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[…] and when I returned down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle was perched on the jag of a burnt pine, insolent and gorged […] the sky was merciless blue, and the hills merciless black, the sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
are you, are you coming to the tree?
where i told you to run, so we’d both be free. strange things did happen
here no stranger would it be. if we met at midnight in
THE HANGING TREE.
( credit: unseenmockingjay. )
✰:
There’s a soft murmur of apology as she pushes herself back up to her feet, like a fawn just learning to walk. There are moments when her muscles betray her and her limbs give way to the FORCE of GRAVITY and she’s left sprawled out on the floor. Less frequent now, but she silently berates her body for its inability to remain upright. ❝ I can’t —– my legs are…. ❞ TIRED, she had meant to say tired, but the word doesn’t quite make it out into the open air.
it is a frightening thing to have your body betray you. it is a distressing realisation to know how fragile you really are. madge is no stranger to her body failing her. she carries its flawed architecture like a home on cracked foundation. she walks unsteady, slow, one hand on the wall, another on her heart. she is shattered glass pieced together, and splintered bone feels like nails in her lungs.
madge is no stranger to her body failing her, and she cannot help but find sisterhood in the girl before her. annie’s loss of balance rips her from reverie, and madge sets down her thoughts as she lowers herself to the floor. ❛ does anything hurt? ❜
❀:
❝ i said to gale that i could give you the strawberries today. all by myself. he’s here, yeah, just back down by the gate. ❞
if you cannot tell by the feathered smile, she is thoroughly pleased by this development. anyone is better than gale hawthorne on her doorstep, including a smaller one. ❛ it’s posy, isn’t it? ❜ madge steps aside, nudging the door open a little wider with her hip. ❛ give me just a moment to get the money. ❜
✰:
‘ I’m going to the grocery store, not a beauty pageant. ’ there’s a stark look about her, disheveled and mussed in all the right ways. did she look like she was going somewhere important? the distressed button down and worn jeans said otherwise. ‘ get up, the fridge is empty. ’
there is a pregnant pause at the tail end of aylen's demand where madge mulls it over. she could pull the blanket tighter around her, a threadbare shield against responsibility. she could shift in her seat until her back is presented and her book returns to full view. she could make it very clear that she is not to be ordered about . . .
but she won't. she couldn't. reliable to a fault and loathe to champion inconvenience, madge is a slave to her own values. so she tosses the blanket aside and she turns to face aylen and she closes her book around her ring finger ( a temporary bookmark until she reaches her room ).
❛ i'm only doing this because you always buy the wrong toadstools. ❜ no comment is made on her trouserless person. no shame is displayed for her granny panties and frumpy shirt. aylen, she thinks, is hardly dressed better.
❒:
peeta is tired, and it’s not the kind of tired a quick nap in his makeshift little bed will fix ; he’s tired of nights like these, where he pushes his food ( more than most people here have for days, he thinks ) around on his plate, watches his mother with cautious eyes. look close & fear lies underneath. he knows the usual routine. eat too much & he won’t look decent, eat too little and he’ll appear ungrateful – there’s a fine line between decency & its opposite and, according to his mother, he doesn’t know where it stands. tonight he’s too lost in his own thoughts & accidentally tips a cup full of water. it spills, clatters against the rim of a beautiful plate – soon thereafter there’s the cold splash of trickling water against his shirt & pants, quick to drench the gray fabric black. his mother makes a snide, disappointed noise – a quick remark, something along the lines of embarrassing children, disappointing children – and urges him to clean himself up. little peeta’s face has turned a deep shade of red and he’s nearly stumbling over his own feet when he pushes out his chair, grabs the water-soaked plate with trembling hands, and exits the room.
if peeta hoped to make it through the night with as few eyes upon him as possible, he was to be disappointed. clumsiness is not a celebrated quality for people of privilege, and it is only natural that a display of it be uncomfortably acknowledged.
the undersees, to their credit, are not so quick to mirror mrs. mellark's reaction. it is only water, mr. undersee laughs, waving a hand as if to dismiss the whole situation. no harm done. mrs. undersee is quieter. she presses her fingers up against madge's elbow and murmurs for her to go help. get him a towel. be a good hostess.
madge is quick to nod, quick to stand, and quick to leave. she embraces her pardon from dinner. she silently thanks peeta for the excuse to escape the dining room. why the adults insist upon children to eat quietly around them, she will never understand. it would be better to confine these sort of dinner parties to the adults.
drink your wine and leave me be.
❛ peeta? ❜ his name is cut in two by the whine of the kitchen door beneath her hand. madge clears her throat and continues after it clicks closed behind her. ❛ i’ll get you a towel. ❜
a pause. the color of his face reminds her of strawberries, and she is quickly ashamed of her previous joy. an excuse that did not end in his embarrassment would have been preferable. ❛ don't worry about it. i spill things all the time. we've had to replace the tablecloth a bunch of times. ❜
Bukowski. (via stealthesunshine)
Imogen Poots Gifs [243/∞]
❛ if it involves dressing up, you can count me out. ❜ if she were entirely honest, madge might have specified that she was not up for anything that involved putting on pants or looking presentable. years of polished hair and straight laces has left her entirely unenthused..
➳:
‘ Depends what you count as frivolous. ‘ A seeming kindness that in fact is comment on a reality that was harshly and recently realised. It isn’t like Katniss could really refute Madge’s point without it being forced, admittedly. But then again, what is the difference between needless activity and full living ? And how would she know ? Before the Games, Katniss would have counted dresses, excess food and unproductive hobbies as pointless and, to varying degrees, contemptible. After them, frivolity is anything other than keeping breathing. Sometimes even that is questionable.
‘ I think if you start to call everything other than necessity needless, then you lose a lot out of your days. Besides, wasting your time doing some still has to be better than doing nothing at all. ’
❛ if you believe that, ❜ madge says, pressing her palms against her thighs, eyes cast toward the ceiling. anywhere but the piano and katniss’ face and the slope of the ceiling that marks her mother’s room. it is, perhaps, the first time in her life, madge has ever felt so much like a child, and she is slow to continue. ❛ waste the rest of the day with me.
❛ my father said that you could stay the night. ❜ it would be her first sleepover if katniss said yes, and she is almost hopeful her offer will be turned down. all she knows is what she’s gathered from the furtive whispers of other girls in their class, and their suggestions are, at best, unappetising.
perhaps if they trade dressing up for an archery lesson.
➳:
how does she begin to explain to someone so shielded – and katniss is so eternally grateful she is so – from the violence she’d experienced in the games as madge that her hands shake too heavily when her fingers untangle to manage even a note. she clears her throat, gives a gentle shake of her head. ‘ no, i just like to listen to you. ‘ she says, not untrue, in a voice that raises only just barely above a whisper.
though she wants to— though she’s always wanted to— madge cannot relate to katniss. she does not know poverty or want or fear. she does not know what it’s like to hear your sister’s name in a hellhound’s bark. she does not know what it’s like to throw yourself on the pyre instead.
she does not know what it’s like to see a life taken or to be the one to take it away.
but, she thinks, she knows what it's like to be intimidated by the piano. it sits with ivory keys and brass pedals and polished wood like a beacon of excess in a district starved. it sits as a reminder of her mother's straight back, lithe fingers, and warbling voice. beauty demands beauty, she would say. you cannot give it anything less than perfection.
❛ when i was little, i would bang the keys with my palms. i thought that if i hit them all at once, i would eventually hit the ones my mother did when she’d play me a song. ❜ the frayed edges of a chuckle play interlude as madge gathers her thoughts. ❛ it didn’t work, of course. but— sometimes i still do it. it feels good to play something ugly. ❜
and people said madge wasn’t in the movies smh
THG places - arena or district 12
Half a smile, half a laugh ; Katniss huffs a gentle snort, all air, at the thought of a tiny child mashing ivories in a rush to make something beautiful like her mother, and wonders for a moment what it’s like. To grow up with room for the excess of impatience. She can’t say she knows the freedom, unless she wants to lie. Hunting and horticulture require wise hands and an ever even temperament, even of children only in their first years of school whose hands tremble from cold and scratch raw from inexperience with the wilderness. Snapping strings, the flick of a wrist and fling of a blade, the split decision to run or climb or fight, to follow or abandon — instinct does in some way dictate success in the arena of the woods, but skill is afforded by intelligence. Her father had always impressed upon her steadiness. Patience. A misstep with a deadly weapon has consequences more dire than a piano key sounding out of time, after all.
But this is no place for those kind of thoughts. No better at speaking, but hands ever ready for movement, she follows two keys up from Madge’s, another couple, and presses down. Half a chord. Or so she thinks, anyway. This isn’t exactly her forte.
‘ You learned eventually, at least. Maybe bashing the heck out of a piano is a better learning technique than people suspect. ‘
❛ maybe, ❜ she says, slow to find the words for the rising tide in her chest. ❛ most people don’t waste their time on frivolous things. ❜
( except me. except people like me: the girls chittering over capitol fashions, the boys in fresh washed shirts, and the families that toss more food than they eat. )
when katniss is around, madge is swallowed by shame.
✴:
Nickname was spoken, voice somewhere between familiarity and lack thereof, and her heart ached, a sharp pain that dug its way into the organ. Like a piece of fragile glass shoving into her breast, and shattering beneath the skin, diffuse pain that almost made body recoil, head bow, mouth fall open whispering litanies of pain, pain pain.
Soft, they used to call her. Privileged. Spoiled. Would they still call her spoiled? ( Probably. And that was okay. )
Never before had she felt SOFTER than in that moment. Before she had been numb, through the incineration, through the flames, through the despair and the late nights, unable to sleep, unable to even think. But there in the infirmary she wanted to crumble, to fall to her knees and wail softly, softly —— to rest her head upon the lap of thelatemayor’s daughter, and pray for her survival. ( Oh, she did not even believe in any of it. )
“Yes, it’s me.” Voice a gentle, wavering, and pathetic thing, slow steps were taken towards the sick bed, and fingers skimmed against the mattress, and gaze was dropped and lifted and dropped again. Looking at the other girl was hard, like staring into the glaring rays of the sun. Trachea constricted, as if she were breathing smoke again, as if she were running in pure desperation, blind panic, hand on her brother and pleading with some HIGHER POWER that baker’s son was okay, that he would live. ( Nowhere to be found. ) “I’d ask if you’re okay, but——”
Forced cheer leaked into her voice, because she wanted to be happiness to her friend, she wanted to be someone dependable in a time when nothing was right. ( Cries had to be reserved for her pillow. ) Palms smoothed at the sheets, creases bunched to the side, and jaw set as eyes settled upon healing skin, skidding clumsily up to distant eyes. “Let me——let me do something for you.”
she tries to see herself as others do, make sense of a catalogue of injuries. to her, her body is a mass of angry nerves, crisscrossing flesh that aches as it stitches itself together. like a phoenix reborn from the flames, she is hot to the touch. like a true undersee, the pain tries to make her hard. it tries to make her lava turned stone. it tries to give her sharp edges and a voice that scrapes others to the bone.
to herself, madge is nothing with a name.
but to others, she is tragically human. she is everything fragile. she is mortality made bare. no one lets her forget the damage she sustained, and she maps it from head to toe.
her hair is singed; the ends smell like kitchen ovens and burnt toast. her face and arms and legs and feet are swollen. a patchwork of green and yellow blossom around her stitches. some cuts will fade. others will mark where she shattered like a glass figurine.
fire melted cloth to skin, and it was under the foliage of the woods that survivors pried it from her wounds. district thirteen filled the gaps. skin grafts, they said. a robin hood procedure. take from the rich; give to the poor. madge is thankful only that they saved her hands.
‘ what happened? ‘ i tried to lift a burning beam from my father’s back.
an earthquake rattles her heart, and its weak structure nearly collapses.
don’t touch me. ❛ tell me something good. ❜
➵:
Dusky digits trail gentle over bone white keys and elicit no sound, their owner but a bare shadow on the bench beside the companion she speaks to. Curiosity is present, but the room feels too quiet to disturb with noise ( as Katniss is certain she has not the ability to make music. )
Perhaps it’s the wonder of having a friend, of being over at a friend’s house. Perhaps it’s the wonder of wealth, striking to a girl who has known only extreme poverty and sickening grandeur, too alien and extravagant to seem anything other than monstrous. Either way, the hunter is rabbit-eyed and small beside Madge, a wallflower presence. It is not entirely conscious.
‘ How did you learn how to play ? ‘
words do not come to her as easily as music notes. she is all rests. she is no sound. how can she remember to speak in a house that creaks to fill the silence? the walls make conversation amongst themselves, shifting and creaking, a backdrop of gossip when the mayor is holed up in his office, when the mother is buried in her room, and when the daughter is in the garden.
( you’ve come to find comfort in the hum of bees and cricket legs. )
but it wasn’t always this way. you tell yourself this when smoke blots the moon and your breaths fill your ears. there used to be laughter that rattled the china cupboard. there used to be the metronome thump of a rocking chair, the click of heels on hardwood, and the universe painted by ivory keys.
there used to be a family. strawberry tarts cooling on the window sill. pinched skin as a dress is taken in. a brush spilling gold around your shoulders.
‘ my gorgeous ladybug. ‘
❛ i used to sit by my mother, and she would guide my hands to the right keys. i was impatient.❜ madge shakes her head; a finger hits a flat note. ❛ . . . i was awful. i’d try to hit every key i passed. ❜
