Title: Six Seeds
Fandom: The Hunger Games
Words: 1778 words
Characters: Effie Trinket
Prompt: Earth/Ground, for yalit100
Summary: The Capitol swallows you whole. How Effie leaves the districts in the spring and returns in the winter.
Notes: AU, though could conceivably be set pre-canon.
Disclaimer: I do not own The Hunger Games.

She is born with another name. A good, old-fashioned proper name, after her grandmother. A secret name, because that same woman fought against the Capitol in the very beginning of the Dark Days, was locked up and let out and forgotten once she made her way home. (Isn't that the way the stories usually go?)

Her parents call her Effie instead. It's their own small act of rebellion and she grows up familiar with the taste of defiance in her mouth, bitter and latent and absolutely festering. She doesn't act on it, not for years and years, and maybe that was the problem - or the blessing - all along.

She is an excellent student. Methodical and passionate and always ready with the answer. And not just the accurate one, but the one you're supposed to say, because there are right things and there are wrong things and then there are half-truths that protect you and your family and all those you hold dear.

Her teacher doesn't call on her all the time, but there's no one in that room that doesn't believe little Miss Trinket will go far (as you can when you live in 8).

Fortune favors them because there's a Victor for the first time in so many years, and that means ifood/i. Food for one glorious, wonderful year. Her mother tells her to be careful, to not eat too much at once. She's going about all this much too fast, small hands messy from picking up the crumbs that are stuck on the plate, that are out of the reach of the fork and knife and spoon she's long since abandoned.

"You'll get sick, Effie, sick of it and sick from it."

She's old enough to understand that this is a metaphor. (She was, after all, quite diligent in her studies.)

Their lives change during the Tour when a stylist arrives. Something goes awry and a member of the prep team gets sick –- face greener than her already emerald skin - and her mother is called to the Victor's Village because she has nimble fingers and the best embroidery work in the entire district. Anything less wouldn't do, not when all the eyes of Panem are on them.

They nearly take her mother away with them, leaving her alone in a crumbling old house that is nearly always too cold, but she smiles ever so sweetly, sliding herself into the strange cat-woman's heart. And just like that, the infamous Tigris takes little Miss Effie Trinket to the Capitol too.

They don't tell you this, don't warn you, no not at all, though a part of you knows it as soon as you step off the train. The Capitol, with its gaping mouth and its neverending consumption, well, it swallows you whole. The earth beneath your feet and the sky above your head get turned upside down and you can stand absolutely still in the crowd and realize that there will never be a time when you will say that not enough is moving around you.

It does not take very long for Effie to feel this way too.

Effie hates it at first, the fact that she doesn't know how to act or how to dress or how to do anything right. She sulks, tells her mother that she wants to run back to District 8, that she won't complain about the weather or the factory work or anything ever again, but her mother sighs and scoops her a second helping of dinner. (It would have been a luxury in their old rickety home.) They never speak of it again.

There are two ways to succeed in the Capitol: (1) know the right people and (2) blend in. Effie Trinket chooses the latter.

She parrots what she learns in school because here, in the heart of Panem, there is only one truth, and that is the government's. She doesn't question; no, not when that would set her apart. The others still mock her and her backward District ways, laughing at her funny words and her plain clothes and her even plainer face.

But Effie is a student, a master one at that, and so she throws herself into her studies, practicing her Capitol accent by reading all the magazines aloud and listening to only the pop stars at the very top of the charts. (She misses the quaint folk songs she used to sing with her friends, but she's here and they're not, and it wouldn't do her any good anyway.)

She wins the school-wide oratory contest by a considerable margin in just under a year, receiving high praises for her nearly perfect diction.

She finishes her formal education and Tigris, her mother's patron if she could be called such a thing, introduces her to a very dear friend. It's how things work here, and before the ink has dried, Effie Trinket signs her life away to the production team of the biggest event in the entire country: nothing less than ithe/i Hunger Games.

It is an opportunity that others would idie/i for, and it briefly crosses her mind that she hasn't thought of that as anything other than a mere an expression for what feels like ages.

She has a mind for detail, for time tables and cues and feeding lines, and so she moves up in rank and then from behind the screen to in front of it.

They assign her to 12, dusty and dirty 12, and it's only a matter of time, she thinks, before she'll be known as the very best Escort there ever was. (She doesn't realize then that she'll be among the very last as well.)

Haymitch falls off his chair and she knows it's a lost cause but says it anyway. (They never had a reason to hear it in the Seam.) "Slow down or you'll get sick."

The two children stare at her with their wide grey-eyes, their fingers and clothes stained with food, and she almost feels guilty.

The next year, she gets Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark and thinks it's finally her chance. But then the Quarter Quell arrives and she remembers her mother's warnings, about too much of a good thing all at once. She holds her head up high anyway, ever the face of confidence; at least one of them has got to do it and it might as well be her.

Chaos breaks out and she sits in her cell, listening to the screams of all too familiar voices. (She had studied and studied and studied the Games in preparation for her role, could identify a Victor or a Stylist by the sound of their cries alone.)

They ask her what she knows and she confesses that it's not much and they believe her. She doesn't leave unscathed, no, not at all, but it's enough that she makes it out of there alive.

She goes back to her apartment, finds it in complete disarray, the remnants of vases and paintings and hopes and dreams broken and smashed on the floor. She is on her second attempt at crossing the Capitol borders, eager to get out and just go ianywhere/i when she is recruited by the rebels. (It's not a day too soon because they execute Portia and her team on stage just hours after.)

Effie doesn't like to talk about the war, about her role in the grand scheme of it all. But sometimes you must give credit where credit is due, and this, ithis/i is the simple summation of Miss Trinket's contributions: she might not have known exactly iwhy/i things worked, but she had enough experience with the producers to know ihow/i they should, and that made all the difference when Beetee tried to blast the Capitol with reports and propos from the depths of the bunkers of 13.

She doesn't consider her meeting with Katniss before the trial any particular act of heroism; it just seemed the decent thing to do.

(Her Capitol friends died when the bombs fell too.)

Plutarch meets her for lunch and she doesn't need to see the paperwork to know he's about to offer her a job. (She knew the moment he ordered the appetizers but it was best, she thought, to let him have the element of surprise.) It's a position representing the new government as an Attache to the visiting district mayors.

Effie looks past the fancy title and the former Gamemaker's flowery description straight to what it really means: a glorified Escort. But still, it's a promotion, and this time she won't be throwing wide-eyed children to Mutts and monsters. She takes three days to think it over before calling the minister's direct line with a list of her requests.

Later, when she's sitting in her newly redecorated apartment, she figures she'll balance the hollow victory with a vow to return to her old house, to what's left of her childhood and her past after the bombs and the fires and the grinning politicians with their promises to rebuild.

(You can't go back, can't resurrect all those ghosts with their pleas to let them live another day, but here's the thing: there's always an after.)

She visits Katniss and Peeta and Haymitch once - just once - after the trial. Things are said and apologies are extended and all seems well enough. They ask her what happened to the bracelet and she tells them it was taken away when ishe/i was taken away. That should be iobvious/i. (She likes to romanticize the symbol, imagines that it was smuggled out and melted down, eventually used for something good in the hands of revolutionaries.)

Peeta asks her to stay for dinner, presents her and the others each a perfectly round pastry for dessert. "Bracelets," he says, "for everyone."

She remembers then why she always liked this one and his way with words.

One day, she gets a letter from an old friend, telling her about the school that has too many students but not enough teachers. Effie Trinket packs up her things and rides the train to District 8. It's a long journey, but when she steps off the platform with a single suitcase in hand, she lets out one long sigh of relief. She buttons up her coat, winds her scarf around her neck, and puts one foot forward on an all too familiar path through the town square. It's not what she remembers, but it doesn't really matter much, not when it's winter, her favorite time of year.