Disclaimer: The Hunger Games is not mine.

Vick's legs swung back and forth as he sat on one of the counters in the kitchen at the home of the Mayor. He figured that his mother would give him one of her stern eyeballings if she knew where it was that he was sitting, but she didn't know. Besides, Madge was the one who had told him that it was alright to hop up there, and it was her house. She was perched right next to him, and she didn't even flinch when he swung his legs a little harder than he had intended and made a banging noise that sort of echoed through the room. Madge's house was nearly always echo-y. His house always had too much noise going on for any loud sounds to be out of the ordinary. Madge's house was always so quiet that it was like noise took the entire house by surprise.

He knew that because he spent a lot of time at Madge's house. Alright, so it maybe wasn't a lot a lot, but the only places he spent more time were home and school. He always made sure that Madge's house was the last place that he stopped when he made laundry deliveries for his mother so that he could linger for a while. He liked the word linger and had latched onto it when he had heard Madge use it once. It sounded much better than what his mother would call what he was doing. She would say that he was dawdling. He wasn't. That might sound like he was just making excuses, but he really wasn't. People were dawdling when they were trying to waste time. Vick was never just wasting time when he was lingering in the Mayor's kitchen or back garden. He was learning things - important things that they never taught him at school (and ones that he figured that Gale didn't even know).

Madge knew a lot of stuff that other people didn't. As he got older (and the more that he understood some of the things that Madge talked about), he thought that maybe there were some people who might know but would never talk about it. He thought it might be like the way that everyone knew but no one talked about how Gale went outside the fence to go hunting. Vick was going to have to learn all of that too, but Gale wouldn't teach him yet. Sometimes, he thought that Gale would have to run out of excuses for not teaching Rory soon because he went through so many of them, but he, sometimes, thought that Gale would keep refusing forever. He could have told his oldest brother that that wouldn't work. Rory would get tired of waiting and try to go out without being taught eventually. Gale probably wouldn't listen to him if he told him that. He looked at Vick a lot like he looked at Posy most of the time - like a baby that he needed to take care of (except Posy was a lot cuter and the only little sister that they had so Gale and the rest of them would let her get away with a lot more than any of the other siblings could get by with).

Vick wouldn't just take off and go on his own to see how things went the way that Rory would. He would find someone else to teach him. Katniss wouldn't, but if he figured out the right way to drop questions at Prim, then he figured he could find out quite a bit before anyone caught on to what he was doing. Rory called him a sneak sometimes, but Vick couldn't say that his brother was wrong about that or just making up names. He was sneaky. Madge had told him that it wasn't a bad thing to be. There were lots of times when being sneaky was an advantage - like how no one in his family had caught on yet that he did a lot of lingering at Madge's house.

She was nice to him. He felt bad for her because most people (even the ones from Town) didn't talk to her much. She was always in her too quiet house where no one seemed to talk to her much either. That was a shame because she had an awful lot of things to say. He had asked her once (when he realized that she was teaching him things and not just telling him stories) why she had decided to talk to him. She had said it was because he looked like he was someone who wanted to know. She was right. He did want to know. He just wished that he could tell more people, but Madge had said that he would know when it was the right time for that. She always talked to him like that - like it was okay that he might not understand everything yet but that was no reason to consider him too young to be learning.

He hadn't needed Madge to tell him that people were always watching. He knew that from his brother's not so very hidden poaching and fence ignoring. He was used to feeling like inside his home was safe from prying eyes though - Madge didn't even have that. There were people staying with her sometimes that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up (Madge never wanted him to linger when those types of people were there, but he always felt bad that he was leaving her alone with them). She told him that if you always assumed that someone was watching, then you never had to worry about messing up and letting them see something that they shouldn't. So, there was always something happening when she was telling him her stories - -they were weeding in the garden or she was feeding him a snack in the kitchen or something like that. He didn't know what all Madge said to explain away his presence, but he had heard one of the visitors in her house (one of the silly ones, not the hair up on the back of his neck ones) call him the besotted little puppy once. He thought that meant that they thought he kept coming because he thought Madge was pretty. He was okay with that - Madge was pretty. Besides, Madge said that you could get away with all kinds of things if you just let people see what they wanted to see.

She taught him how to listen to people to hear what they were saying in what they weren't saying. She taught him how to talk to the "guests" in her house if he ever had to so that they didn't really notice him. They had been working on something that Madge referred to as "playing" them as they sat perched on the kitchen cabinets while he sipped at a glass of milk and Madge cut up an apple. (Most of it would end up in his pockets and divided between Posy and Rory later. Posy was easy enough because she was used to her brothers slipping her extras when they could. Rory and he had come to a sort of an understanding that the Mayor's household did something called "tipping" when he picked up their laundry and that it would be best for everyone's ears if Gale were not made aware of that particular habit.)

"Make what you are showing them and telling them so interesting that they forget about what it was that they were thinking before you started up your show," she was saying as she slid the plate toward him.

"Don't you ever get scared that they'll catch you?" He asked as he started sliding the pieces around to divide them into three piles. He worried about that when the scary visitors came.

"All the time," she answered him in the tone that he had come to know meant that she didn't expect him to understand what she was about to say yet, but she wanted him to hear it so that he could tuck it away and think it over. "Some things matter more than being scared."

"Like when Gale hunts so we aren't so hungry," he whispered.

"Like that," she answered nodding her head.

"And the stories are like that?" He asked trying to draw the connection in his head. "Because . . .," he drew out the word slowly, "if we forget that it can be better, then we might forget that it's wrong?" He tried to string two years of listening to Madge's narration together. He shuddered. "I don't want to forget that it's wrong," he told her suddenly with tears welling up in his eyes without him being sure why they were there. Years of watching the Games with the blood and the death left him with a host of memories that were flitting back and forth across his mind. He didn't realize that he was shaking until he felt Madge put her arm around his shoulders. "I'd ruther Mamma and Gale let me starve," he whispered as he remembered some of the comments about the bloodshed that he had heard from both the "guests" in Madge's house and the people who came to the Reaping with betting slips in their hands over the years.

Madge didn't say anything. She just hugged him into her side.

"Tell me a before story," he whispered into her shoulder wanting the comfort of a reminder that things hadn't always been this way (which meant that they could be different someday again). He picked one of the ones that he had turned over in his mind most often - the one that always came back to him in the weeks leading up to the Reaping when he couldn't get away from the worry that Gale was going to be taken away from them. "Tell me about the 2A back when we had a chance to stop them."