A/N: The worlds of the Hunger Games and Matched trilogies belong to Suzanne Collins and Ally Condie, respectively. This story is meant to be loosely consistent with canon in both worlds but is AU in relation to my other Matched fic, "Re-Matched." This one is for Day 7 (Pie) of the 25 Days of Fic Challenge.
1
In prison, Marcella dreamed of pastry.
Flaky layers surrounding sweet cream filling. Short layers crunching in a pie crust. Warm, airy brioche still breathing the heat of the oven. Butter fragments melting on her tongue.
"There's a committee to develop nutritional regimens," the prison warden tells her when she's uncuffed in his office and the process of releasing her begins.
This one's uniform is white. She's seen ragtag assemblages of clothes, then gray, then blue, then brown, more random pieces, olive, then she lost track. Change at the top means surprisingly little to the people at the bottom.
"You're to be a consultant only. You get an apartment in Singles housing, a voucher for food and health care, and two sets of plainclothes."
"How do I know—"
He hands her a box. The box has a screen. Datapod. That hasn't changed. "Press your thumb there and speak your name. Now it knows you and will keep you on schedule."
2
Her new clothes are dark blue: long pants and a long-sleeved shirt that between them, cover most of the tattoos on her body. The silver swirls on her cheeks can't be concealed, not even by shaking long hair—now equally silver—over her face.
The shoes are thick-soled and will require polishing. They come with a tin of polish, but she has to find her own rag.
3
"Our goals are nutritional optimization through a standardized menu," the woman in the white uniform says. Kath Grant—that's her name. She's brisk, with chewed-on nails and natural brown hair, cut chin-length. In the old days, she would have been a blank slate for colors and designs. Now everybody's like this: stripped down, stark, purposeful.
Marcella has no idea what nutritional optimization means. She's never heard of a vitamin—it sounds like a made-up word. Her job as Third Pastry Chef in the President's kitchen was sculpting fantasies from flour and butter.
4
The walk to her apartment from the Nutrition Division offices takes her past a construction project that's rising over the burnt-out shell of the neighborhood where she used to buy earrings and hair clips. Pieces of art, those were, rotating into new designs with her every motion. She'd worked with skewers to duplicate that in bread: to make the wings of a bird flap or the leaves on a pastry tree flutter and fall.
Air train. The long arc of the single concrete rail doesn't say air to her. Maybe she's too close to the ground to see it.
5
"We're going to start with the most popular canned foods," Kath Grant says. "We need to alter the recipes for the ingredients we have."
The number of lost things continues to surprise Marcella. How do you lose sheep?
Her first task is to make lamb-with-dried-plums. The lamb is goat, and the dried plums are dried apples, but otherwise, it's to be just the same.
Never in her life has Marcella cooked meat more complicated than heating a sausage.
6
It's the little losses that grab at her gut.
Everyone wears blue, brown, white, or the olive of the military. The houses that used to be painted in bright colors and swirling floral designs have been scrubbed clean and repainted in white, with black iron railings and plain black shutters.
How do you lose color?
7
"We have put the excesses and terrors of the warming behind us," the man on the public screen says. His uniform is white, his hair has thinned to show sunburned scalp, and his voice makes everyone in the street stop to listen.
Marcella pulls her standard gray coat tighter and holds out a hand to catch a snowflake. If it's warmer, her bones are too old to notice.
8
"There were things called raisins," she explains to Kath Grant. "They'd be the best substitutes for dried plums."
It's a side question to distract from the fifth batch of goat that's come out wrong. Undercooked, overcooked. Dry and stringy. Burnt on the outside but bleeding when she sticks a knife in it. There seem to be an infinite number of ways to cook goat wrong.
Kath Grant taps the word raisins into her datapod. The first time, it's raizens, so Marcella spells it for her.
"Oh," the supervisor says after a while. "Dried grapes. Grapes are a banned food."
By now, Marcella's been here long enough to ask why without fearing she'll be hauled back to prison. Kath Grant accepts why if it means people do their jobs better. So she asks.
"Grapes were used primarily to make intoxicants. For the health of the public, we don't grow those any more."
9
There were underground levels of the President's palace where Marcella never dared go when she was a third pastry chef, but she goes there now, and no one tries to stop her.
There's enough dust on the concrete floor for her to believe the reason is apathy. The door she hopes to find is unlocked.
Inside, metal boxes are lined up on metal shelves. The boxes are locked. In the stifling gloom, she considers giving up. She wonders if crowbars are another thing that have been lost. Probably not.
The rack of keys is in a cubicle at the back of the room. Locking and unlocking boxes give her a blister where she holds the key, a minor wound that joins her cooking burns and paper cuts. It takes Marcella five more trips to find what she wants.
Her breath catches as she shoves magazines under her zipped coat, loosening her belt and using her waistband to hold them steady, but she needs light and leisure to make sense of the crumbling pages. Cook's Illustrated. Once upon a time, she considered it a useless piece of pre-Crash history, painfully earnest in its quest to establish the one right way to cook things.
These purposeful strangers will love it.
10
Goat needs longer cooking on a lower temperature. Done right, it melts off the bone.
11
"The warming believed it was a revolution." The balding man in white is ranting on the public screens again, or maybe it's a re-run of the same propaganda. Marcella misses the old gossip programs. She didn't believe half of it, but they made her laugh.
"True revolution is impossible until we tame our animal spirits and harness them under the guiding hand of science."
12
"We need a menu for a banquet," Kath Grant says.
Marcella's mind soars to pigeons stuffed inside chickens stuffed inside turkeys, to lobster bisque, to dainty cheese biscuits, to trees blossoming in candied or pickled fruit. She doesn't know how to make half of it, but there were cookbooks in the locked boxes, ones with titles that included Art and Epicure.
Kath Grant means something simple, with goat.
Roast goat, then. Plain wheat bread, light and warm. Green salad, crisp and fresh, dressed with oil and vinegar. Roasted turnips. There are always turnips, but never enough oil to make them palatable.
How do you lose butter?
"What's this?" Kath Grant asks. She's pointing to the final item on the menu. Chocolate cake.
"It's dessert. A sweet. People like it at the end of a meal." Marcella had passed up tarts with jewel-like fruits and tortes with fine-grained cake layers between thin slabs of ganache. Chocolate cake should be simple enough for these people.
Dezert, decert, and finally dessert go into the datapod. "Oh," the supervisor says. "Empty calories. No, we don't need that. We don't have chocolate, anyway."
How do you lose chocolate?
13
The balding man's on the public screen again. Marcella pauses in the civic square, missing the pastel tiled streets that have been repaved in rational asphalt, but missing more the chill and creaminess of chocolate ice cream on her tongue.
"Our new society begins with the match," the man announces.
Match means fire. Fire was the symbol of the revolution that shattered Marcella's world.
"Optimal family and individual health begins with an optimal partner. On the fifteenth of Fructidor, we herald a new beginning when one hundred seventeen-year-olds in each of the provinces of the society are assigned their match."
Provinces. The victors—whoever they are now—have renamed the Districts. It shouldn't come as a surprise, when the months are all different, and when she's had to retrain herself to refer to this place as Central.
What would these people rename the districts? Coalia? Granaria? Aquatica? She's curious enough to ask her dataport for a map of more than her immediate neighborhood before she realizes that she's never been sure where the Districts were. These new names—Oria, Tana, Keya, Camas, Acadia—tell her nothing about the places they conceal.
She's in line at the depot that distributes dinner—bean spread on flat bread, today, with mixed greens and a handful of raspberries—before she sees the joke.
If that girl—Katniss Everdeen—had been assigned a husband, the revolution might never have happened. There'd have been no star-crossed lovers in the Hunger Games, no suicide threat with the berries, no rebellion fomented because the Capitol looked like fools. No intrigue. No romance. Nothing for the gossip shows to gossip about. Old Cesar would have had to focus on—
To focus on watching teenagers kill one another.
14
"I never liked the games," Cassius says. He's older than Marcella, now so bent and shrunken that he looks like some snarky caricaturist's idea of an imp. His skin's purple dye has faded during the decades in prison, leaving him a pale shade of blue that suggests he's already dead.
The others in the oldtimers group nod. They meet to walk around one of the new greenspaces, these people who have been released from prison because the current regime can use their skills. Being in one another's apartments is forbidden.
The litany passes from lip to lip.
"Everybody else watched the Games, but I couldn't face it."
"So awful. I cried when the little girl from Eleven died."
"You couldn't really say anything at the time, but of course I always knew the Games were wrong."
"The Games had to end eventually. You could see the Capitol evolving beyond that."
"It was really just a symbol. But I would have ended it, if it were up to me."
"I only watched it for the strategy and watching the contestants rise to the challenge."
Marcella says the right words, but she remembers her teeth baring in a triumphant grin when Clove took her knife to Katniss. She'd been on the edge of her seat and so furious when the big, dark boy from Eleven—most of the names were gone after all these years—had bashed in Clove's head with a rock.
She'd spent a lot of money on Clove. Chipping in to buy sponsor gifts was something she'd never done before, but Clove was so smart, so spunky, so skilled with her knives. She couldn't just let the girl take her chances, not when there was a way to support her.
When the rebellion started, Marcella had joked that she'd rather start a revolution over Clove's death than over Katniss' survival. But it was like threatening to start a revolution over a dead pet ferret. You grieve. You move on.
She was sure, even through the blurry lens of memory, that she'd enjoyed the Hunger Games.
15
At least she can take pride in how the bread rises.
16
"There was never chocolate," Cassius says as they walk in the greenspace. "Not in our time. It was a synthetic."
"But I used it." Marcella remembers the sharp, bitter smell of block chocolate curling off the grater. The thick feel of melting chunks as she stirred. The swirl as she lifted a perfect strawberry from the dipping mixture.
"We put the synthetic in bars, of course. It's good to have reliable properties." Cassius is out of prison because he was a chemist. "It's why we use pills instead of putting treatments directly into food."
"What treatments?"
Cassius reaches to snap a rose from its stem, then pulls back his hand. "Purely hypothetical. I'd put it in food, anyway."
"Can you make more?"
17
"Passion spurs revolution." The balding man's face is replaced by the famous newsclip, the second-to-last that Marcella remembers clearly from before the guards came.
A girl on fire. It's the Katniss girl, the one Marcella still holds responsible for Clove's death. She's literally on fire, the flames running up and down her thin body in that ridiculous uniform. She doesn't even have the sense to roll in the snow.
"Burn!" Marcella whispers. She'd yelled it at the screen back then.
Marcella was in jail, awaiting trial, when girl shot her own leader. A moment's hope—the revolution will collapse, we can all be as we were—dissipated like liquid reducing from a glaze when the military appointed one of their own and the machine rolled on.
"Cool-headed reason builds an optimal society. We must put the excesses and terrors of the warming behind us."
The warming. They'd renamed the revolution, too.
18
If Marcella could get her hands on a goat, she'd try making butter.
19
The heavy brown bar—passed to her by Cassius in the twilight of the greenspace—has the solid, waxy feel she remembers. Bitterness rises as flakes fall away from the grater.
Before she melts the synthetic chocolate, she sours goat's milk with vinegar, adds baking soda, and lets it bubble. She mashes berries for sweetness to replace the sugar these people don't produce—empty calories—and mixes it all together with eggs, oil, and the coarse flour that she's learned to take for granted.
The batter, when she adds the melted chocolate turns smooth and glossy, though it's all thicker and heavier than she'd like. Cake should form a cloud-like sponge in the oven.
This one stays thick and dense. It's not as sweet as she'd like, but it's chocolate.
Kath Grant picks skeptically at it with her fork. "Empty calories," she repeats. "But it tastes. . . good. We can't serve this."
"Why not?"
"Sweets. . . are a reminder of a very bad time. People in the old Capitol had things at the expense of all of us in the Districts. We can't go back to that."
"Isn't it different when we serve sweets to everyone?"
20
With sufficient determination, it's possible to make alcohol from almost anything. Even turnips.
21
"Give me another of those chemistry journals, and I'll see about synthetic sugar that stands up to heat," Cassius says in the twilight of the greenspace.
The journals in their locked boxes aren't hers, but in the absence of anybody who cares about the past, Marcella will trade them for what she needs.
A/N: This note is about canon and world-building.
When I got to the end of Mockingjay, my fingers were itching to have the Society be the outgrowth of District 13.
On her own blog, Farla points out that the population of the Hunger Games world is apparently roughly 200,000, which is oddly low for 75 years in which people in the Districts had large families, while the population of the Matched world is about 20 million (still low) with a birth rate that should result in a shrinking population. Getting from 200,000 to 20 million with a war or two, plus a birth rate below replacement level, isn't mathematically possible. My call is that, if you asked a typical American on the street questions about countries' populations, you'd get all sorts of answers, so the population numbers in the two series simply aren't reliable. With that in mind, various leaders differed on what would endanger the replacement rate, with a wide assortment of social policies resulting.