Archive of Our Own

Autumm, 52 AAD

Lenore Dove waits for her when she gets off the train.

The peacekeepers escorting Maysilee off don’t notice her – these are Capitol men, not familiar or caring of local troublemakers. But Maysilee’s eyes catch on her immediately. She is leaning against one of the buildings in the square outside the station, wearing a hideous orange dress. It’s dark, and her hair is covering her face, but Maysilee will know her anywhere. She’d gotten very good at this game, these last two years.

Maysilee isn’t cuffed. That is the whole point of this little exercise, after all. She is reformed. She is all better, now.

The local peacekeepers waiting to receive her don’t seem all that happy about this assurance. They eye her warily as she steps forward. Maysilee smiles at them, showing all her teeth.

There’s no reason for them to walk her home, but Maysilee already knows they will. It’s their part in this farce, reminding her they’re the one in charge, that her homecoming is not the same as freedom. Two before her. Two behind her. One right beside her, in case she makes any sudden movements. The rest stay behind with the Capitol men.

When they start walking, an orange-clad figure pulls away from the buildings’ shadow and falls into step a short distance behind them. Maysilee’s jaw tenses at that – these peacekeepers are local, and will recognize their shadow with a glance. She starts talking to prevent them from looking.

“You,” she says – she never bothers with their names – “Has anything interesting happened around here in the last two months?” Peacekeepers aren’t exactly good sources of gossip, but there aren’t many people in District 12 willing to take the risk of talking to Maysilee, these days.

Her escort eyes her with clear dislike but doesn’t break the pretense of civility they’re playing at. “There’s been a small cave in in one of the northern shafts. Work there has been halted for a few weeks now; caused some disruption.”

Maysilee raises an unimpressed eyebrow. “The term ‘something interesting’ was really too difficult for you, huh?” she feels like pushing, a familiar itch under her skin. “Oh, how are the peacekeepers who were there during my ‘little outburst’ doing?”

His jaw tightens. “Officer Kalo has been reassigned for recovery. Officer Purnia, however, has resumed her duty,” he says, voice like ice. “The brick you attacked her with caused mostly surface damage. Though her broken nose had not healed well.”

“Well, her face certainly couldn’t have looked worse,” Maysilee shrugs. Next time I’ll find a knife.

(Sometimes, Maysilee misses her blowgun. In the arena, death had been a constant companion; everything had been a weapon. She was a killer, there; now she’s an eighteen-years-old girl.)

But she bites back the words, lets them simmer on her tongue. So soon after her return, even snide words will be enough to break the illusion of compliance, and Maysilee – Maysilee doesn’t want to go back. Her own weakness disgusts her, the fact she still lets them cow her, that after everything the Capitol can still make her bend her head. But she fears it; the White Room; the silence, the locked doors, the drugs. The way it strangles her. She can’t stand it. After the first time, she’d sworn herself she’d never let them take her back. When she’d realized she will be going a second time after what she’d done to Kalo and Purnia, she’d struggled and scratched until her nails were bloody.

Plutarch had come to see her two weeks before her release, long after she’d worn out her struggle. He was the first person from outside she had seen in her entire time there. His dark purple suit, edges embroidered in yellow, was such a bright stain of color in all that white and grey that in that first moment Maysilee could not even speak.

“I heard about what happened,” he said, quiet, eyes serious. “I managed to get permission for a private visit.”

Private – away from the listening devices she knows are in her room here, then. Must have taken some string pulling. She’d wondered if President Snow knew he was there, if he’s made some promise of getting an unruly victor to behave. If this moment in this hollow prison was going to be one more hook in Plutarch Heavensbee’s climb up.

But she’ll take it – the privacy, and the face of a man who, Capitol or not, is one of the few left in this world who knows her.

So she crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. “Believe me, they deserved it.”

Plutarch nodded. “I’ve read the report. Your reaction was perfectly understandable, even if I think we can both agree it was a miscalculation.”

Maysilee snorted. “’A miscalculation’? we’re two years out of any plan worth following, Plutarch. And it’s not like I have anything left to lose.”

The half-smile melted away from Plutarch’s face. “You’re smarter than that, Maysilee. You know exactly how much worse these things can get.”

Lou-Lou stood in the room between them in that moment, drugged and mad and broken as she muttered the lines they put in her mouth. Once, in another world, Maysilee Donner told her team she wanted to die with her head help up high.

She looked away. “I know. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

She’d been proclaiming that to the Capitol therapists for six weeks now, but only as the words slipped from her lips in that moment she could acknowledge the complete truth of them. This hadn’t been a gesture, a pointed message, a poster painted in a peacekeepers blood. She had simply stood outside the funeral of two children she’d failed to save, watched a peacekeeper shove a dead boy’s weeping sister, and decided there was nothing in the world that mattered but her rage.

"You know, I almost asked Haymitch alone for help with our plan, back then. I thought he and Ampert alone would be enough to pull it off.”

The words are so unexpected Maysilee is jarred out of her grim memories. “You – really?”

She tried to imagine what it would have been like, going into the games with no plan beyond her own survival. Would she have stayed with the Newcomers, and died in the eruption? Maybe Silka would have gone home in her place, crown shining on her brow. Maybe Haymitch would have died alone, with no one to grasp his hand and promise not to let them get away with it.

Maybe Merilee would still be alive.

“Why didn’t you?” she asked, though it was not an accusation. Maysilee had made her own choice, is bearing her own consequences. Plutarch Heavensbee can’t take that from her.

“The way you always fought back,” he says, after a moment. “From the moment your name came out, you were ready to fight us every step of the way, and encouraged your fellow tributes to do the same. Drusilla made you bleed for it before you ever reached the Capitol, but you refused to be cowed. I admire that about you, Maysilee. More than you might believe. I knew we’d need that fire.”

“It didn’t work,” she said frankly. “So excuse me if I’m not feeling all that inspired by this little declaration of faith.”

“No, it didn’t. But I’m not ready to give up, and I don’t really believe you are, either.” He shook his head. “Save your anger, Maysilee,” he’d told her. “There will be a time for you to use it wisely. And we will need you, the next time opportunity presents itself. There will be another battle.”

It wasn’t much, but she clung to it, as her time in the White Room drew to a close and the psychiatrists all declared her calmed and reformed and unlikely to engage in any more sudden fits of violence. Poor Maysilee Donner, driven mad by the arena, struggling to live between regular folk even in a backward place like District 12. What can you do? They had offered to send some of the drugs with her, to help her ‘manage her condition’. She had held to her composure by her fingernails, keeping her face in a frozen smile as she refused. She’d met a few other victors, during her victory tour and her short time as a mentor. She’d seen the way they had learned to drug themselves; smothering their own voices and saving the Capitol the need to put any effort into silencing them at all.

And Maysilee may be screaming at ghosts and clawing at the air but she will not be quiet, she will not let them make her quiet, because if she ever stops screaming she will collapse into nothingness and there will be nothing left of her at all.

Her peacekeepers escort reaches a stop before her front door, at the edge of Victor Village. The one walking beside her reaches into his uniform’s pocket and produces out her key. They had taken it off her after they arrested her, alongside everything else she had on her. She got most of it back alongside her clothes at the end of her stay in the White Room. She doesn’t need to ask why her key is in his hand instead.

“Did you have fun looking at my underthings?” she asks frostily.

“Good night to you, Miss Donner.” Stone-faced, he turns around and starts walking back toward the town. The rest of the squad falls in behind him.

It doesn’t matter, not really. It’s not as if Maysilee keeps anything in her house worth hiding.

Left alone in the dark street, Maysilee hesitates at her doorstep. The hand not holding onto the key rises up unthinkingly to rub at the fire striker handing from her neck in a movement that had long since become an unconscious habit; Tracing the smooth scales, the sharp beak, the inscription of love for a dead boy. Of all the things they confiscated from her during her hospitalization, its absence had discomfited her the most. It had left her always slightly off-balance, hand unthinkingly reaching for avoid.

Exhaling slowly, she turns the key and opens the door. The house beyond is silent. If there had been a search through it, her invaders had left no mark behind them. There is a thin layer of dust over the floor; she will have to pay someone from the town to come and clean it. Tomorrow, maybe.

It is the middle of the night, but Maysilee still finds herself stumbling to her dressing room. It had been two months of grey, ill-fitting clothes that made her body feel alien to her, and now she had been put back into a dress still stained with her own blood as well as Kalo’s. she takes it off, throws it in the corner ( - take it with her to town tomorrow; find if someone there can wash out the blood; if they can’t, decide if she cares). She knows she won’t sleep before dawn, so she pulls on a clean dress in it’s place – yellow cloth, with white lacy edges, and a sash she had made herself from one of her grandmother’s old scarves. Brushing her hair – a bit overgrown, she should cut those edges – and pinning it in place, she finally begins to feel as though her body is her own again.

The dressing room has no mirror in it; neither does the rest of Maysilee’s house. It is ridiculous, to look in the mirror and see anyone but herself looking back; Maysilee had been a twin her whole life and had never made that mistake before. But knowing that fact had nothing to lessen the violence stab of grief that had cut through her every time the angle of her head turned her reflection, for a brief moment, into her sister; the way it never seemed to stop.

And so the mirror had to go. Over time, she had mastered the art of doing her hair and makeup without having to check it, learning to asses clothes only with her own eyes. At first it had only made things worse – the avoidance as much a pointed presence as the reflection had been. But now it’s just a habit. The only times she looks in a mirror is when summer arrives and it is time for her to go back to the Capitol. She will suffer no flaw in her appearance then – violent madwoman or not, she will not let these powdered clowns make her up to be a savage. But that’s alright. Between the Capitol dresses Effie sends her and the flattened expression on her face on the reaping’s morning, the girl who stares back at her in those times looks nothing like Merrilee at all.

In her bedroom, Lou-Lou stirs in her cage at the sound of movement. Something loosens in Maysilee’s chest at the sound, and she steps closer to the cage quietly, trying not to wake her. She had wondered, during those meaningless time stretches in the White Room, if her canary will starve in her absence (it’s dehydration that gets you first). There had been no time to make arrangements during her arrest. She had imagined coming home and finding the tiny corpse in its cage, already beginning to rot (She knows she should have left the bird with Asterid, should never have let her give it back. But Lou-Lou is the only thing she has left. When the canary stops singing, that’s when you know you are dead.)

But the old woman she has been paying to come and feed her while she’s in the Capitol during the games must have considered an extension of her duty. Maysilee adds thanking her to the list of tomorrow-tasks. Look at that, you’re back, says a voice in her mind that sounds like her mother. Little vacation over, time to take things seriously again.

Maysilee snores and shakes her head. “You know, sometimes I don’t miss you at all.”

Lou-Lou chirps questioningly and pecks at her fingers. Maysilee scratches automatically at her neck. Then she turns and leaves the bedroom, heading toward the kitchen. There she throws open the window and leans outside.

“I know you’re still out there. Stop lurking.”

She doesn’t bother keeping her voice down. It’s not as if she is going to wake the neighbours.

Reluctantly, Lenore Dove steps out of the shadows of the empty house next door. “How did you know?”

Maysilee shrugs. She hadn’t been sure, actually, but Lenore Dove, too-honest soul that she is, doesn’t know how these games are played.

“I’m good at knowing your secrets, aren’t I?” The jab falls a bit flat. Neither of them really believes Maysilee cares enough to expose Lenore Dove for her little seditious actions anymore – certainly not after that display two months ago. Lenore Dove frowns at her, but there doesn’t seem to be all that much feeling in it.

For a long moment they glare at each other through the window. Then Lenore Dove breaks the silence.

“I wasn’t sure they’d give you back,” she says.

Maysilee narrows her eyes at her. “What do you care?”

It is Lenore Dove’s turn to shrug. “Where did they take you?” she asks instead.

Isolation must have done a number on her, because she doesn’t even consider not answering. “Some place in Five, I think. I didn’t exactly get a good view of the location.” She flicks a stray curl off her face. “They’ve got a place over there to fix people when they don’t feel like shooting them. It and I are old friends by now.”

Lenore Dove narrows her eyes at her. Haymitch’s girl gets that same look in her eyes as he used to, like they think they can look right through you and take your measure, figure out if you’re worth treating with. Maysilee wonders which of them learned it from the other.

“Did they?” she asks. “Fix you?”

Maysilee raises her chin. “What do you think?”

The words are a challenge, but there’s a thin genuine note in them. As though Maysilee needs Lenore Dove Baird, who had known her all her life and never had a good word to say of her, to tell her she had not been hollowed out yet.

Lenore Dove says: “I think nothing they can take from you was ever worth keeping.”

Summer, 50 ADD

Three weeks after she comes back home, Maysilee burns down Victor Village.

If there’s one thing that’s easy to get in District 12, it’s coal dust. There are plenty of looks when she steps into the hob and asks to buy four bags and someone to carry them over to her new house, but she overpays enough that no one asks any questions. Maysilee suspects the people of the Seam aren’t all that happy to see her, walking around with her bloody hands while all of their children came home in coffins. That’s alright – she never particularly cared for being liked. She’d told Drusilla once that she wasn’t looking to make friends – just to be remembered. She thinks they will remember this one.

She took a lesson on fire, during training. How it grows, how it moves. How to limit it and how to encourage it. It had been less than useless against the false lava in the arena, but she’ll get good use out of it now. She had taken that lesson alongside Wyatt, and Ringina, and some boy from 10 whose name she can’t remember, but who’d shared an alliance with for a few short hours before his death. She thinks of them, briefly, as she lays down the route. This is for them too.

But mostly, this one is for Haymitch. She imagines him beside her as she traces the path of coal from house to house; her ever-reliable ally, keeping watch. He makes comments as she works – a bit more here, I think and don’t worry about that side, it’s all made of wood over there.

It takes hours, but no one comes to discover them – who’d walk by Victor Village if they can avoid it? When she’s done, Maysilee leans back against the wall of her house and claps her blackened hands in satisfaction. “This would make for a fine poster, don’t you think?”

She would burn president Snow’s house instead if she could, bar the door and listen to the screams. But this is what she can reach, and so this’ll have to do.

(Maysilee used to fantasize about burning the shop down, when she was a girl. How the burning sugar would smell. How free she would feel, when it was nothing but ashes.)

Beside her, Haymitch tilts his head. Time to live up to all our talk about being the worst Victors in history, huh?

Maysilee steps forward, toward the place where the coal trail meets her wooden door. “We pinky swore on it.”

Haymitch smiles his thin smile, I knew you wouldn’t let me down, sis.

Maysilee takes the fire-striker off her neck – from L.D to H, I love you like all-fire – and lights a spark.

The fire catches quickly, grasps at the wood of the house she’d despised, blazes through the paths she had laid out until it reaches the others. She follows it, throwing more coal in the places where it flickers, ensuring no house in the village stands untouched.

Haymitch frowns as he turns to look at her. This is getting too big. We did as much as we could. Now it’s time to clear out.

Maysilee blinks at him. It is strange, for a figure conjured from her own imagination to suddenly counter her intentions. Haymitch would, though. “I’m not going anywhere until this is done.”

His frowns deepens. You have to go, Maysilee. Or you’ll get caught in the fire.

Maysilee tells him: “They barred my family’s door.”

Her skin feels dry, now, like it is about to crack from the heat surrounding her like badly made pottery. The smell of smoke is overwhelming so much it’s becoming hard to breath. On her breast, the fire-striker has grown so hot it is burning her even through the cloth of her shirt.

The house she started with, the one meant for her, gives a great groan as its foundations begin to crack. Maysilee leans forward, eager now; her blood sings with the destruction; Haymitch fades.

When the house collapses, it’s an inferno, bright and brilliant. For a single moment, Maysilee feels herself a Victor. Then the burning debris hits her shoulder.

It’s agony. Maysilee crashes to her knees on the polished cobblestones, crying out. Sparks dance behind her eyes. Her fingers scrabble mindlessly for a bag of supplies she hadn’t carried for nearly four weeks. She has medicine there. She can –

The fire is everywhere, now. It surrounds her, rising to swallow her like it had swallowed the only home she’d ever known. Her eyes water, and she can’t tell if it’s the pain or the smoke or the rest of it.

She imagines Haymitch before her again, face set somewhere between furious and mocking. Get up, Maysilee Donner. What happened to dying on your feet?

She pushes herself to her feet, slightly unsteady. Around her, the Village is a hellscape. Three more houses have collapsed. It’s all burning, burning, burning. By sunrise there will be nothing left. If she stays, she will die here.

Maysilee runs.

Or, well. She tries. The smoke is very thick by now. Is this what her mother felt in her last moments? They had found her by the door. Not like Merilee. Merilee never even made it out if her room.

She stumbles past the burning houses. There are voices, she thinks, distant shouts somewhere beyond the fires, beyond the village gate, where the real people leave. She wants to see a real person, suddenly. She is sick of the apparitions of her own mind.

Her lungs burn. Her shoulder screams. She runs as though there is a volcano erupting behind her.

Before she falls, she thinks she makes it close enough.

When she wakes, Effie Trinket sits by her bedside.

Maysilee stares at her, for a long moment, trying to puzzle out whether or not she is dreaming.

Effie is sitting in a white plastic chair, leafing through some magazine. She looks tired, her skin pale and her make-up slightly smudged, but when she notices Maysilee is awake her face light up in a bright smile that might even be sort of real.

“There you are!” she beams. “Oh, this has been such a mess, you don’t even know.”

“What – “ Maysilee’s throat is scratchy from the smoke. She tries again. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m part of the District 12 delegation now.” Effie explains. “And, uh, well – Drusilla refused to get up when they tried to call her about this, and Mr. Heavensbee is currently on a different assignment, and Magno was – “ she lowers her voice “ – not in a fit state to travel, if get what I mean. So, turns out, here I am.” She reaches out to take Maysilee’s hand and manages to smile again. “Don’t you worry, though, I’ve been taking care of everything. The fire’s all done with, and I’ve had a talk with the mayor, made sure that obviously, there’ll be no need for any sort of legal action – I mean, you’re still a minor, after all! And I got you transferred to a proper medical facility; things on 12 are dismal; you’d really think the coal district would be more prepared to handle burn victims by now.” She leans forward. “So, the bad news is, there will be some scarring on your neck and shoulder, and your legs as well. But I really do think you’d be able to get most of that removed after it all heals up, I know this place that everyone says can work absolute miracles – “

Maysilee’s shoulder hurts. She leans back on the pillows. “Alright,” she says, quiet enough the words don’t crack in her throat. “Thanks for coming, I think. What now?”

Effie does her the mercy of not pretending there will be no consequences. “Well, everyone’s been very worried, of course, since you – “ Effie’s smiles dims. “I’m sorry, Maysilee. I understand that things must be very hard for you, right now. It’s understandable that you might – act in an extreme way, in these circumstances, especially with no one to keep an eye and make sure you’re dealing well. But now that it’s come to this – the president himself ordered you be sent to a good facility that’d take care of you.”

“They’re locking me up,” Maysilee translates. Her eyes flicker across the room, trying to find anything that might be used as a weapon. Nothing seems viable. even if she got her hands on something, she’s not sure she’d be able to do anything with it – she feels like she could barely stand, right now. And there’s no one to attack but Effie, anyway.

“It’s only for a short while, until they’re sure you’re better.” Effie squeezes her hand.

“Right,” Maysilee says hollowly, failing to summon the sound of a real bite. “Sure it is.”

When she comes back to district 12 four months later, there are people waiting for her. They’re scattered in the square, all of them, trying to look casual, but Maysilee has lived in this town her whole life, and she knows when people are going about their business, and when they’re hunting for gossip. They all turn to watch her, as she steps out of the train station, some of them not even bothering to disguise it. No one speaks to her, and she bites down on the urge to start making comments toward the audience – she’s never willingly made herself a spectacle, and she won’t start now.

They look at her differently than they did on the day she first came back after the games, though. There is fear in their eyes; there’s respect in there, too. She’s done something unexpected, broke the Victor’s mould in a way someone outside the arena has finally been made to see. These people, at least, have read her poster.

Coming down the steps, Maysilee meets the eyes of an older woman who has Louella’s dark eyes and her sharp nose. The woman doesn’t look away, doesn’t pretend she hadn’t come here for her. After a moment that stretches like eternity, she dips her chin in a nod; Something that might be acknowledgement or welcome or maybe even a thank-you.

It’s enough. It’ll have to be enough, somehow.

The peacekeeper leave her at the edge of Victor Village, that time. Most of it still under construction, but there is a single house already made ready, waiting for her.

She goes in. She has nowhere else to go. She manages to avoid any sort of trip to the Capitol to make her more presentable, But Effie sends her a salve and a heartfelt note, and Maysilee can’t bring herself to throw it away; not when even without mirrors the sight of the twisted skin makes her flinch. Not when Effie fucking Trinket may be the only person left in the world who actually cares about her.

The burns are gone by the time of her victory tour.

Winter, 53 ADD

It’s a bad night.

It’s a bad night and Maysilee is in the center of town again, picking fights. There’s a now-familiar itch under her skin, the one that the demands she get out and do something, anything, no matter how stupid or pointless, as long as it means she doesn’t have to just sit there and let the world be. She’d drunk some white liquor (she wonders who makes it, these days, if there’s some new boy to lug the bottles around), just enough to make her blood hum with recklessness, warming her even in the evening’s cold air. She’s standing in that empty square of land where the Donner Sweet Shop used to stand. The first year, it laid between the shops surrounding it like a blackened scar. By now most of the ash has washed away, the debris taken to be used for other purposes. All that’s left is mud and weeds, a strange hole people’s eyes skip over like a tongue over a rotten tooth. The bakery next door has recently started selling glazed cookies, displaying them in the window like the bright colours might draw passerbys attention away. Maysilee tells dear old Mrs. Mellark that she hopes business is good now that her tasteless biscuits finally have no competition, complements her on making the best out of things.

The bitch tells her she shames her dear mother’s memory with her behaviour and should not go around making comments at people who are trying to make what they can out of life, so Maysilee calls her a simpering vulture with delusions of dignity. At this point there’s a crowd, everyone watching their victor showing her teeth. She a familiar sight, now, a feature of the place like the coal train or the hall of justice. ‘Mad Maysilee’, they call her. The first time she’d heard, she laughed so hard her ribs ached. How’s that for a memorable presentation? Ceaser Flickerman could have made it into something.

Mrs. Mellark is growing red now, and behind her Maysilee can now see her son – that little mouse who was always making eyes at Asterid back in school, and never managed to string a proper sentence about it. She’s about to disregard the harpy to round on him instead when the familiar sound of military boots freezes the argument in its tracks. The spectators dissipate immediately, Mrs. Mellark taking a hurried step back. She needn’t have bothered – officer Cray barely notices her existence, only giving Maysilee a sharp glance as he passes. “I trust there’s no disturbance of the peace here? Good evening, Miss Donner.”

‘Miss Donner’, they say. It’s always ‘Miss Donner’ now, like she doesn’t remember their hands on her arms, on Louella’s, their snarls of impatience as they pulled them away when their names didn’t weigh anything at all. He keeps past her, like he’s hoping to wash the incident off his boots as fast as possible.

Finally, the itch in Maysilee’s blood says. Finally, a fight worth having. She opens her mouth to call after him –

A hand grabs at her wrist, pulls her sharply away and into the alley between two buildings. Maysilee strikes out immediately, unthinkingly, but her thrown elbow barely connects as the person behind her already releases her, leaning forward over her shoulder instead.

“They will take you away again,” Lenore Dove whispers, lips against Maysilee’s ear. “They will take you away again, and this time not all of you will come back.”

Maysilee breaths hard, waiting for her racing heart to slowly calm, before she manages to hiss, “are you really cautioning me against picking fights with peacekeepers?”

“Yes, I am.” At this point Cray is already a good distance away, and Lenore Dove allows herself a slightly louder voice as she steps back so that her body is no longer a warm line pressed against Maysilee’s shoulder. Maysilee turns around to look at her properly. Her eyes are dark, her hands clenched tight. “Believe it or not, even I can learn when the price is so high.”

Her eyes flick to the fire-striker hanging from a cord around Maysilee’s neck, the way they often do. She should have given it back, perhaps; that would have been the proper thing to do. But Lenore Dove has her uncles and her cousins and her geese; Lenore Dove has the small remnants of years with Haymitch to cling to, rather than Maysilee’s few weeks. Maysilee will hold onto anything she can keep. It was never in her nature to let go.

“My eyes are up here,” she says, dry and biting; then she aims between the ribs, because she needs to strike at something and this woman is apparently a volunteer. “What, can’t afford to replace a necklace?”

Lenore Dove flinches, but doesn’t immediately reply – she was always surprisingly quiet, for someone with so many opinions. Maysilee looks her over, taking her in, and then suddenly reconsiders. “Actually, never mind, you do need a new one. I’ve got a few that’ll suit you. Better than anything you’ve got now, anyway.”

Lenore Dove blinks. “I – what are you talking about?”

“Seriously, I need to get rid of them anyway.” Maysilee turns and starts making her way toward Victor Village, suddenly sick and bored of the square and the night as a whole. She stops and looks over her shoulder. “Come on. You want to keep me out of trouble, don’t you?”

She doesn’t wait to see if Lenore Dove follows. She doesn’t have to. The sound of her soft footsteps a few careful feet behind her is a familiar one, by now.

Inside the house, Lenore Dove looks around curiously while Maysilee makes a beeline toward the jewelry box by her bed. She had not been lying when she told Lenore Dove she had more of them than she knew what to do with: she has an obscene amount of money, now, and nothing better to do with it. No future to work for, no shop to run, no mother to raise an eyebrow and ask if you really need another one, Maysilee. And so she buys any that catches her eye, in 12 and in the Capitol and through there from the other districts too. She had taken to making her own, after growing tired of others’ craft never quite matching her expectations. There are chains and beads and gems strewn around on her table, and finished products are charming but pointless when she leaves the house so rarely. She’d been selling them, whenever she can – around the district, on occasion, or in the Capitol, where they hold the value of Games’ apparel and the money might at least serve to feed her miserable tributes for a day. Now she picks out a few that would suit Lenore Dove’s coloring and admittedly dreadful style of dress.

“Alright, we can start with these.” She turns around, finding that Lenore Dove has taken a seat on her bed in the meantime. She is staring at Lou-Lou’s cage, mouth twisted with distaste.

“You don’t like songbirds?” Maysilee asks, challenging.

“I love them.” Lenore Dove looks away from the cage, meeting Maysilee’s eyes fearlessly. “When I was young, I’d sneak away to the forest for whole days, and just sit in the trees and sing with the mockingjays. They’re the freest creatures I know.”

Maysilee thinks of her old mockingjay pin, melted in the furnace of her old life. “Not everyone’s meant for the sky, Baird. Lou-Lou’s a domestic pet, you know. She wouldn’t even be able to survive outside the cage.”

(Little girl, repeating the lines fed to her, dead among the bushes. Maysilee can no longer recall her voice.)

Lenore Dove says: “You might be surprised at what cage-born birds are capable of when given the opportunity to fly.”

Maysilee sits down on the bed. “I’m not sure I follow the implications of this metaphor anymore,” she comments dryly. “Remember only one of us has an inclination to poetry.”

Lenore Dove laughs. The sound is sharp and unexpected, filling the room. Her voice is as lovely as she laughs as when she sings. Maysilee thinks, distantly, that this might be the first time anyone has laughed in the house since the day it was built.

She leans back on a pillow and looks at her, sharp and thoughtful. “Why are you always hanging around me, Lenore Dove? Really?”

She’d avoided the question, before, every time that Maysilee had tried to pose it, and for a moment she thinks she would this time as well. But they’ve never quite been here before, sitting together on the bed in the dim light like little girls at a sleepover; and some things are easier to speak of that way.

Lenore Dove stares at her hands for a long minute, as if trying to find the words. Eventually, without looking up, she speaks: “He called you his sister, at the end. They cut it from the finished recording, but I was watching the live broadcast, and I remember.”

The words cut through Maysilee, leaving her breathless. Sometimes she had almost wondered if she’d imagined that – she wonders that about a lot of things. Memory’s fickle. “He did.”

Lenore Dove nods, mouth serious. “You were his, at the end, and that means – I think that means it makes you mine, now. If I don’t look after my sweetheart’s family, how can I look myself in the eye? How will I look him in the eye, when – “ she closes her eyes tightly, for a moment, and then opens them back. “He promised me he’d come back for me, that his ghost will watch over me and wait for me until it’s time. If he does, I – I want him to know I was there when you needed me. That I didn’t let him down.”

Maysilee laughs. She can’t help it. It’s a terrible, hollow sound, and there’s nothing about this that’s funny. But she can’t stand it, how absurd and pitiful and lonely all this is.

Lenore Dove Doesn’t look offended. She smiles, small and bitter, looking up from her hands. “I get it if you don’t really like that. It’s okay. Willamae hates me, too.”

“His mother?” she guesses. She doesn’t know what Haymitch’s mother is called, or what happened to his father. Hadn’t cared to, right up until there was no one left to ask.

Lenore Dove nods. “She knows it’s my fault, what happened to him. Sometimes when I show up at their place she looks at me – like she wants to kill me, a little bit. But she doesn’t send me away. Sid needs to eat. I bring them eggs and feathers, and money, when I can.”

Last year, Maysilee mentored a girl from the seam, a thin creature with wide brown eyes that stared blankly ahead from the moment her name was called. She’d never cried, not once, but her voice had trembled every time she spoke of what was ahead. Lenore Dove reminds Maysilee of her, in that moment: fragile hollow bones barely able to hold up a determination that is half pride and half resignation. There is nothing she could do to help either of them, not really. But you can offer what kindness you have in the limited time you’re given.

She pulls her legs up on the bed, leaning a bit closer. “Thanks,” she says. “For stopping me, back there. You’re right it probably wasn’t worth it.”

Lenore Dove looks at her thoughtfully.

"I like watching you fight them," she confesses. “I don’t do that, anymore. I’m too afraid for what I still have to lose now. They’ve beaten me, just like they do everyone at the end. But I want to.” Her hand clenches, nails digging into flesh. “God, I want to.”

“I know,” Maysilee says, words like ashes. She wraps an arm around herself, suddenly too cold. “Believe me, I know.”

Lenore Dove’s eyes are fixed on her now, unwavering.

“When he died,” she says, “you told him you won’t let them get away with it. And all the commentators acted like you were talking about the Careers, but I knew.”

Maysilee remembers it: Haymitch’s blood on her hands; the fear in his eyes, at the end; the bleak void inside her chest that had seemed to swallow everything; the smell of the flowers; the sound of the cannon.

“But they did. They still do.” Lenore Dove says bitterly. “You don’t have anything to lose. You have power. You’re Maysilee Donner. You’re supposed to be terrible.”

“Fuck you,” Maysilee manages. Her chest feels tight.

Lenore Dove doesn’t flinch, this time. There’s a desperate light in her eyes. “Is this all you’re going to do? Pick fights with the baker? You promised – “

Maysilee slaps her.

She does it without thinking, rising instinctively, striking out as though to block an oncoming knife. It is only when the sound of it rings in the quiet of her room that she even realizes it happened.

She stumbles back, heartbeat loud in her ears. Lenore Dove’s eyes are wide and shocked, like she hadn’t expected violence from Maysilee; even if it is all she has, these days; even if it’s all that Maysilee can expect from herself.

Maysilee’s breath is coming out in harsh bursts. “You have no idea,” she manages, “no idea what you’re talking about.”

The burst of adrenalin is quickly draining. She sinks back onto the bed. Fuck, she slapped Lenore Dove Baird. Haymitch would never forgive her.

But the other girl is unmoving, hand slowly falling away from her cheek, and she’s still looking at her. “Then tell me,” Lenore Dove says, still desperate, almost hungry. “Tell me.”

Maysilee folds over, elbows digging into her stomach, still trying to breath. “You don’t know what it’s like, over there, when you’re surrounded by them, with their shining skins and their mad clothes and their laugher, like they aren’t even real, like you aren’t. And I want to kill them, I want to kill them all, even Effie, because they’re just so stupid, but I can’t, I can’t ever actually do it, because there are two kids depending on me and I always think what if? Because I made it out.”

The confession tastes like blood, and her face drops into her hands. She can hear Wyatt telling her the odds, letting her know she’s paying nothing for nothing. But Wyatt died for a girl who was never going to make it out. He can’t judge Maysilee for living for one, or a dozen.

There’s an arm around her shoulder, a hand slowly running through her hair. Lenore Dove leans against her, steady and warm as her fingers press against her back. Maysilee had not been so close to another person in over three years. The last one had been Haymitch, his head against her knees as she kept watch on their last night together. She had not realized she missed it.

Lenore Dove speaks in her ear again, as she did earlier in the square. “There’s this old story my uncle used to tell me, about why the world is difficult.” Her fingers keep moving in Maysilee’s hair, voice slow and distant. “Once upon a time, all the troubles and miseries in existence had been locked in a box, made by a wicked god. The god gave the box to a woman, telling her she must never look inside.” Lenore Dove sighs; Maysilee feels the sound in the chest half-pressed against her shoulder. “The woman did, because that is the nature of al humans since the beginning of time; and so all the terrible things had escaped. And once they were gone, at the bottom of the box, the woman found a small golden bird. That was hope. The hope was in the box because the god knew that without it, the humans will never stick around to experience the awfulness.”

Maysilee closes her eyes, letting the words wash over. Eventually, she raises her head and straightens her back, though the task feels heavy. She is so tired.

“I told I can’t do stories and metaphors, Baird,” she says in defeat. “You’re going to have to explain to me what the lesson of this little story is supposed to be.”

Lenore Dove pulls away from her slightly, though her hand remains laid beside Maysilee’s on the bed. She is quiet for a moment.

“I don’t think there’s a lesson,” she says eventually. “I think this is just the way people is.”

“Alright.” Maysilee rubs her forehead. “Aright.”

She turns to look at pile of necklaces, deposited on the bed behind them. Carefully, she selects one – a row of pale blue flowers on a golden chain. Lenore dove raises her face to look at her as Maysilee stands up, but doesn’t stop her as she leans over to drape it over her neck, reaching under her hair to close the clasp. She finds her hands are steady through it.

“What do you think?” she asks.

Lenore Dove pulls the necklace up to inspect it. “It’s pretty.”

“That’s right.” Maysilee picks a few more, putting them on the other girl one after the other, pausing a moment to make sure each fits. By the time she is done, Lenore Dove bears as sparkling a collection as Maysilee had once wore for the slaughter. She looks rather lovely in it. It almost makes up for the ugly eyeshadow.

“There,” Maysilee says. “Now get out of my house.”

She lies down on the bed, then, not waiting to see if Lenore Dove obeys as closes her eyes and lets reality fade away. In her dreams, her dead tributes dance in a Capitol ballroom while the Covey play and sing; men and women in eye-searing outfits dance with them, their skin dyed strange colors and their fingers ending in stylized claws; Drusilla Sickle hands president Snow and Lenore Dove Baird tall wine glasses filled with red liquid, and they toast before draining them down.

When she wakes up, it’s silent in her room. The birdcage door is open. Her canary is gone.

Summer, 53 ADD

Lenore Dove slips into Maysilee’s house at some point during the night before Reaping Day. Maysilee isn’t sure quite when – she sleeps in late, and even when she wakes up, she spends an hour or so staring at the ceiling, and another fussing over her reaping day outfit. The sun is high in the sky by the time she comes out of her bedroom to find the invasion in her kitchen. Maysilee can only assume she wanted to share it with the one person in the district certain to feel more haunted than her.

There’s a strange sort of comfort to her presence, these days. Maysilee had been tolerating her intrusions into her loneliness with more grace, ever since that night they spoke of their reasons. Who the hell is she to deny another their due to the dead, just because she has failed at her own? Most days, the other girl still watches from a distance; but on occasion Maysilee leaves a second cup of coffee out when she sits on the porch, a silent invitation. Then they sit and talk, too living person in this opulent, hollow, village. Maysilee enjoys it, sort of. Lenore Dove doesn’t like her, but she’s the only person in the district who regularly looks her in the eye.

Today, she has apparently taken the liberty of making her own coffee using Maysilee’s kitchen. Any other morning, Maysilee would pick a fight about it. But it is reaping day, when everyone tries to give each other what meager grace they can.

“Good morning,” she says instead.

Lenore Dove looks up, taking in her violet, brand-new dress and matching jacket; her hair, pulled back in a triple braid and held with a delicate hairpin; the fire-striker visible around her neck.

“It’s almost noon, actually,” she says. “I made you coffee, but I think it might have gotten cold.”

Maysilee picks up the second mug off the counter. It’s mostly cooled, but there’s still a faint warmth to it.

“Thanks,” she says.

Lenore Dove shrugs. “You should really lock your front door more often.”

“Why,” Maysilee asks, smile toothy. “Do you think someone is going to kill me in my sleep?”

They sit down at the table together. It’s a strangely domestic scene, if not for the grim look on both of their faces.

“First year without your name in the ball?” Maysilee asks as she pulls out the sugar. They’re of the same year, but hell if she can remember when Lenore Dove’s birthday is.

Lenore Dove nods. “It will be strange, to watch from outside. I don’t think I’d like it.”

Maysilee snorts. “You can be relieved, it’s fine, it’s won’t be a stain on your virtue. It’s not as though we weren’t relieved every year that it was someone else.” She drops two spoonfuls of sugar into her cold mug. “Not like you weren’t glad, back then, that it was me and not you. Of course,” she adds, closing the sugar jar, “I suspect a lot of people were glad it was me.”

The corner of Lenore Dove’s mouth curls. “’Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her--that she died!’”

Maysilee blinks flatly at her. “What.”

Lenore Dove smiles into her coffee. “It’s from an old poem,” she explains. “One called ‘Lenore’.”

“Huh.” Maysilee swirls her teaspoon in her cup. “Well, I didn’t die.”

“No,” agrees Lenore Dove. “I guess you didn’t.”

Before Maysilee can demand to know what that’s supposed to mean, there’s a loud knocking at the door. “Maysilee! Are you awake? We’ve got a big, big, big day ahead of us!”

“Door’s open, Effie!” Maysilee calls out, even as she gets up to approach it. She can already feel a headache forming behind her brow, but she knows the intrusion is not without reason. The one year she couldn’t bring herself to get up and Effie had to come and get her had not been pleasant – although Maysilee is still privately impressed with the speed at which the Effie had managed to get her sparkly and presentable, back then. They were barely even late.

Effie pushes her way in a moment later, beaming as leans up to kiss the air beside Maysilee’s cheek. “Oh, you look lovely. You should really lock your house, though – there are all kinds of dangerous elements in this area, you know, you just don’t know what might happen.”

To Maysilee’s left, Lenore Dove’s eyes narrow, for all that she had been saying the same thing not long ago. She doesn’t say anything, though, only moves to slip outside the kitchen side door; evaporating as though she had never been in the house at all. Effie’s eyes flick to her for a moment, slightly bewildered, before moving on to more pressing matters.

“Alright, I know I’m a bit early today, but I just had to make sure we got all your special packages.” Her eyes gleam in excitement. “I do have some bad news, though. We’re going to have to do most of the moving ourselves. I asked Drusilla to land us some attendants to help, but she’d already started setting up in the square, and, well...”

“Let me guess: she simply couldn’t spare anyone for this?” Maysilee snorts. “She does need all the help she can get to pretend she’s capable of doing her job.”

Effie attempts to give her a reproachful look, but can’t really seem to mean it. “You know how she is.” She shakes her head. “But more importantly, how are you? I heard you’ve been ill, last year.”

Maysilee pauses. “Yeah? what did you hear?”

Effie hesitates. “Not much, really. It’s just, you know how people gossip, and I know Plutarch took that trip a while ago to make sure you’re getting proper treatment…”

“I was certainly getting that,” Maysilee says, bitter, and Effie isn’t so oblivious she doesn’t notice the edge in her voice. “The leash is as tight as ever, no need to worry about me.”

“You know it isn’t like that,” Effie says, wounded. “It’s just, last time you got those horrible burns, and I know there aren’t any proper facilities around here – “

Maysilee bites the inside of her mouth, tasting blood. But there’s a reason she always feels sort of bad after striking at Effie. She sighs. “Forget about it. Come on, I know you want to see them.”

‘Them’ is a row of outfits displayed by the wall in the room that has become Maysilee’s ‘work room’. Each sewn by her own hand according to her own design, made from materials from 12 as well as ones she’d had specifically imported. The Capitol expects her to have a hobby, and she has an ocean of time and no sweets to make, and she must use her hands for something or she will drown in it. It had been Effie’s suggestion, made after seeing them last year, that she try and sell them at the Capitol – “Since you’re always berating people for their terrible fashion sense, you know. Everyone will love it!”. It had taken her nearly a year to finally send the letter with her agreement. If Maysilee is to suffer this rank circus every year until her death, at the very least she can try and make it a bit more bearable to look at; and make them pay for the privilege, while she’s at it.

“Oh, these are lovely,” Effie enthuses in the workroom. “So fresh, they’re going to catch every clever eye. I might buy that green one off you myself – there’s this spring party next month I must attend and all the work for the game always leaves me terribly unprepared.”

“Sure, why not.” In any day but reaping day, Maysilee might have enjoyed the praise she knows she’d earned. Right now, she just wants to get everything over with.

Effie runs a gentle hand over the green dress. “Well, let’s get them all wrapped up, shall we? I have a cart waiting in the front, and the train attendants promised me everything will be taken care of on the way.”

Ten minutes later Maysilee is stumbling down her own front steps, clumsy under the weight of two wrapped packages. She finds that Lenore Dove is still loitering by the door, and mercilessly shoves the pile into her arms. “Take these down to the cart, will you?”

She goes upstairs to pick up the next pile, and then makes her way to the cart herself. There, she discovers Effie did manage to conscript one man for their transportation mission – Plutarch Heavensbee is leaning against the cart, looking at her creations with interest. Lenore Dove, waiting on the other side of it, is eyeing him with such obvious dislike that Maysilee has to bite back laughter.

She steps between them to lay down her burden, before getting out of the way to allow Effie to do the same. Effie heaves a sigh of relief and straightens up before blinking at Lenore Dove with mild confusion, suddenly reminded of her existence.

“I’m sorry, do you work here?” she asks politely.

Lenore Dove shakes her head and steps away from the wagon quickly. “Just came to wish Maysilee luck before she leaves,” she says, clipped.

“Oh, that’s so nice.” Effie pats the top of the pile and then offers a friendly wave. “Are you two good friends, then? I do worry about her.”

“Of course not,” Maysilee says drily. “My friends brush their hair.”

“Ah,” says Plutarch in sudden recognition. He inclines his head slightly. “’The rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore’.”

Lenore Dove flinches, eyes widening slightly. Then she replies, something biting in her voice: “’Nameless here for evermore’.”

Plutarch gives her a long, strange look. “We’ve never spoken,” he says, “but I believe I arranged a call for you, once.”

His voice is quiet, like a strange peace offering. Maysilee isn’t sure what he’s talking about or what he knows, but she thinks it is sincere, in its own way. Maysilee does think that, at the end of the day, Plutarch is sorry that Haymitch is dead. It’s just that it never did much to help any of them.

Whatever his reasons, it works. Lenore Dove stumbles a little, the hostility gone from her eyes, replaced with a faraway look. “Thank you for that, then,” she says. “It was worth  - more than you could possibly imagine, to me.”

Then she turns, like she can’t stand to be part of this conversation any longer. “I have to go,” she says. “I’m helping Sid with his Reaping Day haircut.”

She starts walking immediately, disappearing down the street with moments. Something in Maysilee’s shoulders loosen. Plutarch and Effie are her Capitol people, as trusted as any could be, but they don’t belong here in her world, in any part of it, and the feeling of their eyes on Lenore Dove makes her spine itch.

Fortunately, they seem to forget about her existence as soon as she is out of eyesight. Effie says something about bringing Maysilee’s work tools with them for last minute alterations and darts back into the house. Plutarch leans forward to lift the edge of the wrapping paper and take a look at the skirt at the top.

Maysilee eyes him. “Didn’t think you were all that invested in my dressmaking business,” she says dryly. “Why aren’t you at the square, Plutarch?”

He straightens up, letting the paper fall back into place. “I’ve been hoping to speak to you before the whole celebration begins and we don’t have a minute to think, actually.”

Before we’re surrounded by surveillance, he means. Maysilee tilts her head. “What is it?”

“Before anything else, I wanted to let you know that this is my last year as part of District 12’s crew. From next year on, I will be acting as Junior Gamemaker. It has been quite the promotion.” He gives her a rueful smile. “I would ask you to have mercy on my successor, but I suspect that will do them little good. Either way, I figured I owed our only Victor a proper goodbye.”

“Good luck on the new gig,” Maysilee narrows her eyes thoughtfully. “That much closer to where things run, huh? Good job.”

Plutarch nods severely. “And I intend to make good use of it in time. Which brings me to the other matter I hoped to discuss with you.” He glanced toward the house, as though to make sure Effie was still away. “Ms. Trinket had mentioned on the way here that a former games’ stylist named Tigris was on your list of potential clients. This is a woman who has certain – connections, both in and out of the Capitol. I’ve had the chance to speak to her briefly before, but I suspect in my future position I will find myself under a bit more observation. I’ve been hoping you could pass her a message for me.” He reaches into his suit’s pocket, pulling out a carefully folded note. “And should she be willing, maybe continue the communication.”

Maysilee eyes the note warily. “I hope you realize that I won’t be passing any messages I didn’t read myself first.”

“That would be perfectly understandable,” Plutarch agrees amiably. “I’m not worried about you selling secrets, Maysilee. I think you have proven your mettle well enough already.”

The note sat in his hand, a live viper. It was a terrible idea, of course, playing another round in this game that had already cost her everything. Maysilee felt herself again in that opulent room, trading glances with Haymitch as this man promised them the tools to fight, the help they needed to bring it all down. They’d known, even then, just how reckless they were being saying yes.

But it had already cost her everything, so why the hell should she stop playing now? Is this all you’re going to do? Pick fights with the baker? You promised –

Haymitch had bet on Plutarch. There’s nothing Maysilee can do but cover his bet.

She takes the paper carefully between two fingers, slips it into her jacket. She and Plutarch hold each other’s gazes for a long moment before the sound of Effie’s hurried footsteps shatters the silence. He gives her a sharp nod, and smiles.

“And for the record,” he says, “I actually am quite hopeful regarding your dressmaking business, as well.”

Maysilee can’t quite return his smile, but she nods in acceptance as she moves to grab the cart. “Come on,” she says. “We have a big, big, big day ahead of us.”

Summer, 55 ADD

When Maysilee gets back to District 12 after her fifth year as a mentor, summer is already in full swing, the familiar feeling of the sun outside the weather-controlled area welcoming her home. It has been a long game, this year – the arena had plenty of supplies, and building materials that had allowed a few of the more resourceful tributes to build makeshift forts to hide in. not that it had done a lot of good for her own miserable pair, both dead at the Cornucopia. Their faces are already beginning to fade in her memory. She doesn’t go to the funeral.

The first few weeks after she’s back, Lenore Dove passes by Victor Village every second evening, as though immediately-post-games Maysilee requires a particularly close eye to kept on her. She’s trying to be discreet about it, Maysilee’s pretty sure, but her footsteps are loud in the empty village and she always appears at the same hour, on her way back from town (Maysilee’s heard she’d gotten a job at the school, teaching the younger children about music through the summer. The idea of Lenore Dove as a schoolteacher had made her laugh herself breathless). Maysilee isn’t sure what the other woman excepts to be able to assert simply by standing outside and staring at her lit windows. She never stays for long.

A few days before midsummer find Maysilee waiting for her arrival. She’s sitting at her worktable and sewing, one eye on the window. And then, like clockwork, the sound of boots on the cobblestones.

“Baird!” she yells. “Come in. I have something for you.”

The footsteps outside freeze, surprised, maybe hesitating. She hadn’t invited Lenore Dove inside since that night two years ago, when she gave her new necklaces and Lenore Dove stole her bird. This is a break in the unwritten rules they live by. They sit outside together; they talk in the street, sometimes, when the Peacekeepers aren’t around. But Lenore Dove’s strange watch-keeping is the thing that dictates their disordered interactions. Maysilee never calls for her. And Lenore Dove only invites herself into the house on Reaping mornings.

After a moment, the footsteps resume, now coming closer. The door is unlocked, and so she lets herself into the house, stepping into Maysilee’s workroom a moment later.

Maysilee looks up from her sewing machine. “There you are,” she says, as though they had a meeting that Lenore Dove is nearly late for. She is dressed more severely than her usual manner, Maysilee notices, her rag-like overalls replaced by a boring but well-made dress that must have been a requirement of the school. There are ragged colorful ribbons tied through the edges of it, though, and that broken-up old box she plays on is tied at her side. At her throat there’s a necklace, a chain of pink and orange stones that Maysilee recognizes.

She gets up and goes to her drawer, pulling out the package she’d prepared. “There. I need you take it.”

“You’re giving me money?” Lenore Dove sounds equal parts incredulous and offended.

“It’s not for you, stupid.” Maysilee rolls her eyes. “Your cousin's getting married this week, right? I know what weddings at the Seam can look like. Take this to him, tell him to use it right. Make sure his girl has a decent dress at her wedding.”

Understanding dawn on Lenore Dove’s face. She reaches out, after a moment, wrapping her long fingers around the stack of bills.

“Thank you, Maysilee,” she says quietly. “It’s very generous of you. I’m sure she – I’m sure this wedding gift would be received with joy.”

“Don’t mention it,” Maysilee snaps. “Seriously, don’t. We’ll all be safer that way.”

She comes to regret the whole thing almost immediately. Four days later, Asterid March is at her door.

She knocks and then waits on the step even though the door is open, because Asterid was raised with manners, and always had more patience for the world that anyone should. Maysilee opens the door with a knife held behind her back, because the only people likely to knock on her door are the Peacekeepers and who knows what they might have found out. Instead she is there.

She did rent a nice dress. It’s not new, of course – Seam girls don’t marry in new dresses; town girls rarely do, either; Maysilee had once expected to be wed in her mother’s dress, before it burned alongside the rest of that future. But it has not been worn by many brides before her, and those who did have treated it carefully. It’s made of dark blue fabric that won’t stain easily in the soot-covered streets, its hem and sleeves embroidered with carnations. The making is humble, compared to the garments she wore as a girl, but it is no less lovely for it. It suits her well.

She looks thinner than Maysilee remembers her, dark circle underneath her eyes. But the smile that rises to her face is warm. “Hey, Maysilee. Long time.”

It has been. Asterid is the only one Maysilee had ever explained anything at all, the only one who has more than suspicions. Who knows, better than anyone, why Maysilee is best left alone.

Her right hand reaches for the door handle even as her left loosens its grip on the knife. “Go away, Teri.”

Asterid’s hand shoots out to grasp hers, the smile melting away to reveal the desperation in her eyes. “Please,” she says. “None of my family will even talk to me anymore.”

Maysilee lets her in.

It’s a mother’s job, helping the bride prepare, or an aunt’s or a sister’s, if the mother is gone. “Burdock’s mother offered,” Asterid explains, “but I didn’t want – I don’t even know her that well.”

And so they sit in Maysilee’s dressing room instead, Asterid on the chair and Maysilee making herself busy around her. For Asterid, she even pulls out the small mirror that spends most of its days buried in the back of the closet. It is covered in dust again already, this long away from the Reaping; Asterid doesn’t ask.

Instead she lets Maysilee do her make-up, poking curiously at the few products that have been gifted to her by Proserpine. She has brought a handful of wildflowers with her, and Maysilee sets about braiding them into her hair.

“Do you have everything else prepared already?” she asks as she does.

Asterid nods very slightly, as to not disturb her work. “We filed the papers in the hall of justice this morning. Our new place is at the edge of town – Burdock’s family is getting ready for the celebration there now. We even managed to get some cake – Otho was kind enough to give me a discount as a wedding gift.”

Maysilee reminds herself to think slightly more charitably of the little weasel in the future. “Yellow cream and strawberries?”

“Always.” Asterid smiles, a bit sad. “Merilee used to plan our weddings, remember? When we were little girls. She always thought my pick of food were repetitive.”

Maysilee laughs, and the memory only hurts a little. “I always hated that game. Where did she think we were going to get silk and champagne, anyway?”

Asterid shakes her head at her, and Maysilee tugs at a blond strand in reprimand. “What’s the point of playing if you can’t dream a little wild? She planned a whole new service every season.”

Maysilee smiles even as she rolls her eyes out of obligation. “And a whole new groom as well.”

Asterid sighs fondly. “She always thought she was a matchmaker. Who was it last time?”

“That Andersee boy she had a thing for.” Maysilee rolls her eyes. “Over my dead body.”

“He wasn’t good enough for her,” Asterid agrees. The corner of her mouth rises. “I always figured you would chase him away soon enough.”

“Oh, for sure.” Maysilee ties off the end of one braid. “It was a good game, though, sometimes. She would have like to see you today.”

Asterid’s smile grows a bit crooked. “Neither of us ever imagined this is what my wedding would look like.” She exhales. “Thank you for the dress.”

“Of course,” Maysilee says, soft.

Asterid’s eyes flick up to meet hers, even as she continues working. “I’m not sorry, though. I want you to know that. No matter what everyone says, or how many things have changed. I don’t regret any of it.”

“Good,” Maysilee says firmly. “Good. And if you're ever in trouble, if you need anything - " her fingers tighten painfully in Asterid's hair. She forces them to loosen. " - just tell Lenore Dove."

Asterid glances at her thoughtfully. “She and Burdock are close. She’s been trying to help, through this whole mess.” She hesitates. “Are you – “

“We’re not friends.” Maysilee cuts her off. Whatever is going on with her and Lenore Dove, that certainly isn’t it. “But we have – an understanding.”

She pulls one last blond curl into place. “Alright. You’re ready.”

Asterid stands up slowly, running a careful hand over her hair as she feels for Maysilee’s work, fingers fluttering over the flowers. “Thank you.”

Maysilee smiles. “You’re beautiful.”

With a sudden movement, Asterid surges forward and grabs her arm. “Come to the ceremony. Have some toast. I want you to be there. You can be my maid of honour. Maysilee – “

Maysilee wrenches out of her hold in a sharp movement. "Your shitty seam hut isn't so ugly I'd want it burned when you'd just moved in, Asterid.” She exhales, and tries to soften the bite of her words by tucking a stray hair behind her friend’s ear. “Go. Dance. Love. Don't think of me anymore.”

The afternoon passes in a strange sort of silence. of course, Maysilee’s house is always silent – but this is a different sort of quiet, an anticipatory sort of absence, as though she’s waiting for the sound of wedding music halfway across town to reach her. As though through the quiet you could almost hear sound of a life that’ll never be.

At about 8 pm, Lenore Dove Baird climbs through the back door. Maysilee hears the clatter of it from her bedroom, but doesn’t rise from where she’s laying on her back on the bed; waiting for whatever new intruder that has arrived to come to her.

She isn’t surprised, exactly, by the figure that shows up in the doorway. It is the second breach of their unspoken contract in so many days, but it doesn’t feel like it. It is like Reaping day, in a way: the two of them connected by the same understanding, the same shared ache.

Maysilee pushes herself up onto her elbows. “Abandoning the celebration?” her hair falls in her eyes from the movement, and she looks up at Lenore Dove through the strands. She looks lovely in her preforming dress, her mouth painted orange and her wild hair already escaping its braid. Her tune box isn’t with her, left behind somewhere.

She walks into the room unhesitantly, lowering herself onto the bed beside Maysilee with a sigh. “I used to love weddings. These days they make me bitter. I was glad to play for them, but the moment the singing is over – “ she grimaces “ - I don’t want to stain Burdock’s party.”

Maysilee rolls on her side, raising herself on one elbow to look at her. She thinks of Asterid, in her shitty seam hut, eating black bread with her miner, happier than Maysilee could ever hope to be. She wonders at what Haymitch and Lenore Dove’s wedding might have looked like.

“Did they seem happy?” she asks.

Lenore Dove smiles, and it does look bitter. “Like the sun was shining just for them.”

That’s good. Asterid deserves that.

“I don’t like weddings. Never did.” Maysilee’s lips purse. ““Never dreamed of getting married myself, either. Didn’t really see what the whole fuss was about.”

Lenore Dove glances at her, curious. “You never really stepped out with anyone, when we were at school.”

“No.” She’d practice kissed with some of the girls she was closer to – mostly Asterid – even as Merilee frowned and told her that sort of game was barely appropriate for Seam girls. But the thought of actually wasting her time doing it with one of the boys she knew – the knowledge she’ll one day have to marry one – had always brought a grimace to her face. “Not after, either, although some of those pigs in the Capitol certainly tried. I guess no one ever seemed worth the effort.”

“It can be good,” Lenore Dove says softly, staring at the ceiling. “It’s – I miss it, you know? I don’t regret anything, but sometimes it’s so lonely that you couldn’t believe it.” One corner of her mouth raises in a humourless smile. “Then, I guess maybe you can.”

Maysilee looks at her, for a moment, watches the way the shadows play on her face. It is easy, then: to lean forward; to reach a hand to pull Lenore Dove’s face toward her; to press their lips together. Lenore Dove skin is warm, and up close she smells like earth and cheap vanilla perfume. Her lips taste of homemade alcohol, the kind Haymitch Abernathy might have brewed once.

She expects it to end within a moment, expects Lenore Dove to pull away and look at her with those dark, reproachful eyes. Instead she sighs and pushes up into her, one hand rising to slide into Maysilee’s hair. He mouth opens, and this different than the tentative kisses Maysilee had shared with her classmates a lifetime ago, stranger and headier. They grasp at each, breaths growing hard, Lenore Dove hungry and full of angles against her. Maysilee wonders how Haymitch kissed her. He must have been gentle, holding her in his arms like a bird that might fly away.

Maysilee doesn’t have much gentleness in her, and she thinks any part of Lenore Dove that was breakable has crumbled into nothing long ago. She pushes, instead, biting at Lenore Dove’s lip and sliding one hand under her dress. Lenore Dove groans, one hand tightening in Maysilee’s hair. The other reaches to pull at the hem of her shirt. Then she hesitates, and pulls away to meet Maysilee’s eyes.

“I’ve never done this,” she confesses. “Not even with – “

Her voice falls away, like saying Haymitch’s name while she lies in Maysilee’s bed with her hand up her skirt would be some sort of sacrilege.

Maysilee shrugs.

“You can pretend I’m him if you want,” she says, a bit cruelly. “God knows I do sometimes.”

Lenore Dove’s nails bite into the skin of her stomach, but she doesn’t turn away, instead pulling herself on top of Maysilee and reaching for her shirt again. There’s a lot of talking, after that.

When she wakes up in the morning, the other side of the bed is cold. Late morning light is coming through the open doorway. There’s no trace of Lenore Dove’s presence left behind; but then, none of her precious belonging is missing, either, so she figures it is an improvement.

She isn’t offended by the silent departure. Some of them have to work for a living.

She doesn’t take it personally when she doesn’t see Lenore Dove at all over the next few days, either – her appearances have never been particularly regular. It is only after a week had passed that she really wonders if she’s being avoided. By the time two weeks had passed, it is the longest she’d gone while in 12 without seeing her since the day she first stepped off the train.

It surprise her, though maybe it shouldn’t, that this is what apparently chased her shadow off for good. She’d think Lenore Dove was ashamed – games inappropriate for Seam girls sure as hell aren’t permitted for grown women. But she’d always sensed Lenore Dove Baird had very little room for neither propriety nor shame.

She isn’t sure what it is. But it bothers her finding herself suddenly un-haunted, after having grown so used to Lenore Dove’s presence in her life, to their unnamed but certain connection. And it bothers her, being turned away from, as if just like that they are done. Maysilee has never liked being ignored.

“Fine,” she tells herself bitingly, on the morning that marks a month from the wedding. “So that is how it’s going to be then? That’s just fine with me.”

She ties her head up in a tight ponytail, that morning, painting her lips a bloody red and picking an expensive pair of earrings just because she can. Merilee would have been disgusted with her, she thinks: taking other women to bed, chasing after Lenore Dove Baird of all people. She allows herself a rare moment of eye contact with her reflection to flip her sister off. Then she goes down to the Seam.

Maysilee knows, in theory, where the Covey live. District 12 is a small place. It takes a few wrong turns, before she finds it, a few suspicious glances from the occasional bystander, but eventually she’s there, right by the meadow. It’s not a bad house.

The door is opened by an older man Maysilee vaguely recognizes as one of Lenore Dove’s uncles, wearing a patched overall and a frown.

“Mis… Donner,” he says, sounding something between displeased and perplexed.

She strides past him into the house. “I’m here to see Lenore Dove.”

Lenore Dove’s uncle – what was his name? something Carmine. Kirk, maybe – steps back and looks at her with open dislike. “She isn’t here right now.”

“I’ll wait for her.” Maysilee steps toward the stairs. “She lives in the loft, right?”

Kirk Carmine glares at her, the muscles in his jaw flexing, looking like he’d like nothing more than to throw her from the house. “She went out with the geese. She might be a while.”

“I’ll wait,” Maysilee repeats sweetly, ignoring his glower. Is she supposed to be intimidated by an old fiddler in tattered clothes? She isn’t. He’s heavier, but he’s slower, and unarmed. If he took a swing, she could take him down.

Maysilee isn’t afraid of much, anymore. And they won’t send her back to the White Room for hitting a Covey.

Kirk Carmine must see something of that in her eyes, because after a moment he gives her a curt nod and retreats to the other room. She can hear him waiting silently there, listening to her movement.

Whatever. Maysilee climbs up briskly, Lenore Dove’s door handle turning easily in her hand. Her room is small – only a narrow bad, an old closet and a row of rickety shelves. The ceiling and the walls are painted all over – expertly drawn birds sharing space with a child’s shaky doodles. Maysilee spends a while examining them as she waits, before getting bored and moving to look through the closet. There are few surprises there – after five years, Maysilee is familiar with every article of Lenore Dove’s unfortunate wardrobe. the necklaces she had once gifted her are laid out on a shelf, placed beside a small, glimmering treasure of bracelets and pins and hairclips, all expertly made. It’s criminal, really, that Lenore Dove dresses so terribly when she has so much of Tam Amber’s handiwork all to herself. Maysilee is reaching to pick one up and examine it when her fingers brush something with a surprisingly papery texture in the back of the shelf. Curious, she changes direction to pull it out instead.

When she sees the familiar white-and-purple striped packing paper, reality stalls around her. For the first time in a month, she forgets about Lenore Dove entirely. All that exists is the small bag in her hands, with her family’s shop logo printed on it, a dreamlike visage of her childhood that cannot belong in the world she lives in now.

“That’s not yours.” Maysilee had never heard that kind of vitriol in Lenore Dove’s voice. She is standing in the doorway when Maysilee turns, eyes aflame. Maysilee barely notices.

“That’s – my sister made that,” she says, too shaken to make it a proper retort. “Why do you have that?”

Lenore Dove strides forward and rips the bag from her hands. A single blue-colored gumdrop tumbles out from the force of the movement, and both of them dive to catch it before it hits the floor. Maysilee is faster, her fingers closing around it so tightly she nearly crushes it as she reels back with her miniscule prize. It weighs almost nothing in her hand.

“Put it back,” Lenore Dove demands, voice cracking with desperation, as though Maysilee is holding her beating heart in her grip.

“I don’t understand,” Maysilee says. In her hand is something her sister has touched, a proof of existence for a girl whose every trace went up in flames. She repeats: “Why do you have that?”

Lenore Dove’s face twists. Her words are as simple as a knife to the throat. “Because he gave it to me.”

They stare at each other, then, both of them cut open; between them is the night of Asterid’s wedding; between them is that day, five years ago, when they had both buried their hearts in the ground. The past hits them like a train, headed for the city from which few come back. Metaphorical blood stains the floor of the loft, speckling the white paper bag.

Into the silence, Maysilee says: “Do you want to know what really happened in the arena?”

Lenore Dove says: “Follow me.”

By silent agreement, they leave the bag on Lenore Dove’s bed. Letting go of the gumdrop is not the hardest thing Maysilee had ever done; she knows the score on that. nonetheless, her fingers struggle to let go.

The Covey house is at the edge of the Seam, and no one watches as they leave it. Maysilee follows Lenore Dove through the meadow, full of color and life in this time of year (she doesn’t trust lovely green places, these days). When they reach the fence, Lenore Dove climbs through the hole without hesitation, bending under the twisted wire. Maysilee doesn’t hesitate, either. There are few things that scare her, anymore, and none of them lives on the other side of that boundary.

They walk through the woods in silence. Maysilee has lived in district 12 her whole life, but the forest beyond it is an alien land to her. For a while, she nearly forgets about Lenore Dove beside her and all that’s behind, too absorbed in watching the trees, listening for the sounds of all the creatures surrounding them, moving out of sight.

Eventually, Lenore Dove leads them to a shaded spot, somewhere deep, where a tree stretches thick branches over the ground. She pulls herself confidently onto one of the lower ones and turns to meet maysilee’s eyes for the first time since they left the Covey house.

“Whatever you have to tell me here,” she says, “even the mockingjays won’t repeat.”

Maysilee pulls herself onto the branch beside her, leaning her back against the trunk. She presses her hands against the rough bark and breaths in the smells of the forest, painfully familiar and yet entirely new. Then she tells Lenore Dove everything.

It feels like a cleansing. She remembers the movie she had watched during her victory ceremony, those brutal weeks warped into a new shape she couldn’t recognize, presented before that shimmering crowd like a stuffed corpse; her own memories insubstantial before it. In the woods, five years later, just between her and Lenore Dove, there’s a place for the truth to breathe.

She starts before the arena: starts with Louella, with the carriages and the blood and their helpless spite, Haymitch racing through the square with a girl he could never save. Then she talks about Plutarch Heavensbee and Beetee from district 3, of Wiress and of Ampert and of the Heavensbee manor library, where she and Haymitch met each other’s eyes before laying their necks under the knife together.

She glosses over the parts she knows Lenore Dove must remember: Wyatt’s death at Cornucopia; Haymitch’s death, cut up by the mutts; her own victory, Silka’s blood coating her hands. But she tells her of Sub-A, of the plan, of the explosion; so much and so little as to mean nothing in the end beside a crown and three coffins and her whole world in flames.

It takes a while. Above them, the sky grows dark blue, the voices of the forest changing. Lenore Dove is quiet, at first, listening with an unreadable expression. Then she starts asking questions: at first, just clarifying facts; then asking after more details, digging through Maysilee’s story as though she could reach through the words and witness it herself if she just asked the right question. She interrupts to ask about Haymitch again and again, demanding to know what he said, what he did, grasping greedily at details that Maysilee herself can no longer hold.

“I don’t know!” she snarls after another ‘and what did you talk about then’. “I don’t remember, and they didn’t fucking record that part – “

“Okay.” Lenore Dove exhales. She reaches to touch Maysilee’s hand, and then thinks better of it. “Okay. I’m sorry. Please continue.”

So she does, telling it all until she runs out of words, until the game is lost and over and the story reaches its end.

“And then I came home,” she says. “And the rest of it you already know.”

Lenore Dove’s fists are clenched. For a while she doesn’t speak, her eyes miles away as she stares into the now-dark forest around them.

“Thank you,” she says, eventually. “For giving me this. I think – I think I needed it. Or maybe I didn’t, but I’m glad to have it, anyway. It’s right that I should know. Even if it didn’t work.”

Maysilee’s voice is hoarse. She hadn’t cried, through the telling, but somehow it feels as though she had. “There should be someone beside me and those fuckers at the capitol who remembers how it went.”

“Come back here tomorrow,” Lenore Dove says, then. “I’ve got a story I need to tell you, too.”

The next day, Maysilee makes sure to take a circuitous route to the meadow. She doesn’t care what the townsfolk think of her, but it’d be stupid to risk the peacekeepers hearing about her going down to this area for no good reason two days in a row.

She finds the same hole in the fence Lenore Dove led her through easily enough. Inside the forest it gets harder – there is no clear path, here, only endless greenery. She tries to find landmark she recognizes from their walk yesterday: a tree stump; a colorful bush; a stream. She is aware she is probably getting herself lost, but can’t find it in herself to get all that agitated about it. She isn’t in a hurry, and she’s got two knives shoved in her belt. She’d been in much worse situations than this.

Eventually, she hears Lenore Dove’s voice echoing from the left, singing a half-familiar tune. Stepping there, she finds it coming from the throat of a dark bird perched in one of the trees, and then another, a bit farther ahead. Following the sound, eventually she finds the woman herself, leaning against a tree and fiddling with her tune box.

She straightens when she sees Maysilee, eyes brightening. “There you are.”

“Sorry if I kept you waiting,” Maysilee says, trying to be sincere about it. She brushes a lock of hair from her sweaty forehead. “You said you had a story for me?”

Lenore Dove nods, then hesitates. “There’s something I should show you, first.”

She leads Maysilee through the woods, again, ducking into a small, thick grove that is barely passable. Once inside, it takes Maysilee a moment to realize she is standing inside a graveyard.

Lenore Dove makes her way to a mossy slab of slate at the end of the row. There is no date carved on it – on any of them – only two lines that sound like a poem: yet some maintain that to this day she is a living child; that you may see sweet Lucy Gray upon the lonesome wild.

Lucy Gray. Maysilee’s lips shape the name, testing it. There is no question about its origins. She glances at the woman beside her. “Is this your mother?”

“No,” Lenore Dove looks at the stone, eyes soft. “This is the victor of the 10^th hunger games.”

Maysilee is reminded of a recording she saw when imprisoned after her victory, a Covey girl singing before a Capitol crowd in old-fashioned clothes. “I always wondered who she was.”

“A lot of people do,” Lenore Dove says quietly. “It’s not a story they like having told. There were days you could be whipped just for mentioning her name.” She raises her head, eyes burning. “Her name was Lucy Gray Baird. And if I get to hear you story, you get to hear hers.”

And so they sit down there on the ground, between the headstones of dead Coveys, and Lenore Dove tells her the story of Lucy Gray Baird. Of the tenth hunger games, brief and messy and violent; Of Coriolanus Snow, the motherfucker, and Maysilee remembers cold pale eyes and a thin, blood-stained smile and the hands that placed a crown on her head, and feels the urge to laugh until she chokes.

“It was agreed in the family, after that, never to speak of her to outsiders again. It probably would have been safest no to tell the story even to me and to my cousins. But she was one of us. And – “ a smile flashes – “there should be someone beside those fuckers in the capitol who remembers how it went.”

Maysilee leans her back against the cool stone. “Why did you tell me, then?”

Lenore Dove shakes her head. “It just – felt like the right thing to do.” She looks to the stone, eyes lingering on the epitaph. “She is yours too, I think. In a way.”

“I guess she is.” like the gumdrops, with the sweetshop’s symbol still printed on the bag; like the ghost of Haymitch, always walking beside them, sharing the quiet; maybe like Lenore Dove herself.

Maysilee stands up, goes to stand at the edge of the grove, something restless moving under her skin. Above her head, one of the birds is still singing in Lenore Dove’s voice. The song sounds familiar, like something she’d heard sometime before: you say you won’t love me, I won’t love you neither; just let me remind you who I am to you.

Lenore Dove pushes herself up and makes her way toward them, tilting her head to sing back at the bird. “'Cause I am the one who looks out when you're leaping; I am the one who knows how you were brave...”

Maysilee says: “I’ve never heard you sing before.”

Lenore Dove lowers the hand she had raised toward the mockingjay and smiles ruefully. “I don’t do it often in public. It makes me nervous, you know? I’ve been trying to get better at it, with the new job. Children are an easy crowd.” She smiles. “Maybe someday I’ll be ready to preform in public properly. Like Lucy Gray. There are a few songs I’ve been practicing I think I’d like to sing before everyone again.”

Maysilee thinks of bright orange graffiti against the town’s walls, of Lenore Dove’s three arrests for singing the wrong songs to the wrong crowd. She bares her teeth in a grin: “I bet that would be a hell of a show.”

She can’t remember the last time she actually liked the idea of a performance – she is sick of them, these days, sick to death – but she’d like to be in the crowd for this one. Would like to see what it is like, Lenore Dove bold and unbound.

“Might be my last,” Lenore Dove says, in a voice that tries very hard to be matter-of-fact. “I think I’m past the age when they offer you leniency.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be the one stopping me from pulling stupid angry stunts?” Maysilee smiles. “If you ever want to do it, tell me first. I’ll help you get as far as I can.” She tilts her head. “Won’t be so bad, to go down together.”

She can’t quite say, I think you may be all I have, anyway.

Lenore Dove bites her lip and looks away. “I can’t,” she says. “I promised him I won’t get myself killed like that, after the last time.”

Another thing they share, it seems. The inescapable chain that is the commandment of the dead upon the living.

“When was it?” Maysilee asks softly.

“After they took hi – you. I sang in the town square, all the angriest songs I could think about, I didn’t care anymore. And then, that night, when I was in the station – he called me. I didn’t know how, until I met Plutarch; I guess now I know why, too.” She closes her eyes. “He got so mad, when I told him what happened. He made me promise that I’ll never do anything like that again; that I’ll live, instead, as well and as long as I’m able, and in return, he’ll be waiting for me when I’m ready to go.”

“Sounds like him,” Maysilee says, fond even as the words cut through her. Haymitch and his strong opinions about how anyone around him should survive.

Lenore Dove’s eyes are bleak. “I promised him that I’ll wait for him too, until that day. That there’ll never be anyone else.” She looks away. “So I guess my word isn’t worth all that much, in the end.”

Maysilee closes her eyes. “I’m not your boyfriend, LD.”

“You’re something,” Lenore Dove says, because she is braver than Maysilee, or at the very least more honest. “Something that matters. I don’t know if it’s something he’d be able to forgive me for.”

Maysilee’s hand rises, unthinking, to clasp at the fire-striker hanging around her neck. She thinks, again, of Merilee’s judgement, of her mother’s horror if she could see her now, sneaking to the woods and climbing trees with a Baird. Of what her father would’ve said, if he’d known his daughter will never be married. She thinks, also, that Lenore Dove is right. Haymitch probably wouldn’t have liked this.

She tells her: “They’re dead. We aren’t.”

Lenore Dove’s face twists. “And that’s it? That’s all we get?”

“It’s the only truth I know.”

Lenore Dove makes a sound that is half a laugh and half a sob. “I know you’re right. I’ve known for a long time.” Her shoulders shake. “But fuck, it isn’t fair.”

“It never was. I’m sorry.” Maysilee offers her hand. “Ready to get back?”

Lenore Dove wipes at her eyes and exhales before taking Maysilee hand. “Let’s go home.”

They do. Somewhere beyond this wood might linger the ghost Haymitch Abernathy, forever sixteen and in love. In the here and now, Lenore Dove and Maysilee are twenty-two and getting older; they walk away from the Covey’s graveyard together, hands not-quite-clasped, shoulders close. They don’t look back.

Winter, 56 ADD

It’s a harsh winter, that year, and the one after it is even worse. The children that Maysilee mentors that brief, cold spring between them arrive already sickly, and die quickly and without fanfare. It snows heavily and ceaselessly for what feels like months on end, mineshafts getting blocked and buried. Outside the town, the meadow dies into a bare, grey field that fails to recover in the summer. Asterid, down in the Seam, spends her days running from one house to the next, treating colds and frostbites with what little resources she has against the inevitability of hunger. Maysilee manages to send her some Capitol medicines, passing them through Lenore Dove as she had the money; but with the train coming as rarely as they do due to the weather even she is quickly left with little to offer.

Lenore Dove herself spends more and more time in Maysilee’s house, through it all. It is a matter of survival more than anything else: there is only a thin layer of roofing separating her little attic from the snow outside, and sleeping there she freezes so badly her fingers grow clumsy on her instruments. In Victor’s Village, the houses have a heating system built into their walls, the only buildings in the district beside the Hall of Justice and the mayor’s home to be so. Maysilee understands that, and elects not to bring it up as those quiet intrusion into her life turn from the occasional incident into a familiar habit.

The first winter, Lenore Dove is wary about it, arriving irregularly and often leaving early, staying for days through the storms only to return to the Covey house as soon as the sky clears. The second winter, her belongings begin to follow her into the house, trinkets on her shelves and questionable clothes taking up space beside hers in the closet. At some point she asks Maysilee if she can bring the chest containing her books and her music notes over into the study, to use during the long days hiding inside (Maysilee doesn’t care. It’s not as if she had any say in the outfitting of this house, anyway). Her uncle helps her carry it over, looking at Maysilee with baleful eyes as he steps into her hall. He doesn’t like their arrangement one bit, she figures, but he doesn’t say anything about it. He, too, knows how cold it is in the Covey house. They all take what they can get.

After years of isolated exile, the regular presence of another in her house is jarring. Maysilee’s existence is one of constant silence, broken only by the sound of the television and the voices in her head. But now there are footsteps in the hallway; now there is clattering in the kitchen; the sound of the door opening and closing at unexpected hours; the sound of singing, late at night, as a hand runs softly through her hair.

There are times it is nearly unbearable.

Some days they barely speak, Maysilee bent over her designs in the study as Lenore Dove goes to her geese and her uncles and her students, passing through the house without a word. Other days they share the couch in the living room together, pressed against each other to fight off the cold that creeps even into this well-built house. They speak quietly, voices nearly buried in the sound of the storm howling outside, words that no one but the two of them will ever hear; and for a moment, Maysilee thinks that if the pouring rain washed away the whole world outside, she wouldn’t mind all that much.

At night, they share the bed. Maysilee learns the taste of Lenore Dove’s skin, the feel of her hair between her fingers, and of her cold feet pressed against her in the early morning hours. Lenore Dove learns that Maysilee rarely sleeps through the night; that she spends long, dark hours wondering the halls or sewing in her study with a knife never far from her grasp; how her dreams, when they come, are brief and violent; how she screams the names of those she’s lost and those she’s killed as their face mix with each other in her mind.

(The first time she wakes up calling for Haymitch, Lenore Dove gets out of the bed and doesn’t return for two days. The second time, she grasps Maysilee’s hand so tight her bones creak, and stays.)

It is not the life either of them dreamt of, when they were girls and the world was narrow but the future was wide; not the life anyone who’s ever loved them had wanted for them, either. But there are sayings about wishes and horses, and a dead girl in the woods who said that you kept what you could, and this is where they are; this is what they are left with.

Maysilee figures at least they may be mad together, now.

It is sometimes late in that second winter that the door opens and, rather than Lenore Dove’s boots on the carpet, the sound of conversation enters the house. Maysilee, sitting at the sewing machine, reaches for the blade hidden under her desk. But the voice speaking to Lenore Dove does not belong to any of the district’s peacekeepers, and the tone of the conversation is easy, not agitated; slowly, her fingers let go of the handle. She creeps down the hallway carefully. They are in the living room, sitting on the couch, and Maysilee opens her mouth to ask a pointed question when the boy speaking to Lenore Dove turns his head to look at her.

It’s almost worse than looking in a mirror. In Maysilee’s mind, Sid Abernathy is a child, a little mess of elbows and knees as short as her elbow. The boy in her kitchen is half a head taller than Lenore Dove; the face he turns to her is sharp and serious. His eyes are Haymitch’s eyes.

Maysilee’s lungs burn. With nothing to possibly hurt, her fingers ache for the knife left by the sewing machine.

“What is this?” she snaps. She thinks her voice sounds steady.

The boy looks away. Lenore Dove’s mouth is a tight line. “Sid is sick. It has been – getting bad. Asterid did what she can to help, but she said he should be somewhere warm if we hope for his lungs to recover.”

Sid jumps in. “I won’t get underfoot, miss Donner,” he says, carefully. Maysilee wonders what he thinks of her, what he might’ve heard. Mad Maysilee in her house on the hill. “I’m sorry if I’m intruding, and I’ll pay you back however I can. Just give me a day to get better, maybe two.”

“Three,” Lenore Dove cuts. “Asterid said three.”

Sid looks down. “Three, if you allow it.”

Maysilee looks at him sitting there, shoulders tense and eyes wary. She doesn’t know how old he is, beside ‘Reaping age’; he could be on the train with her, come spring. He’s got the same thoughtful wrinkle in his forehead that Haymitch used to get when he concentrated. She had forgotten about that. She realizes, with a sharp pang, that the details of his have grown muddy in her mind. Do he and Sid have the same nose? She isn’t sure. She’ll have to ask Lenore Dove. She can’t ever ask Lenore Dove.

She doesn’t want him in her house. He’s a sick kid in need of shelter, and his brother is not there to take care of him and Maysilee has central heating she has killed for, but fuck, she doesn’t want him in her house.

Well, sometimes propriety requires you do things you don’t want to, young miss, says her mother’s familiar voice in the back of her head, so straighten your back and put up with it.

Some ghosts are easier to bear than other. Maysilee gives a sharp nod. “Turns out I’m allowing it. You can use the second room down the hallway, I’m sure Lenore Dove can take care of you,” she lets that get a little biting. “I have a design to send in a week, so just don’t bother me. And LD, for god’s sake, get him something to wear that won’t stain my furniture.”

Having managed this slightly lackluster line, she flees down the hallway back into her workroom. She pricks her fingers four times in the next ten minutes, little dots of blood soaking into yellow cloth. Whatever. They can call it a controversial design statement.

His presence remains a burning coal in her mind even at night – lying in her bed, she can hear him coughing down the hall. The inescapability of it makes her dig her fingers into her arms, makes her wants to claw her skin off.

Lenore Dove makes her way into the bedroom long after nightfall. She has the decency to look a bit uncomfortable as she sits down on the bed and lets down her hair. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you before bringing him.”

Maysilee stares at the ceiling and listens to the sounds of rustling cloth. “Liar.”

“Okay, fine.” Her voice is muffled for a moment as she pulls on her sleeping shirt. “I thought I had the best chance of making you say yes if he came here immediately.”

The bed dips slightly as Lenore Dove lies down beside her. “You’re kinder when you’re taken by surprise.”

Maysilee says: “I don’t like looking at him.”

Lenore Dove says: “It’ll pass.”

Sid avoids her for the first two days he stays in the house. They reach a certain equilibrium, during that time: she keeps to her room and her study, most of the day, and he to the spare room, though Maysilee doesn’t know what he’s doing there. She leaves food for him on the counter, like a stray cat. The dishes are always washed by the next time she’s in the kitchen. Lenore Dove comes and goes as she wills – “Work has to get done no matter the weather” – and fleets between their separate territories, her voice carrying down the hall although the words are lost. They keep the heating on and the windows locked.

He still coughs at night, but the sound’s growing less frequent. Asterid is a good healer. Soon enough he will be gone.

The third day, she looks up and suddenly he’s there.

He’s leaning in the doorway, watching her, and when he catches her gaze he offers her a strange, awkward smile. That one surprises her – not many people smile at Maysilee. She still can’t figure out what he thinks of her. She wonders, suddenly, if Lenore Dove passed on her story; if Sid Abernathy knows what his brother died fighting for. She can’t read anything in his eyes but her own memories. Only Haymitch, staring out at her from the wrong face with the eyes that watched her as her ally-friend-brother bled out. You promised. You promised. You promised. What have you done with yourself, Maysilee Donner, the meanest girl in town? Less than I would have done.

“Do you want me to fix the lock on your door?” Sid asks. “I’m good with fiddly things.”

Maysilee starts violently, the bloody image shattering in the face of his words. “Excuse me?”

“It’s just, I noticed your front door is broken. And I know not a lot of people come around this area, but it still isn’t safe, especially with all the expensive things you have here, and with Lenore Dove hanging around. And I’ve fixed locks before; it won’t be that hard. I meant it, when I said I’ll pay you back.”

He’s got pride. She has to like him a little for that, despite everything. She focuses on the conversation. “Kid, I don’t even remember where I left the key.”

Sid raises his eyebrow (a half-remembered movement) – “Okay, well, if you give me some coin I can get some tin from the shop downtown and make you a new key, too.”

Maysilee opens her mouth to refuse him. Closes it. Lets her eyes wonder, momentarily, to the knife, taped under the table; to the skirt half-done laying on it; to the cooling coffee mug Lenore Dove had left for her this morning. She looks away. Sid Abernathy is still in the doorway, watching her.

“Make two,” she says.

Spring, 57 ADD

Drusilla Sickle retires seven years after the only success her career has ever seen. It is not surprise: she has always claimed to have never recovered from the fall that had cost her the victory tour; her influence even in her miniscule kingdom had been steadily eroding, Maysilee ruthlessly and methodically edging her out until she ran the post-reaping process near singlehandedly. It hadn’t been easy – Drusilla had fought her for every inch – but she had the silent support of both Effie and Plutarch, and Drusilla had nothing but Magno’s unreliable presence. It is a flat victory, when their tributes end every year dead either way; but it is what Maysilee can get, and at least no girl after her has entered the arena with whip-marks under her foundation.

Her replacement is a man in his late thirties by the name of Saturnus Dovecote. Maysilee drags herself out of bed early on reaping day to meet him as he disembarks the train and take his measure as soon as possible. His disgust at having been placed in charge of district 12 is both familiar and unsurprising, but the meeting still leaves Maysilee coiled as a snake. Drusilla – with decades spent at the bottom of the ladder – was vicious and bitter. But this man – this man’s eyes are hungry, with a sharp gleam of avarice in them that sets Maysilee’s teeth on edge. She doesn’t know what mistake had seen him tossed into the dead end, but she has the feeling she might have to find out soon.

In the hours before the reaping, Lenore Dove takes her to the meadow. It’s quiet, this time of day, bathed in the golden morning sun, stretching wide around them. They make love on the grass, heedless of the yellowing blades getting caught in their hair. Afterwards, Maysilee lays with her head on Lenore Dove’s stomach, idly watching the wild weeds around them.

“Do you know which of these are poisonous?” she asks, absentmindedly. She rises on one elbow for a moment, reaching to touch a small white flower growing by Lenore Dove’s ankle. She doesn’t come to the meadow often, but maybe she should.

She feels Lenore Dove’s shrug more than she sees it. “I only know which ones are edible. Burdock would know, though. I can ask him if you want.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” she says, and lays back down. Or, if it hurts, it might be someone else.

Lenore Dove strokes a hand through her hair and begins to hum, her voice quiet enough that the sound remain only theirs and the meadow’s. It’s one of her favorite songs, something about a murderer and his lover dying hanging together from the same tree. It has a light rhythm to it that belays the grim words, making them somehow easier to understand. Maysilee wonders if Lenore Dove wishes she’d died with Haymitch; if she’ll take dying with Maysilee instead, the day she stepped too far; have her death as a consolation prize, just as she does her life.

Ugh. Reaping day makes her melancholy.

The fingers in her hair stall after the last verse, the meadow suddenly to quiet. Lenore Dove sighs above her.

“Come back to me, alright?” she asks quietly. “I know you don’t get a choice about going, when they come for you. But come back to me.”

Maysilee thinks of Saturnus Dovecote with his hungry eyes, the way he’d looked her up and down earlier in the square. Thinks of Plutarch and his webs, of whether this might be the year he catches her eye and asks her to lay her neck in the noose as Wiress and Mags once had. She turns her head, closing her eyes and leaning back against the soft cloth of Lenore Dove’s worn dress. Listens to the sound of her heartbeat under her cheek, trapped between her ribs like a bird in a box.

“I’ll try.”

Summer, 57 ADD

Wiress comes to the Capitol, that year, mentoring a boy for the first time since the quarter quell. Maysilee’s heard rumors – Victors gossip like everyone else, and Maysilee Donner had never been one to miss a sharp word in the crowd. But reality is gentler than the whispers, and much improved from the frantic, half-present person Maysilee had seen only briefly during her crowning. She seems scattered, her eyes never focusing for too long, but there’s nothing vague about the smile she gives Maysilee when they meet in the mentors’ room.

There is little time and little privacy during the games, but three and a half weeks in Wiress waves Maysilee over and leads her to a small and private sitting room in the compound she’d never been to before. Maysilee opens her mouth to speak, but Wiress raises a hand. Silent, she watches as the other woman carefully opens one of the couch cushions, fishing out a small metallic device and quickly turning it off.

“Would register as a bug,” she states. “Should take an hour…” she trails off, getting distracted by placing the mic back in place.

Maysilee doesn’t care. “Oh, thank you,” she groans, dropping herself onto the other cushion. “Sometimes I feel like if I have to say only nice obedient words until we’re done here, I’m going to drown myself in the public fountain.”

Wiress’s teeth flash in her smile. “It’s good to see you again, Maysilee. I’m glad – “ she looks away.

“You too.” Maysilee smiles, the most honest she has in a long time. “I’ve been wondering about you. I’m glad you’re still okay.”

“So am I.” Wiress tilts her head. “I should give you my phone number. Then you can call me, sometimes. The phone lines are tapped as well, of course, but still. Might be nice.”

“I will.” It’s been seven years since Maysilee had a friend, and suddenly she longs for it. “Though you’ll probably have to teach me how to work the thing. I’ve never even touched.”

“Oh, it’s not all that – “ a thought strikes her and she leans forward. “Oh, Maybe you can advise me on mentoring. You have a lot of experience, and it’s only my second time. I don’t know if I’m doing it right yet.”

“You did as right as anyone could by us,” Maysilee promises, the assurance that most mentors never get the chance to receive from those they send to their deaths. “I mean it. But I know how often it feels like nothing you do matters.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “God knows they never make it easy on us.”

Wires eyes linger on her thoughtfully. “You’ve got a new escort,” she comments. Maysilee had nearly forgotten this about her – how observant she was, how quick to track down problems.

Maysilee exhales, shoulders dropping. “He’s been putting his hands on Alice,” she says. “Would be putting his hands on me, too, if my reputation didn’t make him fear I’d cut them off and deal with the consequences. But she doesn’t have a reputation.” Only desperation, the kind that makes a girl do whatever it takes to get a better chance of survival. “Next year’s girl won’t, either. He’s testing the waters, and soon enough he’ll figure out we can’t make it sting.”

He doesn’t want to be there, but he’ll take everything he can get from them, in the meantime. Effie will try to lodge a complaint. Effie had tried to lodge a complaint about Drusilla three years straight, before coming to terms with the fact no one in charge cared how escorts behaved in a hopeless place like twelve.

“There are measures that can be tried.” Wiress grimaces, Maysilee’s mentor in the face of oblivion one more time. “But it’s a risk. If they think we overstep…” she trails off, either distracted or caught by a memory. Its hard to tell; Maysilee doesn’t know if Wiress has ever seen the inside of a white room like the one Maysilee still dreads, or if she’s always been clever enough to keep her crazy nice and quiet.

Eventually she refocuses. “I’ll try to ask Lever. She’d been here almost since the beginning. The older Victors can have a lot of pull, even here, after…”

“Must be useful,” Maysilee can’t help the edge of envy sneaking into her voice. “Having that sort of back up.”

Wiress’ eyes focus on her, dark and suddenly sad.

“I’m sorry you’re the only one,” she says, and Maysilee thinks briefly of Lucy Gray’s headstone, out in the woods. “Beetee has been looking after me, these last few years, helping me deal with the  - you know. Everything.” She waves a hand, and then adds, in a sort of thoughtless, glass-sharp observation that Maysilee is quickly coming to associate with her: “I guess I am only four years older than Ampert was. And his wife left him, you know. Said she had to, for the baby. So I’m replacement gears.”

Maysilee likes Wiress’ bluntness. She may be broken, but at least she’s true. It makes her easier to talk to.

“I’ve been sleeping with Haymitch’s girlfriend,” she offers in return. “Almost two years, now.”

The words hang in the room for a moment. Wiress blinks.

“Is she nice?”

Maysilee thinks of Lenore Dove’s hand in her hair; of her harsh steel and burning eyes; of the soft and bleary smile she turns to Maysilee on late mornings.

“Sometimes,” she says.

Wiress smiles. “Like you, then.” She thinks for a moment. “Dead people don’t have girlfriends, though, I don’t think.”

“Neither do women,” Maysilee points out dryly. She’s always figured that’s why her and Lenore Dove’s arrangement work

Wiress seems amused. “I’ll make sure to say that loudly during our phone calls.”

The sound of hurried, heeled footsteps in the hallway makes them both fall immediately silent. Wiress’ fingers close around Maysilee’s wrist, tight as a vice. They wait, tense, until the door is suddenly pushed open.

“There you are!” Effie bursts into the room, hair frazzled. “Oh, I’ve been scouring the whole compound searching – Oh, miss Wiress. I’m sorry to startle you.”

Her voice becomes less loud on the last word, her determined stomping toward Maysilee pausing at Wiress’ wide-eyed flinch. Where many of the Capitol employees are impatient, Effie is strangely gentle with Wiress – with all the mentors they work with on whom the scars of victory are unignorable. It makes Maysilee like her, when other things make her near-unbearable.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation,” she apologizes. “But Maysilee, we need you right now, Mrs. Whimsiwick might be willing to invest some money into Alice, and you have to look over the contract if we hope to get it transferred today – “

And whatever they don’t transfer today is unlikely to have a receiver tomorrow. Alice has been doing alright for herself, far better than her male counterpart, who’d been killed within the second day. But she’s alone, her only ally dead, and she has run out of food two days ago.

“How much are we talking here?”

Effie tells her the number. Beside her, Wiress exhales sharply. Wiress’ girl is already dead.

“That might not be enough even for a loaf of bread, at this stage.” And a loaf of bread won’t win the games for anyone.

Effie closes her eyes. “I know,” she says. “But we gotta try, right?”

There are shadows in her eyes, these days, during the games. Her right excitement is real on reaping mornings, but as soon as the canon fires, her smiles grow feeble; her polished nails are always bitten to the quick. On the nights their tributes die, she and Maysilee always sit together in silence. And then when it’s over she claps her hands and shakes it all away; she’s still the bright-eyed young woman who had swooped to their rescue with a rack of formalwear, all those years ago.

For that, too, Maysilee loves her. Sometimes she likes to think someday, she and Effie might even understand each other.

She takes Effie’s hand, her other wrist still clasped by Wiress, who’d seemingly forgotten it was there.

“We gotta try,” she agrees.

They get back to work.

Summer, 58 ADD

When Maysilee comes back to the Capitol, the year after, she comes on a different mission.

She tries, still, in the beginning, because they gotta try. But she knows, pretty early on, that they aren’t going to make it. And she has learned much of how to conserve her recourses. And so she focuses her efforts on Saturnus Dovecote.

Last year she was not prepared, her promise to Lenore Dove keeping her from simply shoving him out of the train and hoping it’ll look like an accident.

This year she had time. To consider her options, weigh her risks. To speak to Plutarch, who has been playing this game for a long time, who knows the steps to be taken, the prices to be paid. At the end of the day, it is not that complicated at all.

She’s never been much for playing nice, but she does her best, when he comes off the train; smiles her prettiest smile; says nothing as he harasses Mila, as he had Alice before. And the day after the games begin, she accompanies him to an opening party. She lets him buy her a drink, tolerates his wandering hands. Empties the vial handed to her by an Evox that morning into his wine as he looks away. It would resemble a sudden illness, Plutarch had told her. A sudden and severe allergic reaction to some unknown compound he must have encountered at a watch party somewhere. You don’t know what they’ve been using, these days.

At the end of the evening, she lets him kiss her before begging off and slipping from his grasp, spending an hour carefully washing her mouth after for traces of the poison.

The next morning he is there, speaking to sponsors, but by the evening he begs off. The next day, he does not appear at all. Effie keeps her updated on his condition, torn between concern and guilty relief.

He dies a day before the games end. Attending the victory ball alone, Maysilee feels like a Victor; as she had not in the one held in her honour, and far more than the poor boy trembling under the attention and the crown.

She leans against the wall, the vicious satisfaction in her breast dimming slightly at a familiar pang of bitterness as she watches the glimmering, laughing crowd. At least two of the dancers, she recognizes, are wearing dresses made by her hand. Effie tells her a Mad Maysilee design is considered a wild, risqué styling choice, one some delight in. She assumes wearing it to a victory party must be charmingly bold.

They were stupid children, she and Haymitch, promising each other to sow destruction if they got out. As though the Capitol was not master of making their fury and violence into a shining brand; a fashion statement.

A server pauses by her elbow. “Miss Donner. You are expected in the private room.”

Maysilee lowers her wine glass. “By whom?”

The server tips his head subtly to the side. Maysilee follows the movement, and sees president Snow leaving the ballroom through a semi-hidden door.

Blood slowly growing cold in her veins, Maysilee turns to follow him. It has been eight years since the last time she was deemed worthy of the president’s time. She thinks of the report she’d passed to Plutarch three days ago, detailing shipping timetables from the Capitol and back. They don’t speak of where it’s going, but she’s got a pretty good idea.

Whether or not she’s right, it seems she may be about to die for the answer.

When she enters the room, Snow is already sitting at the desk. He gestures for her to sit as though this is a scheduled meeting.

Maysilee does. Then she waits impassively for him to start, not bothering with pleasantries.

After a moment, he does. “I assume you must have heard by now that your district’s escort has passed away this morning.”

Oh. Not Plutarch’s plots after all, then. “I’ve heard. Very sudden, though I can’t say I liked him.” She leans back, trying to keep her face blank. “Are we getting a replacement already? I didn’t know the president handled things like that himself.”

He flicks a hand. “That would be managed later. It is the circumstances of his death that concern me, you see. He died of a violent reaction to a foreign substance. I don’t suppose you know where he might have contracted such a dangerous substance?”

Maysilee shrugs. “The man attended a lot of parties. I didn’t follow his schedule, as long as he showed up for work.”

The president sighs. “I’m going to be very clear here. I did not care for Saturnus Dovecote. He was an idiot, a failure, and a stain on his family’s name. But there are those who would miss him – and they are worth twenty of you, Miss Donner, every one.” He leans forward slightly. “There are certain games that are permitted to citizens alone, miss Donner. District 12 residents should not mistake an invitation to the party for an invitation to overreach.”

“Twelve girls are worth nothing to you, huh? You don’t care what happens with them?” She thinks of the grave in the woods, where she and Lenore Dove have made a habit of visiting. She smiles at Snow, the expression sharp and mean and familiar on her face. “I know where she went, you know. Your Covey girl.”

His eyes are cold and empty. “If I am displeased with your conduct again,” he says precisely. “You will never know where yours did.”

It’s like a glass of ice water poured down her spine. Distantly, Maysilee feels her smile grow skeletal.

The president tilts his head. “You didn’t think I didn’t know about her, did you?”

But she has, she realizes. In some place in the back of her mind, she had allowed herself to believe that the undefined nature of her relationship with Lenore Dove would render it beneath notice, as well. As though the fact her official lodging was still listed in the Seam meant no eyes had noticed them.

It has been years. He could have killed her any time, as easy as he did everyone else Maysilee has ever loved.  He simply hadn’t bothered, until he started thinking she may be a problem once again.

It’s the Capitol version of mercy in its own way, she realizes. Her acts of rebellion made meaningless even in the eyes of those who would punish them. No more desolate isolation for Maysilee Donner, who tried to paint her own poster. Just the same leash they put around the neck of every Victor, of every soul in this forsaken land.

She meets his eyes, knows he sees the understanding in her own. He looks amused, a bit; mostly bored, as though he’d eager to get to his next appointment.

She thinks: he’s a middle-aged man in a suit.

She thinks: I’m stronger than him. There are three possible weapons on this desk. Grab him by the tie, smash his head into the desk twice, then jam the pen into his eye. It will be over within a minute. He will be dead quicker than Saturnus was.

Maysilee isn’t the naïve girl she’d been coming out of the arena. She knows it will not be enough.

He says: “I don’t want any more problems from you, Maysilee Donner. In fact, I would rather forget you exist. Can you do this for me, Miss Donner?”

Maysilee bites the inside of her mouth until she tastes blood, and feels the chain settle around her throat. “Yes, president Snow.”

When she gets home, she walks up to her workroom and opens the desk drawer. There’s a small bottle there, one she had considered bringing with her to the Capitol, before realizing how easily its content could be traced.

In the arena, poison-making had been easy – it could be pulled from anything: the trees, the grass, the rain. The real world is different, kinder. But Burdock had taught Lenore Dove what the right plants looked like, and she had taught Maysilee, in turn. They stung her fingers as she picked them, but she found enough to make the mix and bottle it for a rainy day.

She turns it between her fingers now, watching the way the late afternoon light fractures through the glass. The floor creaks by the doorway, but she doesn’t turn. She knows who it is.

She thinks, for a moment, of offering the bottle to Lenore Dove. To drink together from the same cup, as married couples do. Where I told you to run, so we both be free.

She doesn’t. Haymitch would never forgive her. Nor would Wyatt, or Lou Lou, or Wellie, or Kerna – thirty-one dead Newcomers, so Maysilee Donner could be the one to come home.

Instead she says: “Do you still have those gumdrops?”

They go to the meadow together. They take the geese with them. Letting them wonder around and chase away anyone else who might’ve come there. It’s quiet, though, no one watching but a few birds who’d wandered over from the woods. The summer-dried weeds are golden in the fading light, the season’s last flowers still bright between them. It used to remind Maysilee of the arena, but these days it mostly reminds her of long afternoons with Lenore Dove, sprawled together in the grass.

They sit down on a log together, and Maysilee tells her of the party, and the conversation, and the threat.

Lenore Dove’s face tightens throughout it. When Maysilee finishes talking, she grabs her hand.

“We should run. Run like Lucy Gray. He never got her. He won’t get us either.”

Maysilee pulls away, turning to look at her. “And live like animals in the woods? Let them have this world? It isn’t theirs.”

Lenore Dove narrows her eyes at her. “Don’t tell me you intend for us to live with their knives against our throats for the rest of our lives,” she says. “Because I won’t believe you.”

Maysilee shakes her head. “Not for the rest of our lives.” She thinks, again, of the information passed to Plutarch, that the president didn’t mention. Didn’t know about at all. Of Wiress and Beetee and Mags, still waiting in the wings. Someone like you but luckier, someday. “Just until we get the chance to do something that will matter.”

Lenore Dove watches her face. Then she glances down, at the small, yellowing paper bag resting between them. She smiles, crooked and a bit sad, and nods her assent.

“To a better future, then,” she says, softly, and opens the bag.

The gumdrops taste terrible, calcified and too-sweet. Their colors are still bright, though, reds and greens and blues spilling into their palms. Maysilee thinks of Merilee’s hands mixing the sugar and the artificial dye in the pot; of her father, bent over the packing station; of her mother standing behind the counter, watching the store like a queen over her kingdom. Tastes the memory, and swallows it down.

Lenore Dove starts singing softly, something old and bittersweet Maysilee thinks she’d heard in funerals, before. Down in the Seam, they’ll be burying Mila and Adam now. It’s a good weather for goodbyes.

'll be along
When I've finished my song,
When I've shut down the band,
When I've played out my hand,
When I've paid all my debts,
When I have no regrets,
Right here in
The old therebefore’

Maysilee leans back, letting the words wash over her as she watches the houses at the edge of the meadow, windows lighting up one by one. Asterid’s house is one of them, she thinks, though she’s never been to visit. Her baby must already be crawling. Maybe Maysilee should make her a dress. She had been staying away, but really what’s the difference, one more or one less leash around her throat? Might as well get to hold a baby. Might as well get to see a friend.

“I love you,” she says; there’s a sharp inhale to her left. “I know we don’t talk about this, mostly. But I want you to know.”

“Me too,” Lenore Dove whispers. Her fingers, warm and familiar, slide between Maysilee’s own, and she holds them. “I love you like All – I love you too.”

The geese honk around them. They eat the gumdrops until there are none left, and then share a disgustingly sweet kiss, both of their mouths stained blue and green; They leave the empty paper bag in the grass. Afterward, Lenore Dove lays her head on Maysilee’s shoulder. They watch the sunset together.