Chapter Text
Part I - The Lottery
One ❧ Shady Grove
Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd, where he stood a little apart from his family, not looking down at his hand. – Shirley Jackson
The sun rises on District 12 like a clumsy criminal trying not to get caught. It hides behind the clouds but conceals none of its heat from the low-slung buildings of the Seam.
Shady Jade isn’t in the meadow, or in the Covey’s crowded house, when the light filters through the eastern edge of the forest. He’s tapping his foot in the alley beside the bakery on the town square. He’s waiting for it to open.
Reaping Day is always a bit stressful in the Covey house, but this one in particular comes with a grim understanding. The 25th Games. The first Quarter Quell. And the Covey have spent the last 25 years making sure everyone in 12 knows that they’re not District necessarily. They’ve always been outsiders.
Now that the tributes are getting voted in, Shady Jade and probably the rest of the Covey are sure that one of their two youngest boys, perfectly in the middle of Reaping age, will be dying this year. At least Maude Ivory turned 19 some five years ago, and Elizabeth Ash is only seven this year.
It comes down to Shady Jade and Donnie Evergreen. The rest of the district won’t send one of their boys with the option of ‘outsiders’ right there.
If he doesn’t lose this lottery, Shady Jade only has three more drawings to go before he’s in the warren, in the mines. With six other living Covey, all of them more practiced on instruments than him and more capable of keeping a tune, he would be more valuable in the well than performing or teaching merchant kids their scales.
At least there his sense of rhythm would have a purpose and he’d be able to bring home coins for the family to spend on grain. As it stands, he’s only allowed to bring in the tesserae rations for himself and Clerk Carmine. Even if they all split it anyway.
No one else is recognized by the authorities as family, though all the Covey see it that way and live under the same roof.
Shady Jade assumed it would also be more of an argument than it had been if he started taking out more slips. This year, it doesn’t matter. Clerk Carmine hadn’t even put up a fight. They all know he’ll go or he won’t. It’s not even chance anymore. Voting makes arguing about tesserae pointless. His uncle didn’t bother this year. And Shady Jade has a sinking feeling in his gut that he’s more disliked than his… cousin of some sort.
He catches his own grey-green eyes in the reflection of the bakery window.
Caught in the margins between the Clade-Covey look, the merchant one, and the shades of the Seam, Shady Jade is just innocuous enough to fit both everywhere and nowhere in District 12. He figures most people forget him.
Half-deaf and Covey doesn’t give you great options, and he isn’t anyone’s favorite at their now increasingly sparse performances. At least he doesn’t think so. He’s been that way, half deaf, as long as anyone could tell. No misfortune’s come for his life here besides living here at all. Just the same hunger and scraping for pennies the rest of the district has to deal with. So people mostly ignore him. His cousin, though?
Donnie Evergreen is a favorite of the girls in town, and everyone above twelve gets a vote. Two, actually. One for the boys, one for the girls.
Shady Jade put his votes in yesterday. He voted himself for male, a lot of the kids of Reaping age voted themselves.
His small group of friends talked about it after school over a shared and watered down bottle of white liquor two afternoons ago. Jethro was the only one of the group who wouldn’t say he’d vote for himself. Shady Jade had been able to tell Ripper wanted to say she’d vote for him if he didn’t do it for himself, but she hadn’t.
The girl vote had been tricky. He didn’t want to condemn his friends to death. After all, Lucy Gray still stood a shadow over his family. Even if she’d won, she’d… disappeared? Died? None of the Covey know. And 12 hadn’t had a victor before or since.
He’d ended up voting on one of the Lipp girls. It wasn’t really out of resentment. Just that he doesn’t know them as well as anyone else in town. They’re so far away, and anyway, when he was a baby one of their family had shamed his mother for having him with a Covey at all. Shady Jade holds grudges, but he holds them quiet. They’re tucked away in the holler and revisited when he’s unsure, like he was for the vote.
A lot of the district hasn’t voted yet; he can see from beside the bakery that people are gathering outside the post office in the square. Shady Jade is glad he got it over with early as the heat of the day starts to set humidity into the shirt he threw on this morning expecting to get back home before the reaping. It’s something that belonged to one of the Covey girls a long time ago, he figures. Just a simple number with square buttons and yellowed fabric.
When the baker finally opens her door to prop it open and let out the steam which smells like some sort of salvation, she only offers Shady Jade a glance. Eminently forgettable, as always. He drinks in the smell of fresh bread for a moment.
The hawthorn taps on his shoes echo in the bakery’s hollow, hard spaces. He’s been wearing tap shoes since he was young. At least he has rhythm, if he doesn’t have tune.
Shady Jade buys two loaves of white bread; a treat for Reaping Day. It’s not his money. The coins come from performances he and his family have done, but Shady Jade knows as well as anyone that his dances spare them pennies at best. It’s Maude Ivory, Tam Amber, Clerk Carmine, and Donnie Evergreen who make the real money. They all know it. The bread will calm some of his family’s anxieties and be a small comfort to Donnie Evergreen, who’s probably just as nervous as Shady Jade is.
Two boys named for green and overgrown forests; two boys uncertain which of them will be dying next week. It’s the first Quarter Quell. Probably the first of a hundred, if Shady Jade knows anything about the way freedoms can be quelled. And he at least is pretty sure he knows a lot – the Covey have been wing-clipped for years now. At least twenty-five. The Dark Days are becoming a smudge in common memory.
He should talk to Donnie Evergreen today, before they have to dress and present themselves for the slaughter, but instead when he leaves the bakery he finds himself back in the alley. He crouches by the edge of the building, looking out at the line of people outside the post office. Half of them must be writing his name on a line.
A line that won’t save him. It’ll do everything else. Being mostly forgettable won’t save him either. At least people like Donnie Evergreen.
It’s already too-hot, and the back of Shady Jade’s mouth is bitter with anxiety. He should move, but he doesn’t. Not until he realizes there’s someone next to him. Bascom Pie isn’t really paying attention to him, he’s looking at the line in front of the post office, too. He’s a year older than Shady Jade, but part of the same group of mostly-seam kids who hang out together. He’s also taller, more charismatic, and sloppier with his movements in a way that’s almost endearing. Shady Jade lets him talk first after examining him.
“What do you want to bet the merchants aren’t voting in any of their own?” Bascom says. Shady Jade only half catches it, but he can guess the bits he doesn’t hear.
“I think me and Donnie Evergreen are top of the list, don’t worry.” His voice is a mumble. He almost never talks louder than that.
“I don’t think you should either, with the stuff Donnie Evergreen has been getting into, I bet you’re safe.”
Shady Jade turns Bascom’s words over and over in his head. Has his ‘cousin’ been doing something he isn’t aware of? He knows that Donnie Evergreen has been hanging out with a Chance girl recently, but that didn’t seem serious. The Covey aren’t really rebels, they’re just not part of the monuments built to the Capitol either. So maybe just the association with a rebel family? But Donnie Evergreen hangs out with girls all over both sides of the lines. Kind of like Shady Jade’s dad in that way.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” is all he says.
“Well maybe neither of us should worry. We’re due another victor. I voted Saerrow in for girls, she was so mean at that last Hob party, what about you?”
“Myself for boys, obviously. And Myrabella Lipp for girls. No real reason.”
“Man, you actually voted yourself?”
“You didn’t?”
“Nah. I did one of the Mellark boys.”
“Huh,” Shady Jade says, voice neutral but he’s thinking about the idea of not having voted himself for death. Kind of seems alluring. Not something he can change now. He figures it’s better to spend the week before he dies not dwelling in haunts of regret. He’s also thinking about how Bascom lied over that liquor, then.
“You think there’s any chance I have to go in? I hear they’ve built a whole special arena this year.” Bascom examines his fingernails like he’s not nervous, but Shady Jade can see his whole form tense with it.
“No, I don’t think anyone hates you that much.”
“We should have all gotten together and figured out who had the best chance to make it out.”
“Maybe, I guess.” Shady Jade’s muscles are now getting tired of crouching here. His mind is more tired of this conversation than that. He taps his deaf ear, some distant anxiety trying to make sure he still can’t hear anything out of it. When he was a young kid, the quiet was annoying. Now it’s a kind of comfort. A small part of the world, soft, silent, and his. No one else he knows has this particular quiet living like a bird nesting in their ear.
“It would have made all of this easier.” Bascom’s face is set in something trying to mask a similar kind of anxiety.
“You’re not gonna go to the Games, Bass.”
“I’ve been dreaming about it for a week. Isn’t it worse to go when it’s not random?”
Shady Jade is quiet for a long moment. He straightens, standing up to lean his back against the wall and give his knees a break. It’s a chance to subtly move so his good left ear is actually faced toward Bascom.
“I think it’s maybe better to know you don’t belong somewhere, and be told that outright, than to have to wonder.”
Bascom seems taken aback by the statement, and looks at Shady Jade with a look that he hates . It’s something between pity, shock, and discomfort.
“You belong here, you know?” Bascom says.
“I don’t. None of us do. We’re just stuck here. Better to hunt us to extinction than block the entrances to the tunnels and let us suffocate,” Shady Jade doesn’t realize he’s speaking for all of his kin until the words are out of his mouth. He’s pretty sure they don’t all feel that way. Tam Amber, Donnie Evergreen, and Clerk Carmine are happy to make a quiet life, they’d prefer it. Maude Ivory, she’s just… an unreasonably optimistic person. Barb Azure’s grave would echo with resentment for him even suggesting they should die out. Shady Jade imagines Lucy Gray, under her headstone or wherever she is, would also scream and rage about it, from the stories he’s been told.
Bascom also doesn’t seem to agree.
“Extinction? You want the Covey to die out all the way? Twelve would be all grey and black without you.”
“Probably be safer,” Shady Jade mumbles, his eyes affix on a weed growing through the cracks in the pavement next to the bakery. A dandelion, maybe. No flowers, though. He’s never been as good with plants as his kin.
“I don’t think anyone would be safer just because we were more dismal. Grey isn’t a color that makes people happy.”
The two boys sit in silence after that, left in the shelter of Shady Jade’s lack of a response. He wonders if shades of green make anyone happy. Because they sure don’t make him feel anything but a deep anxiety in the pit of his stomach right now.
Eventually, Shady Jade shifts. He holds up the paper sack of bread.
“I need to bring this to my folk, and get ready for the big ol’ day. Good luck, Bascom.”
Bascom looks up from his thoughts like he almost forgot Shady Jade was there.
“Yeah, you too.”
“You’re not gonna go to the arena, don’t worry,” Shady Jade says but doesn’t wait for a response. He’s already out of the alley and into the square, gingerly moving past the line of voters. Tap tap tap. Tap shoes amid the whispers each small group is sharing before they even notice him.
The Covey house leans hard on its foundation. It isn’t exactly well-built or comforting anymore but it’s home, and it has been since Shady Jade can remember. The forest of wildflowers around it forms bowers over rabbit trails. The cat Barb Azure found in the meadow and brought home when he was only a toddler used to make nests in them, til they found him in a ring of bergamot and azalea, dead of some poison the Peacekeepers put out for the wild dogs. He’d died six months after she had. Since those two were some of his first losses, Shady Jade looks at the wildflowers like a graveyard now. He averts his gaze when coming home.
He still remembers last summer, when despite his discomfort he picked a handful of the flowers, and tied them with one of Maude Ivory’s ribbons. The boys he hung around with had told him a girl wanted to meet him. He’d stood in the square for four hours before he realized either she’d tricked them, or they’d tricked him. He didn’t care much, he’d just been keeping up appearances. But lies always sting, especially from friends.
He notes the ink staining his fingertips when he puts the bag down on the counter and tries his best to ghost his way up the winding staircase but Elizabeth Ash stops him. She’s four foot nothing and her hair is still in pigtails, but she’s wicked smart already. Before Shady Jade notices, she’s standing on the stair in front of him. Quiet as a mouse when she wants to be and loud as a hurricane when she sings. She’s the essence of the Baird line.
“Reaping day,” she says with a conviction neither grim nor joyous. She knows she’s just stating fact. Shady Jade looks down at the seven-year-old in a now stained peachy dress that used to belong to one of the other Covey girls. She looks like a sunrise done up in seriousness and linen.
“Reaping day,” he repeats. He’s never sure if it’s time to try to help be a parent to her or if she’s going to try to have a full adult conversation.
“Do you think it’s gonna be you, or Donnie Evergreen?”
“Me, probably.” He never lies to her. She’s too smart for that, even at her age.
“I hope you win, then,” her voice is resolute. She turns on her heel after saying it and goes up the stairs ahead of him, disappearing into the Covey warren somewhere. He can’t even thank her. He knows he won’t win, anyway. And he knows she’s going to the room she and Maude Ivory share to cry about the same conclusion. That there’s nothing he can do now.
Instead of worrying about it, he washes his face and puts on one of Clerk Carmine’s old shirts. It’s the color of wild roses, and ruffled at the collar. Shady Jade doesn’t particularly like it, but it’s decent. For Reaping Day, at least. He’s examining his off-blonde hair and freckles in the cracked mirror when Maude Ivory calls from the first floor.
“Everyone, time to go, soon as you can, let’s be as pretty as we all know we are!” her voice is musically upbeat but touched by some sadness Shady Jade doesn’t fully understand. He pulls his hair into a loose bun he’s certain one of his kin will nervously make neater on their way or during the ceremonies.
Just. Three. More. Years. At least, if he can make it through this one.