marissa monaghan. 12.

Elliot Monaghan Sr. was a fair man. He'd spent his whole life cutting deals and meeting people in the middle. Rare was there a moment where he didn't get his way - and in those infrequent times he made sure that he won the long game.

So when a young man, fresh out of his last reaping, walked into his home with a collard shirt and a crooked tie and asked him for his eldest daughter's hand in marriage he said of course - on one condition.

The boy take her last name.

Not a moment later the boy agreed, shaking hands and almost running to tell Marissa the good news. Elliot watched his daughter smile, flick her gaze through the gap in the door for half a second and whisper a thank you, Papa. They'd had their own discussion hours earlier and Marissa had cut her own deal. The love of her life, for the rest of her life, and for her children's life too.

She'd run the shop and teach her brightest everything that went on in and out of the books.

She was his brightest. Marissa, beautiful and careful. She grew up with pretty bows in her hair and a sharp mind, irresistible to all her classmates. That boy from the edge of the Seam had been lingering outside of their home for years now, so he came as no surprise to her father. Who was he to judge a boy from a place his own family had originated - and who was he to question Marissa's own judgement? He trusted her, even at that age, to keep good company - and the moment Elliot realised his daughter felt the same way about the boy he had begun hatching his own deal, one Marissa knew she had been training to answer her whole life.

She had a drive she could only have inherited from her father. His other daughters were beautiful, yes, and intelligent - but not like Marissa. She could read a room, anticipate actions, show initiative and thought-out planning. Charm customers and keep the books up-to-date, take a subtle cue from her father, not question the boxes of liquor that weren't on their allocated shipment sheet for that month. The moment Elliot Sr. saw her open a crate, stare at its contents without a word, and close it again - that was when he knew she would be the one to inherit it all.

Every Monaghan child worked in the shop, as had their father and his siblings, and their mother and her siblings, and back it went. How they came to acquire their wealth nobody quite knew - and nobody quite cared enough to investigate. Marissa would spend her days behind the counter memorising faces to names to stock, and when they shut up shop she'd sit in the front window and watch the sun set behind the trees of the Merchant Village.

It was a quiet, beautiful childhood spent in that shop. A calm before the storm. Eighteen years old and she had learned every trick in the book, knew when her uncles were going out after dark and what they were ordered to bring back. Stood in the crowds at a funeral of a friend too stupid to make it back alive, dipped her head down out of respect and rolled her eyes underneath the brim of her hat. The men wanted to do the heavy lifting and she let them, shields from gunshots and stab wounds, all desperate for the shiny gold coins rubbed between her fingers.

When her father sat her down to bargain with her heart she sat pensive for a moment, staring at the deep wood of his desk, and toyed with the prospect of herself in his shoes.

After a long, quiet moment she flicked the coin in her hand - heads, but she followed heart instead.

"Deal, Papa."

She stirs over maps of the train lines and draw X's and O's in red marker. She hugs her children when they fall over and kisses them as the fall asleep. As they slumber she draws the curtains of the shop and twists the sign to say Closed - and the Monaghans get to work.

In the dead of the night they run across train tracks, pry open locks, brush over footprints and never make a sound. Someone radios through to Ten - old school technology, stuff the Capitol would have abandoned years ago. Analog is harder to track - near impossible. But not completely impossible. Only one person radios in. Another radios out. Nobody can know the full story - nobody except Marissa Monaghan.

When her brother doesn't return from a routine extraction of medicine from a train leaving Six, she panics. Because she doesn't know where he is. If she doesn't know, then-

They find his body five days later, a bullet wound in his brain and his gun empty and Keeper boot prints in the mud around him. 

The little bastard killed himself to keep their family safe. Idiot, she thinks at his funeral. Smart, she tells everyone else. Her first taste of grief is harrowing, the feeling like the graze of a bullet against her skin. They were close. Too close. And her brother was only twenty-one.

In Panem, that was more than most children got. A luxury. The Monaghans weren't short of those, no thanks to their father's hand in the mayor's office. But all the money in the District couldn't stop a bullet and a last resort.

Maybe if she had-
If she could have-
If she should have-

Her husband holds her delicately at night. Her children - six of them now - behave, for the most part. Her father says it's not her fault. To not even dare think about shutting down their next raid. His son had died for his family's safety. The Monaghans would not let his death be in vain.

So she crosses out names on her maps and circles new ones and takes a long, hard drag of a cigarette. 

No more Monaghans would fall. Not under her watch.

When her father dies, she takes it terribly. Eli Junior takes it far, far worse.

So she turns to Plan B. The twins turn twelve years old and she sits them down at the kitchen table, still dressed in black from the funeral that morning.

"You'll start working at the shop after school," she instructs with the same clarity her father did at that age. "And I need you to promise that you won't tell your siblings about what happens in the back rooms."

"Okay," says Juliet immediately. "I promise."

James frowns, a storm stirring in his eyes. A kick from his sister under the table and a glare, he caves.

"Okay," her son drawls. "I promise."

"Good," says Marissa. "You'll start tomorrow afternoon."

A wrap of knuckles on the wooden table.

"Don't you dare be late."

Juliet arrives on time.

Her daughter dies good and kind and brave and whole, despite her mother. Despite her wounds. She dies protecting a child. She dies protecting her sister. She dies protecting her family. She dies headstrong. She dies fighting, she can see it in Juliet's eyes as they flicker. She fights. She tries.

Her daughter dies and Marissa becomes the pieces of her shattered soul.






After, she picks up a piece and cuts her palm on the jagged edge.

Bleeding, she holds Noah close.

Picks up the phone.

Dials the mayor's office.

Watches her daughter's friend kill her murderer.

Smiles.

"Deal."