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It happened fifteen years ago.
She was with a group of her girlfriends after their final week at University, sitting in the living room of one of their expensive penthouses, laughing and sharing a bottle of wine. Their long acrylic nails brushed against the carved glasses, the rims stained with remnants of brightly colored lipstick.
“In honor of our new chapter,” one of her friends had proposed to the group, her eyes watering with unshed tears for their childhoods and their home.
They had packed up and left fifteen minutes later.
Effie remembered it hurting, a lot.
She had laid face down on the black leather bed, pinching her face together in pain as her friends held her hands, giving her words of encouragement. She remembered the buzzing of the pen, and how her body would involuntarily twitch whenever the spiky haired man doing the job would hit a particularly sensitive spot of her skin.
While some girls chose their arms or chests for their symbols (the wrist being the most popular option), Effie asked for her’s to be on the back of her left shoulder blade. That way it wouldn’t be visible all of the time, but she could expose it whenever she felt the urge to make a statement. If there was one thing Effie Trinket loved, it was making a statement.
They took a photo together that night with their new tattoos, posing in their penthouse with the blinding lights of the Capitol behind them, reflected on their pristine white teeth.
The spread-winged birds sat perched upon the collection of pointy-tipped arrows on their bodies, the black ink marking the emblem of the Capitol forever on their skin.
Effie used to look at the mark and her eyes would well up with tears of happiness. She loved her country, she loved her city, and she loved her friends. To her, that Capitol symbol meant that she would always have a home, and have someplace to go when she needed it most, regardless of what her new life brought her.
Now, Effie couldn’t bring herself to look at the ink at all, still as dark as the day it implanted into her skin. If she caught as much of a glimpse of a wing in a mirror, her stomach would knot painfully, and she would turn her head around, quickly leaving the presence of her reflection.
Her home , which tortured and abused her and left her nothing but the shell of her former self. Her home, which made her believe that she was a hero for sentencing innocent children to their deaths. Her home, which killed her family and friends, and took things from them that they could never get back.
Cinna, Portia, Finnick, Primrose, Chaff, Seeder, Rue, Cecelia, Wiress, Gloss, Cashmere…
Only a few of the tens of thousands of people that now lay dead because of the people that she thought were the beacons of justice and grace. The people she used to love.
That tattoo on her back was not only a marker of the government that had terrorized the districts for years, but also for the monster that she used to be. That she still was.
She remembered the peace keepers laughing as they whipped her naked back, her tears decorating the cold floor of the Tribute Center beneath her with every hit.
“Thought that a tattoo would save you, rebel slut?”
They would bark, laughing as her sobs caused flecks of blood to fall from her face down to beneath her bare knees.
One particularly bad night a few weeks after she had arrived in District 12, Haymitch had caught her in the bathroom with a knife in hand, a slow trickle of blood falling from where she had begun to dig the mark out of her skin.
That had ended in a screaming match, which subsequently resulted in Effie breaking down onto the floor, and Haymitch cradling her in his arms until the rays of morning came up on their house.
The first time Haymitch had seen the symbol, he hadn’t said anything about it, but Effie could see how his demeanor changed the second his hand landed on the soft flesh. It had been during the 72nd Hunger Games, when they had ended up tangled together in Haymitch’s bed after the Sponsor’s dinner. She had been straddled on his thighs, naked albeit for the pink lace bra wrapped around her breasts. He had put a hand on her shoulder, pushing her down next to him, when he caught a glimpse of the black ink. He had stopped, and Effie could see his jaw set as he took in the ink in her flesh. She had forced her lips back onto his after only a minute, unable to face his scrutiny. They never mentioned it after that. But she could see his reaction every time it was revealed, and every time was the same.
She knew that the doctors who treated her after her torture in 13 must have seen it too, but, much to their credit, none of them said a word. With how hard Haymitch and Plutarch had to fight for her life against Coin, she had no doubt that the knowledge of her tattoo being made public would have ended in her immediate execution. From there, she was too scared to ask anyone to remove it, in fear that they would report her to the authorities for Capitol allegiance. Despite the permanent scars from Capitol weapons that now lay next to it, the symbol itself was enough to sign her death warrant.
Then she had gone to 12, and there was surely nobody there who would be able to do it, and the thought of going back to the Capitol was too horrendous to even think of. Henceforth, how she ended up in the bathroom with the knife in hand. But when that failed, she resorted to trying to think of little of it as possible.
Sex was already so non-existent between them as every unexpected touch sent Effie back into the torment of the Capitol cells, that Haymitch had no need to see the tattoo. So neither did she.
But she knew.
Months went by from her arrival in 12, and slowly, Effie grew more accustomed to her new life. She still startled at unexpected noises, but it didn’t send her into the full panic attacks that it would have just weeks before. She had allowed Haymitch to see her fully naked for the first time since the night before the Quarter Quell about a year into their cohabitation, and much to her surprise, he didn’t laugh. He didn’t mock her as she expected, nor tell her how much uglier she had gotten. Instead, his eyes welled up with tears that he desperately tried to hold back. His hands lingered over her scars, not wanting to scare her by touching her but also unable to look away.
He didn’t bat an eye at the tattoo that time. He had a stronger reaction to the scarring the whip left on her skin than the ink itself. That night he had held her in their bed, his hands running down her long arms.
She didn’t know how, but before she could comprehend it, they were making out. She had started it, that she knew. She had pushed his hesitancy aside with her nipping teeth and hard breath, and soon enough it felt like it used to. Soft moans mixed with grunts and the feeling of skin against skin, and she lost herself in the feel of him.
Normally sex between them was anything but loving, but all of the terror that the war had brought seemed to have changed that. They still hadn’t said the words out loud, but if Haymitch’s careful worship of each of her scars wasn’t love enough, then she didn’t know what was.
For the first time, he didn’t scoff at her tattoo. He looked her in the eye, and lowered his head down to place a kiss in the center of the eagle, where a new scar from her own knife now sat next to it.
Effie felt a tear slip from her eye and Haymitch quickly brushed it away with his thumbs, cradling her face in between his hands.
“You’re better than all of them Effie. Don’t let that shit define you, okay?”
She answered with a bruising kiss.
She had gotten the idea a week after that.
She finally acted on it two years later.
When she told Haymitch of her plan, he had been sure that she was losing her mind.
“No. No way am I letting you do that alone!” he had told her in a voice that deterred all argument. But Effie was not like all people.
“This is not for you to decide, Haymitch. I’m going. I’m doing it.”
He was standing in the doorway between their kitchen and living room, his chest rising and falling painfully fast as she stood in front of him with her hands on her hips.
“If you think your flashbacks are bad now, they’re just gonna get ten times worse if you do that shit. Why the fuck do you want to go back?”
“I need to Haymitch, it’s my home. I don’t expect you to understand-”
“Damn well I don’t understand,” he cut her off, his voice a small bit away from a shout.
She didn’t tell him about her real intentions. If she told him, she was scared that he would insist on coming along, on glaring at the artist if Effie showed even a morsel of pain as he tended to do at every doctor appointment she went to. She didn’t want him there to hold her hand. This was solely for herself. She needed to do this alone.
They didn’t talk to each other for the next day and a half. He wasn’t in bed when Effie turned in for the night, nor when she woke up the next morning.
She was shocked when Haymitch had met her at the door that afternoon, his sharp gaze a silent insistence that he would be joining her to the station. They walked in silence, Haymitch staring fixedly in front of him underneath his heavy brown coat, his eyes unreadable. Effie tugged her sweater sleeves down uncomfortably every few minutes, feeling more exposed than she had in a long while.
“Call me when you get there,” Haymitch’s breath brustled her blonde hair as he kissed her forehead in farewell.
“I will.”
She managed to save her tears until she was safely inside the cover of the empty train, collapsing into her seat as she buried her bare face in between her hands. Her plain nails, dull clothes, and naked face, on their way to the Capitol.
In only ten hours, Effie was shut inside of her old apartment. She couldn’t bear to make it further inside than the entranceway. The fluffy carpets and colorful walls seemed to mock the plain woman standing in its doorway, pressing in on her until she felt like she wanted to run away from her skin itself.
She slept on her bathroom floor that night, not even taking a step inside her bedroom before leaving for good, determined to give the deeds to the first person she saw on the street and never think about it again. She didn’t even pay for it anymore. Nobody wanted to live in the abandoned old Capitol homes. The Capitol citizens found the vacant city blocks too depressing, and the districts wanted to touch the least amount of Capitol property as possible.
She couldn’t say she blamed them as she hurried down her street for the last time, the shadow of the Tribute Center towering above her.
The actual appointment took only an hour. She had been lucky to get in contact with her old friend, his parlor long shut down, but his pen still ready to go in his basement. They barely exchanged a word as he twisted around the ink on her skin, turning one design to another. Effie caught the glimpse of resentment in his eyes as she handed him the slip of paper with her request. She didn’t want to push her luck.
She barely flinched that time as the needle punctured her skin repeatedly, only twitching when it got a little too close to her tattoo’s neighboring scars for comfort.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” was all Effie said as her old friend’s eyes lingered on the puckered skin of where she had been lashed. Thankfully, he obliged.
That time, when Effie looked at her back in the mirror, she did not run away. Her eyes filled with tears, but not ones of pain. For the first time in a long time, she caught a glimpse of her old self. She swore that her eyes shone for a moment as she took in the black lines.
She returned back to 12 that night. It was obvious by Haymitch’s trepidation as she got off the train that he was expecting Effie to be much less well than she was, but she was positively beaming as she jumped into his arms.
“I missed you,” she sighed as he wrapped his arms around her, his hand resting over her sensitive back where the mockingjay now lay, forever inked into her skin.
“I missed you too, sweetheart.”
Effie swore that she could feel the bird spread its wings in victory as she leaned in for a searing kiss.
She no longer loved her country, nor her city. But she loved her family, her true family. And for her, that was enough.