02 - BROWN

She doesn't expect anyone to visit her in the Justice Building, and she's right on that assumption. The Peacekeepers tell her that each person that comes will get five minutes with her. She hears sobs and shouts and nervous chatter from the room next door, where her District partner must be meeting with half of the city, but her room is entirely silent. No one comes in to comfort her or give her words of encouragement. Her father is probably still hungover and asleep, and there's no one else in her life. No family, no friends, no well meaning strangers. No one. She is alone in the goodbye room for an hour with nothing to do but feel the rage build up in her bones. She's sixteen and she's going to die anyway, so she gets up and starts tearing apart the furniture savagely.

Or at least, she tries to. The mahogany bench is too thick and heavy, held together by woodworking she knows she'll never be able to fathom. There's a table and some chairs, and they topple and dent the hardwood floorboards but not much else. She lets out a strained scream as she rips a tapestry depicting Mercedes' Victory from the wall and tries to tear it apart, but the exquisite threadwork won't give. She ends up curling up on the cold wooden floor, banging her fists weakly against the brown, glossy boards until she's heaving in breaths and her hands ache so much that she can no longer move.

When the Peacekeepers open the door, they say nothing, as if they've seen worse before. One stays back to mop up the remnants of her tantrum while the other takes her by the arm and pulls her towards the back of the building to where she'll board the train. She wants to fight out of his grip, but she's tired, so, so tired, and she likes being dragged along without having to put any effort into walking. Her dusty brown boots squeak jarringly against the hardwood floors as the Peacekeeper lugs her to the train platform, but he doesn't tell her to knock it off, he just keeps marching. She's delighted that they'll have to scrub the marks her rubber soles leave behind from the brown wood once she's gone for good. She'll at least have done something of her own accord before she dies; she'll at least have left a mark on this world, no matter how brief it will end up being.

She thinks no one will visit her this time, and she's wrong. She stumbles into the goodbye room and slouches on the mahogany bench, absentmindedly tracing the whorls in the slick brown wood. Dirk has a brother and aunts and cousins left, but she has no one like always. He and Mercedes and Greason are her only family, and they will be waiting for her on the train. She lays down on the bench and feels it cold and hard underneath her. She focuses on that feeling, the firm, the cool, steadying herself and stilling her rampant heartbeat as it makes her chest surge and pound.

She knows it's right that it was her. Mercedes would never lay her life down for anyone, not to mention a stubborn teenager from Twelve of all places. The rebellion needs cannon fodder to make this sham of a Games realistic, and Indigo is just going to be one of the bodies to fall in order to save the nation from itself. She knows she must make this sacrifice so that the boys and girls huddled in the rotting tenements outside can live without fear of death and disfigurement. Yet she still fears it all, the death, the screams, the pain, the anticipation, the terror. She's been ready to die for a long time, but she feels the beast awakening inside of her, the beast that came out in the humid jungle of the 41st, and she wants to shoot an entire vial into her veins to quell its rumbling. She thinks long and hard about her dazed highs and tries to ignore the still lucid parts of her brain that insist on thinking of a way to survive this. She's about to get up and try to go to the train early so she can get high immediately when the Peacekeepers ease open the door. The man, half her age and unsure of her mental state, gingerly tells the Victor that she has a visitor.

Indigo says nothing although curiosity and confusion prick at her muddled brain. A visitor? It must be a trick, or some teenager on a dare. She still sags against the bench and lolls her head to the side, doing her best to look as distant and drug addled as she can. It isn't very hard, she's high as often as she isn't, and she knows all the ways people look when they're nothing more than drugs and daydreams. Beetee told her and Dirk through a coded letter that they needed to seem as high and disconnected from reality as possible, so she follows his instructions. She doesn't know why it matters how she acts, she'll be dead at the Bloodbath, but she follows what he says anyways. She doesn't know a person in the world who would visit her, so she must play-act and make them believe there's nothing left in her head but blurry, incoherent visions.

A slim woman with mousy brown hair that barely reaches her shoulders slips into the goodbye room, her warm, muddy brown eyes looking at Indigo first with wonder and then slight confusion. She strides silently over to Indigo, and the Victor can't help but analyze her the way she analyzed everyone from her Games at the Capitol. She's thin as a rail, thinner than Indigo, although her skin isn't yellowed and loose from addiction. A dingy factory uniform, the gray wool so dusty it seems pale brown, clings to her bony frame, and her spindly fingers twitch and fumble over each other nervously. She can't be older than forty, and if she were well fed and ever saw the sun, she might be considered somewhat pretty. The woman says nothing and Indigo says nothing for almost two minutes until her unknown visitor clears her throat quietly.

"My name's Penelope," the visitor whispers, tucking a strand of her greasy hair behind her ear.

"Sounds like pineapple, I love pineapple," Indigo drawls, pushing herself into a sitting position. Part of her deep down inside stings with indignation at playing so stupid and broken but she keeps going, she has to, the future and the plan matters more than her pride.

"I...I know you must not be in your right mind, getting Reaped again," Penelope murmurs, frowning. "Everyone thought it would be Mercedes. I was praying it wouldn't be you."

Snow knows Mercedes would never lift a finger against him if it meant her life on the line. Indigo doesn't say it however, tucking it in the back of her brain like all her other smart thoughts and just nodding absentmindedly, lolling her head to the side again.

"I knew it would be me, it's always me," Indigo slurs, her eyes focused on the gleaming red-brown mahogany instead of the woman. Her words hold some ounces of truth this time. She knew she was getting Reaped after all, and Snow has always enjoyed toying with her.

Penelope looks uncomfortable but forces herself to continue. "Well...I just wanted to say thank you."

"For what?" Indigo inquires, maybe a bit too lucidly, but she can't contain her curiosity any longer. Who is this woman? Why does she owe her thanks? "I don't know who you are, missy."

"You saved my life," Penelope whispers, her eyes brimming with tears, and Indigo is convinced she must be dreaming or on a bad trip before the woman continues. "I was barely three years old when you won your Games. I was so sick, I coughed so much I could barely breathe, and we were hungry, so hungry. My mother could barely afford moldy bread." Penelope draws in her breath with a rattle as a tear drips down her pale cheek. "I was going to die, she knew it, and she didn't know what to do, but then you won. You won, and the food came on Parcel Day, and we could all eat. We ate and we ate and we ate, and she used our money for food to buy me the medicine I needed. I...I'd be dead, if it wasn't for you. I wouldn't have my family, if it wasn't for you."

Tears are in Indigo's eyes now too, as she remembers the first Parcel Day so vividly it almost makes her slip to the ground from the bench in shock. She hasn't thought about it in years. It was over three decades ago, why should she care? But then she remembers the light brown crates being lowered from the trains into the cheering crowds. Indigo wept as she made a heartfelt speech to her people about loyalty and sacrifice, when really she was crying because she realized how many children would not starve to death this year. Indigo cries, she can't help it, because she suddenly remembers the joy she felt on that day and the depression that set in when the last train came twelve months later, knowing then that her District would starve again for many more years.

Penelope steps closer to Indigo, sitting down next to her on the mahogany bench, eyes alight with hope now that she sees the Victor is understanding her. She sticks her hand into her pocket, and Indigo's eyes open wide as she pulls out a wad of denarii, enough money to pay for two month's worth of food for an entire family. "You saved my life, so my husband and I agreed we owed you if you were Reaped. We would love to be your very first sponsors, Ms. Arnett."

Indigo doesn't know what to do; she's going to die in the opening minutes, she doesn't need this money, and Penelope's family will starve without this money, she must know that. She's already sickly thin, and her children might die without this money. Indigo can't take it, she can't, she just can't.

"No," Indigo insists, pushing Penelope's fistfuls of money back towards her. "I won't let your family starve."

"We will make ends meet, we always manage," Penelope says with a twinge of sadness in her voice, but the insistence is more prominent than the sorrow. "You must take this from me, Ms. Arnett. You must."

Indigo sees the sadness in her eyes, and she also knows the pride of the poor. Every debt must be repaid, and no helping hand can go unnoticed. Not everyone would go to these lengths, to repay Indigo for something she caused only indirectly thirty odd years ago, but Penelope believes her pride and honor rests on it. She sees Indigo as someone to be revered, someone who saved her life when in reality Indigo was only focused on saving herself. Indigo knows there's only one way to make Penelope refuse, to make the woman take her money and leave her and let her die like she must, so she does it.

"NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!" Indigo wails, loud and piercing, and Penelope's eyes open wide in shock. "I WON'T! I WON'T!"

The doors bang open, and the Peacekeepers march inside, guns raised. Penelope stuffs the denarii in her uniform pocket and stands, hands up, with utter fear in her eyes. Indigo rolls off of the bench and starts spasming on the ground, mumbling gibberish.

"What did you do?!" one of them growls, his pistol pointed right at Penelope's head.

"Nothing!" the woman squeals. "Please! She's just crazy, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have come here."

To provide confirmation, Indigo mumbles something about poison dart frogs and jungle fires and little girls screaming for their mothers as she jerks around on the floor. The Peacekeepers just nod, putting away their guns dutifully. She's just a batty old Victor going through withdrawal. One of them restrains Indigo, holding her by the arms tightly, while the other one kindly escorts Penelope from the room. As the woman leaves, Indigo sees pity, disappointment, and disgust all mingled together on her face, and she smiles despite herself as the dark brown doors slip closed behind her.

The Peacekeeper throws her down a bit too roughly on the mahogany bench, but Indigo doesn't care. She's a walking corpse already, and at least this Peacekeeper acknowledges it and isn't afraid to treat her like one. She smiles and presses her face harder into the glossy mahogany as he walks out, feeling the cool brown wood push against her nose and her cheeks and her eyes and her forehead until it's all she feels. The smart sixteen year old girl inside of her tells her to run out and beg for Penelope's money anyway, it's you or her, and the beast inside bristles at the Peacekeeper's roughness, flexing its claws in pure fury. She bangs her head against the mahogany until they both shut up and the only voice inside her head is Beetee's, or at least what she thinks she remembers his voice sounding like. Act crazy. Act crazy. Act crazy.

She repeats it over and over again until she's convinced she really is, and then she crawls out of the goodbye room and to the train to convince the rest of the nation of it too.

A/N: I hope you guys enjoyed this one and that you got to get a glimpse of Indigo as an adult. Let me know what you thought and leave a review!

Until Next Time,

Tracee