Chapter Text
Recommended listening for this chapter:
As It Was by Hozier
“Maisie Cartwright!”
The name was delivered with perfect, cheery, Capitolite inflection.
The name hangs in the air like coal dust, a death knell for a child known by everyone in the district.
The kind of loss that hits everyone, low, aching, and stinging in the gut before she’s even dead.
Because that’s what the Games meant.
They meant two, too-small pine boxes and a quiet train ride.
They meant twin funerals and sad, quiet mourners because they were too tired to resist anymore.
Maisie was twelve as of the day before, and looked far younger than that, as a great many children in 12 did.
Too-young in the hunger panged frame, and too old in the eyes from seeing too much and living through conditions no one should endure, much less a child.
All in all, she looked to be about six.
Years of starving and neglect would do that.
Her father had died in the mines when she was four, Cardew Cartwright.
Cardy was a friend to everyone in the district and an enemy to none, except that wasn’t, precisely speaking, true.
He was a hard worker, a good man - truly, a good man, but unfortunately for Maylee, his wife, and Maisie, his young daughter, Cardew Cartwright was a miner by day, and a rebel by night.
Rebels never made it far in District 12.
Never further than a short drop and a sudden stop when they were caught outright, or informed on.
Cardew kept his hands clean just enough to not be implicated outright and in the red.
But it was enough.
Enough that the peacekeepers and the Capitol knew his name.
Enough for an ‘accidental’ cave in, in the mines.
And enough to leave poor Maylee and their daughter Maisie with less than they already had, which was already barely scraping by.
Maylee had already taken in all the washing she could, inheriting all the business from poor Willamae Abernathy several years back (God rest her soul), but it wasn’t enough.
Maisie was a sickly child, barely alive as it was.
And medicine in 12 was expensive. More expensive than food, more than rent.
Poor little Maisie, with her sallow skin and willowy Seam build, her eyes in hollows, and the skin stretched tight over her bones.
She was beyond even Asterid Everdeen’s help, though she did try with all her might.
Asterid was a kind woman, and Burdock supplemented all her plant knowledge with his own in hopes of helping little Maisie.
Cardy and Burdock had been friends since birth, just like Hay-
No.
No one talked about him. Or brought him up.
Not anymore.
But Burdock had loved Cardy. Had grown up in the Seam next door to Maylee, and loved her like a sister.
Even though she was a sickly thing, Maisie was an absolute treasure in 12.
She wanted to help everyone, even the drunk Victor when he dropped a bottle or lost hold of one of his bags, here came little Maisie, trotting over to help him.
Even the lousy drunk couldn’t help but give a begrudging smile.
She was a sweet kid.
She helped the other children in school, delivered her mother’s laundry, asked Otho Mellark to feed his pigs for him, fed the geese in the pond, anything to help anyone.
And she loved playing with little Katniss when she went for her visits to the Everdeens to get checked over.
It was a shame.
Sobs choked out across the courtyard.
Men.
Women.
Other children.
Even the peacekeepers, for once, looked ashen and ashamed.
No one wanted the albatross of having their name pulled from that bowl.
But as a district, their hearts ached.
There was no denying it.
Maisie Cartwright would die in that
arena.
If she even lived long enough to see it.
Little Maisie paled more than should have been possible, fidgeted with one of her braided pigtails - each tied off with a little red ribbon, the finest things she owned, and took shaky steps toward the stage.
Before she could manage but a few jerked movements, a voice rang out, from the older girls, from the back.
“I volunteer!”
There wasn’t a sound in the suffocating heat but the hum of cicadas.
The tension in the air pulled tight as a string, the cicadas roared as if they felt it, too.
Every member of District 12 took a collective breath and held it.
People in 12 did not volunteer.
Everyone’s bad luck was their own. Everyone was just trying to survive to the next reaping.
But the voice rang again, louder this time, in a drawl with a twang sweet as honey.
“I volunteer as tribute!”
Not a shout of desperation, not a pained screech of salvation or a shouted plea - just a statement.
And that was the oddest thing of all.
Everyone turned and stared at her, even Haymitch, already completely soused to the gills, sobered for a moment - sweet little Maisie completely forgotten in favor of the one who had stayed her execution with a call to Effie Trinket as if she were catching the attention of an acquaintance and not volunteering to be slaughtered, live on television.
Ophelia Frost Baird.
Well-known around 12.
A Covey girl.
People in 12 did not volunteer, as a rule.
The Covey, especially, did not.
She walked to the stage with calm and grace very out of character for a tribute of District 12. Very out of character for anyone outside of The Capitol or the Career districts, with their pride and aplomb.
She was levelheaded - a clarity in her eyes that Haymitch found, quite frankly, jarring.
But he couldn’t seem to look away from the odd girl. Something about her was screaming, shouting at him to keep his eyes on her, to watch her.
Everyone knew about the new batch of Covey that had come in, or rather that had been “brought in” by the peacekeepers, when Haymitch and his friends were children.
Atlas Frost Baird - her father - had been a young man, handsome and stout and entirely un-district looking.
He had dark curls, aristocratic cheekbones, and dark, Covey eyes. He sang like a bird, could charm anyone but the hangman, and he had a smile like the devil.
Of course he hadn’t been district-looking.
He wasn’t district, until he had been made district.
The exact terms of their arrival were…unknown.
But the rumors said (and the rumors in 12 were, unfortunately, rarely wrong) that a band of Covey simply arrived at the fences, found their way through it, and were rounded up by peacekeepers to be brought to the justice building for “processing”, which in the nicest way possible stated that they were questioned, the adults roughed up a bit, threatened profusely, and then forced into district citizenship after begrudgingly buying the story that they were simply on their own and hadn’t known about Panem at all, they were simply looking for somewhere to live and survive.
Haymitch had never bought a word of it, something in the story always rang a bit hollow, even though Lenore Dove had always corroborated the story of her cousins. To Haymitch, it never seemed quite right.
No one in their right minds came to the districts and chose a life here over freedom.
No one gave up freedom without an ulterior motive.
No one chose this life.
And now, standing on the stage before him as his tribute, was one of the last remaining Covey, one of the ones from beyond the fences.
And she had volunteered, no less.
He just knew this was one giant cosmic joke.
Fate playing with him and forcing his attending out of his booze-addled fog.
A Covey volunteering for life in a cage, if there was any life left to be had at all.
He never could have predicted this in the history of never-ever.
He snorted, loudly, looking to all around him like a madman, or perhaps precisely like the unstable drunk he was.
Effie fixed him with a scathing, warning glare. Probably for ruining such a momentous occasion in the history of the games.
Then, with effortless brightness, turned to the new tribute between them on the stage with a cheery grin.
“Hello, there! Why you certainly are something, aren’t you? My, you’re District 12’s very first volunteer! What’s your name, darling girl?”
“Ophelia Frost Baird,” the girl replied evenly - hell, Haymitch thought, she was downright pleasant.
“Ophelia Frost Baird,” Effie echoed, stretching her name with awe.
“What an interesting name! And look at this dress, why, I’ve never seen one in 12 like it!”
Effie had never paid much attention to the Covey, or what was left of them, Haymitch wasn’t even sure she even knew who the Covey were, but the Covey certainly didn’t dress like that anymore.
Ophelia Frost wore a very old dress.
It had been mended, and mended again, but it was something truly to behold. She wore a deep, purple-burgundy corset, with snakes and flowers illustrated in intricate black lines like a tattoo on purple leather.
The dress was a brilliant scarlet from sleeve to bust and to the top row of diamond shaped tulle on the skirt, and then it had been dyed darker and darker, row by row, from scarlet, to crimson, to burgundy, to a deep aubergine just past her knees. Her boots were old as well, very old, and the uppers had been dyed to match the burgundy of her dress, while the lower leather was a yellowed cognac color.
The oddest piece, in Haymitch’s opinion, was the silk shawl she wore around her arms.
No one wore more layers than they had to on reaping day, in the middle of summer and the sweltering, sticky heat.
But she held the silk shawl around her like armour, like a lost girl clinging to security and wandering through a terrible story.
It was dyed similarly to the dress. A deep amber yellow at either end with a golden fringe and meeting in the same sickly burgundy in the middle like it had been held aloft at both ends and steeped in blood.
She was an odd girl, that was for sure.
But then, the Covey usually were a little peculiar to the district folk.
But Effie, oh, Effie was positively eating every bit of her up. Haymitch did his best to drown out her jabberjaying over the girl that was playing on his hangover.
“Why, I think you might be the best dressed in the district! My, my, we have an interesting one this year, do we not?” She grinned and prompted the crowd.
Not a soul reacted. They simply stared.
“And the girl you volunteered for, I’d bet my hat you know her! Is she your sister? A friend?”
For the record, it was a hideously ugly hat made of teal sequins and peacock feathers.
Ophelia Frost set dark, moon-like eyes on Effie Trinket, meeting her eyes for the first time, and Haymitch swore he witnessed the moment Effie fell absolutely in love with the girl.
“Why, everybody knows Maisie,” she replied with a small warm smile, charming Effie Trinket down to the cockles of her sequined heart. “She’s like a little sister to everyone. I’ve known her all her life.”
“Oh, how darling of you, to protect her, to be her champion in the games!”
“Well, I’ve always wanted to visit The Capitol, figured now was as good a time as any,” the girl answered with a demure shrug and a shy laugh, as if she was going on a vacation instead of into the den of nightmares that haunted every victor until their deaths.
Haymitch’s eyes snapped to her, then, and something uneasy settled in his gut.
He took in her bruise colored dress and shoes that were older than Panem, her long, dark golden hair that flickered with reds and bronzes in the sun like a flame, and the shape of her jaw that reminded him of someone that he couldn’t quite place but found no comfort in trying to recall.
She looked like a thing of nature, a goddess from one of the old tales Ma used to tell him and Sid, the ones with fairies in the woods that made you fall in love and lose years like days, in the blink of an eye.
Ophelia Frost, with her name like ice and her appearance like fire, and a voice sweeter than it had any right to be while walking to her violent, bloody death.
There were many things that made him unsure about her.
One thing was absolutely certain, though, he was going to find out exactly what Ophelia Frost was playing at, and he absolutely, positively, could not let Plutarch Heavensbee meet her.