry."
Silence.
He looked at her still, but in a different way. "For what?"
"I guess this is what I wanted to have said earlier. To both Ian and you."
"That you're sorry doesn't matter. So's a good thing you didn't say it."
The reply stung. She felt her chest grow cold again, and yet here was a person, in her arms, still not pulling away.
"Nothing I say matters." She said, not at all in the tone of feeling sorry for herself or even wanting any compassion. This was simply a fact, about her whole life. "Come on up."
The switch in tone snapped him back to reality now, and she struggled to help him to his feet, exhausted as they both were. In the mirror, both their faces reflected sternly back at them, posing the questions neither wished to answer. Dozens of refracted reflections inside countless mirrors infinitely reaching towards the nucleus of here, now and the future. The kernels of the Hunger Games, of class, repression, war, breakfast, propriety, distance and distance, long reaching through space.
She observed his hands, cold under the running water. A hand that found its way reaching for hers quicker than intention or logic. And regardless of logic, she wouldn't have drawn hers back, but would have let the caress linger infinitely if he had turned towards her to lean forward gently and place a kiss behind her ear.
But he hadn't, she had imagined it, they had never even gotten up from the floor.
The faces in the mirror; her own ever present ghosts; her own hesitations; her all-consuming fears.
Yet the person in her arms was real. Real, and burning warm, and shaking slightly, and in that moment, to her, as if naked. Devoid of pretension, intention, and performance. To her, soul crushing yet comforting.
Ian's words echoed in her mind and they sounded like Haymitch's words, too. So she tightened her grip around his hands.
They stood there for some time, on the floor, trying to make life more bearable.
Dolls, mannequins, pawns, gentleness, the Capitol, admiration, patience, the system, the ways of love, and forgiveness, and honesty, and trust, and truth, they're unbearable; all the things we say we aren't.