❨ wildflowers & wild hearts ; mickey&marley ❩

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Mackenzie Pryce was tired. Living life in the limelight was taxing stuff; his every move was watched by prying eyes. He was seen having dinner with Jacinta Salazar, so rumors of scandal were born. His mother and sister went to the market without him, so it must've meant there was strain within his household. So on an so forth.

He had learned sometime in the middle of his Victory Tour that the best way to deal with the accusations was to laugh at them and move along; anything else just fanned the flames.

It was a dull and particularly cloudy day, and he was set on spending it quietly now that he was home and there weren't any immediate events to prepare for. Max was out on a walk; his mother was napping upstairs, and Mackenzie sat in the den practicing the guitar when he heard the knock coming from the back door.

He would've ignored it, pretended not to be home. Probably some Capitol reporter or yet another complete stranger bringing him a basket of baked goods. (It was strange how many people wanted to help him now that he could afford to help himself; where had they been when his mother was working herself into the ground to keep a roof over their heads?)

But the fact that the knock came from the back piqued Mackenie's interest, since the back yard was entirely closed off by a ten feet tall brick wall.

He sat his guitar down in the laundry room and cleared his throat, hand resting on the door knob for a moment as he prepared the public figure persona that the Capitol had so carefully crafted for him, and he opened the door.

Ambushed by a blur of dark curls, Mackenzie stumbled backwards as the other person clung to him in an embrace. He searched his mind for who it could've been, for who could've been so happy to see him that they hugged him out of instinct, and came up short handed. He pried the boy's hands from around him, forcing the pair of them to separate, and when he looked down at the boy, he saw himself staring back. A reflection of Mackenzie, live and in the flesh. The same hazel eyes, same thick eyebrows, tall and skinny, with olive skin. His breath caught in his throat.

"I'm sorry. But, uh— um—" the boy said; Mackenzie studied him in bewilderment, eyes wide with shock and confusion, "I think you're my brother."

He opened his mouth to reply and nothing came out. His mother certainly didn't have any other children besides Maxine and himself. His father, though.

"Who—" A million questions ran rampant through his mind; almost none of them were complete enough to be formulated into a question.

"How?"

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It would've been easy not to believe him. It would've been easy for Mackenzie to tell him he was wrong or that there had been some sort of misunderstanding. It would've been easy to close the door in this boy's face and to never see him again.

The look was certainly similar; that much was obvious although the boy, Marley, had a certain innocent charm that had been lost on Mackenzie long before the arena.

"All that deep shit aside, you're also a bas— Uh, your dad walked out on your mom, too. Same with mine."

"A bastard," Mackenzie retorted, leaning into the door frame and crossing his arms over his chest. "It should be used as an insult to all the shitty Dads out there, huh?" As opposed to shaming bastard offspring for existing. If a man left his child, it should have been him who walked the streets with a brand; if anything, Mackenzie planned on using his title as a power move when the time came. He would be a walking reminder of the demons you simply cannot outrun some day.

Maybe he'd wait until Bryson was sick and bedridden. Or maybe he'd wait until the guy's wedding anniversary. Maybe he'd call for a press conference in the Capitol and announce it to all of the world and watch as Seven finally turned its back on one of its biggest embarrassments.

"Please don't think I'm just here for money, or because I wanna trick a victor; that doesn't matter to me! I live in a cabin with a bunch of sweaty lumberjacks. I really don't care how rich you are! I just— I just want a family. That's all I've ever wanted."

It would've been easy not to believe him.

Mackenzie wasn't sure what to do, so he sized the boy up. Everything about Marley was a place Mackenzie remembered going once, but was also wholly foreign and unknown. The hands; Mackenzie knew how hard a lumberjack had to work in order to get callouses that big. The kind eyes; it was the thing that made him a bad liar and Maxine a good one.  It would have been easy not to believe him, but he couldn't help it. He sidestepped and motioned for Marley to come inside, peering around the yard for more potential siblings waiting their turn.

"And that's why I'm here, and that's also why I trampled all of your flowers."

"You trampled—" he cleared his throat, closing the door behind Marley and making his way into the den, "Do you, uh, want something? Tea? DNA test?"