Chapter Text
Steve watched the first bubbles engorge on the surface of the tomato sauce and pop with a splash. He gave it a stir with one of the few pieces of cookware they still had—a wooden spoon, in this case—and waited for more bubbles before killing the heat.
Their last can of tomato sauce. Expired ten years ago. The only thing about it that has really lasted is the vibrant red color and the salt content. If he keeps himself distracted, it’s the same as tomato soup. Nothing close to what his mother used to make, but it’s also not boiled water and cabbage. He would be eating that tomorrow, and the day after that.
“Okay, mom,” he says, somehow both tired and wide awake. Wired. He had an interesting day ahead, to say the least, but until then, he needed to feed his mother.
She sat by the window, coherent enough to gaze out across the wide boulevard opening its arms on either side of them. Steve wished she would sit in a different room, where the sunrise would give her peach tones instead of cool, mean lighting. But this parlor gave her peace, and he was happy she walked around at all.
He’d kill for an actual peach, but instead he stirs the bowl of soup sauce and tests it on his own palate—
Steve makes a face that Annette Harrington is too oblivious to see. He might as well be eating cabbage, the flavors on his tongue are just tomato and water. Old tomatoes…
Steve took a moment to revisit the can in the sink—to be washed and sold as scrap metal at the earliest opportunity. The paper label has long since been pilfered or worn away, but the factory happened to stamp letters into this particular can, so Steve can read almost clearly: CRUSHED TOMATOES.
He sighed. So that was why. Once upon a time, all tomatoes in cans were seasoned. This can emerged from a factory during the war, which made it surprisingly fresh in comparison, but totally devoid of the extreme luxury of anything green, like herbs. No salt.
“Well, it’s just me who will hate it,” he murmured to himself. As he sits back down before his mother, he knows there’s some kind of irony to all this.
Red and purple are the most expensive dyes and pigments, his mother told him, so long ago. Apart from yellow. That comes from saffron.
They weren’t expensive, really. Red and purple proved as easy to come by as a swinging fist, cheap if there was something sharp or heavy in that hand. The war put red and purple in abundance. Yellow too, even though piss washed away far more easily. The worse off a person was, the more vibrant the pigment.
Ten years later, Steve sat with a bowl of red—more like orange at this point—gently cradling his mother’s head to massage her jaw. She wasn’t stupid. Just…lost. Steve had a long time to learn how to coax or trigger reactions from her. Massaging around her ears, pressing the pad of his thumb along the strong muscle of her jaw until he reached the hinge. Relaxing her jaw made her eyelashes sag a little. Whether she consciously knew food was coming, or her body simply responded in grateful need, Steve didn’t know. More than likely, the massage reminded her of Steve’s father.
The highly decorated veteran of the Harrington clan lived in the hospital. Comatose. The same as dead Steve knew, but his mother only truly roused when it came time for her signature, seal, and blood sample to unplug her husband. It wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t nice either, even to her only child. The prick of a finger was all it took. Steve tried to find solace in that she was as close as skin deep.
So Robert Harrington stayed plugged in, siphoning money out of the bank accounts to the point that Steve and his mother lived like the war had never ended. Black market canned goods of fine produce. An empty penthouse home on the most prestigious street in the Capitol, all furnishings sold and traded apart from the bare minimum. A memory. A good one, Steve could only assume, based on how faraway him mother went. His father was the old money who married a young, beautiful thing with the right pedigree. Steve hadn’t believed there was anything more than respect and occasional fondness between his parents. Only real love could make his mother this way.
Right?
Steve would rather visit a headstone, but as things were, he planned to get to the hospital today before school. He’d rather have the privacy and quiet of a cemetery. Even better, the Harrington mausoleum. He’d rather the money pumping his father’s heart go into the pockets of caretakers for his mom.
He did have the Hendersons. They were something. Special, even. Capitol citizens were not exactly known for compassion and generosity, but the city had its own economic ecosystem, which included upper, lower, and Avox classes.
The Harringtons were the uppest of the up.
The Hendersons were the building’s managers. Service staff. They kept the floors clean and the mailboxes locked. Claudia Henderson had similarly lost her husband during the war, and her son had been just a baby. A big baby, who now stood ready to intercept Steve in the stairwell.
“Steve, hey! What are you doing later?”
Steve’s shoes screeched to a halt. His father’s shoes. They were too big but shined the way old money should. “Is your mom home?” he blurted. He can’t leave if Claudia isn’t around to make sure his mother doesn’t turn a stove on in some daydream of wifely duty.
“Yeah, yeah, she’s cooking. She wanted to bring something over—Steve.”
He pivots back in the direction of his home. He knows it’s a lie. The Hendersons might have been granted the most meager—still grand by District standards—apartment in the basement, but there was no way they didn’t struggle for money. It was written in the dirt smears on the infernal baseball cap Dustin insisted on wearing over his longish, curly hair. Baseball. What a relic. If he was as smart as his grades claimed, the kid would sell it to an absurd collector, instead of constantly diminishing its value with his sweat.
Steve didn’t say any of this. He had his own relics that he kept close to his soul.
Dustin caught Steve’s shoulders and held him still. “Steve. I promise she’s taken care of.”
The muscles in Steve’s jaw clenched just as quickly as he released it. A nervous tic bestowed from his mother, apparently. He doesn’t knock Dustin’s hands off of him, though. Steve has never considered himself a violent person. Proud, yes. He does, however, wiggle out of Dustin’s reach because he can’t look anything less than a Harrington today. He can’t. He’d ironed his Academy suit jacket with the bottom of the pot he’d just used for breakfast.
Far from ideal, that Dustin knew about his mother. Very, very few people did. Three, in fact: Dustin and Claudia Henderson, and Steve’s only—dare he say—friend, Robin Buckley. She had been an accident, but a blessing he was eager to rendezvous with at school.
Brushing the sleeves of his uniform, he huffed, “Since when has your mom been cooking?”
Dustin smiled, all gums in the front. Shouldn’t a fourteen year old have his teeth already? “Since she got some corn syrup from the closet. Corn syrup, dude! She’s over the moon. Don’t be surprised if she uses your stove. Ours cuts out a lot.”
“Yeah, so does the rest of the city,” Steve sighed, resuming his path down the stairs. There was a reason the elevator was out, and it affected the Henderson’s stove most days. It was a reasonable trade, a steal even: the use of the Harrington kitchen for his mother’s care. The only real pitfall was his mother’s pride. Every so often, Steve caught her realizing who sat talking to her and her matching whiskey eyes found him with more personality than he usually got to witness. Claudia Henderson was a good person, she just had the wrong last name and mannerisms. The Capitol elite like to believe they’re born superior. Really, it’s just whatever a person is taught, but old money can see new money imposters from a mile away.
It angered Steve beyond words that his mother’s pride woke her up better than her son asking for soup. He didn’t voice this to anyone, not even Robin. It was one thing for a son to think ill of his mother, but Steve would never allow anyone else to spit a word towards her.
“What the closet giveth, it taketh away, or whatever. Are you good?”
Closet. Black market. Everyone had their favorite terminology. Robin’s was closet, and Dustin had picked it up.
“Oh shit yeah, it didn’t cost us anything. She was cleaning the place on the third floor, and tripped over a floorboard. She’s been petitioning the city for ages about those floors and ceiling cracks but, well we know how the elevator’s going.”
Steve frowned as they went round and round the staircase. He didn’t particularly miss the elevator. They were almost to the ground floor as he said, “What council do you write to for that?”
“No idea.”
Meaning, there wasn’t one. Or it never wrote back to them. There were too many empty floors in their building. Not enough families to pour money into the place, or to entice the city to take care of its oldest names.
Steve didn’t fault Dustin’s mom for not talking money with him. It might be that very negligence that made Dustin total idiot when it came to tact. That’s where he and Steve…fit. Dustin had the grades, but Steve could read a room. Dustin was far from evil; he just didn’t have the teeth to stop certain things from flying out of his mouth.
Steve listened to him continue as he slipped a hand into his pot-ironed trousers for the mailbox key. “I don’t know why she bothers airing out the empty floors, but she got so pissed at the floorboard, she ripped it right up. I would say that’s pretty awesome, but it was a hiding spot. A couch or something was supposed to hold it down.”
Steve’s father’s dress shoes clipped over the marble and granite floor of the lobby. There used to be a huge, circular red carpet directly below the chandelier. There had been a massive circular, wooden table as well. Steve remembered the bouquets that would stand on it. The vases were big enough for his little kid body to sit inside.
He took a sharp right from the stairs and slotted his key into the wall of brass mailboxes adjacent to the concierge desk. Nobody stood behind it anymore. “What was the jackpot?”
“Liquor,” Dustin smiled as if he’d been the one to find it. “She got the whole nine, dude: flour, baking soda, vinegar, even the tiniest jar of honey, but she chose the syrup instead of real sugar to get more for the bottles.”
That’s not nine things, Steve wondered to himself. Something tickled his brain, the familiarity of something…
His eyes landed on Dustin’s hat. Nine innings in baseball. And then there was the voice of his father in the back of Steve’s mind, “We played the front nine…the back nine...”
Golf. Steve didn’t remember the rest of the story, but clearly nine was a popular structure in pre-war sporting events.
“What is she making?” he asked as he pulled out a surprise parcel. Usually there was never any mail apart from the rogue envelope. Hospital paperwork, but the important stuff typically arrived with a person. The Harrington name warranted a personal exchange from one pair of hands directly to another’s.
“Uh,” Dustin wavered. This earned Steve’s attention off of the parcel, which he tucked under his arm for a later unwrapping. Dustin shrugged and tried to say casually, even as he peeked around the empty lobby. “She stress cooks. Honestly…she found the bottles weeks ago. She saved them to trade for today.”
Steve pressed his mouth into a consoling line and rubbed the kid’s shoulder. He didn’t have time for compassion, he needed to drop by the hospital and get to school. He was already expected alarmingly early, never mind doting on his parents. There was something cruelly ironic about that too.
Today was July Fourth, the day of the Reaping. On the anniversary of the Capitol winning the war, the twelve districts surrounding the Capitol put their kids, between the ages of twelve and eighteen, on display while two names were plucked from a raffle. One boy and one girl. The collective twenty-four tributes would compete in the Hunger Games, a glorified fight to the death televised across the country. Everyone was taking care of their children for whatever few precious hours they had left, while Steve looked after his parents.
Dustin was wise not to voice his own or his mother’s dislike for the post-war celebrations. It’s also in this moment that Steve realized how Dustin never answered him about what his mother was cooking. Insinuating that it might not be up for sharing. The kid might have some tact, yet.
Steve just knew Nancy was going to give him an ear full at school. Until then, he inhaled deeply, and offered to walk Dustin to school. The kid agreed with the caveat, “I’m going to Will’s place first. His mom saved some stuff from being thrown away. Thrown away! What idiots! One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Will and Jonathan were excited, so it’s probably something to do with music. I hope it’s a stereo, the kind with a radio.”
Nerds, Steve thought benignly.
He walked Dustin halfway, where he split off for the hospital. He really ought to have thought better about the shoes. The hospital had been a last minute decision, but keeping a pair of worn sneakers in his book bag was not. Steve ducked into an alleyway and switched shoes, grateful for the familiar soles and cushion.
He as good as strolled right into the hospital, so familiar were the staff with him. “Good morning, Mr. Harrington,” the lady behind the visitation desk purred almost musically. “Happy Hunger Games.”
“Huh? Yeah,” he returned distractedly. Not like she cared. Hospital staff had seen every flavor and degree of emotion human beings were capable of. Steve’s slip in manners and etiquette would hardly be noticed.
“Go ahead, dear.”
It’s not like there was a line to see his father anymore. People had stopped visiting. His old business colleagues were slowly rotting in luxury or dead. As for his fellow veterans…it was the man’s job to send men to their deaths, not die himself.
Steve entered the hospital suite. It was actually cheaper to house him here than in the Harrington penthouse. The military paid for his medical care. The Harringtons paid for the luxury. To house him in his actual home would make the government and its money recede. Steve preferred him here anyway. He didn’t know if his mom would ever flicker awake if her comatose husband was constantly within line of sight.
It was a joke. All of it. A façade that Steve despised. Hiding the fact that the noble Harringtons were dirt poor, their penthouse a cracked and battered shell from before the war. That Steve was an orphan and next to nobody knew it. That he bought the sneakers on his feet third-hand with the money from a minimum wage job in the shadows of the city where no one knew him. It was Robin’s skill with bleach that made the shoes almost pass the test. They looked new, or just reasonably loved by an athletic student, unless someone saw the worn out spots on the soles. Where the rubber had long since thinned out so only the fabric insoles shielded Steve’s heels now.
Steve pulled up a chair beside his father’s bed. He loathed it here. He visited when things were hard….no, worse. Worse than usual. Steve visited when he needed to be reminded of strength. Or spite. Spite could be a hell of a drug. Nothing lit a fire under Steve’s ass like wanting to get the hell out of a hospital. Away from a corpse.
“Hi, dad, uhm…” he began quietly. The man would hardly hear him alive let alone asleep, but Steve still got up to shut the door anyways. Bad idea. Some heir of a war hero, squeamish and claustrophobic. Steve rerouted from the chair to the windows and threw up the sash. There was a dry breeze today. It helped. The infusion of light made the dim cave feel less like a roomy casket.
Everything was wrong. The room was wrong, smelt wrong. Steve had the man’s true fragrance hidden in the vaults of his memory. He had the actual cologne bottle at home, hidden in a place Claudia Henderson would never find it. Steve rarely sprayed it; the bottle had been half empty already when his father…passed? Still, it was like a weak medicine for pain. Nothing could compare to the real smell of his father’s warmth combining with the cologne and the brushes of his mother’s citrus perfume on his clothes, but it was nice to possess half of the whole. Because the other half lay here, sterilized and waiting to die, officially.
Robert Harrington would never put gray curtains in front of the windows, or cover himself in waffle-knit blankets. He would never allow Steve to walk around with the dirty canvas pencil pouch that he gingerly extracted from his bag. Nor would he allow Steve to fill the empty boot polish tin with water for the branch of lilac he revealed from the pouch. The purple blossoms immediately scented the air, giving Steve a little reprieve.
He set the flowers on the bedside table and began, “The roses are dead. Mom could tend them, but…let’s just say it’s good the lilac comes back every spring. Mom always favored the picky flowers but the lilac makes the whole block know we’re still around. And the wisteria vines are probably all that’s holding the building together.”
A weak smile flashed on his face, but he quickly dashed it against his lap when he looked down. “I’m going to be a mentor,” he said to his knees. He might as well save his energy. Acting took a great deal of energy, and the day would be chock full of fake smiles and conversation.
“For the Games. The Gamemakers are working with the senior class of the academy. I guess…thanks for being an alumni, and for making donations before…My grades aren’t good, but I want to go to school. I want to stand a chance. If my tribute goes far enough in the Game, it should be enough for some sort of scholarship. I…I know neither you nor mom likes borrowing or charity, but I need it.”
Steve looks up, waiting a little while to see if his father’s pride is enough to wake him up. It isn’t.
Steve swallowed thickly. “How did you send someone to die? How did you convince them to do what you ordered? I think I’m the only one who ever told you no. I don’t know how to obey—how can I know what will make a tribute fight? To trust me? I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I wouldn’t trust me, either.”
The gentle, beeping machine answers him alongside the rustling tubes pushing air into his father’s lungs. Even if he did speak, his throat has been so dry he might as well be an Avox.
Steve’s head jerks, shoving that thought away, hard. Avoxes were traitors who had their tongues cut out. His father was nothing close to that, and even so, something inside Steve twitched unpleasantly at the notion of making light of the Avoxes.
He needs to go. He’s said his piece and he’s got a long walk to the Academy. Steve tilted his wrist to see his father’s watch there, held on by a leather band. A smart investment, a mechanical thing that did not rely on a battery. Standing up, Steve went to the sink on the wall opposite his father. The patient didn’t have any need for a toilet but the nurses used a sink, so the latter simply attached directly to the wall for easy access. No mirror, though.
Steve looked to see if anyone could possibly be entering the suite, his ears almost picking up the prickle of silence behind the machine noise. From his interior breast pocket, he withdrew a square powder compact. It was a relic in the same way his father’s cologne was, older than the war, perhaps even older than Panem. Plastic compacts were not hard to find, but a metal one…
Vintage, was the word that crossed his mother’s mouth at one point. But as to whether this was hers…one of Steve’s sharpest first memories was a jape made by his father’s colleagues. Not sharp in its clarity, sharp in how it injured him. Steve remembered not understanding the joke, how a man like his father would choose any accessory over his mother. It took a long time for him to figure out that some men saw no difference between women and jewels, and maybe his father had a preference for sapphires instead of diamonds.
Steve had stolen the compact on sight. He never dared to try and figure out whether it belonged to his mother or someone else. All he knew was that it was lovely, and his now. Spite and longing proved an interesting cocktail. What was he to think? His mother had always carried brass compacts with uniform designs pressed into them. They looked like large pocket watches. The shell compact in Steve’s hands stood out in a beautiful, terrifying way.
The square lid was a glimmering sheen of blue, green, and dark silver mother of pearl. The body and interior were sultry yellow brass, protecting a fine, glass mirror as well as an almost seamless little door. Popping the lid of the compact exposed the peachy powder cake, but Steve hadn’t much use for it, usually. But he couldn’t get himself to throw it out, so the door stayed shut, and he checked his hair in the mirror. He made sure his voluminous brown and chestnut tresses arched over his forehead the way he wanted, and that the pieces around his ears curved correctly to frame his face. He used a little brush slotted underneath the powder cake to make sure his expressive brows were combed right.
Maybe he should dab a little of the powder under his eyes…So much of his features came from his father but his enormous doe eyes were his mothers. Like gaping windows he could never keep shut all the way.
He snapped the compact shut without opening the powder. Today was an exciting day. Nobody would be looking at his skin, or the discoloration there. He changed his shoes regardless of the long walk; people needed to see him from a long ways down the avenue called the Corso, and he needed to look the part to perfection.
Steve Harrington, son of Robert and Annette Harrington. The Capitol’s finest and the first mentor to a tribute in District…
Well, he didn’t know yet. The Reaping wasn’t until two o’clock.