Chapter Text
Cayson wasn't a boy that'd stay out of trouble - No, I knew that from when he was of a little age. Toddling around with his chin stuck to the sky and his tongue poking from plumped lips, he'd always been ready to rouse the dead. Kept me on my toes. Still does.
It'd been me hoping against hope that he'd kept that head of his down, just at least for the 54th Games. Being fixed in the mines meant he couldn't fire up the Peacekeepers, let alone what was left of them Booker Boys. He'd have to keep his chin pressed down into the stone, have to bear the splinters of those shabby picks and keep the storms from hailing through his misty gray eyes. Battered palms were the taxing work of rigid stones, not the bruised knuckles from the bloodlust of wrath. Seeking some justice in a system that pummeled the very word beneath the heel of its stainless boots.
The mines could only hold my boy for so long. This was a truth I'd never once denied.
"They got Cayson!" The finer details of his arrest are limited down to Ima's hysterics, pulling at her father's sleeve. Careful stitches rip loose, spilling the contents of dusty plaids down past his soiled fingertips. "Mama, I told him he shouldn't have. I swear it!"
I'm already peeling away from the sink, snaking my hands over hers. "Ima, dear, please." There is never once a situation where I wouldn't fear for my child's safety. But fear does not respond well in this world. Not unless it is for the wrong people. "What happened?"
Tulie has already taken Ima's place, wedging her teensy fist through her father's open hem. Tears gather beneath the clouds of her all-embracing gaze. "Cayson?"
The world is caught beneath Ima's snivels and Tulie's teardrops. "We'd gotten to the Hob - Mama, I told him not to do it! Told him they'd been out more regularly."
"What he'd do, Ima?" Oren pauses, holds our daughters' hands within the scabs and blisters of his own, and closes his eyes. The world shifts, beyond the rotted wood of our walls, beyond the echoes of machinery and screams of the Seam children. Grief preserves within the very floorboards, etched in memories and tired sorrows. "Is...is he hurt?"
"Got a bottle cracked over his head." Ima rambles, her breath hitching through her panic. "Right before the Peacekeepers beat him to the ground. Said he disturbed the peace- not like they took Abernathy with 'em." She spits his last name as if it were a curse, forbidden on the tongue in hatred. Not like it was once a name a part of our loving kin. Not as if she'd call him 'Hay', just as her little sister had done.
I don't have to ask what Haymitch had been doing there. The boy is a well-known drunkard, stumbling the streets at all hours of the night in search of a bottle. He'd long since been stripped of being a Victor. Nobody wanted to claim him as one, lest they be ashamed to call him our own.
There once was a time that pride had rung through our streets, boasting great joy for a fighting chance against the other districts, but a fleeting hope is all it had been. We might as well have buried seven people that day.
"What'd Haymitch do?" I know Cayson had been itching for a fight all week. Ever since that District 2 girl had been carted off from the arena, exulted as the winner of the Games, while our two little kids lie beside the rest of them uniform coffins. Another two Capitol body bags, poised in smooth glinting wood.
"What's it matter?" Thunderstorms rage within the fury of her eyes, all too akin to Cayson. I'd raised righteous children, unafraid of the heel that looked to crush them. They think they're all too big for it. "If Abernathy hadn't swung that bottle, Cayson would've gotten away before they were able to take him. He's only not getting a whipping because they riled the whole Hob up!"
Too many whippings this year. The March's haven't fared well under the overload of lashed victims. I find myself lucky that my boy is not one of them. Not yet at least.
"Can't they take him then? Cayson didn't do nothing!" Tulie was much too young to know the tasseled dark haired, grey-eyed boy we helped to raise, so her protests against him come from a place of communal anger. She doesn't know any better. She doesn't know that sweet little smile he'd had when he twirled Louella around the table, calling his sweetheart 'bullfrog royalty'. Doesn't know that he'd slip a bottle of white liquor under our sink, just in case we couldn't afford to make a visit to the apothecary. Doesn't remember how his Mama was like my sister, and he and his brother our family.
I suppose I forget that too sometimes, watching him stumble drunk up the dusted streets, yelling vague threats to anyone who dared to get too close. We'd learned to avoid him. He sought our ignorance as if it were a prize he'd won- Isolation for the Victor of 12. As if we couldn't tell the grief he bore. As if we couldn't help. He'd have none of it, and so we had obliged.
Willamae would be so ashamed. She'd have wanted someone out there looking out for her boy. Someone to pull him away from the ledge he so tediously staggered across, not a District that was just waiting for him to fall. But what more could we do for someone who refused us at every turn? Who consistently went to that ledge and tempted fate, no matter our pleas or our efforts?
"Haymitch is a Victor. It's different for him." Oren explains, though I'm not sure Tulie or Ima understand. I had always thought the Victors would be celebrated with lavish lifestyles and proper living. I suppose they get a house, and food, and survival is only a torment of their dreams, but the presence of the Capitol looms above their heads in ways us district folk don't worry for. Haymitch has ever only looked clean when the cameras are filming. He smiles when his eyes are dead. He's escorted as if he were held on a leash, not as if he was adored among the Capitol people.
They're a whole class of themselves. Neither District nor Capitol. It only makes sense that his punishment is different.
"Hooray for his favor." Ima snarls, pulling at Tulie to get her off Oren's lap in hopes we'd start to move. "He's got Cayson punished for it."
"Cayson can do a fine job of that on his own." I won't neglect that Haymitch played a part, whether he'd meant to hit my son or not, he'd done it all the same. But Cayson has always thrown his fists to the sky, unbothered to where they land. If I mean to barge into the jail advocating for my boy, I'd be doing it with a level-head and a right mind. I cannot afford to lose another child by throwing caution to the wind, hoping it may stick.
"You two stay here with your father." I start before my girls can get a word in. "Tell your brothers to keep their heads down when they get home. We don't need nobody else starting a fight."
_______
I remember when Willamae and I were young, we'd sneak off into town just to get a whiff of the freshly baked goods in the baker shop's windows. We'd both be bright-eyed, staring through the glass at the loaves of warm seeded bread and creamy frosted cakes, and we'd say that one day we'd marry the baker's boy. That he'd shower us in all the pastries we'd ever dream of, ones that, to the Seam, would never even cross our minds.
Those fluffy pink swirls on the white cake- yes, that would be Willamae's. It would taste of the rainbows over the meadows and the sweet delicacy of berries in the woods. The crescent shaped bread- that would taste like the moon. I had always hoped it would be like the dewy spring mornings, when the heavy fog laced the air with wisps of clouds and not a breeze sure to give you black lung.
As we had gotten older, we'd learned that the Merchants from the square never married Seam children- it was unheard of. The baker's son married the apothecary's daughter; the coal miners married the washwomen. Tradition continued its course. Willamae and I married coal miners, who we had worried for every day of our lives the moment they set foot into those deadly caverns.
We'd raised our families of little boys and little girls who'd grown to know the same fate as everyone else. And we'd worried for them, every day of their lives when the reaping bowl claimed their names among the hundreds of other children. The canaries would sing until one of our husbands was killed in the mines - from collapse, from explosion, from rebellion. All would be silent. For grief, the world was transfixed in this state.
But only for a little while. It's not long after that we'd worry for our children, watching as they're marched to the stage. We'd fear for the ones left at home, for their fate in this cruel, vicious world. Blood would spill, fires would burn, the world would become ablaze, and the canaries would sing. They only ever stop when the miners are killed.
Would Cayson outlive the mines? If starvation doesn't pry him from my begging hands, will he be destined to fear over his children being sent to slaughter? Will I lose him to the confines of the jail's walls?
Surely, if Lenore Dove Baird, in all her fire and rebellious nature, could survive behind the bars of her cage, then Cayson still has a fighting chance.
Even then, she's gone beneath the ground, gone to better places than here, I hope. But it had not been the mines, nor the Games, nor starvation or cell walls that had claimed her life- it had been the world. Appendicitis, they say, that stripped the young Covey girl of her wild spirit and snuffed out the fire of her heart.
The world waits for no one. I suppose we all leave it in some way.
But I look to the stars above that today is not the day I lose my child.
The gray pillars outside the jail do little to assure me of this. All bleak and dreadful, as old as time stands, it seems. Scorched embers of lit cigars die beneath the stone walls. I cannot imagine for the life of me why someone would wish to fill their lungs with toxins when it's the very thing that chokes the life of our district. The air is dried in coal dust. Only the breeze needs a spark to ignite our skies. Who finds satisfaction in becoming a vessel of such filth?
Unsightly yellow, as sour as the old lemon trees, flickers into view. A plastic face of pin-needles that seals my daughter's death.
I blink it away. I will have none of that- not now. A child's life hangs in the balance of a peacekeeper's fate, and I will not determine him a life beside his sister. Not now.
Visitation is sorely limited nowadays, but this trend is not new. We're all slowly slipping past any functional means of society. Devalued to bits of crushed coal shaken by marching boots, soiled bodies by the whipping post, tesserae in the malnourished hands of tiny children- we're nothing but to service the Capitol.
It's by any luck at all that I'm allowed to speak to Cayson. The jailer's a peacekeeper, a younger runt of the men that'd been shipped to our district not long ago. Most of those boys are out to prove something when they're treated like dirt by their own. They're bitter and brutal in the worst of ways, out looking for that validation. But this boy's a bit kinder. Softened around the edges while the others are rigid and rough. He won't be around for long, but I'm mighty glad he's here today.
"You got minutes, Mrs. McCoy." He doesn't tell me how many- I'm not sure he knows this himself. I have until he's liable to trouble.
"Thank you." A nod doesn't suffice in payment, so I slip him a few scrips. Two of the few I've got on me, but it may be enough to buy me some time. Any time at all.
He nods and leaves me be. Alone with my boy behind bars. My boy whose olive skin is stained crimson where thick lines drizzle past his nose. Up to the stray hairs on his forehead, down to the curve of his chin. Beaten and bruised, reduced to a mess of red, black, and blue. He doesn't look a bit abashed. "They're gonna let me out, Ma. I'd got no record of assault until today. First charges blow over after a couple of days."
"You think that makes this any better?" His assurances might as well have fallen on deaf ears. "Wait until they make it out that you've sparked havoc in the Hob. You think they'll be so light in your punishment then?"
My boy's not a loud-mouthed rebel. He sits with his thoughts, having the dignity to show me some shame. "I wasn't looking for a fight-"
"You were."
He sucks his teeth before meeting my eyes. We cannot afford silence, so he finds his words to give me some clarification. "Haymitch was there, drunk as a skunk, haggling with poor Hattie. If he'd been any louder, the Peacekeepers would've coming running anyhow. Hattie didn't need that trouble- not when he'd caused her so much already. She's just getting back her footing in the business."
My boy's a righteous man, but he's never cared much for Hattie and her liquor. He's an angry soul, hardened in his grief, driven by his pain. Haymitch wasn't just there- not to him.
I wait, Cayson stares. He's told his side, unwilling to budge, or so he hopes he appears. "So, you saved her the trouble?"
"I did my best."
"And you both drew more attention to yourselves."
"If Haymitch hadn't swung-"
"Cayson McCoy." We do not have time. Minutes are seconds, I cannot lose them to arguing. "Your Mama's a tired woman, and you've got a stormy spirit. You and that boy go way back before the mess of this world tore us apart. It wasn't just any fight; you and me both know it."
Dignity does not win out to his shame. Resentment coils around him like a constricting cottonmouth. "He's grieving her, Ma." He pauses. Our seconds tick to a close. The cottonmouth sinks its teeth. "Won't let us know anything about her last days. She's ours, and he's claimed her last moments." Tears trail alongside his dried blood. Poison runs through our veins.
My sweet little girl. Rounded, plump cheeks livened by her toothy grin - all mischief and spunk. My darling little girl. My Louella.
"Time's up, Mrs. McCoy." The jailer calls, but it's two braided pigtails that lead me to the door.
_______
There's come a point where time has sectioned itself within my memory. A division between my days with Louella and my days without. There is no year, no month, no specific moment that is simply outside of it. She is either there or she is not.
In the days after the 50th Games, there had been a liveliness that had awoken our district. As if for the last forty-years, our homes had lived in a deep slumber. A wakeless nightmare of distant cries and empty bellies. A world without the yearning of hope. There was, for what seemed like the first time, something more than the growing graveyard up on the hill.
District 12 had a living Victor. A child had returned home.
Behind him, three others awaited their burial.
On the second day of the 50th Games, the world I'd grown to know was broken in two. My baby girl convulsed under the meadow's trees. Her body shaken in horror, caressed by the sweet sight of nature as it stole her life. Drunk on the blood that poured from her lips, her neat little nose, her bold tender eyes.
The canaries sung. The cannon fired.
During the final day of the Second Quarter Quell, the colors of the world lived upon the screens. The blades of the fields were the greenest thing, as if the sun only ever shone in one place, and the bark of the trees a fierce tawny brown, forever reaching their limbs to the crystal waters of the sky. Cotton clouds. Pure. Spared of ash and ridden of Twelve's coal dusted haze. Underneath its appeal raged a scarlet shower, rosy droplets- a deep, dark apple red. Ripened only in carnage. I'd never seen blood that color before.
Willamae's boy convulsed under the warmth of the paradise's sun. His body rattled with each dying breath, powdered in grime, slow as it worthlessly dressed his wounds. His innards held only by the tremor of his hand, draining into the greedy soil as it welcomed him to an early grave.
The song of victory played amongst the screens. The hovercraft's whirl retrieved him into the heavens.
I'd sobbed, only able to hold Willamae as she howled against me, buried into the crook of my arm. Her child, her boy, had won the Games. Bled dry, cut nearly in two, but a boy who'd make it back home.
In all the horrors of the world, the odds had shown us favor. The little bit that there was left. If any at all.
In the days after the 50th Games, while the Square cheered for our Victor boy, the Seam spurred awake by the returning life of our own, I awaited for the colors' return. When would it flow from the screens and paint the walls of my home? Would the moss across the bricks ever liven like the clovers in the spring? Where had the burst of sunshine gone- the one that clothed my little girl to her slaughter?
There was never much of a return, even now. I've gone blind to the beauty it once held.
The last I'd ever seen of color had been through the swell of rising smoke. Of orange embers and golden flames. Their screams muted the rest of the world after.
Oh, Willamae, my sister. Sid, her darling boy. Louella, my dear girl. You've gone where I cannot follow, worlds apart, where land stretches to the stars. Why must you go? Has my love reached you still?
Four years past the 50th Hunger Games, I miss you always.
My boy sits in jail. My daughters seethe at the injustice. The bounds of my loss do not shrivel in my fear, my anger, my love -if the world were any kinder, they would.
But they do not. And as I pass through the Seam, the ghost of her footprints kicking the dust at my heels, I turn to the bones of a charred wooden home, where only soot clings to the sprouting buds, not yet trampled by the miners' neglect. Once life lies pain to bring life once again.
I do not find myself walking home to share the news of Cayson's arrest, to his subsequent release, to the dull hope of his near future.
My darling girl guides me forwards to the home of our Victor.