don't pass me by {patricia&zelda}

[rook]

patricia jane valfierno

♕

Since the founding of the district, the people of Five have been harnessing the power of water to light up Panem and heat their homes. Initially it was just mills and rotational pumps that were used, crude and rudimentary in design, but functional all the same. It wasn't until a decade after the rebellion, with the construction of the hydrodam, that the brute force of the water was then converted into pure and clean electricity.

The dam is central to everything in Five. It maintains a decent standard of living for people who rely on it's electricity, whilst also providing the largest number of jobs in the district, with a huge workforce of several thousand and even it's own union. A union I'm proud to be a rep for.

I didn't think I'd ever be someone who has a job. Not before when I lived on the streets, and certainly not after I came home from the arena. But here I am, standing with my sleeves rolled up in a grey workman's jumpsuit, wrestling with a burst valve down in a draft tube - Working for a living with the stench of stale water in my nostrils and working up a sweat for meagre pay that I don't even need.

For years I shut myself away in that house, fighting ghosts, sitting alone, hating myself. There was a time, a long time, where I thought that was what my life was going to be for the duration. I was fine with that though, it was my burden, my reward for what I had to do. I isolated myself because attachment is something I wasn't permitted.

When the burdens got heavier, the threats more real, the abuse more physical, I lost all control. Unbreakable Patricia Valfierno, reduced to a sobbing, violated mess.

It wasn't until Snow died that they stopped caring about me. They actually let me live my life.

I got better. I'm happy now. I can breathe again.

I'm me.

Community has become important in my life, I've come to depend on these people. My crops sell well at the farmers market, not because of who I am but because they're good crops. I think people don't see a Victor when they look at me anymore, just an aging woman trying to contribute to the local economy.

And here, at the plant, my colleagues treat me as normal. They're all strong characters with their own demons that they've had to fight, I expect that's why I've walked into these halls unjudged. The laughs over lunchtime coffee and the satisfaction of working together to fix a critical issue are as close to a normal life as I'm ever going to get.

I'll never fully let go, but I think this is moving on.

It has to be.

"Patricia, can you run a spot check on the transformer before the hour is up?" My supervisor asks.

It feels weird to have a supervisor, but Harry is a good man. I fasten my wrench and twist hard, the spewing leakage of water pitters out to a dribble at my feet. I wipe the sweat and spray from my brow, and give him a nod.

I like that people treat me normally now. I think it's a mixture of enough time passing, and people having their own problems - either way, years of special treatment grind you down. I just want a normal life, and I think, finally, I've found one.

I buzz the lift and ascend to the powerhouse.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

z e l d a .

"You say you like the wind
blowin' through your hair
Well, come on roll with me
'til the sun goes down"

The air is crisp this afternoon, a false spring. Zelda Gingham reaches her hand out over the edge of the dam and plucks a cottonwood seed from the air. She cups it in her palm for a moment before laying her hand out flat again. The next gust of wind picks the seed up and carries it away.

"So it's that simple, huh?" she asks.

Her guide nods and then glances down at their clipboard. "Yes Mrs.Gingham."

"It's Miss," Zelda says, absentminded. Her gaze is trained on the water pouring out into the river below. When the city planners had announced the hydroplant, she'd been a little dubious. Five had been working off of coal for so long, the idea that there was an alternative way to harness electricity had seemed ludicrous.

Now here she is, contemplating yet another new energy source.

The other day, she'd woken up to grey clouds weighed down by thick smog. The factories around Gingham Electric pumped clouds of noxious black gas into the sky, her own factory pumping out almost as much as the rest of them combined. There's a saying in Five, you'll never have to light your first cigarette. The air quality is so damned bad here that the number one cause of death is lung disease.

Zelda doesn't want that for her kids, she doesn't want it for anyone. Sadie'd picked up a nasty cough last week and every time she heard her daughter hack like a smoker, she'd felt the slightest bit more awful about contributing to it.

"Of Course Miss Gingham, so sorry, if you'll come this way, I'll show you the powerhouse next."

She lingers over the rushing water a moment longer before turning to follow the young intern along the wall to the centre of the dam's electricity conversion. How strange it is to be considering a total plant conversion two decades into her career. Would her grandfather be horrified or impressed?

Doesn't matter, she supposes, seeing as he's long dead.

They enter a large enclosed area that houses massive turbines and generators, all built to harvest the electricity from the water. It's unnerving how much all of this is beyond Zelda's understanding. She knows coal power up and down, she could run the mechanisms in her sleep. This could all prove to be too overwhelming.

As she walks through the machinery, she doesn't feel nervous though. There's only this sense of wonder unfurling in her chest, a bud that's been closed up tight for so long. It's good to have something new to learn, wonderful to not understand everything all over again. It almost makes her feel young.

A woman is there amongst all of it, slight against the backdrop of a turbine. Focused on her task, she hasn't seemed to notice the intern and Zelda's presence yet. With all the propaganda over the years, it isn't hard to recognize the victor even though Zelda's only ever seen Patricia Valfierno from afar. Though she's aged, her features have sharpened, still there's a softness to her that she's never seen before.

A happiness, maybe.

The intern explains things to Zelda as she walks but her descriptions are vague, the meanings don't land. They use enough big words to sound smart but it doesn't seem like they know what they're talking about.

"Thank-you," Zelda says and taps the intern lightly on the shoulder, "I'll be alright from here."

They nod hurriedly and leave Zelda to it. It's sort of funny, back in the day she had to shout just to make her voice heard but today when she stepped into the Dam's office she didn't even have to introduce herself. They bent over backwards to accommodate her for a tour. Odd how a name can carry so much power.

She doubles back slowly to where Patricia was working on a turbine but waits to make her approach until she is seemingly finished her work. Water rushes through the powerhouse and all of it seems fairly straight forward, she doesn't need help, it's just that it isn't often she finds herself face to face with a living legend. It's curiosity that makes her approach Patricia, nothing else.

"Truly the people's victor, aren't you Miss Valfierno?" Zelda says and extends a hand to shake. She's never heard of a victor working a union job before Patricia. From the information she's gathered on the woman, it's safe to say that's not the only unique thing about her. "Zelda Gingham, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind taking a walk with me."

She doesn't wait for a response before she turns to head back out onto the dam's walkway.

[rook]

patricia jane valfierno

♕

I take the readings on the transformer, taking a pencil from behind my ear and scratching 16kV down into the output column of my clipboard. Adjacent to this is the stepped-up voltage, which I fill in as ~400kV, with the squiggle being shorthand for an approximation. We won't actually know the true voltage until after it's fed into any step-down transformers.

It's a lot of power being generated, yet only a quarter of it will actually reach the district. The majority is fed through hundreds of miles of pylons that extend all the way to the Capitol.

"Truly the people's victor, aren't you Miss Valfierno?" Comes a voice.

I turn to see a well-dressed, clean-cut woman striding briskly towards me. She looks out of place here in the dark din of the powerhouse, with her smart clothes and neat hair - but it doesn't deter her at all. She speaks assertively to be heard over the generator's constant hum and the whirring of the turbines below, and her words stir a strange pride in me.

The people's victor. Sounds like a publicity stunt, a gimmick, an angle. But it's not, I don't do any of this for recognition. I do it because it makes me useful. Thing is, I'm whatever people need me to be - be that a voice of reason, a person of influence, or just an extra pair of hands.

Her gaze is strong, her shoulders pulled backwards with confidence as she opens her palm and offers me a handshake along with her introduction.

"Zelda Gingham, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind taking a walk with me."

I grip her hand firmly and shake it - she already knows enough about me. Her palms aren't rough like mine, not worn down by the same hard years, but they're not soft either - she hasn't just spent her life behind a desk.

Gingham. Gingham electric. It twigs, and as she opens the heavy sealed door to let the sunlight flood in, I nod to myself in understanding of why she might be here.

Stepping outside reminds me of when the arena cracked open and I saw daylight for the first time in weeks. I raise my forearm to my brow, allowing my eyes to adjust to the sun, and my ears to get reacquainted with the harsh roaring of water cascading from the pumps.

"Not a great place for a walk." I mutter, my words likely being lost down the crashing falls below.

Zelda, of Gingham electric. I've not heard much but I know they run primarily on coal. She seems from first impressions an ambitious woman. She's around my age, with intriguingly dark eyes and thick hair that is starting to curl aggressively in the moisture. I figure she has an interest in hydro-electric power, perhaps for her business - otherwise maybe she just has an interest in me.

"Are you here for Patricia the worker, or Patricia the victor?" I ask, brushing a ginger twirl of fringe out of my eyes. I then sink my hands deep into the pockets of my jumpsuit as we begin our trek across the long stone walkway.

Either way, she's here on business - so let's cut the crap and get down to business. I have shit to do.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

z e l d a .

"You say you like the wind
blowin' through your hair
Well, come on roll with me
'til the sun goes down"

Always fair, she's still a woman who has become accustomed to getting what she wants.

Zelda pushes the door open and the sun, which hadn't seemed too bright before, holds her in place for a moment as her eyes adjust to the sudden glare. She nods her head a little and the sunglasses that she'd pushed up onto her forehead when she'd stepped into the powerhouse earlier fall back onto the bridge of her nose with a gentle click.

The view from the walkway stops her in her tracks for a brief moment every time she sees it. Five, down below in the distance smokes like a factory line worker, barely paying notice to the green surroundings that begin on the way up to the dam, hesitant, dwindling and keeping far away from the centre of the district.

Five is a scorch mark on the map, but she'll be damned if it isn't her scorch mark.

She flexes her hand at her side, the memory of Patricia's grip still playing over and over like broken record. Shorter fingers, only by a little, calluses along the joint lines and a little bit of grime but a firm grip and a steady shake. Interesting.

Patricia steps out beside Zelda. She gives the victor a moment to readjust to the sun and tries not to watch out of the corner of her eye. There's something about Patricia that makes Zelda feel like she can't take her eyes off the woman. Sort of like if she looks away she might miss something.

In the sun it's easy to see the freckles that dot the bridge of her nose, see the sheen of ginger in her hair that was harder to spot in the dark of the powerhouse. That serious expression that's always been a trademark of her's since she was reaped is there too.

But soft, again, like sandstone made smooth by the tide after a very, very long time.

"Not a great place for a walk."

Zelda looks ahead again and smirks a little. She pretends that she couldn't hear that, maybe Patricia's words got lost to the rushing water of the dam. That stubborn streak in her wants to argue that she's wrong, that it's the perfect place for a walk, but that isn't why she's here. Another time, maybe. She'll let Pat see what she sees when she looks out at their home.

Zelda starts them walking along the top of the dam and Patricia matches her pace.

"Patricia the person, actually," she says, "If that's alright with you." Sometimes folks need their masks and their labels and Zelda's not the type to take that from them.

She gestures vaguely at the smoke stack called Five and weaves her words on the spot, the idea already evolved in her head just needing translating. "When I was a little girl, I thought this was just how things were, everyone had black skies and acid rain."

She hadn't known that other districts don't live like this, that the fact they only see blue sky once every few months is wrong, that a life span should average out at longer than sixty years. Zelda leans against the walkway railing and takes a moment to collect her thoughts.

"Then the dam went up and some of the factories were closed and now we've got more sunny days. I didn't think Victors had to care, but you care. I suppose that's made me care again too," Zelda says. It wasn't just that. Sadie's cough, Oz's seasonal depression from all the grey and the children orphaned under her roof had slowly untwisted the knife from her gut as well.

"Thank-you," Zelda says. Her tone is simple, genuine, "For not giving up on us."

[rook]

patricia jane valfierno

♕

As we amble along the catwalk the mist starts to cool the sweat on my forehead, a pleasant relief after hours of working in the powerhouse's heavy humidity. I find myself having to keep close to Zelda to hear her voice over the crash of the outlet pumps thundering downstream.

"When I was a little girl, I thought this was just how things were, everyone had black skies and acid rain." She allows nostalgia to take her back, and I join her, letting her words to return me to a time when Rose and I lived on the streets of Five.

The great chimneys near our den pumped heavy fumes into the air day and night. When we were little I told my younger sister that they were magic cloud generators, operated by a wizard. She liked that story. In truth, these fumes were causing sulfur dioxide to dissolve in water droplets above, turning the seasonal downpours more acidic, rusting the pipes that snaked around factories and eroding the trees.

Once I'd have closed up to Zelda's words, shut myself off entirely. I grow uncomfortable being told I'm an inspiration, or that I set a good example, because we all know I don't. Years of drug abuse and alcoholism well documented, the smear piece on not mentoring Lysander, just as Lethe bypassed mentoring me - a cycle of neglect, a culture of failure in Five.

But, I suppose, these people depend on me, just as I depend on them. I'm their constant through the years of change, standing strong despite all the shit that's come my way.

"Thanks, but I really haven't done anything." I withdraw a little.

This isn't my way of giving back to Five. This is my way of moving on, of getting out of that house and having purpose. It's being a part of society instead of drifting alone above it.

I'm old. I've strands of grey hair hiding underneath the ginger, frown lines are now tattooed on my forehead, while my hands are worn and my back sore. The world has forgotten Patricia Valfierno, they've finally moved on from her story. She's free to live her own life now, one of hard work and simple pleasures, not blood and glory.

"In truth, it's the district that didn't give up on me."

I rest my forearms on the wet metal barrier, blinking to the horizon. The mist of the falls masks the details, but you can still see the grey spider that is District Five sprawled out amidst the green, the wildlife decaying around each of it's contorted limbs. The cost of progress.

I've seen the world, from the glimmering towers of One to the derelict shanties of Twelve, and I can at least draw this conclusion.

"We have it better than most."

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

z e l d a .

"You say you like the wind
blowin' through your hair
Well, come on roll with me
'til the sun goes down"

Patricia denies her praise, tries to divert it to the district instead. Of course, Zelda should have expected nothing less from the stubborn victor. It's hard for someone to see their own growth anyway, to be able to step back and subjectively look at all they've accomplished.

To say that it was the district that hadn't given up on Patricia is a sad lie. This district has long been a machine that would gladly chew up every last person in it in its quest to rise to the top, victor or not. It's evident in the way that they've slowly been poisoning themselves little by little with toxic fumes for years.

As long as the district earns a place in Panem's legacy, the world could crumble beneath their feet.

Zelda smiles a little bit, her companion's drop in energy doesn't sway her. Her grandfather had once told her that she was put on this earth to argue.

And she's damned good at it too.

"I know you think that you're no better than the rest of us," Zelda says, "But that's part of what makes you good." She pushes away from the railing, "Take it or leave it, that's just what I feel."

It's hard to argue against feelings. Fragile, fickle things as they are. They don't have to make sense, they don't have to have any logic at all. Zelda has been ending conversations for decades with this move.

"We have it better than most."

"We could have it better," Zelda answers. She leans on the railing, facing Patricia's side profile. For the first time in a long time, a small shiver runs through her. Patricia Valfierno is not an easy woman to read and Zelda's always been forward, never really able to tiptoe around an idea once she's had it.

"What if there was a way to clear out the smog?" she says, tone almost shy in front of Patricia. Her plan almost feels like a fantasy, a wild idea that could send her family's business into ruin, put her children back out onto the streets that they came from.

"If we can use water for energy, what's stopping us from harnessing the wind?" Zelda asks. She turns her gaze back to the district, back to the dark blanket of cloud laying low over the buildings. It's hard to imagine Five without it's smog cloud but lately it's all she can ever think about. Other districts don't live like this, so why should they?

The idea sounds insane, hardly like an idea at all but Zelda still remembers when the dam was proposed, everyone thought the concept was going to fail. Now here she stands on its wall.

For the first time in a long time, something in Five changed for the good.

"I'd like you to help me figure out how," she says softly. No pitch, no jovial tone, the only decoration lacing her words is hope.

[rook]

patricia jane valfierno

♕

"We could have it better."

Flirting with the idea of a better society is a dangerous game. We walk a fine line trying to improve things for ourselves in the districts: push it too far and the Capitol will take what gains you've made and set you back a decade to put you in your place.

The current system works on a win-win basis. Five gets a percentage of the energy produced by the hydrodam, so the better results we get the more energy goes to Five, as well as to the Capitol. Anything we do going forwards will have to be on that basis to keep the Capitol from dismantling it and using it for their own gain.

As she explains her idea, I frown a little, staring down at the several thousand litres of water crashing below - my head then slowly lifts as I follow the spray as it rises into the great achromatic sky, like upwards rain.

The deafening roar kills all sound, and the sheer force of the water creates a maelstrom that rages on and on, unrelenting and fierce. In the eye of the storm is Zelda Gingham, her ambition radiating against the mist, her gaze stern and holding. She is determined, focused, even a little bit terrifying - but a good woman, underneath it all. I can tell that much.

She awaits my answer, and I realise all I have for her is silence. My eyes move from the treeline, to the decaying town, then back to the water. When I turn back to Zelda, she is looking at me patiently, and I sigh.

I just help out here, Zelda. I want to say. There are some great engineers in Five, with better minds than mine. I should tell her.

I say neither of those things, instead I am frozen for some reason, mouth half-open like a fish. Why don't I say those things? I want to. I want to shut her out and tell her I'm not right for this and to let me go back to my repairs, but I don't.

Maybe it's the cold air hitting me after hours of working in the heat. Maybe I'm in shock. Maybe I'm losing my nerve.

Or maybe it's just because she is kind, and she needs me, and it's nice to be needed.

It's really nice to be needed.

I laugh.

"When do we start?"