Am I Interrupting?

He’ll hand it to Snow—the bastard is nothing if not opportunistic. And Plutarch, equally so, will be ringing his landline to ask him to brush up on his chess and save him a match when he’s back in the Capitol. A phony nicety for appearance’s sake, because Plutarch will be too busy in his new role of Head Gamemaker to play any other game. And if fortune, or Snow, has anything to say about it, Haymitch will be knee-deep in preparations for whatever death march is in store this time. 

A phony nicety with a clear message for whoever has ears to hear it. Those for Haymitch typically came in letters through the years, which he mostly ignored. He ripped his landline out for a reason. 

Effie had it reinstalled months ago, claiming Haymitch needed it now that he had victors to handle, schedules to oversee, things to be in the know about. Shame Plutarch conveniently failed to let him know about this. 

Plutarch was singing a different tune about the Quell last year. Slipped it in when he found Haymitch schmoozing a pair of sponsors and pulled him aside to praise the diamond in the rough that was his tribute. She was an utter natural, someone to carry the torch of her predecessors, and Plutarch at least had the sense not to compare her to you directly. Haymitch didn’t need Plutarch’s observations to make his own. 

“She’s already got the entire country in love with her,” Plutarch mused, gesturing to a crop of children running around the courtyard. “And it’s not just kids who look up to her. By this time next year, every adult you know will be fighting for the chance to be like Katniss Everdeen.” 

It was a twofold warning; the first of which Haymitch figured entirely himself the second he heard the Capitol’s collective sigh over her. Over both of them. Like they were holding their breath to see what prize could be spun from these coal lumps, as they had with Finnick and Johanna and too many before them. A fate Haymitch escaped by the skin of his teeth—not without signing other pieces of himself over—but there are numerous torments to victorhood. Beneath the layers of anesthesia and a grief that will never be scrubbed clean, he can now be grateful you escaped them, too. 

Plutarch’s second warning wasn’t exactly a sweeter pill to swallow. Which of his old classmates or neighbors would Haymitch have to bumble through mentoring come the Quarter Quell? Which would get to experience up close and personal how Haymitch butchered their kids? 

As Haymitch sits slumped on the booze-stained velvet of his couch, stewing in the wreck he caused while Snow fades out on screen, he decides this trade off is worse. 

He migrates to the kitchen when the broadcast switches to Caesar Flickerman and Claudius Templesmith. Finds a new bottle to replace the one he smashed against the wall. And he’s a second away from tearing into it when his front door bursts open. 

Peeta marches in, eyes rimmed with remnants of tears and bottom lip still quivering as he no doubt thinks through how to best have this talk with Haymitch. He draws the curtains open, and a window. Light and air are what Peeta needs to steady himself, to thrive like a plant under the sun in spite of harsh conditions, and he’s decided Haymitch requires the same. He keeps himself upright with a hand on the kitchen counter, right across from his mentor turned…tribute? They’ll find out in three months. 

“Wonderful,” Haymitch deadpans. “Can’t you leave me to enjoy my last days in peace?” 

“You aren’t dying,” says Peeta, equal parts pointed and dismissive. 

A man can hope. Haymitch pops off the bottle cap. “Don’t go casting your bets yet, boy.”

Peeta crosses his arms, holding himself stubbornly. Sometimes, Haymitch wonders if you handpicked Peeta to mimic your path in life. The girl was a given, more like Haymitch than she had any right to be. Peeta does a fine job filling in your strong-willed, sanctimonious shoes as he declares, “I’m going back in. You have to let me.” 

Haymitch scoffs long enough for it to turn into a laugh. “I don’t have to let you do anything.” 

Peeta straightens up. “The Seam thing about owing people—Katniss tried to help me make sense of it, but I didn’t and still don’t fully.” 

And why would he? Peeta grew up in a merchant culture where people placed expectations that had little to do with looking out for others and more to do with how to keep their own. Didn’t make every one of them selfish—Haymitch learned better from Maysilee—but it made them comfortable enough to not think about costs. That, and Peeta is the kind of soul who does things for others without expecting a thing from them in turn. Haymitch doesn’t have to debate if it’s a worldview you’d agree with. 

“I think I understand to an extent, though. The idea of us being responsible for each other.” 

Haymitch averts his eyes when he sees Lenore Dove and Burdock perched on either of Peeta’s shoulders. He takes a bitter swig and breathes in. “I’m failing to see what your revelation has to do with me.” 

Peeta drops his arms, glancing out the open window briefly. It draws in a breeze that makes the hair on Haymitch’s neck stand up. “You chose Katniss in the first Games, but you had a responsibility to the both of us.” 

Here we go. Haymitch was responsible for every kid entrusted to or forced upon his shoulders. All forty-eight of them, and then some. “Would you have had me choose differently? Because if memory serves, you said you understood.” 

“No, I wouldn’t have,” Peeta agrees, “and that’s what I’m asking of you now. When we’re in there, choose her again.” 

“Now who’s making premature predictions?” 

“You were responsible for me, and you chose not to be. I’ve been on the outside of your plans more than once now,” Peeta says, brows knitting with slight rather than full-blown resentment. Calmer than he’d been about Katniss and Haymitch’s shared secrecy back in Eleven. 

Choosing between them wasn’t new to Haymitch. In the years he’s been given a kid with grit, he’s backed them with the little he could give. Mags told him, about five and six years down the line, that’s simply how it goes. If you want to bring someone home, you have to learn to prioritize. Haymitch told the girl she’d learn, too. But he has never had to look any of the nonchosen in the eyes and admit he willingly discarded their life for another’s. It’s a peculiar remorse, strangely crueler than the guilt you and the ghosts who have lingered elicit in him. 

Haymitch gives a quick nod, and Peeta continues, “Which means you owe me. Anything I want—that’s how it works, right?”

He clenches his jaw, grinding his teeth together. “Just about.” 

Satisfaction turns his eyes a lighter blue than the storm passing through them seconds ago. Peeta seems pleased briefly, like he’s earned a good mark on his schoolwork, and Haymitch gulps two more mouthfuls of liquor. It’s easy to forget Peeta is still a kid at times, but not now. “I want you to help me do whatever it takes to save Katniss then. That includes letting me go back in with her.” 

“I think you’re overestimating how much help you’ll be to her in there.” Haymitch isn’t sure Peeta will be a very helpful mentor either. Not in his first year. Peeta may be a quick learner, may have the potential to be the mentor Twelve deserves eventually, but without the guidance of how to navigate this side of the Games, he’ll struggle. And every mentor will be coming in with their own personal investments. Those who would be likely to help the new kid are doubly expected to be thrown into the arena. 

“I can’t protect her if I’m not by her side,” Peeta argues. Boyish naivety at its finest. But who is Haymitch to judge? He knows firsthand what it is to give in to such desperation. He would’ve done anything, did do everything, and here he is, his love and family lost to him forever. Fate may be kind to Peeta, but Haymitch doesn’t waste time hoping for the impossible. 

“Who’s to say you’ll be of much use anyway?” Haymitch scratches his nose. “You’re down a leg, and she carried your load the first time around.”

Peeta anticipates his rebuttal with his own, expression sharpening. “You’re no less of a liability with that liver of yours,” he points an accusing finger, “and you owe me.” 

Haymitch grumbles, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” 

“I have to go back in with her.” Peeta sheds his composure, exchanging the prop for a plea that doesn’t require any acting. “Haymitch, please. I have to.” He doesn’t respond, which spurs Peeta on. He isn’t the one with your voice, but Haymitch hears you in the cracks when he repeats, “Please.” 

Haymitch takes a seat at the kitchen table, eager to wrap this up because the girl will be here soon. Once she’s done taking her sweet time putting two and two together. “Which one of us is going to tell the girl about this?” They won’t is the likely answer, if Haymitch agrees to this plan of his. It was much easier telling Peeta not to give away his interview strategy last year. He doesn’t bring up that bit of the boy’s hypocrisy now. “She’ll be vying for me to take your place.” 

“Will she?” Peeta asks, shifting more weight onto his right leg. 

“Dumb ain’t a good look on you.” Haymitch pinches the bridge of his nose and huffs. “You think she went through the trouble of pissing off Snow to let you die now?” 

Peeta considers this for a moment before he shakes his head. “Maybe not, but things are different now. There’s more to lose if she dies. Who will her mother and Prim have to look after them like she does? And what about the people in the districts who believe in all she represents? Their momentum will die out, and who wins then?” He steels himself to say, “And I won’t—I can’t—get by without her.” 

Oh, how true that reigns. Peeta fails to see she won’t be any better off in a world where he doesn’t exist. Colorless and cold. That’s what her life will become. “Look, kid…” Haymitch sighs. “Let me drink on it, yeah?” 

Peeta draws a slow breath, accepting that’s the closest he’ll get to an agreement. He motions to Haymitch’s array of liquor under the table. “Make the most of that because I’m cutting you off tomorrow.” 

His conviction makes Haymitch snicker. “Sure you are.” 

He keeps the window open after Peeta leaves, indifferent to the chill that creeps up his spine and settles in goosebumps on his arms. Along with the installment of a new phone on Effie’s orders, Peeta picked him up a clock for the kitchen. Handmade by his father’s friend. Did Oliver know who Peeta intended his hard work for? Probably wouldn’t have stopped him from gifting it. 

Haymitch tracks the minutes and watches them turn to hours. He drags the tip of his knife along the table. From the living room, Caesar and Claudius have shifted from dramatic outpourings of love for their victors to rambles about who they’re most excited to see. Coming off her win, the Girl on Fire is their main consensus. 

Girl on Fire. And yet she moves like the world has frozen to give her all the time she needs. Maybe Haymitch should search for her himself, get this over with, but he can’t force her to talk before she’s ready. He tried that when they worked on how to market her during the interviews. It was as futile as a bucket of water to a forest fire. What she needs first is space to grieve the future she didn’t even want to begin with. 

When Seneca Crane announced the double victors policy, Haymitch knew it would amount to nothing. Seneca, whose ignorance Haymitch thanks, surprised him. Too desperate for a spectacle to realize the consequences in what he’d done. Seneca Crane learned in the end. 

The pride and relief of getting them both home didn’t come without the envious question of why that couldn’t have been you. If Haymitch recognized it was a possibility in your Games, he’d have played the angle up and wouldn’t have had to pretend very hard. He would’ve forced the Gamemakers’ hands entirely. He would’ve married you under the Capitol’s watchful eyes, sung and danced for their cameras, and it would’ve been fine so long as he was with you. 

It didn’t take long for the envy to die out. Haymitch was nothing but selfish for wishing to condemn you to their clutches, even if it meant a life together. And when all is said and done, the kids deserve to choose each other of their own volition. Not anyone else’s, and certainly not Snow’s. 

Doesn’t matter much now, he guesses. Clock’s ticking, their nooses are squeezing, and Haymitch is still waiting. 

She could be dead in a ditch somewhere, or run off into the woods. Neither seem likely, especially since Thread’s lackeys so kindly informed them the electric fence was fixed a few weeks back. Haymitch and Peeta sat there with the Everdeens, each of them tense and playing dumb over what was taking her so long. 

When she finally walked in, hobbling on her hurt ankle, his heart dropped straight to the floor. Asterid tended to her as soon as the Peacekeepers left, the way she had for you nearly three decades ago. Did she—did Burdock—ever see you in the angles of their daughter’s face? Hear you in her mockingjay voice. 

The first time Haymitch heard it—before the song she gifted little Rue or the shout she gave to take her sister’s place—he thought death had come. He’d been at its door plenty of times in the years since you left him to complete silence. After the Games for that year concluded, Haymitch returned to Twelve to hit Ripper’s moonshine hard. She took over his spot as Hattie’s protege, and somewhere down the line, when both Hattie and Bascom Pie passed, she became the sole vendor of Haymitch’s vice. 

He tried to hitch it back to Victor’s Village immediately after his purchase, loathing to see Clerk Carmine now selling at the Hob, or Burdock going in to trade, or Louella McCoy carrying her first child through town. 

Most everyone had a child by that point. Somewhere between the ugly thought of which of them he’d one day mentor and the hopeless one of what yours might’ve been like, he wound up in an alley right outside the Hob. He couldn’t get it out of his head once he caught sight of Louella’s baby boy: the idea of children. 

Did he want them, genuinely, before the Games? Maybe in that flippant way so many young people do, with the assumption that they should because that was usually how life panned out. 

Would you have wanted a child? Haymitch couldn’t stop himself from asking, clutching at the bracelet in his shirt pocket and pinching the larkspur through the fabric. Children were another thing he’d never get to know firsthand; another choice taken from you. In all his pondering and wallowing, Haymitch hadn’t realized he conjured his hypotheticals to life. 

She stood a few feet away, unblinking eyes reflecting the sunlight onto his face, hair fashioned in two braids like his sweetheart used to wear. Six-years-old, give or take, and so tiny her hand-me-down dress was pinched together at the sleeves with clothing pins. Your dress. 

“Are you sick?” she asked, and if it weren’t for the alcohol diluting his senses, Haymitch would’ve bashed his head into the wall behind him. Unlike the rainbow girl from the Capitol’s television, she sounded exactly like you. Your old dress, your exact voice, and it might as well have been your face. 

She tilted her head, mouth twisting curiously. “Don’t you talk?” 

It had to be you, and why you’d come to him from that day in your meadow, Haymitch couldn’t figure out. 

“Katniss,” called another similar, recognizable cadence, deeper and distinct in his exasperation. “Baby, what’ve I told you about wandering?” 

“I knew where I was going.” 

“Even so.” Burdock scooped her up into his arms, and not above grace, he looked down at Haymitch sympathetically. Haymitch saw it was her pa she resembled most then. His hair was back to the length it had been during most of their youth. Right at his chin. Burdock swallowed as if to force down the words he’d like to say, and Haymitch glared up at him, feverish hands aimlessly searching for his bottle. 

Burdock adjusted his hold on his little girl, spinning around as she continued to stare. “Papa,” she said and pointed over Burdock’s shoulder, “that man’s sick.” 

“I know, baby,” he said, sorrowful, walking off while he continued to soothe her concerns in a whisper. 

Haymitch stuck to the alley, nursing his burnt lungs and the horrible realization that parenthood and all the weight it carried did appeal to him. He wanted to mull over pages of poetry or saplings in the woods for baby names. To hold them in his arms and kiss their sweet head goodnight, listen to a small lilt call him Papa, raise them into their own people.

He nipped that in the bud real quick, because grieving a hypothetical child was as torturous as those who did exist. The only thing he’d ever raise were lamb to the slaughter. And he couldn’t afford to sink into that feeling. 

So he doesn’t now. He never has lingered on the peppermint tea he found at the gates of Victor’s Village that night either. It was Burdock’s doing, that was obvious enough. The tea helped with the nausea, and it’d probably help with the churning in his stomach now, brought on by the bang of the door against the wall. 

His pain in the ass girl blows into the kitchen much like his boy, with her hours-long delay sparking the panic in her face. 

“Ah, there she is,” Haymitch holds up his bottle in mock acknowledgment. “All tuckered out. Finally did the math, did you, sweetheart? And you’ve come to…what? Ask me to die?”

Katniss runs her hands up and down her clothed arms to soothe herself, or to generate heat. Haymitch should close the window, but he doesn’t want to. The air helps Peeta think; the cold forces Haymitch to be present for this. 

“I’ll admit, it was easier for the boy. He was here before I could snap the seal on a bottle. Begging me for another chance to go in. But what can you say?” He exaggerates the twang of your—her voice. “‘Take his place, Haymitch, because all things being equal, I’d rather Peeta have a crack at the rest of his life than you?’” 

She chews on her bottom lip, fixating on the table for a moment before looking back at him. She can’t deny it. Maybe she doesn’t want Haymitch to die—kid’s got a heart, after all. Too much of one. It bleeds through the fingers of anyone who holds it. But she needs Peeta alive, for the same reason Haymitch needed you. She can’t deny it, even if she has yet to understand what it is she feels.  

“I came for a drink,” Katniss says decisively. 

Haymitch laughs and hands her his offering. “Finally, something I can help you with.” 

Katniss runs her sleeve across the top and takes two giant gulps, only to sputter into an immediate cough. A novice at drinking, coupled with her sweet tooth, it’s a miracle she doesn’t barf it right up. Her face contorts, but by the way her shoulders relax once the sting wears off, Haymitch can tell she takes comfort in the liquor.  

More like him than she has any right to be. 

“Maybe it should be you.” She pulls out a chair. “You hate life, anyway.” 

“Very true.” Haymitch shrugs. “And since last time I tried to keep you alive…seems I’m obligated to save him this time.” 

“That’s another good point.” Katniss rubs her nose and tips the bottle again. 

Haymitch slumps back into his chair, contemplating Peeta’s argument, and recounts it aloud to her. She frowns, but doesn’t seem surprised in the slightest. Oblivious as a bag of rocks, she’s at least able to recognize everything the boy would give to her. With or without being asked. Peeta’s love, however rose colored, is unabashed and unconditional. “You could live a thousand lifetimes and never deserve that boy.” 

Katniss waves a dismissive hand, accepting his words without hesitation. Her acceptance twines through Haymitch’s heart and jabs at the lining of his ribcage. Haymitch didn’t deserve you, but what place is it of his to put that on her shoulders? Still, a bitter part of him means what he said to her. 

“No question, he’s the superior one in this trio.” Katniss takes another swig and waits a beat to add, “It’s not like anyone decent wins the Games.” 

“Nobody ever wins, period,” Haymitch says with a scoff. Absentmindedly, his hand moves to his chest; it hovers above his shirt pocket. “There are survivors, no winners. Think you’d know that by now.”

“Well, Peeta has to survive. So what are you going to do, Haymitch?” 

There are numerous benefits to his death for all parties involved. Snow will be pleased to finally rid himself of his least favorite puppet. Peeta will be guilt-ridden, but he’ll be alive and have Katniss, so that’s something. Ideally, Katniss will have Peeta in turn, along with her whole family. That’s only if she learns to play her cards right once and for all. 

And Haymitch… He’ll put an end to his twenty-five years of solitude. He’ll be free—you’ll have no choice but to let him be so. “Go back in with you, if I can. But if it’s my name called, there’s nothing I can do. Peeta will only volunteer in my place.”

Katniss purses her lips as she stares at him. Haymitch turns his head away momentarily, unable to bear the effect she inherited from Burdock. From you. Whatever it is she asks of him, she’ll make it so he can’t refute. She speaks above a whisper, “How bad would it be for you in there? Knowing everyone?” 

Bad. Very, horrifically bad. “Oh, it’ll be pretty unbearable whichever side I’m on.” Between battling the withdrawal and working through the shit shape he’s in now, he’ll be lucky to die quickly before he has to kill any of his people. Haymitch motions to the bottle. “Can I get that back now?”

“No.” Katniss hugs it to her chest and folds her legs up on the chair. Haymitch rolls his eyes, grabbing a new one from under the table. She takes a deep breath. “You can help him. That’s what I’m asking. If it is Peeta and me in the Games, keep him alive.” 

His fingers tense around the spout; his throat constricts with the obscenities and refusals and agreements he wants to scream all at once. 

“It’s like you said, things’ll be bad no matter how you slice it.” Her voice catches for a second, forcing Haymitch not to retreat, to stay grounded in the torture he saw coming a mile away and flinches at anyway. What does Katniss know of her brilliant, dazzling aunt? Is she aware of the dagger she’s driving into his chest? 

“And whether Peeta wants it or not, we have to save him. We both owe him that.” She continues, small, so very small in her pleading, “Besides, I’m as good as dead. The Capitol hates me, but he might still have a chance. Please, Haymitch. Say you’ll help me.”

Yes, no, maybe, do you know how important you are to the entire country? Haymitch wrestles over which answer will be the least painful, but they all cut deep. Because he achieved the impossible, and neither should know what it is to live without the other, and when he sits with it, really sits with the idea of his boy or his girl dying, his soul begins to splinter. The dreadful realization crashes into him—removed from his atonement and the larger stakes of revolution, Haymitch cannot lose either one of them. 

But there’s no way out of choosing. And as he glances at Katniss, a tapestry of the best parts of his lost loves and the worst flaws he harbors inside himself, he’s helpless to agree with her logic. “All right.” 

Her tension eases, but there’s one more thing Katniss needs from Haymitch to ensure he understands the severity of her request. “Peeta lives. Not me.” One more nail to the coffin wherein Haymitch’s love lies. “Promise me.” 

“Haymitch, you promised!” 

He watches the wind trickle in through the window and tries to will away the sight of your scrunched up nose. Last time he saw it in person was when the little one’s name was called, head held as high as she could keep it. Before her sister replaced her; before her wails caused Haymitch to fall off stage, imagining her namesake flowers cushioning your head instead of his. 

With a bite to his tongue, Haymitch gives a curt nod. “I said all right, didn’t I?”  

Katniss sighs, relieved. She places the now empty bottle back on the table, her movements clumsy. “Thank you.” 

Don’t thank me yet. As she staggers away, taking the noise but leaving the torment, Haymitch pushes off the table. His fingers tremble as he picks up the pieces of glass in the main room. Hazelle already went through weeks of making his house livable again. This isn’t a mess he wants her to have to clean, especially not when she’ll be out of a job in a few short months. She has her oldest boy to help keep them afloat at the very least—the fruits of your family’s kindness sown in his. 

Haymitch listens to Peeta’s and Katniss’s begging on a loop until they blur into fragments of his memories. 

He never imagined he’d have anything to lose again—his life didn’t count. It made him all the more valuable to the cause. A tireless, never ending cause. Twenty-five years of waiting and trying to no avail have taught Haymitch that Plutarch was right about some things. Revolution is made up of failures and sacrifice. He won’t let his boy and his girl become either. He won’t gamble with history repeating itself. 

The phone rings at sunrise, jolting Haymitch from where he’s unconscious on the tile. He waits for the light to find him, and picks up the call. 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

Peeta is too furious and too tired to cut them slack when he finds them nursing their hangovers on Haymitch’s porch. By the looks of it, Haymitch did make the most of his stash, the drunkest he’s been since they first met on the train to the Capitol. 

He lays into them, makes it clear he will not have drunkards on his team if they plan to have any shot at getting two of them home, and leaves them to mumble about their mutual dislike of self-righteous people. 

However self-righteous his mission may be, Peeta isn’t budging. Haymitch and Katniss can resent him all they want once they’ve buried him in his grave. 

In the last year, he’s nearly died enough times not to be as scared of it as he once was. His fears of death have morphed to those he could lose to it, and his nightmares are the perfect canvas for their portrait. They’ve been worse in the past month; really, since they returned from the tour. Over two short weeks, Peeta had grown accustomed to waking up with Katniss beside him, a soothing balm to the taunt of her absence in his sleep. 

When he wakes now, convinced he’s back in the cave with Katniss bleeding out beside him, Peeta takes to the easel. He brings the memories to life in an attempt to store them elsewhere than his brain. To remind him he’s still real. 

As he makes the trip into town, skin buzzing with residual anger, a small piece of him wishes he wasn’t right now. 

Peeta never expected to win, even after the wrinkle in the Gamemakers’ rules. Even once Katniss found him and gave him something to live for. The last nine months have been an extension of his lease on life. He can be grateful for the time, pained as it’s been, that he’s had with his family, with Haymitch, and with Katniss. 

They’ve made something of a friendship, which is more than Peeta could’ve ever hoped for. He is grateful for that. He no longer needs more of her if that’s all she can give, and he doesn’t need more time either. He’s going to die, but he’s finally made peace with that. 

His father seems to know so, too, when Peeta walks up to him outside of Ollie’s house. Much like last year, like his whole life, he doesn’t offer much comfort in the form of words. His brothers are already inside. Graham sets the table and doesn’t spare a beat for Peeta, who tries not to let his perceived indifference sting. When Graham hugged him goodbye in that tiny room of the Justice Building, squeezing so tight his lungs could feel it, he came the closest to crying that Peeta had ever seen before. 

Bannock offers a smile, clasping a hand on Peeta’s shoulder when he passes him. It happened in increments; back in the Training Center, replaying the scene of Katniss running up in Prim’s stead, Peeta wondered what it was like to be protected like that. 

Resentment clung stubbornly, and he had to let most of it go if he ever wanted a relationship with his brother once he returned. 

Peeta reminds himself now of Bannock’s efforts to mend the distance that’s existed between them all his life. He sits with it all—afternoons spent together in town, Bannock’s questions about his paintings, his openness about his own life at the bakery—and smiles back at him. 

Vivi and Baylor, who Peeta can normally count on for conversation, are too busy avoiding eye contact. Ollie picks up his kids’ slack, avoiding any topics that could put them down a path of acknowledging the Quarter Quell. If the Seam has their unspoken regulations on “owing” people, the merchant equivalent would be lying. Except it’s not outright lying; rather, the collective omission of all the ugly skeletons in one’s closest. Everyone knows they exist, but unless they say it aloud, there’s no reason not to go on pretending otherwise.  

Peeta would prefer they all come out and say something than be treated like a battered dog.

Ollie didn’t used to be like that—the most honest person in Peeta’s life growing up besides his father. He’s improved his ability to sidestep uncomfortable conversations since becoming a widower. On his way out, Ollie stops him at the door and rustles his hair. “See you next week, Peeta.” 

For however many I have left. “Thanks for lunch.” Peeta adjusts the box of leftovers in his arms and winds down the cobblestone. 

Unlike with Bannock, Peeta’s time in the Games didn’t change a thing with his mother, so he doesn’t anticipate comfort or remorse, nor does he want either, from her. Distance and detachment are the kindest gifts she’s given him. He really has no reason at all to seek her out at the bakery, except to see, if only on his end, what fragments could be mended in the months he has left. 

None, is the answer Peeta receives. From behind the till, she glances his way when the bell above the door dings. She snickers and drums her fingers on the counter. “Start wishing you get lucky again, boy.” 

His smile comes mockingly, and he swallows the venom curdling in his chest. He can’t argue with her right now; he can’t let her words hurt the way they once did. “I’ll get on that.” 

“Your father couldn’t bring that home himself?” She narrows her eyes at the box he places beside her fingers. 

Peeta takes a step back. “He won’t be here until much later.” 

“Hm.” She sits down on her stool, regarding him with boredom. “Is that all then?” 

Maybe Peeta doesn’t expect comfort, doesn’t want it, but…for one second, he imagines how it’d feel to have a mother who gave it anyway. “Let me know if you need any help tomorrow. Bannock said you had a big order for the mayor.”

“We’ll manage.”

Whatever. His offer is a hollow one anyway in the grand scheme of everything there is to learn and do over the next months. Peeta creates their training schedule, Effie sends the requested tapes of the past victors’ Games, and with the help of the Everdeens, they’re put on individualized diet regiments. 

Whipping Haymitch into shape is its own beast. The first week is dedicated just to seeing him through the vomit spells. By week two, he’s able to stand long enough to try knife throwing, but Peeta worries three months is no time at all to prepare Haymitch. 

For all that Peeta may be the weak link in Haymitch’s eyes—hell, in just about everybody’s—he can at least jog around Victor’s Village without needing to stop three steps in. 

“Try again.” Peeta leans over the railing of the back porch, watching Haymitch miss for the seventh time in a row. Beside him, Katniss groans. 

Haymitch, wobbling on his feet, scowls. “The hell I am. I’ve been at this for half an hour already.” 

“You need more practice than the two of us.” His body will continue to refuse the change if Peeta enables him. And Haymitch doesn’t need to be coddled. “You think the Careers take breaks?” 

“I don’t give two shits about what the Careers are doing.” 

“Well, you should, and you’re going to,” says Peeta, resolute in his demand. “You agreed to the plan, Haymitch.” 

“Didn’t give us much of a choice,” grumbles Katniss before Haymitch can. Peeta purses his lips at her, and she backs from the railing, huffing. “I want a turn.” 

Things don’t exactly improve in the days that follow, but Peeta manages to snap Katniss and Haymitch out of their shared sulking to take this seriously. He still catches them exchanging secret quips and silent complaints when they think he isn’t looking. So long as it keeps them on track, they can complain behind his back all they like. 

Peeta watches them spar with sticks in Katniss’s backyard, a natural segue from weight lifting all afternoon. The doorbell echoes out onto the yard, and Mrs. Everdeen’s voice, instructing their visitor to go around back, carries through.  

He assumes it’s Gale, but it’s not a Sunday. Katniss’s instincts seem to have her believe the same, because she drops her stick and doesn’t move except to glower at Haymitch when he jabs her in the stomach. She rolls her shoulders back like she’s readying to play mediator, which Peeta finds amusing if not endearing. She’s not a very good one, and they don’t need her to be the middleman between them. That’s what created their—rivalry? Mutual envy? Awkwardly polite interactions?—in the first place. 

Peeta isn’t sure there is a good name for it. They aren’t rivals, or enemies, or anything of the sort. Peeta doesn’t hate Gale, and he can tell that for all Gale doesn’t like him, he’s not without respect for him. There are bigger things to worry about, to fight for instead of over. They’re coming out of the harshest winter Twelve has ever known, and the weather isn’t to blame for that. Gale, as much as Peeta, knows who is. Maybe more so, in some ways. 

Plus, Katniss will need Gale to help her through the other side of this. How could Peeta ever truly hate him for being what she needs? 

When Madge rounds the corner of the gate, Katniss relaxes, which puts Peeta at ease for both of their sakes. Haymitch, on the other hand, stiffens head to toe. “May—” He reels, the sudden pitch in his voice dropping again. “—dge.” He mumbles about taking a break and heads inside, avoiding eye contact with Madge like he’s afraid she’ll scorn him for his near mispronunciation. 

Madge isn’t docile by any means, not to anyone who knows her, but snapping over a slight misstep isn’t her style, and Peeta thinks Haymitch knows that, as decent a judge of character as himself. It’s obvious to Peeta that he’s scared of something, though. And the rarity of seeing even the slightest of fear rattle Haymitch is enough to give him pause. 

His greeting comes a minute delayed from Madge’s. She doesn’t mind, so neither does Peeta—he isn’t the one she’s here to see. 

Katniss meets Madge by the gate before she can step further into the backyard. She shoots Peeta a look that says this conversation is private and she better not catch him eavesdropping. He only laughs in turn, and finds interest in watching how Katniss’s behavior around Madge compares to how she is around him, or Gale, who she seems the most comfortable with. 

With Madge, Katniss holds herself like she still doesn’t believe their friendship is genuine. Same way she didn’t think to take Peeta’s feelings as more than face value. 

Peeta’s breath catches when Katniss laughs at something Madge says, sounding flustered and surprised. It reminds him of the way her eyes went round and her lips twitched into a grin when he told her that memory of her singing the Valley Song. His lungs stammer helplessly until Katniss accepts whatever Madge drops into her hand and settles on the bench beside him. He fixates on the glinting copper between her fingers. “What is that?” 

Katniss motions for Peeta to grab the charm. “I let her borrow it. Actually, I tried giving it to her, but she said it suited me better.” 

“Birds are your thing,” Peeta teases, grinning wildly when she dismisses him with a scoff. “Did you get it at the Hob?” 

He recognizes the drooped look on her face from the one instance he’s seen it prior. So, he knows the answer even before she says, “It belonged to my father’s sister.” 

He remembered his father mentioning it once: Mr. Everdeen’s sister. In the same breath he used to tell Peeta about his near engagement with Mrs. Everdeen and her husband’s bird-stopping song. He had a sister with the same gift, he told Peeta. A gift Ollie apparently wasn’t immune to once upon a time.

When Katniss first divulged the secret of her mysterious, dead aunt, she hadn’t meant to. Peeta assumed she hadn’t, anyway. 

“My father’s sister liked these,” she blurted one morning when they’d been working on her family’s plant book. Peeta stopped his sketching of the maple leaves and watched her rub her thumb over the corner of the book. She seemed more embarrassed by the ease of sharing the information than by the fact itself. And Peeta was more concerned with her discomfort than surprised she shared it with him at all. “That’s what he said, at least. They were twins. She died before I was born.” 

Peeta knew better than to ask for more details, as much as he wanted to. More on the grounds of enjoying the newfound territory they found themselves in where they could talk to each other without walls than anything else. But he had since learned it wasn’t his place to push, and if Katniss’s reaction was any indication, it wasn’t an easy story to tell. 

“It’s pretty,” says Peeta, holding it up into the sun. Ollie, talented as he is in his trade, couldn’t make something this beautiful. “Not a mockingjay, is it?” 

“A bluebird.” Katniss stretches her hand towards him. She pockets the charm and twirls the end of her braid. “I’ll probably leave it for Prim.”

“Why would you do that?” Peeta asks rhetorically, sharply, suppressing the guilt that arises for trying to entrap Katniss into admitting her intentions. 

Her eyes narrow and her lips press into a thin line. She’s no less captivating than the day she first lulled his heart around her finger. No more infuriating than she’s always been with her stubbornness. 

Haymitch’s footsteps stop them from saying anything they might regret. Everything they should. 

Peeta can feel Katniss glaring at him for a second longer. Haymitch scans the yard. “Your friend gone?” They both nod. “Great. I’m gone, too, then.”

Peeta opens his mouth, and Haymitch points up at the early signs of evening. “I’m done for the day.” 

Well, he has been consistent, so maybe an early day is earned. With a glance up at the swirls of amber and magenta dancing across the blue sky, Peeta’s bones ache, strained by all their progress. “All right,” he agrees, and stands with Katniss following a beat later. 

He looks back at her, and she frowns a little when he doesn’t say anything else. Really, Peeta can tell she’s still peeved he tried to expose her poorly kept secret, and he isn’t exactly thrilled with her either. Katniss sighs. “Bright and early tomorrow?” 

“Bright and early,” Peeta echoes. Haymitch snickers, causing them both to roll their eyes. 

Katniss darts inside after seeing them to the front lawn. Peeta throws out a quick goodnight and is about two steps down the pathway home when Haymitch calls him. 

“Kid.” He nudges his head towards his house. “Up for a game?” 

Inside his living room, Haymitch defers the first turn to Peeta once he sets the chessboard. He waits for his move to say, “You understand I have to volunteer for you if you’re called.” 

Peeta looks up at him. He was wondering when this would come up again. It’s going on a month now since he gave Haymitch time to get comfortable with his wish. Haymitch concentrates on the movement of his first pawn, brows pinched together. “I don’t expect you to, Haymitch, and even if Katniss does, you don’t have to.” 

“Neither of you are people I wanted to have to know,” Haymitch says bluntly. “To care for” hangs silently in the air, but Peeta feels the underlying sentiment. 

“I’m sure.”  

“Aside the fact that Katniss’ll skin me alive if I don’t, I won’t live very well with myself if I let you walk into that arena without trying to take your place.” 

Peeta scoffs, because for all that he’s been holding Haymitch’s past exclusion over his head, he isn’t the only one with a sense of responsibility. “I won’t be jumping for joy if the roles are reversed. And I won’t be of any use as a mentor. How will I help Katniss, or you, when I’m busy worrying instead of learning the ropes?” 

“I’m well aware,” Haymitch says, holding up a hand to placate the string of Peeta’s impending arguments. “Which is why,” his tone sours, “I understand you’ll volunteer if I’m called.” 

Peeta waits for him to rescind his comment. “Are you…” Letting me go back? Promising you’ll save Katniss? 

Haymitch’s eyes snap up from the board, exacting in the warning they mean to convey. It makes Peeta’s stomach clench. “It’ll destroy her. Got it? You need to accept that if you’re going to do this. If you die, Katniss will lose herself.” 

Katniss is a good person, softer and kinder than she believes, and maybe she has grown to see Peeta as a friend. But he doesn’t believe he could possibly be so important to her—more than those she truly loves—that his death would be something she can’t come back from. “She’ll be alive.” 

“She’d rather not be,” says Haymitch lowly. 

“She’ll have her family, and Gale, and you.” They’re more than enough, and Haymitch can’t deny he will look after her. “She’ll have people to protect and stay alive for.”

“None of us can replace who you are to her,” argues Haymitch, closing his fingers around his rook. “She cares about you, kid. In what way, I can’t say on her behalf, but she does. It will destroy her.” 

It’ll destroy Peeta. There is no real life for him without Katniss. And Peeta isn’t blameless for the mess they’re in, anyway. If Katniss hadn’t saved him in the arena, she wouldn’t be at risk of dying again. “I accept it,” says Peeta, unwavering. “I want a life for her, Haymitch. Katniss deserves one, even if it’s not perfect. And I know you don’t think so, but so do you.” 

Haymitch stares at him wordlessly. Finally, after the room darkens and Peeta switches on the lights, he says, “You deserve to live more than any of us, Peeta.” He reaches beneath the coffee table instinctively, then retreats when he seems to remember there’s no bottle waiting. “As long as you know what you’re getting into. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens in three months.” 

Peeta nods. “I guess so. It’s your move now.” 

The match isn’t a very long one after they’ve come to their agreement, but it lasts enough time for Peeta to see Haymitch in a better light. Peeta considers his warning, unravels the hidden pain in it, observes the twitch of his fingers still in search of his crutch. And once they call it a night, on the walkway back to his empty home, Peeta allows himself to ask:

Who did Haymitch love and lose for it to have destroyed him like this? 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

Katniss is grateful that Peeta has given up the role of relentless coach in exchange for his affectionate nature again. Because when she finds the tape of the Fiftieth Games, she is overcome with the urge to throw herself back in his arms. She refrains, relying on an inhuman strength she scarcely possesses whenever Peeta is in her vicinity. Haymitch’s name, written on the side of the tape, anchors her. Less so because it’s Haymitch—though that’s a factor to consider—and more because Katniss knows what these Games took from her father. 

He put off telling her for as long as possible, and Katniss is sure that if it weren’t for her daily pestering, he would’ve held out longer. Or not. Often, she thinks he needed to say it as much as she needed to hear it. Before then, he only ever had good things to say about you. His force of a sister, who liked to climb trees and collected rocks from the woods and took far too long to learn how to use a bow. 

Every time he shared a piece of you, Katniss could tell it helped ease something in him. Funny how it seemed each detail only made her feel more tangled inside about you. The knot you occupied worsened when her father finally told her about how you died. Well, he didn’t specify much besides saying you died in the Games. Katniss was convinced he only craved because she would be coming up on her Twelfth birthday, and they had been talking about the Hunger Games and what they meant for her. 

When her father died, taking all the answers to the questions that still lingered, she forgot she wanted them in the first place. Until Prim’s name was called, and Katniss wound up facing the same fate you had. Over the last year—between pretending to love Peeta, placating Snow and the rebels, and now being forced into the Games again—there hasn’t been much room to sit with those questions. 

Now, Katniss holds the answer she most sought to know in her hands. She passes the tape to Peeta. “We never watched this one.”

He shakes his head. “No. I knew Haymitch didn’t want to. The same way we didn’t want to relive our own Games. And since we're all on the same team, I didn't think it mattered much.” 

“Is the person who won Twenty-Five in here?”

“I don’t think so. Whoever it was must be dead by now, and Effie only sent me victors we might have to face.” Peeta stares at Haymitch’s tape for a moment, weighing it in his hands. “Why? Do you think we should watch it?”

Aside from the fact that they’d be invading Haymitch’s privacy, does Katniss really want to see the gorey details of how exactly you died? She surprises herself when an immediate yes sounds from some corner of her mind. “My father said these were his sister’s Games.” She doesn’t know why she says it like an accusation when it’s not a truth her father would’ve made up. 

Peeta’s eyes go wide, and he blinks to recover from his shock. “We don’t need to watch. We have all the necessary information on everyone else.”

“I want to,” says Katniss, steeling herself with a breath. “It’s the only Quell we have. We might pick up on something valuable about how they work. And we don’t have to tell Haymitch.”

He waits a minute, like he expects her to take it back. When she doesn’t, he agrees, “Okay.” 

Katniss curls up next to him, honeyed milk in hand, as the screen flickers to life. President Snow, as repellant in his youth as he is now, reads the second Quarter Quell card. Twice the number of tributes, a reminder that there is no strength in numbers. The edit immediately cuts to the reaping; district by district, four children are selected for the honor of the Games. 

Your name is called first for Twelve, and the camera gravitates to you the way Katniss does now, a familiar yet sudden desire to know more of you. As you walk to the stage, expression fearless and head held high, she thinks of the meadow and its vibrancy in the early light of dawn. Not just because of the colors of your outfit, which are vibrant and pretty in a way that differs from her mother’s old merchant clothes. She recalls those hand-me-downs she and Prim wore up until a few years ago. Made up of similar cloth that no doubt belonged to you. 

“I see the family resemblance,” says Peeta once you’ve settled on stage, careful with his tone. 

Katniss pulls back from him slightly. “I resemble my father.” 

“And she was his family.” Peeta soothes her with a squeeze of her hand. “I’m only saying you look alike, I think.” 

“You think we look alike, or we do?” 

He looks at her, then back at the television. “You do.” 

Katniss chews on the inside of her cheek. Her spiral is postponed by the drawing of the second female tribute. Maysilee Donner. 

“Oh!” Katniss sits up, recalling her mother’s sullen face during this year’s reading of the card. “She was my mother’s friend.” 

Peeta points to a blonde girl hugging Maysilee and another golden head. “I think that’s her.” 

Sure enough, her mother detaches from Maysilee with tears welling in her pretty blue eyes. Katniss realizes there has been no exaggeration of her mother’s past beauty. The other girl, identical to Maysilee, holds her mother’s hand and weeps. 

“Madge,” Katniss whispers.

“That’s her mother,” Peeta supplies for her. “My dad said she and Maysilee were twins or something.” 

Lots of doubles that year. The mayor’s wife and her morphling addiction pop up in Katniss’s thoughts. Soon after, they land on Madge trudging through the snowstorm to bring Gale painkillers. Most of all, Katniss thinks of her mockingjay pin, once belonging to Maysilee Donner, and the bluebird charm of yours that she inherited and tried to pass on to Madge. She’d done it with the intent of evening the scales since she gifted Katniss her aunt’s pin. A trade of sorts, which Madge shot down. Katniss wonders if she knew about the connection between their families. She wonders about the meaning her pin and charm take on now.

The first boy is another Seam kid. Haymitch’s name is called last, and Katniss finds it hard to believe he once looked like that. 

The only thing more horrifying than admitting Haymitch was once handsome is how it circles her back to Peeta suggesting she could somehow resemble the beautiful girl with the sun-rivaling eyes. She wishes she hadn’t asked Peeta’s opinion, wishes he hadn’t given it, wishes she could completely erase the memory it stirs up from months back. 

Haymitch lived in a pigstye, and even if that was how he liked it, she figured it’d have to be cleaned eventually if she was expected to live around him. Katniss dropped in about a month into her family’s move to convince him to hire Hazelle for housekeeping. It was a win-win situation, especially since Gale was working in the mines full time and couldn’t dedicate as many days to the extra income of hunting. 

Now, with the crackdown of the Peacekeepers and Gale’s face burned into their minds as a poacher, Katniss worries how his family and hers will get by. At least she doesn’t have to doubt that Peeta will help them. Haymitch will, too, even if he acts otherwise. 

Back then, she wasn’t sure she could count on him agreeing without putting up a fight. 

Haymitch kept his door unlocked, so it was easy for Katniss to slip inside and find him passed out, knife in hand, on his kitchen table. Easy, if she didn’t count the mountains of trash she had to conquer and the smell of stale alcohol that caused her to gag every five seconds. 

Asleep as the dead, Katniss shook Haymitch, then resorted to poking him with a wooden spoon found on his counter, without any results. After poking some more and screaming his name, Haymitch’s eyes snapped wide open, clearly half-trapped in a nightmare, and landed on her with an even sharper panic. 

Out of his mouth, strained with disbelief and what Katniss could only describe as remorse, flew a name Haymitch shouldn’t know, because it belonged to her family. 

Why Katniss didn’t correct him or press on how he knew that name, she couldn’t tell herself. She waited until Haymitch was slouched back into his seat to give him the bottle she intended as a bribe. Haymitch didn’t, or couldn’t, look at her for the remainder of her stay, and after she finished making the case for Hazelle, he only mumbled an annoyed, “Okay.”

Katniss was too pleased by her success to care about the name incident. But the answer is obvious, and it should’ve been at the time, too. 

“Peeta, you don’t think he killed one of them, do you?” she asks before she can form the nerve not to. “Maysilee, or my…father’s sister.” It feels strange to call you differently. You aren’t anything to her. Katniss clamps a lid on the voice that reminds her you never got to be. 

“With forty-eight players? I’d say the odds are against it,” says Peeta, making room for Katniss to burrow back into his side.

They breeze through the chariot rides, a brief snippet of training, and the interviews. Twelve’s tributes are displayed in the usual mining uniforms for the parade, but you all clean up nicely for the interviews. There are so many tributes, they barely have enough time to focus on each. You get a quick feature of your walk on stage, dazzling in an ensemble that reminds Katniss of a much more subdued version of Cinna’s fire dress. 

Haymitch, being the victor, gets a full interaction with Caesar, who looks the exact same except for his pine green hair. His strategy isn’t much of a stretch from his real personality—Haymitch gets by on being an ass, and the crowd eats it up. 

About eighteen kids die on the first day, by Katniss’s count. Most of them had been distracted by the breathtaking scenery of the arena. A meadow stretched as far as the eye can see, rainbow songbirds flitting across an azure blue sky, endless crops of flowers Katniss can recognize off the top of her head. It’s all so dizzying—what must it have been like in person? 

Even Haymitch seems in a daze right at the start of the countdown. For the briefest of seconds, the camera catches him glancing to his left, at you. You meet his eyes and tear away right before the gong sounds. 

Katniss sips on her milk, chalking up that exchange to nothing. Obviously the two of you would’ve known each other as tributes, and she finds it unlikely the cameras meant their focus as anything more than a dramatic close up. 

There hasn’t been much to convince her otherwise, but Katniss is surprised to see you take on so many allies when the Games begin. You seem smart enough to know traveling in that big of a group is a liability. But you don’t care about the pitfalls. You and your gaggle of allies narrowly survive the bloodbath and wind up on the mountain on the opposite end of the arena’s woods. 

Within the first hours of the Games, most of the tributes quickly discover the poison laced within the arena’s beauty. The flowers, the waterbeds, the fruit trees—all deadly. A couple of Careers die from that alone. 

Whereas you and your allies, only appearing in brief one minute intervals compared to the other tributes, have established camp on the mountain, Haymitch takes to the woods alone. For the most part, except for a stinging butterfly attack, he gets by pretty well. He never stops moving north, and has no run-ins with the Careers on the first days. 

The same can’t be said for Maysilee Donner, who, to Katniss’s shock, proves herself to be resourceful and lethal. With a pack of darts she poisoned herself, she kills a Career from One on the mountain before she finds you. You’re stone-faced when she throws a quiver of arrows at your feet. 

“You sure took your time,” you say, and Katniss flinches. It’s the first time she’s heard you speak on this entire tape. 

“You didn’t exactly make yourself easy to find,” Maysilee bites back, but there’s no real heat in her words. Just like that, the two of you are locked in an alliance you’d be hard pressed to sully if you ever expect to go home. 

You’re split apart on day four, along with the rest of your group, when a volcano erupts on the mountainside. You take center stage then—the cameras quickly show the twelve deaths that result from the explosion, including one of a boy from Four at your hands. With the state he was in when you found him, it was practically a mercy kill. 

From that point on, the clips get a little longer, but they’re just as choppy. You make your way into the woods, limping, and you’re immediately attacked by a nest of jabberjays. They lure you with Haymitch’s voice and Maysilee’s—Katniss can understand Maysilee being bait, but Haymitch?—and others she doesn’t know. Regardless, the mimicry of the birds is sickening and twisted, forcing you to cower in a ball on the floor.  

It’s about two minutes of that—at least, in the edit—and the whole time Katniss presses her right ear into Peeta’s shoulder, waiting for your torture to end. 

It does, and Katniss is left no less uncomfortable when the next clip of you features Haymitch. He stumbles upon you and runs to your side, all his prior arrogance and selfish demeanor gone. Katniss assumes it’s a play to bring your already dismantled guard down. Instantly, she worries Peeta was wrong—Haymitch did kill you. In the split second where you lack any reaction to Haymitch as he brings a hand to your face, Katniss feels an unexpected sense of betrayal. 

Haymitch doesn’t do anything but hold you to him. Face buried in your hair as you cling to him in turn. There’s a familiarity between you that runs deeper than a handful of days training together. The burn inside Katniss shifts into utter confusion. 

Once you seem to snap back into yourself, neither of you miss a beat to bicker. You shove Haymitch away from you and try to stand, resisting his help. 

“You won’t get very far walking like that,” Haymitch reasons as you glare at him. It’s clear to Katniss that your resistance has to do with something more than Haymitch’s irritating habits. “Not without another pair of eyes to watch your back. I could use the help, too. Least until you find your real allies.”

You hold your glower for a second longer, but your shoulders relax, and so does your face. “You are my real ally, jackass.” 

He grins smugly. “Sure know how to make a guy swoon, don’t you, sunshine?”

“Thought making people swoon was your specialty.” You’re pretending to be indifferent, but Katniss notices how you seem to get as much amusement out of this as Haymitch. “Ladies man.”

The easy nature of your flirting is downright strange to watch, taking Katniss back to Peeta and her failed attempts to match his efforts in the arena.  

More than flirty, Haymitch is…gentle with you. It’s a jarring contrast from the Haymitch she knows. But Katniss thinks of how he’s looked after her and Peeta, too. How he fought those Capitol surgeons on her behalf last year, and how he always kept a hand hovering behind Peeta in the first weeks he was learning to use his prosthetic. How, underneath his meanness, he has shown his care for them. 

Maybe he cared about you. Katniss contemplates the possibility as another of your conversations plays out. 

Seemingly out of nowhere, you snap at Haymitch, “You can’t keep me alive, and I don’t want you to.” You hug your knees to your chest, the woods darkened around you. “I just want you alive.” 

“I may not have to follow you, but I will,” he says, as firm as your declaration. “Because whether you like it or not, I want you alive. You don’t get to call dibs on wanting to save me more.” 

“Fine,” you say after a beat. 

Haymitch looks as suspicious as Katniss feels. “Fine?” 

“We’re on even ground now,” is all you say as you extend a pinkie his way. 

“I reckon that’s a fair deal.” He locks your pinkies together. 

Goosebumps prick Katniss’s skin, because again, this promise between you and Haymitch seems different than the usual district alliance. A thousand times more pressing. And if it turns out Haymitch broke it, Katniss doesn’t know how she’ll ever look him in the eye again. 

You and Haymitch continue north, losing yourselves in a maze of tightly woven hedges that spit you back out in the center of the woods. There, a pack of three Careers waits and doesn’t hesitate to attack. Although the Careers are larger and stronger, you do well for yourself, and so does Haymitch. You kill the girl with an arrow, and Haymitch takes out the first boy. The second one, unraveled in a way that makes Katniss think of Cato, knocks you back into the hedge, where the thorns and vines latch onto your uniform. 

You’re on the Career as soon as you yank yourself free, knife coming down on his shoulder before he can strike down a disarmed Haymitch. You manage to survive a fall on the head, and Haymitch’s taunts split the Career’s attention between who to attack. “C’mon, Panache, thought you were the big man around here? Don’t tell me you can’t handle a real fight.”

A blow dart to the neck stops the Career from killing either of you. Haymitch skids to his knees beside you, checking for blood. Maysilee steps out through the trees. “We’d live longer with three of us.”

“Guess you just proved that.” Haymitch rubs his neck, keeping one hand on you. “Allies?” 

The three of you, bound by your alliance, do better together. You divide your food equally, create a voting system, and sleep in shifts when nightfall comes. Well, Maysilee sleeps. During what should be one of your shifts, you stay up beside Haymitch, the sides of your body practically fused together. 

There’s so much context missing from what you reveal, and Katniss tries to make sense of the details about this implied kiss of yours, which she’s sure must be a skit for the cameras. Except you don’t sound like you're joking, and Haymitch is hanging on to your every word, and when the two of you actually kiss, without restraint or shame, she nearly drops the honeyed milk onto her lap. 

“Eugh!” she squirms out of Peeta’s arms, skin tingling with a strange mix of disgust and embarrassment and her own shame of knowing she’s completely invaded Haymitch’s privacy now. 

Peeta only snorts at her reaction, and breaks into laughter after Katniss yelps at the screen and averts her eyes. “Oh, come on,” he teases. “It’s no worse than our displays last year.” 

She scowls, crossing her arms. “I saw a tongue. That’s worse.” 

“Well, they’re done now,” Peeta says, amused. 

The Games continue into the next day, and Maysilee is far from pleased with you both. “How ticked do you think she is with us?” asks Haymitch while the three of you divvy up the responsibility of packing your camp. 

“From one to ten?” You hum thoughtfully. “I’m at a six. You’re a nine.” 

“That seems unreasonable,” he says pointedly. 

“You’re more annoying than I am, peach.” An accurate assumption, one Katniss can attest to. 

Haymitch snickers, brushing his fingers against your elbow. “I’d say it’s a tie, sunshine.” 

You beam, your smile radiating through the screen, and Katniss has to take a deep breath to ask, “Was it real, do you think?” 

Peeta doesn’t answer for a while. For a few minutes, the footage pans to some Careers. When Katniss turns to Peeta, prepared to repeat her question, he almost seems sad. “If it wasn’t, they were pretty convincing actors.” 

Better than I am. Katniss watches you and Haymitch, now reeling from a ladybug mutt attack that’s left you covered in blood and slumped in his arms. “It was real for her,” she decides, because no one could fake that much unconditional love in their eyes. No matter that it’s directed at Haymitch, of all people. Katniss looks at Peeta, and the guilt stops her from melting back into him. “Maybe that’s why Haymitch was so insistent on us playing the star-crossed lovers angle. He did it once, and it worked.”

“Not as well as it did for us,” Peeta reminds her. 

He’s right. If it had truly worked, you both would’ve been alive. 

You and Haymitch are now the main focus of the Games. Maysilee pokes fun at the both of you, but your trio is pretty unchanged. Haymitch is still deadset on heading north, and you back his idea. Maysilee asks at least a dozen times why you’re both convinced heading north is a good move, and she finally stops, refusing to budge until she gets a real answer. 

Haymitch looks to you for an answer, then shrugs. “Because it has to end somewhere, right? The arena can’t go on forever.” 

Maysilee doesn’t look convinced, but the three of you are back at the hedge, burning through it with a blowtorch from one of the dead Careers’ packs. All there is on the other side is flat, dry earth leading to a cliff. One step off it means death by the jagged rocks in the bottom. 

Maysilee insists on heading into the woods again; Haymitch insists on staying. You refute both their arguments, and outright deny Maysilee’s suggestion to break the alliance. Even though there’s only six of you left, you’re determined to see the end through as a team. Katniss can’t decide if that makes you naive, or loyal. 

You walk off with Maysilee to find whatever supplies you left behind. Haymitch figures out the forcefield is a boomerang by kicking a rock over on accident. He laughs at his discovery and begins to play a one sided game of catch with a green stone. 

Seems like such a pointless victory when Maysilee’s screams cut through the songbirds in the air. Your own follow, furious and desperate, and Katniss holds her breath. 

Pink cotton candy birds tear Maysilee Donner’s throat before you and Haymitch even have the chance to save her. You hold either of her hands, and all Katniss sees is Rue’s body in her arms.  

You’re frozen and unblinking after Maysilee’s cannon sounds. Haymitch has to pull you away from her body with a soft, whispered, “I’m sorry, darling.” 

Settled feet away from Maysilee’s death scene, eyes wide and brimming with tears, you finally murmur, “It can’t come down to the two of us.”

“It won’t,” Haymitch promises, his forehead pressed against yours. You have to know he can’t ensure that, but you nod in acceptance anyway.  

The edit cuts to what the Capitol probably perceived as a happier feature of you and Haymitch at the time, kneeled in front of each other, faces nearly level. 

You tug on the bluebird around his neck, the very one Katniss left behind on Prim’s dresser, and she only has a short second to wonder where it came from before she turns away. Less out of embarrassment this time. A part of her recognizes this isn’t a moment meant for the cameras. 

When Katniss looks again, it’s afternoon, and the Career from One has found a tiny tribute who she kills in the blink of an eye.

The Career from Four sets her sights on you. Her knife lodges itself into your lower abdomen at the same time that your arrow pierces her heart. 

Haymitch catches you, bringing you down to the floor while his words fly out in a panicked jumble. You yell at him to leave you. “Haymitch, you promised!” And Katniss can only think to connect it back to your pinkies locked around each other, committing to being equals. 

The woods around you are so beautiful, and Katniss hates it. Haymitch hesitates. You resort to begging through your pain. “Please, go.”  

There isn’t much refusal after that. Haymitch kisses the top of your head, and you push him like you did when he found you in the woods, without any real resistance. “Go.” 

With Haymitch out of the vicinity, you break down into tears. 

It’s all so awful, and though you’ve never been anything to Katniss that she could miss, she is not as detached from you as she believes. 

Peeta senses the shift in her. “Do you need a break?” 

“No,” Katniss says, shuddering. They’re almost at the end anyway. 

Haymitch has it out with the District One girl. Both of them are vicious and brutal and unforgiving. Katniss feels an instant dread when you somehow manage your way into their battle, luring the Career to you. She’s strong, taller than you both, and despite the injuries she’s sustained, is fueled by some super human rage. 

You pull Haymitch, who’s holding his intestines inside with one hand, through the stunning, harrowing woods. While he runs towards the cliffside, you end up bait for the Career. She drags you by the hair, and when Haymitch shouts profanities at her, she drops you to throw her ax. It should deliver a death blow to him, but he falls onto his face, letting it whizz over his head. Now weaponless, the girl holds a hand to her bleeding eye socket and stands over your body. She seems to have decided she’ll finish the job with her bare hands, but it’s too late. Because the ax returns to bury itself in her head. 

Because you’re already dead. 

Two cannons sound, but it’s a moment before Haymitch’s victory is declared. The Capitol needs their dramatic finale, after all. He crawls to your body, screams up to the sky, and babbles a confession of love you’ll never hear over and over. 

The trumpets finally sound, and Peeta clicks the off button. 

Katniss sets down her mug on the coffee table, cleaning the wetness on her face. It’s a long while before Peeta breaks the silence softly. “He couldn’t have faked that.” 

Couldn’t he have? Haymitch didn’t kill you, didn’t betray your alliance technically—that doesn’t mean he wasn’t using you. That doesn’t mean he didn’t break what you had. He let you out of his sight to save his own skin. His cries very easily might’ve been a way to save face. Or maybe the guilt moved him. Or maybe he meant every bit of it. 

“Guess not.” Katniss swallows a fresh wave of tears. “Doesn’t seem fair if it was real. I mean, we lucked out with those berries in a way, if we ignore the trouble they’ve caused in the long run.” 

“Seems they caused plenty of trouble themselves,” says Peeta carefully. “The forcefield at the bottom of the cliff, it’s like the one at the Training Center. They found a way to turn it into a weapon.” 

Katniss rubs her hands down the silk of her pajama bottoms. “Not just against the other tributes, but against the Capitol, too. They didn’t plan it to be part of the arena. They made the Games look stupid by figuring it out.” 

“They probably stirred a lot of feelings across the districts, too,” adds Peeta. He adjusts a blanket over Katniss’s shoulders. 

She can’t help but snicker, and somewhere deep within her, a light begins to snuff out her sadness. No good reason behind it, she laughs for the first time in months. Peeta’s eyebrows shoot up, and he shakes his head. She catches her breath. “It’s almost as bad as us and the berries!” 

“Almost, but not quite.”

Katniss whips around. Haymitch stands behind them, gulping down a swig from a bottle of wine, and she should be angry that he’s relapsed, but she isn’t in the slightest. Not even about what she just saw. Haymitch’s presence forces her to confront that she has no room to judge what might be real. She is no better than him. And in her realization, suddenly, finally, Katniss begins to see Haymitch. 

Peeta shifts beside Katniss while they wait for Haymitch to yell or snap at them for watching the tape. He doesn’t. His drunken eyes land on her, and he grins. “Something to say, sweetheart?” 

Katniss bites her tongue. Was it real for you? Did you love her as I now do? As is the tendency of kind people, you’ve rooted yourself in Katniss’s heart. You’ve always been there in some hidden way, a seed only known by the flowers it grows. And though she never knew you, never will, she thinks she understands who you were. Selfless and inherently good, same as Prim and Rue and Peeta. 

Too good not to be guided by love. It must’ve been easy to be loved by you, and your one weakness was in giving it freely. In believing your love would save you. It’s a mistake Katniss won’t repeat. She doesn’t care to be saved; no, she’s entrusting something far more precious to Haymitch. 

And this time, he will keep his promise—Katniss leaves him no choice. 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

Tonight, Haymitch will not be sleeping a wink, and for once, the nightmares aren’t to blame. They’ve been worse in the last days since their arrival in Panem’s finest hellhole. Really, since the first night on the train, when his two brats decided to replay the worst moments of his life on his behalf. 

Even catching just the tail end was enough for his mind to spin without the assistance of alcohol. Haymitch had been pacing in the bar car, testing his restraint for no good reason besides the fact that three months of sobriety left his thoughts sharp and clear and loud. Which is how he needed them if he was ever going to have a shot at pulling off his plan. 

Didn’t make it suck any less.  

Drowning in the too loud thoughts and too bright lights, he swore he was already drunk when he heard your voice faintly. Yours. He could be certain it wasn’t Katniss because the words spoken were entirely too familiar, and the speed of them was different. That’s how Haymitch distinguishes your voices now: the rhyme is the same, but the rhythm couldn’t be more distinct. 

Neither of them have given away a change in opinion of Haymitch, not in any noticeable way, and quite frankly, he couldn’t care less about that right now. Coordinating a revolution, on top of the already taxing work of mentoring, is enough of a headache without worrying about teenage mood swings. 

And whether or not Katniss, in particular, hates him now is nothing new, and doesn’t change the fact that Haymitch needs to pour all his energy into keeping her alive. Even if it means breaking his promise and her heart. Some cycles can’t help but persist. 

Haymitch can also tell Katniss is gathering up a list of questions and demands that have nothing to do with saving Peeta. At the very least, she still trusts Haymitch and his opinions. She may not listen, but she trusts him, and that’s more important than her not liking him. It saves him the effort of spending what little time is left convincing her to take on her lesser preferred people as allies. As if he hasn’t tried to drill their importance into her brain for the better part of the last week. 

Instead, the night is reserved for setting other pieces into motion. 

Beetee and Wiress managed to worm into Katniss’s good graces already, which shouldn’t have surprised Haymitch as much as it did. Katniss gravitates to those with soft hearts and hopeless chances—or they do to her. It’s a symbiotic relationship, he figures, and he can’t ignore the memory of the little ones he failed to protect no matter how much he tries to. 

Less so when Haymitch meets Beetee’s eyes in the dark corridor of District Three’s floor, reflecting Ampert’s bones back to him even after all these years. 

Paper trail’s too risky, and the likelihood of misinformation is higher if spread across different messengers. And every person Haymitch trusts are the very ones who can’t leave their floor, so it’s up to him to deliver each player’s jobs to them one by one. 

“You’ll be with Johanna and Blight,” he says, cutting right to the chase. The bugs in the walls will be shut down for half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes if they’re lucky. It still only leaves him a handful of minutes with each of them. “Get to the northern end of the cornucopia, and they’ll meet you there.” Being paired with Three will give them pull with Katniss, and keep some much needed muscles around Beetee and Wiress. Johanna won’t be pleased to be on babysitting detail, but it’ll be Blight's problem to deal with in there. 

Wiress blinks, her sharpness further dimmed in the dark. “Breakout. How will…” 

“The sponsor gifts will tell you when we’re coming,” Haymitch answers. “The district they’re from indicates the day, and the amount will tell you the time.” 

“And the meeting point?” asks Beetee, hushed. 

“Plutarch said you’ll know.” Kept that card close to his chest when Haymitch pressed for more details. But he doesn’t doubt Beetee will be able to figure it out—he’s the real brain of this operation. 

Ada, one of Haymitch’s fellow, so-called unscathed victors, pokes her head in from down the hall. She’s a quiet thing, but she’s stern, and one arch of an eyebrow tells Haymitch he best be leaving her tributes to get rest now. Wiress begins to mumble a spaced-out goodnight. 

Haymitch comes up empty on what else he can say in so few time—what he wants to now that he’s discarded the necessary parts off his chest. There is a very real chance this is the last time they ever see each other again. His mentors, his people. 

Beetee takes a deep breath and looks at Haymitch with a faith that hasn’t wavered since the day their roles were reversed. This time it works. 

How he maintains his conviction, with two sons dead and no wife waiting for him back home, Haymitch will never know. Then again, here he is, throwing one last ditch effort. Haymitch rubs a hand over his heart. If only. 

Mags and Finnick receive similar instructions, with the added bonus of Effie’s gift to Haymitch. “This should keep her from shooting right away,” Haymitch tells Finnick as he drops the gold bangle into his hand. “This, and Mags.” So long as he refrains from pissing Katniss off too bad, Finnick will be in the clear until the breakout. Katniss’s wariness isn’t what makes his job the hardest, though. “But she’ll go ballistic if you lose the boy, so I’d advise you don’t.” 

“Right,” Finnick snorts, and Mags shakes her head at him. 

Finnick’s lived through more than anyone should have to, and knows intimately what’s needed in order to survive. But he’s still so young, even if he’s never had the chance to be it. And he’s in for a rude, fatal awakening if he doesn’t heed Haymitch’s warning. 

Haymitch clicks his teeth. “Your funeral, kid.”

Finnick purses his lips, no less convinced. He slips the bangle onto his wrist. “I need you to do me a favor if I’m taking this in.” 

A creased picture of Finnick’s love is placed into Haymitch’s hands. His fingers shake slightly when he passes it. Haymitch knows Annie first and foremost through Finnick and his devotion to her. Beyond that, the memory of Annie’s viciousness in the first days of her Games and how quickly it dissipated to fragility are secondary. 

Watching it in real time took Haymitch’s mind right back to Silka, but it wasn’t her brutality he remembered. For so long, he thought he would hate Silka as he did in the moment he saw her standing over Wellie. Fear her as he did in his nightmares. He thought he hated Maritte, too, even if it wasn’t really her hands who took you. Hated them at least a fraction of how he did Snow. 

Annie’s Games and the crash of her Victory Tour were a harsh, overdue jolt back into reality. In the nights that followed, when Silka’s ghost invaded his sleep, she wasn’t looking for a crown. She was crying to go home, as she’d been at the foot of that tree. And in the mornings, a trace of you lingered in the memory of a long forgotten conversation. Career or not, Silka wasn’t the one he hated. 

Maybe Katniss will listen quicker, figure out what you did early on about who the real enemy is. 

“I’ll keep it safe,” Haymitch says, finally, and when Finnick’s eyes glisten for a second, he looks so much like the little boy Mags asked them all to take under their wing after his win. You keep the kids safe, and yourself. 

Finnick nods, grateful, presses a kiss to Mags’s temple, and leaves Haymitch with a halfhearted, “See you on the other side.” 

It’s harder to resist all thought of you—or even Maysilee and Wyatt—around Mags. With Beetee and Wiress, there are other faces Haymitch sees when he looks into theirs. The three of them being the only ones whose memories are shaped like his own. The only ones, beside Plutarch and Snow, neither of whom are anything more than a taunt in their respective ways. Effie counts, too, maybe, but she’s fortunate enough not to understand. And besides, Haymitch long ago scared her off from ever saying your name again to him. 

There was a period of time when it ripped Haymitch clean in half to realize the footnote you’d become. He couldn’t stand hearing the Capitolites fawn and cry and grieve you in their hollow way. You weren’t theirs to lose, and what you had together never belonged to them. And yet, he also couldn’t stomach how all acknowledgement of you faded from existence. 

What right did the world have to forget you? Any of you—his ma and Sid, Lenore Dove, every single one of his fellow tributes. Burdock, whose death was another notch in Twelve’s longstanding list of disasters that have nothing to do with the Games but everything with the Capitol. 

Bitter as it made him, Haymitch had no right to pretend he wasn’t in the business of forgetting, too. 

Mags pats his cheek gently, and like with Beetee and Wiress, there are no perfect words to thank her. She has given so much of herself to these Games, to her tributes, and to Haymitch. She, of all people, deserves freedom. 

Six and Eight are simple stops. Their main task is to keep the other tributes distracted, ward them away from Katniss, and manage to survive themselves. As expected, when Haymitch makes the trip to the seventh floor in between them, Johanna is far from pleased with her pairings. 

“Tough break, kid,” he offers dryly. 

Johanna scowls. “She better be fucking worth it.” 

She is, and in ways that have nothing to do with what’s around the corner. 

When Haymitch makes it to his last stop, he and Chaff have a drink for old time’s sake. Seeder indulges them and pulls out a deck of cards. After Haymitch has them made aware of their roles, of course. Same as Six and Eight, they only need to serve as bait, then get to Katniss as soon as possible. 

Only, as if that’s any easier. 

Forty-five minutes have come and gone, and it’s high time Haymitch tries to close his eyes. But the buzz of alcohol has turned into a livewire. He replays each piece of the puzzle, every conversation he’s had tonight, and somehow lands on the uproar of tonight’s interviews. 

Mighty as Peeta’s efforts were, Haymitch knew the possibility of a baby wouldn’t be enough to upend the Quell’s rules. Just as he knows Cinna is going to face dire consequences for the stunt, however genius it was, that he pulled with Katniss’s dress. Snow must be having a field day finding a broom big enough to sweep this mess they’ve made of his Games. 

Snow hid his concern well when they won and he summoned Haymitch for what he assumed was going to be his execution. As always, Snow knew death was a kindness he’d accept, and a part of Haymitch recognized he couldn’t die now. Haymitch kept Katniss alive, saved Burdock’s little girl where he failed to do so with you. He did the impossible, and brought Peeta back home too. Now he had to reckon with whatever he damned them to. 

“I don’t have to remind you what happens to those who step out of line.” Snow sat across from him, reeking of condescension and roses. 

“No, sir,” said Haymitch, and he worked double time to keep the bite out of his tone. Because again, Snow was dangling a life in front of him to pacify every instinct that screamed at him to rebel. He wondered at the time if Snow even remembered you, or if you were just another tally he marked off. A punishment for Haymitch, and not the tribute who made Panem’s invincible president flinch. Haymitch worried, too, that he saw the connection, and that he’d see to Katniss’s punishment for that alone. 

Haymitch got the answer to his questions when Snow’s lips curled into the vicious grin that continued to make his guts twist with equal parts rage and sickness. “Good. Then you’ll ensure Miss Everdeen learns quickly, too. It’d be a shame for you, I imagine, not to keep this one in check.” 

Snow feigned indifference then, but he never would’ve rigged the Quell if he weren’t terrified of the trouble Katniss has caused and the hope she’s stirred in the districts. Nearly half of them rebelling; probably more after tonight. He estimates Two will be the toughest to sway, which is why he didn’t risk cluing in Enobaria and Brutus. He tried to approach the subject with One’s mentors, but Ruby and Hermes shot him down as soon as they caught a whiff of what he was implying. 

Cashmere and Gloss won’t put Katniss above each other, anyway, and Haymitch can’t blame them. 

Haymitch walks up to his bedroom window, though Sid’s stars are impossible to see through the city lights. The drink’s wearing off, but he doesn’t reach for the next one yet. He needs the fog lifted enough to make peace with the very thing he told Peeta to accept. Time and time again, Plutarch has claimed the ends justify the means. Maybe so. But there is no end that could supplement the gap that’s left in the wake of so big a loss. 

Katniss shouldn’t be made to survive through any more deaths, and if Haymitch could shield her from it, he would. But there’s no way of keeping her out of this war. A war that, if things go according to plan, will not cost her Peeta. It may just cost her everything else. 

And Haymitch will live with it—with her anger and his guilt—because he has no other choice. He’s going to pull this off if it’s the last thing he does. 

His kids are gone the next morning, along with what’s left of those Haymitch could call friends. Effie is down in Mentor Central before he arrives, waiting by the entrance like a disco ball in a haystack. From afar, Haymitch can see she’s been crying, no doubt grieving the goodbyes she didn’t get to say last night. 

The sight of her sadness gives him pause, though he’s used to it. Especially over the last few days, as it’s turned the edges of her blissful ignorance into as close to an awakening as she’ll get. It also, unfortunately, stirs up the memory of the last time Haymitch saw Effie this distraught. 

He’d all but given up on attempting to be useful to his tributes during those Games, and Effie was coming up on a decade of picking up his slack. She found him passed out in the living room of the newly furnished tribute quarters when he should’ve been at a sponsor event. Gave him a ten minute lecture on decorum and honor. Effie made the mistake of finishing it with mention of you. “You may not believe so, but I remember her well, Haymitch. And she would not stand for how you’ve let yourself go.” 

Maybe she believed evoking you would snap him into what she believed he should do. Just about everyone else had. But it had been years already since you disappeared for good. From his drunken stupors, from his nightmares, from his life. “Oh, that’s rich coming from the glorified assistant.” He seethed and threw his arms up, spilling wine all over the carpet. “You can’t remember someone you didn’t know, Effie. And she would’ve thought you were the joke, not me.” 

Haymitch approaches her softer now, consciously smoothing out the parts of himself that have wilted into something jagged and twisted. “They send their love. Said you were the best escort ever, or something like that.” He clears his throat and tries to muster sincerity, because the kids were right. Effie deserves it. All she’s done for him in the entire time they’ve known each other is be there, even when he was at his most cruel. “They really appreciate you, Effie. And so do I.” 

Effie hesitates, chin quivering, then draws a steady breath. She dabs her eyeline with a silk handkerchief and reaches a hand out to him. To his surprise, he takes it. “You did well with them, Haymitch.” 

Three days later, as he waits for his barely alive girl to wake, Haymitch proves Effie wrong. 

It’s been five hours since they narrowly escaped the Capitol’s fleet and retrieved the three they could reach, Katniss included. Five hours since Plutarch called the search for the others off after a minute. Four and a half hours since a rebel lackey subdued Haymitch from taking control of the hovercraft by pulling out the threat of gunfire. The familiarity of the threat prompted a voice in his head to wonder if they were just trading one puppeteer for another. 

Haymitch adds the worry to his list of things to contemplate once Katniss wakes and he’s broken the news to her. Once they’ve settled in Thirteen and he has a whole staff of security to take on the trying task of protecting her. It lands third place—his worry—right after the people he has to grieve and the wounds that’ve been spliced right open again in the last day alone. 

Haymitch’s hands shake as he tilts back the flask Plutarch provided three hours ago. He’d down it in less time under different circumstances, but savoring the liquor grounds his mind. Across the table, Finnick, the first to wake, stares at the bowl of broth in front of him. Haymitch knows he’s caught in a spiral of replaying Mags’s death in his head, because he himself is trying desperately to postpone it. And alongside his grief for Mags, Finnick is consumed by all thoughts and worries for his love. 

Haymitch knows, because that is one rabbit hole he can’t avoid. Your ghost has forsaken him, but you are still in every corner of this room, in every breath Haymitch takes which both steadies and unravels him. In every stall of his heart that reminds him Katniss is going to take this very, very terribly. 

It’ll be a miracle if they kill Peeta quickly. More realistically, he will suffer solely so Katniss will. She finally convinced Snow of her devotion to Peeta; at every turn of these Games, she left no room to mistake her love for anything else. Snow will wring every last ounce of use Peeta has as bait. He’ll attempt to control her as he sees fit the same way he used you to break Haymitch into his mold. Snow never got his hands directly on you though, and it cuts Haymitch anew to admit death very well might’ve been mercy for you. 

Plutarch pushes the bowl of broth closer to Haymitch, prompting him to eat silently in exchange for his previous verbal cues. Haymitch takes a sip from the flask instead. From the burn it sends down his throat, Haymitch can tell it’s the same toasted whiskey Chaff preferred. 

They’re still in the air, Haymitch reminds himself. He still has to wait for Katniss. Everything else comes second, or third, or fourth. 

Plutarch sighs and finally breaks the silence that followed Finnick’s initial wails upon waking. “Will she still cooperate without the boy?” 

“There was a high chance she wouldn’t cooperate with him, so what do you think?” Haymitch says dryly. He sets down the flask and turns to Plutarch. “There’s no telling right now.” 

With a tilt of his head, Plutarch looks at Haymitch with recognition, and a sense of sympathy he hasn’t shared in decades. But Haymitch can tell he isn’t as worried as he should be. It doesn’t click to Plutarch, and it never has—he doesn’t know what it is for one’s heart to beat in tandem with another’s. And at the end of the day, Plutarch is still Capitol born and bred. “She’ll have to see this is bigger than one person. You did.” 

“Are you going to tell her that, Plutarch?” Haymitch spits out. “Go ahead and preach to her about the costs of revolution. I’m sure she’d love to hear it.”

Plutarch lifts a shoulder, and he has the decency to feign embarrassment. “She’ll take the news about the boy better if it comes from you.” Oh, sure, she’ll take it as well as she would a bullet. That’s what it’ll be coming from Haymitch, the same person who swore he’d choose Peeta while knowing he wouldn’t. Again. He fulfilled Peeta’s request, at least, but what good is that now?  

Finnick mumbles some incoherent piece of advice, or a question. Haymitch can’t make it out over the steam clogging his ears and the willpower it takes not to knock the flask over Plutarch’s head. 

The hovercraft is smooth sailing, but Haymitch feels a jolt when Plutarch continues, back to business as usual, “Communications are down in Seven, Ten, and Twelve. But Eleven has control of transportation now, so there's at least a hope of them getting some food out.”  

“What about Four?” Finnick asks louder but just as hoarse, and it nearly makes Haymitch recoil. “Can I— I need to get to Annie. Can’t we get to her?” 

Plutarch shakes his head. “No, I'm sorry. There's no way I can get you to Four. But I've given special orders for her retrieval if possible. It's the best I can do, Finnick.”

Finnick stifles a sob and croaks, “What if you killed me? If you broadcast it live, they’ll see, and they’ll have to spare her. They’ll have to. They can’t hurt her if I’m dead.” 

They can’t hurt you if you’re dead. They’ll do plenty to her. 

Haymitch restrains from snapping at Finnick. He wills his chest to do something useful for once and stop squeezing around his heart. He fishes for the picture in his pocket and slides it down to Finnick. It’s a cheap ploy, but Haymitch needs the kid to snap out of it. To remember Annie isn’t dead. Neither is Peeta. Yet. Finnick chokes on his words and looks up from the picture to Haymitch. “Don't be stupid. That's the worst thing you could do, and you know that. Get her killed for sure. As long as you're alive, they'll keep her alive for bait.”

The door slams open, and Katniss stumbles into the room with an iron grip on a syringe. Haymitch exhales sharply. The hovercrafts’ windows are tinted black, but daylight still manages to filter through and grind his nerves into rubble. Katniss squints to adjust to her surroundings; her eyes flare when they land on Haymitch. 

“Done knocking yourself out, sweetheart?” he says, head throbbing with the weight of Finnick’s brokenness and Katniss’s drugged, confused face. Katniss careens forward, and Haymitch steps up to catch her wrists. Her right hand twitches with an attempt to stab him with the needle. “So it's you and a syringe against the Capitol? See, this is why no one lets you make the plans.” Katniss stares at him, wide-eyed with whatever’s left of the sedation swirling through her veins. “Drop it.” He squeezes her wrist until she forces her hand open and releases the syringe. 

He settles her next to Finnick while Plutarch places broth, a roll, and a spoon in front of her. Five star meal where they’re heading. “Eat,” he says kindly, playing the diplomat between them.  

Haymitch sits directly in front of her, and his stomach ties up in dreadful knots. The medics told him to speak carefully in the first hours following their sedation, and Finnick’s muddled state helped solidify why. Regardless, Haymitch knows Katniss and what she needs, so he keeps his words direct. “Katniss, I'm going to explain what happened. I don't want you to ask any questions until I'm through. Do you understand?”

She nods, obviously still out of it. He’d give her more time, but really, they’d both be postponing the inevitable. Haymitch explains in detail about the rebel plan, the districts who agreed to uphold it, and how their rebellion has sparked into a revolution she is now an integral part of. 

When all the cards are laid out on the table, Katniss doesn’t seem any less lost. Ragged and broken and stabbing Haymitch in the throat as she asks why they left her in the dark. Plutarch gives Haymitch reprieve for a second and mentions the risks that would’ve come with telling her and Peeta about the plan. He leaves Haymitch to stress the fact that they would’ve been the first ones the Capitol captured. 

“The first ones?” Katniss furrows her brows. “Why?” 

“For the same reason the rest of us agreed to die to keep you alive,” says Finnick, fingers running up and down Annie’s picture. 

Katniss shakes her head. “No, Johanna tried to kill me.” 

Haymitch forces himself not to turn away. “Johanna knocked you out to cut the tracker from your arm and lead Brutus and Enobaria away from you.”

“What? I don't know what you're—”  

“We had to save you because you're the mockingjay, Katniss,” cuts in Plutarch. “While you live, the revolution lives.”  

Haymitch can see the realization finally settling across her face. It’s a subtle, visceral shift, as is usual with Katniss. Tugging her mouth into a frown, widening her eyes with despair, setting her jaw firmly. His fingers stretch in the direction of the flask as Katniss whispers, “Peeta.”  

Immediately, Plutarch and Finnick look at Haymitch to supply the answer. Of course. 

“The others kept Peeta alive because if he died, we knew there'd be no keeping you in an alliance,” says Haymitch, trying to keep as even toned as possible. The air between them is coiled tightly, stretched taut like a rubber band waiting to snap under the pressure. He sticks to the facts and accepts the pointlessness of feigning detachment. “And we couldn't risk leaving you unprotected.” 

“Where is Peeta?” Katniss demands, heavy with anger and swelling with tears. 

You’re in your grave, wherever that may be. You’re not here. You aren’t sitting across from him. You aren’t the one he’s betraying this time, and yet, every inch of his skin grows cold. “He and Johanna still had their trackers in. They’re in the Capitol, along with Enobaria.” Haymitch can’t fight the shame anymore; he drops his gaze. 

In the split second of silence that follows, Haymitch questions if she heard him right. But then Katniss lunges. 

Her nails rake across his face, and Haymitch barely has time to react with a hiss when he falls backwards in the chair. 

“You son of a—”

“Katniss.” Finnick is the first to reach them, attempting to pull her back to the best of his weak ability. Though he’s larger and they’re equally battered at the moment, Katniss’s hysteria easily overpowers him. 

She fights against Haymitch’s grip on her arms to lash his face again. “They’re going to kill him!” 

“Calm down.” Haymitch dodges her when she tries to bite his hand. He’s careful, conscious of the bandages wrapped around her wound, even as his patience begins to fray.  “Get off, you little shit.”

“He’s going to die!” Katniss spits out the words like venom. “Do you care?”

Does Haymitch care? Does he— Blood spools from the scratch marks on his cheek, and he tastes iron in his mouth. Tastes the acid on his tongue.

Plutarch joins Finnick’s efforts to peel Katniss off. Two medics rush in; one carrying an identical syringe to Katniss’s intended weapon. Her words are much more lethal in their truth. “He’s going to die, and it’s your fault!” 

“You let her go!” Him. Katniss let Peeta out of her sight. She separated from him, and now he’s in Snow’s clutches. 

“And you killed her!” Him. Haymitch killed Peeta. Has killed him, is going to. Either way, his boy’s probably as good as dead. 

Between Finnick and Plutarch and the first medic, they lift Katniss onto the table. “You promised me!” 

Whatever wretched retort Haymitch has geared up in the heat of his frustration diffuses. It’s all he can do not to let his mind play tricks and convince him it’s your screams punishing him. 

Katniss wails, banging her head against the metal as they restrain her wrists. “You’re a liar! You’re a liar!” 

The poke of a needle to her arm eventually gets her to stop. She isn’t asleep, but she isn’t hysterical either. Haymitch stays slumped on the floor for a moment longer, hand coming up to the blood on his face. 

One of the medics tries to tend to Haymitch, and he waves her off, mumbling, “Just focus on the girl.”

On unsteady feet, Haymitch sees Katniss and Finnick back to the medical bay. Watches them insert tubes into her wrists until she’s forced into complete unconsciousness. Finnick doesn’t react when it’s his turn, and sinks into sleep. 

Plutarch is unfazed when Haymitch returns, though he exhales tiredly. “That went better than I thought.” 

Haymitch holds the ice provided to him up to his temple. His scratches have been disinfected, but the sting has spread throughout his body. “How ’bout she claws out your eye next time?” 

“I don’t doubt she’d like to.” Plutarch scratches his temple. He offers Haymitch a pitiful smile. “The apple doesn’t fall far—”

“Don’t,” Haymitch sneers. The flask tipped over during Katniss’s attack. Whiskey gathers on the floor in a pool of brown, the exact shade of dried blood. His knees give out and he plops into a new chair. “Do you have any more?” 

“No,” says Plutarch cautiously, “and I probably should’ve mentioned this sooner, but District Thirteen has a prohibition on all alcohol.” 

“Probably should’ve.” Haymitch scowls, fingers curling into a fist around the ice pack. 

“You’ll have a room ready for you by the time we land, as well as a team to help mitigate your withdrawal.” 

Haymitch closes his eyes because if he looks at Plutarch any longer, it’s likely he’ll have to radio the rebel with the gun to make good on his threat. As much as Haymitch wants to lash out, as much as he wants to provoke Plutarch until he has no other choice but to lay him off, he can’t. For the same reason he hasn’t before. 

Only now, it isn’t just you plaguing his guilty heart, condemning him to life, binding him to an already broken promise. You’ve passed the torch onto his kind-hearted boy, who will be lost to him all the same, and his brilliant girl, who will never, ever forgive him for his betrayal. 

For better or worse, Haymitch is still in the game, fighting for the world Lenore Dove tried to get him to see. The one so many have died to build. And as long as Katniss and Peeta are still alive, he won’t let your fate be theirs. 

Even so…when they land in Thirteen and a medic approaches with a syringe should he resist, Haymitch welcomes the sedation. 

Taglist: @lovemiss-vale @aureolinb @mqrieshrt @bueburgers @dem1dearest @nikki-is-a-nerd @lovelylittlelesbianlore @jjloveshotch @inneedofcaffine @poetsandroses @kindsleybooks @ivyhaec @x-gabrielle-x @ghostlythinggoingaround @happiness2112 @sundawn1990 @starryjeongyeon @kuurbyfun @lenteheure @petrasbones @wertyuizxcvbnm @shiftingf1 @sarcasm-n-insomnia @defnotbrooklyn @harrypedro465 @rinatzsstuff @whimsybeth @youraggedybitch @poppysrin @watergirl85 @prettyandromeda @gaz0xx @marsupialnoises @madisonosidam @redshinyshoes @comfortcharacterwrites

A/N: nearly 18k words...why was this longer than sunshine's death chapter 😵‍💫 fr though, i didn’t want to rush through haymitch’s grieving and healing process; hence, the amount of post sunshine chapters, including the last two being set in the trilogy timeline. we’re so close to the end though, and in honor of that is the return of the tweets

You lay him on his back. He opens his eyes long enough to see Burdock in your place, blocking out the worst of the dying sun. Lenore Dove crouches beside him to help sit Haymitch up. 

Leave me here, he tries to tell them, but the words are acid in his mouth the second Lenore Dove presses her hand to his forehead. She swallows her shuddered breaths. “She’s with the birds now.” 

With the birds, in the maple tree—what does it matter when you’re still dead, and so are Ma and Sid? 

Burdock grabs Haymitch’s left arm and glances at the vomit on the floor. His frown deepens, drawing attention to the dried tears along his jawline. 

“Ruined your pa’s suit,” Haymitch mumbles. 

He hauls him to his feet, shaking his head like that’s the least of his concerns. “It can be washed.” 

Well, Haymitch has ruined a lot of things of theirs. A soiled suit must be a splash in the pond compared to everything else. 

“Let’s get you back to mine, yeah?” Burdock squeezes his shoulder. 

“Don’t,” Haymitch wheezes. The sharp pins from earlier begin to prick his lungs at the thought of seeing your parents, being tended to by them in the walls of your home. Not his. He’ll never have a home again, and he doesn’t belong inside yours. “I don’t want to go there.”

Lenore Dove and Burdock exchange worried glances and coded asks. Haymitch has no use deciphering them, so he stares up above. Which branch were you on? He can’t find it anymore. 

Burdock sighs, having reached a silent verdict with Lenore Dove. “Okay, that’s all right.”

“I’m sure Blair won’t mind having you.” Lenore Dove wraps both arms around one of Haymitch’s, steadying him as his legs begin to wobble. 

Blair wouldn’t mind at all. He’ll let Haymitch take his bed while he sleeps with one of his siblings. His pa will lend Haymitch whatever clothes he needs. His ma will make jam that won’t taste like the kind he had on his birthday, but will be a noble effort all the same. “Don’t wanna be there either.” 

“Where do you want to go?” whispers Lenore Dove, patient yet strained.

“Here.” Where his rotten roots can’t reach anyone. Where he can search for your branch until he’s granted his own wings to fly to it. 

Lenore Dove and Burdock reconvene in another silent meeting. Haymitch is fading again, in and out of consciousness, back and forth from the hellhole of his memories. He’s kept in his equally torturous reality by the clearing of Burdock’s throat. 

“Here’s not an option, Hay.” He takes a step, beginning his and Lenore Dove’s pointless pursuit of finding a new home for Haymitch. “We’re getting you somewhere warm and out of this suit.” 

Haymitch thought the cold was in his head. He forgot that it existed on the outside of his body as much as it does on the inside. That must be what’s keeping him good and numb now that the sleep syrup’s run its course. He doesn’t have the heart to tell Burdock there is no warming him up. There is no substitute for you. 

Nightfall peaks from behind the mountains. From the edge of the meadow, Haymitch sees the Covey house in its current darkness. Not a hint of light slips through the curtain gaps. Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber must be at yours. Maybe your parents wouldn’t deny him entry, but Clerk Carmine surely would, in looks more than words. And Haymitch can’t blame him for that. For seeing him as is—a plague brought to infect them all. 

If only the rest of your family had the sense to see Haymitch the same. Either way, he was right to refuse Burdock’s offer. 

Blair joins them halfway through the Seam with a pot of bean and hammock soup. “From Mrs. McCoy.” He trades the pot with Lenore Dove, carrying the weight of Haymitch’s right side. 

They get to where they’re going quicker after that. When they cross the gates into Victor’s Village, Haymitch takes in all its magnificent, lonely, burdensome glory. 

“Guess you get to choose your own,” says Blair, muffled by the imagined cotton balls in Haymitch’s ears. 

In theory, he does get to choose. None of the houses are labeled with his name or any sign that they belong to him. But he certainly belongs to them, and the furthest from the entrance, towering above its identical prisons, makes sure he knows it. 

“That one,” he mutters and points to his new cage. 

Even the artificially chilled air and rose scented walls cannot keep out the coal dust. It trickles in through the front door as they cross into the living room. Plopped on one of the couches, Haymitch lets Blair and Lenore Dove wrap him in blankets. 

Burdock switches on the lights. “I’m going to find Asterid. See about more sleep syrup. Try getting him to eat something.” He glances at Haymitch like he wants to say more to him, not just speak of him. He doesn’t, rushing back through the doorway and down the marble steps. 

“Don’t forget clothes,” calls out Lenore Dove. Haymitch feels her sink onto the couch beside him, and he digs his nails deeper into the velvet as she asks, “Do you want a bath or food first? And don’t say ‘neither’ because you’re getting both eventually.” 

His tongue feels useless in a way his legs somehow don’t. He pushes up, letting the blankets fall, and takes a shaky step forward. Blair catches him before he falls straight through the coffee table. 

“Let’s find the bathroom in this place,” Blair says, dazed with more than grief. 

Haymitch shakes his head. Stop helping, stop caring, stop keeping me alive. His useless tongue forbids him from saying any of it out loud. What was the point in letting him keep it? 

The bathroom gives him time and space to be alone, at least. The bathtub is larger than the one in the apartment, but furnished with a similar shower head. He stays in there, melting under the water with steam curling around him, until a knock on the door says his hand-me-downs have arrived. 

His self-appointed saviors are huddled in the living room when he wanders back into it. The windows pointing out to the front porch reveal nothing but darkness. Blair has his back to him, and Lenore Dove and Burdock are both looking to each other for what to do. Not one of them notices Haymitch in the hall yet. 

“He shouldn’t be alone right now. Or here, in their clutches.” Lenore Dove wipes the tear stains on her cheeks with rough movements. 

“Blair and I are staying.” Burdock crosses his arms, straightens his shoulders, and reminds Haymitch so much of you that he nearly runs the other way. “You’re already on thin ice with C.C. and Tam Amber. You gotta go back.” 

“None of you should stay.” Either they can’t hear Haymitch’s murmuring, or they ignore him. May as well be a ghost. And if he is, then where is yours to lend him guidance? 

Lenore Dove shakes her head. “They aren’t allowed to be mad at me today.” Even through her pain, she holds herself with a boldness that’d cut straight through her uncles’ leashes. The kind that’d make Haymitch laugh and admire her under different circumstances. Right now, it makes his lungs shrivel up. 

Burdock surely feels the same, because he scoffs and grabs her hand. “They’ll be mad at you tomorrow. Lock you up for the rest of your life, and they’d be allowed because of today.” Haymitch hears the way you exist on the edges of their exchange like an anvil over their heads. Burdock and Lenore Dove could go on like this forever—skirting around the nightmare with their roundabout speech, spouting riddles about what they should or should not do in your name. 

Her eyes flare up before ultimately extinguishing themselves with fresh sadness. Quite a scare she gave her uncles, Haymitch imagines, but he sees no regret for whatever she did to wind up in jail, or for however long she kept their hearts stalled. Lenore Dove starts up again, but Haymitch delivers the final blow. “Go home.” 

She turns to him, sharp-eyed, Burdock and Blair following suit. At least they heard him. Haymitch stumbles over his feet and words, slotting into the circle they’ve formed. “You should go home.” 

Whether it’s the expectant anger of her uncles or what her family’s buried today, Lenore Dove drops it. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she promises, hesitating like she means to say more. She opts to pull him into an embrace. 

Haymitch lets himself slip out of her grasp and back onto the couch. Light dangles from the ceiling and glares at him unnaturally. A poor imitation. 

When the old oak of the front door shuts, a slow and heavy creek following more murmurs, Burdock and Blair resume their diligent, hopeless task of helping Haymitch. He meant it for them, too—his wish that they’d go away. He doesn’t repeat himself. Can’t. Seems he used up all his energy to shower and send Lenore Dove back into her uncles’ protective arms. 

After changing the bandages on his knuckles, they ladle him a bowl of bean and ham hock soup, coming to find the kitchen fully stocked as all the other rooms are. Glass plates and silver spoons and crystal cups that even Maysilee would scoff at, despite their finery. She’d recognize it for what it is: another set of Capitol chains. 

Blair brings the bowl, but Burdock is the one who gets Haymitch to eat. He doesn’t need to force the spoon into Haymitch’s hands, or coax him with words, or threaten him in any way. His eyes are plenty disarming, plenty influential. 

Each mouthful strikes a cord in Haymitch’s misshapen guts. He stares off into the room, watches Burdock and Blair watching him in turn, but he isn’t here. He’s in the arena, sharing a pot of soup and mourning Wyatt alongside you and Maysilee. He’s in the apartment with Mags and Wiress and their attempts at comfort. He’s newly five, learning what it is to mourn for the first time. 

Haymitch doesn’t get to finish eating; the sparks of cold find him quick and clog up his airway.

Burdock administers sleep syrup, a lighter dose than what Asterid gave Haymitch yesterday morning, and tells him how much he should take in the coming days. Haymitch files it away with everything else he doesn’t care to hear right now. Blair’s well-meaning assurances of “We’re here for you, Hay.” Lenore Dove’s promise of tomorrow, which sounds closer to a threat. Each word out of Burdock’s mouth, be it instructions or sympathies or under-the-breath comments to Blair. 

His mimicry of your voice is the last Haymitch hears before slipping into a different kind of torture. 

Haymitch can’t see them properly through the wads of smoke. Ma and Sid manage to find him themselves, screaming as they turn to ash. He tries to reach them with desperate screams of their names and panicked shouts at the chains around his wrists and ankles. They bound him to the same desk where he was first turned into a spectacle by Prosperina and Vitus. 

Strange hands, stranger than theirs, touch him now. Running gel through his hair, scrubbing dirt off his back, forcing him in place as his home shreds piece by piece like wood shavings. The more they shape him in their image, the less Haymitch fights back. 

“Haymitch!”

Why isn’t he fighting? Ma and Sid are dying. Why isn’t he fighting?

“Haymitch!” 

Their shadows flicker in the flames. He wants to scream at the faceless hands to stop touching him, to let him save them, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t save anyone. 

“Haymitch, it’s okay!” 

With a yank out of the cuffs—the fingers—around his wrists, Haymitch scrambles back into the headboard of the bed. Fire lashes behind his eyes, even as the pitch black of the room tells him he’s awake. Burdock and Blair loom over him with their arms raised in surrender. 

“You’re okay,” Blair soothes weakly. “It was just a nightmare.”

Burdock steps forward wordlessly, letting the light from the hallway snuff out the darkness. 

Haymitch’s demands of “Go away!” come out ragged and unintelligible. He swings his legs over the bed. Burdock and Blair try to help him stand, but he pulls away from them. Drawing in sharp breaths, he manages to gasp, “Leave.” 

“All right,” sighs Burdock, catching Haymitch when he nearly trips over himself. “Take it easy.” 

Burdock’s dismissal hardens his resolve. “Leave me alone.” He pushes Burdock and Blair towards the door, down the stairs, into the living room. His shoves are halfhearted, but they entertain his efforts. Haymitch can no longer tell if he’s shooing them or if they’re guiding him. “I want you to leave me alone.” 

They don’t ignore him again; he doesn’t let them. Burdock grabs Haymitch’s wrist when he goes to push him again. Despite nearly being sent over the coffee table, Burdock only seems to care about getting Haymitch to calm down and sit. 

Haymitch bites down on his cheek until he tastes iron. Why does Burdock still care about anything, let alone about him? 

“Don’t pretend like you can’t hear me,” Haymitch sneers, sidestepping Burdock and Blair, storming to the front door on steadier footing. 

“We hear you just fine,” says Burdock, dry and tired. 

“Great!” He jerks the door open to the star dappled sky and nearly loses his grip. “Then hear this: You want to do me a favor? Go.” 

Their faces begin to blur, just enough that Haymitch can’t make out their reactions. Better that way.  

Blair begins shakily, “Hay, we aren’t—” 

“Stay away!” 

Even after Haymitch repeats himself, their hesitation stretches onward. The details of Burdock’s face become visible again. He stares at Haymitch with the same open, trusting look that first folded him into his friendship, now remolded into an ache that is all Haymitch’s doing. He doesn’t deserve Burdock’s care anymore; he’s not sure he ever did. 

Finally, Burdock moves and takes Blair with him. He stops on the marbled porch, glancing at Haymitch. “If you need to be alone right now, that’s fine. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother,” Haymitch grumbles. “Just pass the message on to Lenore Dove.” He slams the door in their faces before Burdock’s sullen, curious eyes crack through him. 

The pot of bean and ham hock soup is on the stone counter when Haymitch wanders into the kitchen. Devoid of an appetite, stomach raw and nauseated, he makes a beeline towards the three bottles of sleep syrup on the table, meant to last him…a while, he guesses. One of them’s gone in minutes. 

His eyelids grow heavy, his body weightless, his chest perfectly empty. He floats on a cloud of velvet, waiting for the fall. Suspended between sleep and reality, Haymitch fixates on the dark corner leading to the inner hallway. He expects nothing, but you’ve always exceeded his expectations. 

Haymitch blinks at you from the couch. It isn’t right for you to look so at place in this gilded cage, but you do. He remembers the same being true the night of the interviews. Wearing this exact gown, hair up instead of down, hollow smile hiding your frightened eyes. 

Your nose twitches with disgust. “You really shouldn’t drink that all at once.”

Bile builds in his throat, and he expects to throw up again, or for you to disappear. When neither happens, he sucks in a breath. “What are you doing?” 

“Right now,” you sigh, “I’m watching you lose the fight against moderation.” 

Haymitch follows your gaze down to the empty bottle rolling around the rug. Asterid said two spoonfuls would do the trick from here on out, according to Burdock. But two spoonfuls weren’t enough to patch up his oozing soul. “I thought you’d stay in the woods.”

“Wanted to save you the trip. I’d rather you don’t undo the trouble they went through by getting lost again.” 

No shoes on, you drag your gown as you’d drag your feet. Silk fabric rustles along the floor. It’s the only audible noise in the dead of night, save for the thumping in his chest. For all that he hates how easily you fit in with the Capitol’s ideals of luxury, Haymitch is still just a moth to a flame. 

“Don’t deny it.” You sit on the edge of the coffee table and lean forward. “I can see the gears shifting in your pretty little head.” 

Haymitch rolls onto his back, but he doesn’t tear his focus from you. “They’d find me again anyways.” 

You hum. “Probably.” 

“But I told them to stay away.” 

“Oh, peach.” You smile gently, like you’re breaking difficult news to an ignorant child. “You know better than to think getting them to quit will be that easy. They’ll be back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next—”

“Will you?” Haymitch flinches, the selfishness of his question further tainting the space between you. 

Your smile doesn’t fade, instead growing pained with the rest of your expression. “You’d have me stay forever, wouldn’t you?” 

He tries to push up on his elbows and falls back against the cushions. “I’d have you here,” he chokes on the last syllable. “I’d have you—I’d—” 

“Shh, Haymitch.” You put an immediate stop to his spiral. Moving from the coffee table to the ground, you kneel beside the couch. So close he could catch the tears sitting on the cusp of your eyelashes, or press his nose into your hair, or count every one of the crystals on your dress, which look exactly like glass shards. “You know better.”

He should, but even so, he reaches for you. And like a moth to a flame, he burns. 

The second his nose makes contact with the floor—the rug a poor buffer for the tile—Haymitch stops breathing. His nose isn’t broken, but he can’t breathe. Each intake of air pierces his lungs and slips through the resulting gaps. He can’t move either, because he knows when he looks up you won’t be there. 

He might as well let the room’s shadows steal him. Sink into the hole you’ve carved out of this world. 

They’d find him. Haymitch feels them creeping around—the Capitol, the cameras, President Snow. There’s no escaping them; he will never be free. 

By some miracle, Haymitch finds it in himself to crawl to the kitchen. He passes out soon after downing a second bottle, letting you seek him out in his nightmares. Choking, dying, singing your own funeral song. 

Eventually, the third bottle makes its way into his bloodstream. Eventually, Haymitch follows you into the woods before you can save him the trip. Eventually, Asterid stops providing any sleep syrup at all. 

Fine by Haymitch. White liquor’s a hell of a lot stronger than sleep syrup anyway. 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

You were right. Getting them to quit was no simple feat, especially when it comes to Burdock and Lenore Dove. Running them off proved difficult when they returned the morning after finding him the second time around. Or was it afternoon? Evening? Who knows? 

Haymitch no longer concerns himself with keeping track. It’s all one cyclical blur. 

Blair was the first to throw in the towel, having endured weeks of Haymitch’s tirades. He nearly made it two months, or three, before he accepted the inevitable and left Haymitch with a tearful hug goodbye. 

Burdock and Asterid clung on hard until that rock split open her pretty merchant face. Hurting his girl, on top of killing his sister, was Burdock’s last straw. The latter should have been enough before Haymitch had been forced to use those rocks. 

Lenore Dove… She sticks like a leech, dropping in as much as she’s able to sneak out, despite his tactics to get her to leave him be, or her uncles’ efforts to protect her from danger. Haymitch can lock the doors and windows all he likes—her voice carries through, asking him to open up, then demanding that he does. When she decides she won’t take a locked door for an answer, she evokes your name. 

It works, much to his shame. And when Haymitch does open that door on those rare blue moons, allowing her to tell him about what you’d want and what needs to be done, he isn’t sure he can use the same cruelty that worked on the others. He isn’t sure. But he does either way. 

Haymitch leaves his flint striker on the porch one morning, finds it in the same spot later that evening after Lenore Dove drops off a basket of something he doesn’t bother bringing inside with the weekly delivery of his winnings. Ignores the throb of his heart and the bite of your chiding when he throws it at her feet through the second story window the next day. Hates himself enough for the both of you at the sight of her hurt. She snaps then, yells about making change with or without him, and he learns to tune her out. 

The emptier the bottle, the less Haymitch feels. So he drowns himself in all Hattie has to sell in order to do what’s really needed of him. 

“Haymitch,” she says as she accepts his coin, which is unusual. Hattie stopped speaking much after his first purchase, when she extended anything she could offer in his time of grief, and he said all he needed were three bottles. Rarely, she offers the occasional update on others’ happenings. 

“Burdock is coming to trade again, but his color’s not back yet.” It’ll return eventually, because his strength supersedes Haymitch’s. But he reckons things will always be a little dull for Burdock, too, with your tether forever severed and no one else to blame but the boy who was meant to be his best friend. 

“Blair’s joining him now too, you know.” How would he? He’s made it his mission not to. Blair has two younger brothers and parents to help feed—go figure Sorrel and Burdock would teach him. They might’ve done the same for Haymitch. 

“Word has it that Covey girl was suspended from school for an outburst in class.” Lenore Dove already told him herself, not divulging or admitting to the accusations, on one of those mornings Haymitch opened his door. Suspension’s a far cry from a fourth arrest, so their teachers must’ve given her a pass on the grounds of grief. 

Hattie told him this sporadic information—about his old friends, about the rumblings in the air—like it would prove necessary when he came out the other end of this rough patch. Except this was his life now. There is no brighter end in sight. “I appreciate the coin, but you oughta learn to ration, boy.” 

His gaze flits up to her worried eyes. The very ones that took him under her wing. What’s it to her when she’s the one sustaining more vices than his? “Stick to the business you’re good for, Hattie.” 

With days’ worth of his anesthetic rattling in a bag, Haymitch drags himself out of the Hob, by some miracle avoiding a run-in with Burdock, and into the nipping breeze of…fall…winter… Who the hell cares? 

Matters even less when Haymitch catches sight of Clerk Carmine as the daylight gives way to the stars. There, on the edge of town, Haymitch doesn’t give him the chance to pretend they aren’t walking the same path. He spits out, “You should pay more attention to your niece.” 

Clerk Carmine whirs around, glowering at him with no lost love. “What was that?” 

“Need me to spell it out?” scoffs Haymitch. Leaves crunch beneath his boots. Maybe it is fall. “Keep Lenore Dove away unless you want her dead, too.” 

And before Clerk Carmine has the chance to curse him for his callousness, for all he’s cost them, Haymitch marches away. A tightened grip on his clinking bag, he doesn’t linger on Clerk Carmine’s drooped face, or his mounting guilt, or the storm he’s probably sent Lenore Dove’s way. It’s safer than the one she’d get caught in if she kept by his side. 

Haymitch drinks all the way back to his gilded cage, ignoring the hardened streets and their humming of insolence and the influx of new, antagonistic Peacekeepers. 

His companions await him. Those he’s killed, those whose spirits he’s dimmed in place of the lives he’s ruined and will only continue to worsen. 

And you. 

Sometimes you are still merciful. You greet Haymitch after hours spent dodging Panache’s sword in a heap of white roses, or running from exploding ladybugs while Maysilee’s scream plays from memory, or sifting through piles of ash and decapitated squirrels to get to Ampert’s bones. On the worst nights, when Sid’s burnt off face is the one under the rumble, you sing but do not appear to him. Different lullabies and ballads from the Covey’s catalogue, many he didn’t think he even remembered. 

Other occasions, which are most, you do well to remind Haymitch of his failures. Your brilliance is sharper than he knew it to be before. Death changes people, and so does betrayal. How Haymitch has hurt your people—once also his—warrants whatever harsh edges you have in store tonight. 

Tell him now: she is standing here at my head;

Not beautiful now, not even kind.

But you are beautiful. Beautiful and unforgiving, like the neglected flowers in his garden. Nearly winter then. 

He may take her now; for she never speaks her mind,

But is ever the one thing silent here.

You aren’t bothered by the chill—do ghosts get cold? Or are they perpetually frozen? You were always warm, a sunbeam gifted from above, but Haymitch wouldn’t be able to tell now. An invisible current keeps him from touching you, so he stays cold too, letting the dirt cushion him as he drops to his knees before you. 

She is not of us, as I divine;

She comes from another stiller world of the dead,

Stiller, not fairer than mine.

There are more lines that follow, he’s certain, but you’ve decided they aren’t worth sharing now. You close your eyes as if mulling over the poem on your own, your fingers curling around the edge of the wooden bench. Starlight bounces off the glass pieces in your hair; the resulting effect is the fading embers of a fire. He deludes himself into believing they’re dandelions or jasmine, the kind you used to weave into your braids on happier days. 

You come to Haymitch in this gown more than you do your arena outfit. It took him a long time to pinpoint why, to remember that night as the first in his string of betrayals. 

Though every nerve in his body aches to hold your hand or lay his head on your lap, Haymitch holds himself still. If he tries to touch you, you’ll disappear, and you already have more than enough reason to tonight. “Which part is that from?” 

You crack open one eye, annoyed by the interruption. Maybe you did have more to recite. That poem you love is endless, like his life. He doesn’t understand how you could be so comfortable with glass in your hair, and his guts begin to flare up, but you steamroll over him with a sigh. Both eyes look across the scene of his backyard. “This could be a nice space if you put some effort into it.” 

Haymitch lets a gulp of liquor scrape the lining of his throat. He waits for it to dull his chest just enough to say, “I don’t care about having a nice space. Which part is that from?” 

“And into yourself.” You drum your fingers against the bench. “I mean, honestly, peach, you couldn’t even make it a year?” 

“You’re dead,” he blurts, and nearly drops his crutch. 

“Duh.” 

“My family’s dead.” Why won’t the earth tear in two and swallow Haymitch whole already? 

“I’m dead, they’re dead,” you say casually, flicking your hair over your shoulder. “So is Maysilee, Wyatt, Wellie, Ampert, I could go on all night. You know who’s not dead? Your friends.” You huff out a bitter laugh. “Though you sure almost changed that for Asterid.” 

You’ll never let that one go, having yelled at him plenty the night it happened, scolding how he’s disparaged Burdock, then mocking how he almost gave you matching concussions. Even though Haymitch expects the same now, he cowers. “I—” I love you. I’m sorry. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but take me with you anyway. “I did it to keep them safe.”

“Is that what you told yourself when you left the Newcomers?” You lean forward, elbows on your knees, and cut through his quickening breaths with a vicious whisper, “You just had to play the hero. You had to be a rebel. How’d that work out for you?”

His impending apology dies on his tongue, and his stomach churns with something much harder than guilt. At the sight of your mirrored anger, he clamps down his defense and answers honestly. “Not great.” 

You hum, a satisfied look on your face that quickly sours. “And now you think you have the right to yell at my family? To threaten and hurt them?” 

“I’m trying not to.” And you know that—you have to. There is no more place for love in his life; President Snow has seen to it. But Haymitch is no less culpable. Everything he touches, he destroys. He is sparing them from himself as much as he is protecting them from Snow’s vengeance. 

Your lips are tightly sealed, a refusal to be swayed, so he repeats himself again in a broken slur, “Which part are those lines from?” 

You stare down at him, and he swears he can feel your hand curled around his jaw, forcing him to hold your gaze. “The irony is,” you chime, “you don’t need to try very hard to hurt people, Haymitch. You do enough just by loving them.” 

His eyes burn, and he sees there is no denying the truth. He searches for the will to beg you to see the benefits in letting him die, but as a glass shard falls from your hair, you condemn him with your last words. 

High above, the moon emits a bright yellow like the primroses where Haymitch swears he left you alive. In his sleep, you’re gone upon his arrival. And as he stirs awake in his garden to a pale, apathetic sunrise, his memories begin to tell him the same. 

He stays holed up in the garden until his skin turns blue, and collapses in his living room where the other ghosts of his past return with a vengeance. 

Time continues to slip through his fingers. Silka joins Panache in his efforts to hunt down Haymitch, and the other Careers he killed recommit to their own alliance. He falls into a new cycle of letting them catch him, feeling their nails shred his ribcage, and fending them off with his knife once awake. Haymitch runs himself ragged with attacking the room’s deceptive shadows, succumbing to your latest melody when his mind begins to spin. A song, not a poem, and not belonging to the Covey. 

Down in the Willow garden,

Where me and my love did meet.

As we sat a-courtin,’

My love fell off to sleep.

I had a bottle of Burgundy wine,

My love she did not know,

So I poisoned that dear little girl,

On the banks below. 

Where the song comes from, Haymitch can’t remember. It produces pictures of lakeside lilies and the caress of water at his feet before he’s pulled under the waves of your crystal clear message. On the night you sing it in full for him, he knows it’s time for another restock. 

Effie Trinket doesn’t give him the chance when he comes to hours later. He swipes instinctively, but she’s wrangled his knife out of his grasp, standing above him with pursed lips and a weary disposition. 

“Haymitch, I’m so sorry to hear about your family’s accident.” She sets the blade down on the kitchen counter, too far for him to reach from his place on the ground. “But this simply won’t do. We have a responsibility, and you have a sacrifice to honor.”

Oh, sure, it was a real accident. Tragic, coincidental timing too, coming off of your sacrifice. Effie doesn’t know any better, blind to the horrors of the Capitol and their dear president, but her ignorance isn’t any easier to swallow. 

Haymitch washes up under Effie’s orders, though it takes a while for the rose scented soap to replace the booze and dirt. Prosperina and Vitus declare they can stomach him long enough to ready him, but the roses make him plenty nauseous in turn. 

Plutarch’s camera greets Haymitch as soon as he’s out the door, one step behind the entire way to the train station, where Plutarch informs him of Magno’s demotion and Drusilla’s accident. “Maysilee was right about those boots. I suggested Effie as the natural successor. Given her innovative track record, they went for it.”

“But you’re still stuck slumming it?” Haymitch deadpans, itching to run back to his prison when it hits him you won’t be joining him in this one. Steeled, not gilded. 

“It’s in my contract I continue with Twelve through your first year as a victor. Who knows where I’ll go then,” Plutarch says with an attempt at a friendly smile. What intentions hide beneath it? “You look like you could use a sandwich. Tibby!” 

Facing your kin and living with the ghosts should’ve been enough to prepare Haymitch for the wretchedness of the Victory Tour. District Eleven proves that nothing could’ve prepared him for seeing the families of his fallen allies, echoing meaningless words about their heroism when there is more to be said of them. Little as they really knew each other, Haymitch thinks of all the things he noticed about Hull and Chicory. Even Blossom and Tile. Everything that made them people instead of pawns. 

He sticks to the cards. 

Plutarch takes over Effie’s job of corralling Haymitch when the night’s festivities come to an end. He’s hidden away in a corner with the district’s most recent victor, who has introduced him to the wonderful world of Eleven’s specialty rotgut. 

“He’s all yours,” says Chaff, toasting the air mockingly. 

Instead of dragging him back to the train, Plutarch rushes him up a set of stairs and into an abandoned attic. He yanks the bottle out of Haymitch’s hands when he begins to blow whistles into it. 

“We don’t have long. This is the one place in the Justice Building that isn’t bugged.” Plutarch’s lax posture and narrowed eyes, almost honest in their urgency, convince Haymitch he’s right. 

More than that, they send him down memory lane, straight to that pitcher of hot chocolate. The very one Haymitch found while President Snow withered to death. If only he smashed the pitcher right over his head. Did Plutarch know Snow’s plan when he lent it to him? Was he a willing participant, eager to make one last show out of you?

It doesn’t matter, because the wave is already swelling inside Haymitch. He lunges clumsily, and only has the liquor to blame for how quickly Plutarch dodges him. He’s the killer here, after all. This should be easy for him. 

“Okay—” Plutarch sidesteps another of Haymitch’s lackluster attempts. He grabs his wrists, forcing him to sit on the nearby windowsill. “Hate me all you’d like, but get a hold of yourself for one minute.” 

His words do the opposite of their intended effect, worsening Haymitch’s need to make someone, if not Snow, carry the blame. He sets out to do just that with Plutarch, the one tangible culprit other than himself, and strides forward. Sensing another meager attack, Plutarch pulls something out of his blazer’s inner pocket. 

Haymitch falls back, fists dropping. “Where—Where’d you get that from?”

“The surgeon in charge of victor affairs is a colleague of mine. Normally they toss all extra items on a victor’s person, save for their token, but I promised she’d get this back.” He drops the bluebird into Haymitch’s outstretched hand. 

His muddled head swirls as he cradles the closest thing left of your heart. Plutarch promised who, exactly? The simple answer is you, but when would he have… 

“Now I need you to listen closely. The arena plan may not have produced the results we wanted, but it wasn’t the failure you believed it to be.” 

Haymitch sees you in the reflective light of the bird’s beak, the sunset scarf around your neck and the fading embers in your hair. He sees Plutarch leading you out of the library, hears the unavoidable confession to his involvement in the rebel plan. He swallows down the return of tonight’s main course. “How much did she know?” 

“Not everything. It would’ve been a risk. Besides, she wasn’t needed on the frontlines.” Plutarch smoothes his rumpled blazer. “Symbols are powerful weapons in and of themselves, and every good revolution needs one.” 

“And that symbol was meant to be her?” 

“It could’ve been. Beetee chose you for a reason, too. Admittedly, I was partial to Everdeen, but there have been others before, and there will be more down the line to pick up the torch.” Plutarch lifts a shoulder like he’s only trying to placate the rage emanating from Haymitch, not add to it. “That doesn’t mean we don’t need you.” 

So it’s not enough to reduce you to a blip in his machine of revolution—he expects Haymitch to sign himself away to the cause once more. “You don’t want me. Everybody’s dead because of me. It was a failure, and it’s on me.” 

“Don’t sell yourself short. You shook up the Capitol in more ways than one. Every misstep along the way was outside of your control.”

“Her death wasn’t a misstep,” Haymitch seethes, squeezing the bluebird in his hand, “and she’s not a token you can replace.” 

“No, I suppose not,” he relents. With a quick glance out the window, he straightens himself. “Revolution takes time, Haymitch, and it requires sacrifice to succeed. You can decide whether this one amounts to something or not. But I know she would’ve liked to see a free Panem, and I know you should be a part of making that happen.” 

There’s that word again, the idea that you were a martyr for two opposing ends of a war. Effie said it like she snatched the tagline directly from a Capitol poster. Probably did. Neither she nor Plutarch understand. You were more than a piece in the Capitol’s games, or Plutarch’s. Haymitch has half a mind to tell Plutarch just that and more. He should know you’re already free, and maybe you would’ve liked the same for those in this world, but Haymitch isn’t sure he still does for himself. What good can he do now? What freedom does he deserve? 

“You don’t know a thing,” he mutters. “None of you do.” 

Haymitch finds his own path to the train. 

Every stop is as bad as Eleven. At least Plutarch leaves Haymitch be, taking to the sidelines to record his triumph across the districts. In Six, he sees Wellie’s head hanging from every corner. Both Five and Four provide ugly reminders that the blood on his hands was literal. By the time they reach Three, Haymitch thinks he’s numbed himself to the point of permanently discarding all emotions. 

Until he sees Beetee on a platform beside his wife, from whom Ampert clearly got his looks. Beetee was nowhere to be found during his crowning ceremony or the two weeks that followed, so Haymitch assumed he killed himself. It’s obvious now why he hasn’t. Beetee holds his wife’s hand while she protects the swell of her stomach with her other. Ready to pop any day. 

Another kid without a brother, and what a great one Ampert would’ve made. Nothing like Haymitch. 

He cries in his room back on the train, for Ampert and Beetee, for you and Burdock. For Sid, the sweet baby who, from the second he was born, looked up to his brother like he could do no wrong. 

Effie tries her best to keep Haymitch sober for One and Two. Shame there are no locks on the bar car. 

The Capitol festivities come and go with their usual fanfare. President Snow looms over them with an air of immunity, and when he finds Haymitch in the crowd during his own speech to his adoring subjects, he stands like the victorious one. 

Back in Twelve, Haymitch is ready to sink back into his pit of solitude. Like his homecoming, there is no grand crowd to welcome him back. There is, however, a similarly unsettling message that awaits him. 

Effie gasps over Haymitch’s shoulder. Plutarch stifles a cross between a laugh and a scoff. He averts his camera, and Haymitch wonders whether he should be thankful this taping isn’t live. A part of him, buried beneath layers of alcohol, would’ve liked more people than his wardens to see the bold orange letters sprayed across the platform. 

THE CAPITOL LIES

As quickly as the satisfaction bubbled inside him, the fear kicks in. Because there’s only one person Haymitch can think of who’d do something like this. And there’s no good moment to think about it with Effie ushering him to keep on schedule, looking to the Peacekeepers who’ve accompanied them for answers. 

She’s appalled the whole way to the Justice Building, ranting about the sheer audacity of some wayward soul to suggest the Capitol was anything but honest and just. If that’s the case, Haymitch seethes internally, then why were forty-eight kids buried this year? 

Mayor Undersee tries to assuage Effie’s worry, promising there is no tolerance for treason but the Peacekeepers’ reported the cameras were too old and froze before a picture could form. He already looks tired in a way Mayor Allister did her last years before retirement. Maybe his son will have to pick up the slack sooner than expected. 

While Haymitch has already had to confront your family, and the Donners, and the Callows, it’s horrible addressing them on those platforms. His speech—Effie’s, technically—is all stammers and slurs. It’ll earn him a scolding from her, maybe another surge of fresh spite from his own district, but he skips over any part that’s a reference to you. 

Afterwards, throughout the lackluster party in the square, Haymitch voluntarily sticks by Plutarch, who’s a fine repellant. No one wants anything to do with Haymitch, and the feeling’s mutual. Except when it comes to Barb Azure. She keeps track of him from a distance, by Sorrel and Burdock, the latter of whom has longer hair than he did last Haymitch saw. Mid-neck, a braid on one side flitting across his nose when he turns to look at Haymitch. 

He avoids Burdock’s eyes, exchanges them for a glimpse of Barb Azure, who elicits the same ache and yet feels safer. Haymitch can tell, by the way her mouth curves into a watchful frown, the only reaction he’s seen of her tonight, he’s caused her worry. More than he’s worth. Her time is better spent hating him, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem her spirit will allow it. 

He wonders why, wonders if you’ll visit once the cameras are gone, wonders about Lenore Dove and that welcome banner and if that’s why he didn’t see her and the uncles anywhere in the square. 

Your bluebird weighs heavy on his heart, safe as it is in the pocket of his shirt. Haymitch stands in his front yard, well after the sun has dipped and Plutarch has finished his recorded tour of his new house. 

“You have more power than you believe, Haymitch,” he says in parting. “Don’t quit before you have the chance to use it.” 

Haymitch feels the urge to kill him again. “And how do you use your power, Plutarch? Filming our last days, having tea parties with the president—you’re not fixing a thing. You’re just full of shit.” 

Recognition flashes across his face, and amusement comes fleetingly, though it takes Plutarch a beat to actually answer. “I never claimed my methods were perfect. But at least I’m still in the game. For what it’s worth, your better half wouldn’t disagree.” 

And with that, Haymitch finds himself alone in his much too large, much too quiet, much too golden cage. It’s all the more constricting without any bottles in the house. He stocks up extra, enough that he doesn’t have to leave Victor’s Village until three rounds of his winnings are delivered to his door. 

In those three weeks, your visits are restricted to his dreams, always the same sequence of Maritte’s attack, the shattered pitcher, and then nothing. It replays in his head as he wanders District Twelve, prolonging his trek because he doesn’t want to sleep tonight. He doesn’t want to see if you’ll be waiting for him when he returns. Weeks of silence can only mean a reckoning around the corner. One he’s earned but fears nonetheless. 

Most of the merchants have closed up shop for the day, except for the sweetshop, every one of its lights on despite the yellow moon beating down on Twelve. The crop of golden hair at the counter, turned down to the till, stirs the harmony of ladybugs and fire. When Merrilee glances up, the pink of her dress swallowing her whole, a soft blue finding him through the blurred glass window, Haymitch reminds himself she’s not who he’s missing. 

He traces the twists and turns around Twelve, muttering that schoolyard song, pretending you and Maysilee are the ones singing it together now. A voice replaces both of yours in the dark of an alleyway. Haymitch blinks his eyes open, landing first on the cutting words painted the same shade of orange as those on the train platform. 

NO HANGING TREE

He shuts himself off to the words and the world, trying to scrub them clean in his head. A pair of hands hoists him to his feet, and he doesn’t resist letting them lead him where he asks to go. 

Lenore Dove, expectedly, doesn’t leave after she gets him inside. Haymitch flinches away from her when she tries to settle him on the couch, and she winces in turn, taking a step back and holding herself tensely. She crosses her arms, orange stained nails digging into her sweater. 

“You’ll get arrested for trespassing,” he says, a mimicry of the threats he’d throw at her and Burdock when both of them still came together. “I thought you already were.” 

“Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber have me under house arrest except for school. In part thanks to you.” Lenore Dove was always sweet lilts or emotional edges, never bitter. Not like she sounds now as she credits Haymitch for his role in her newfound restrictions. 

“Great job they’re doing.” 

“They can’t stay awake twenty-four-seven.” She wavers on the defensive for her uncles’ sake, despite her own blatant frustration with the circumstances. “Have you eaten anything real lately?” 

Haymitch senses Lenore Dove scanning the filth of the living room, wrecked beyond repair in just the few months it’s been his. Drink stains on the rug and velvet, trash overflowing, clothes scattered under a layer of dust. To her credit, she does her best not to react, but her face swirls with pity and sorrow. He snorts. “Oh, don’t you worry. I had a nice, hearty meal before we ran into each other.”

He’s never challenged Lenore Dove, never had cause to, even in moments when they didn’t see eye to eye, even when he didn’t understand her riddles. They have never argued, and the closest they’ve come was Lenore Dove demanding he let her in and Haymitch doing the exact opposite. Knowing this, he barrels over the litany of concerns building up on her tongue. “I liked your painting. Could’ve used a softer touch though.” 

Her pity dissolves into confusion over his sudden ease with coded words. But Lenore Dove knows exactly what he’s referencing. “People deserve the truth—” 

“It’s a shame you haven’t shown anyone else,” Haymitch cuts in sharply. Did she know the cameras at the station weren’t anything more than fillers? Would it have made a difference if they were? “But you know what, painting’s not really your style.” 

“I think it suits me fine,” she says without missing a beat. “I think you should give it a try instead of singing and dancing for them.”  

Maysilee’s pinkie is a phantom sensation; yours wraps around his other. Haymitch opens his mouth, but Lenore Dove beats him to it. “You think I don’t see what you’re doing? Putting up all these walls to keep us out because you think you deserve it.” She’s close, so very close, and yet she couldn’t be more off base. He’s doing this for them, not just to himself. “You aren’t the only one who loved her.” 

“Stop it.” He shakes his head. “I don’t wanna hear this.” 

“Maybe it wasn’t in the same way, but she was my cousin. And Burdock’s sister. And people’s friend.” Lenore Dove sniffles, and unlike before, the thought of you makes Haymitch want to slam the door shut instead of opening it to her. “It was a different love but the same amount. We understand. You aren’t alone in the pain, Haymitch, or the fight.” 

“There is no fight, Lenore Dove. None I want a part of.” He rounds the corner into the main hallway, and she’s on his heel. 

“You don’t believe—” She huffs, working herself into a quick frenzy like when she found out about Maysilee’s canary. You may not be here to add fuel to her fire, but Haymitch sees you’re settled in the forefront of her mind. “You can’t believe it. Not after all the lives taken from us this year. The lives that’ll keep being taken if we do nothing.” 

His jaw ticks, sending a pang to his head. For the first time in all the years Lenore Dove has graced his life, all the years he’s loved her, she causes him true anger. “I did do something, Lenore Dove. I fought, and I lost. You think I don’t know how many people died?” 

“I never said that!”

“I know exactly how many of ’em died—I helped kill them.” Haymitch stifles the rumbling in his chest, stills the twitch of his fingers. “You think you or Burdock or anyone understands, but you don’t. And I don’t have to explain it to you. But you need to quit what you’re doing before you get yourself killed.” 

The overly bright fluorescents catch the defiance in Lenore Dove’s eyes, the disbelief that he could even ask that of her. Haymitch thinks of her coyness surrounding her first two arrests and her ability to skirt around a real confession. She maintains that now, even as she says, “Nobody should have to die for their games. I won’t stop believing in the possibility of the sun rising on a better world.” 

A better world, a free Panem. Plutarch’s pipe dream rings in Haymitch’s head. 

“Good for you.” He curls a fist over the doorhandle, nearly slams the oak into his nose. Everything he has to tell her and apologize for slips through the cracks between them. Any form of begging will fall on deaf ears and lead to her swaying his resolve. Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber will get a handle on things. They’ll figure out a way to watch her all hours of the day, to stop her before she’s caught. How else can Haymitch protect her, besides falling into the role he’s written for himself. “Now get out of my house.” 

Lenore Dove doesn’t fold or flinch or even look hurt the way she did over his callous return of the flintstriker, her expression burning. “I know what my cousin would’ve wanted, and it ain’t this.” 

What a shame you aren’t here to tell him yourself. Haymitch says it out loud to her, yells it vindictively, and it’s hours, bottles, later before you prove him wrong. 

“You know she was doing this?” He pushes up from the kitchen table on shaky limbs. 

“Course I did.” You slip off the counter, black uniform nearly blending with the night.  

Resentment is a treacherous thing; without a rhyme or reason Haymitch can name, it tints the way he accuses, “And you never stopped her.” 

“There’s no stopping Lenore Dove. And it’s not like I can now. Or have you forgotten?” 

“I haven’t forgotten,” Haymitch snaps, insides coiling as tight as your gaze. He stops right in front of you, backing you into the counter again. “How can I? You won’t let me. You won’t leave me alone!” 

“I’ll leave if you want.” You grin, tugging at the roots of his heart. “I’ll go away like the others. Push me out that door, force me to leave, tell me you want me to.” The quirk of an eyebrow silently communicates go on then. 

“She’s being reckless,” is what he murmurs instead. Lenore Dove will go on fighting, go on trying to help him, despite being furious with him. It’s in her nature, just as it is in Haymitch’s to have you stay. 

“Take a look in the mirror,” you snipe, leaving only a sliver of space between your faces. The proximity is dizzying, almost as much as the absence of your breath fanning his cheeks. “Lenore Dove is willing to die for her people, instead of expecting it the other way around.” Your nose brushes his, and Haymitch grows cold when he doesn’t feel it, when he remembers the acidity of your poisoned blood. “You think on that.” 

He does, through the turn of a new day, through the days that spill into weeks, through the pathway that leads to the Covey home in the blinding light of day. 

Though he’s long since given up on telling time, Haymitch knows it’s a Monday because the Hob was packed with people yesterday, every one of them casting their judgement on his horrid state of being. Presumably a school day, and if what she said is true, there’s no risk of running into Lenore Dove. 

Haymitch doesn’t consider the likelihood of there being anyone else home. He makes sure your bluebird is balanced on the porch railing and spins around before Tam Amber comes out from his workshop. 

“Too late to run off now, boy.” Tam Amber stops him instantly. He walks around to porch steps, wiping his brow with a red handkerchief. “You ain’t subtle.” 

A dozen sharp-tongued quips come to mind, but there’s no use for them. Tam Amber isn’t someone Haymitch needs to swat —he is not a fly on the wall or a gnat fretting over him. He isn’t risking his life by seeking Haymitch out. He is someone you loved. So maybe there is a risk in speaking to him. Haymitch still finds himself saying, “Came to give that back.” 

Tam Amber glances over his shoulder, to where Haymitch points his finger. He isn’t surprised to see the bluebird, his crinkled eyes welling with pain over suspicion. And the lack thereof leads to the horrible, nauseating question of whether they opened your coffin. Whether they saw you—Haymitch staggers over a rock—like that. 

“You don’t give back a gift.” Tam Amber doesn’t move to help, but he holds Haymitch’s gaze until his breathing steadies, eyes flickering down to his wrist. 

Technically, you never gifted the charm to him. You gave it to Plutarch, of that Haymitch is now certain, who passed it on to Beetee and Ampert, who sent it his way. Doesn’t make it a gift just because you let him hold onto it. Fleetingly, he can hear you calling semantics, imagines the smile that’d be playing on your lips, and buries the image under his shame. “It was more of a placeholder than anything.” 

“Lot of care was put into this placeholder.”

“Which is why I’m returning it.” He’d take it to you directly if he knew where you were buried. Whenever he sets out to find you, he’s sent packing by your condemnation not to follow. 

“Son,” Tam Amber starts gently, mournfully, holding out the bluebird in his direction, “if it was entrusted to you, it was a gift.” 

Why couldn’t it have been Clerk Carmine who caught him? He’d have yelled and cursed at Haymitch, not thawed his heart with the reminder of how easily you gave him yours. Tam Amber holds no hate in his eyes as he looks at him, and Haymitch shuffles away, at risk of breaking apart entirely. “You’ll take better care of it than I ever could.” 

The next months are a repetition of those following his homecoming. Effie is unchanged when she wakes Haymitch much like she did on the morning of his Victory Tour. Smiles and encouragement and scoldings against Haymitch for not looking after himself. Would she change her tune if she knew he spent the better part of his nights chasing shadows with a knife? If he confessed to longing for your ghost? If he told her about the bloodied whipping post they cleared out to make room for this big, big, big day? 

It’s hard to hold it against her in earnest when she is his main source of human contact now. And whether he wants it or not, she does watch over him. 

On stage, Haymitch picks out Lenore Dove, furious as he last saw her, one row behind Merrilee and Asterid, and breathes out when none of their names are called. When Burdock and Blair are not either. No, Haymitch is given a different pair of kids he recognizes. Fifteen-year-old Laurel Grover and twelve-year-old Flint Moss, both Seam. 

They look to him, helpless, all the way to the Capitol, where they are given an upgrade in apartments for the year. Laurel is a shy thing, but she’s quick on her feet, tells him so and all he says in return is that she’ll need it. Flint has more confidence than he’d expect for a kid in his circumstances. Talks a mile a minute and asks a dozen questions, but none of them have to do with survival. They are both resigned to their fates, and against his will, it makes Haymitch think of you.  

He bumbles over what to do for them, how to be there, and if there’s even a point in trying. He isn’t given access to the other victors or mentors the entirety of their training period. He’s confined to the Twelfth floor except for occasions where his presence is required. The parade, after parties, the interviews. 

It’s then, in an empty hallway, on the way to the bathroom after outdrinking Chaff, that Haymitch runs into Mags. 

She’s aged five years or so since the night of his ceremony, but she’s mobile and steady in the way she approaches him. 

Haymitch struggles over what to ask first. “Are you— Is Wiress— What happened?” 

Mags squeezes his hands, eyes darting up to a corner behind him. Right. They can’t discuss this here. Maybe not ever. 

“I’m sorry about your family,” she whispers, voice more hoarse than it once was. For what comes next. Mags doesn’t apologize for you, or tell him what he should do in the wake of all this loss. She rests a hand against his cheek and stares at him with sadness. “You did everything you could.”

A hazy confession floats above him. The wish Mags once wanted for herself. The district partner she tried to protect in her Games. Every part of Haymitch screams at him to deny and correct her lie, say she doesn’t understand, but she does. To whatever extent. 

He accepts the lie and falls into her arms.  

How long’s it been since he’s been held like this? Out of kindness and comfort. The touch of Capitol citizens doesn’t count. It comes in passing, with a million strings, and they feel they’ve earned every one. Running a hand up his arm, down his back, across his hair. Like they’re petting a dog, like he’s back in his much more literal cage.  

And like a dog, Haymitch learns to bite. To snarl and resist until they learn to avoid him. To find a new novelty. He may not tear down their posters, but he’s making Maysilee proud in some way, if not you. 

The worst victor in the history of the Games. Shame it makes him the worst mentor, too. 

His boy dies in the bloodbath; his girl makes it to day two, gets taken out by the boy from One. Their coffins rattle the entire way home. 

She has no relation to either of his kids, and yet, the first face Haymitch sees when the train doors open is Cindy. She shuffles on the platform, twisting a ring around her finger, demeanor smoother than he’s ever known her to be. Haymitch only ever frequented her booth at the Hob with you and Burdock. She’s normally the topic of conversation, not a participant. Her role in his life is nonexistent, but she liked you, and much farther down the line, he realizes that’s why she volunteered herself for this. 

“There was a big display, exactly two weeks after the reaping,” she says in a quick, hushed tone once they’ve left the station. They’ve amped up the Peacekeepers there, but they were pretty unmoved when Haymitch stepped off the train and bid them farewell with a mock salute. “There’s been so much loss. We’ve all felt it.” She glances at him pitifully. “I never got to tell you at the funerals—”

“What kind of display?” His patience for sympathies has run out, and he’s not in the mood to postpone getting back to you now. A month of cooing Capitolites and deathbound children and recaps of last year’s “best bits” have stripped him of his ingratitude for you. 

Cindy clears her throat and checks over her shoulder, looping her arm through his. “Burning of flags, a protest against watching the Games, a riot. Peacekeepers traced it back to that Covey girl.”

“Lenore Dove?” Haymitch stops walking, sobering up quicker than he has in months. 

“She incited that riot last year,” Cindy says, cautious. “There was word she sparked one at the school before the tour, and, well, she’s got a history.” 

“Is she on the base now?” Three arrests was pushing it, but four? Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber won’t be able to sweet talk or negotiate or beg her way out of this on their own. “I have to get to her. I gotta—I have to—” Haymitch sputters and pulls away from Cindy, who only tightens her grasp on his arm. “Cindy, I swear—”

“Haymitch,” she sharpens, detaches from emotion, reassuming the no-nonsense woman she’s always been. “It’s too late.” 

Cindy’s wrong. Lenore Dove can’t be—what she’s implying. Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber have a close eye on her, and Haymitch has all but broken her heart to keep her safe, and she has an endless fight left in her. Haymitch can fight harder too, against the Capitol like she wants, against her putting herself in danger. Because she’s not gone. Because Haymitch can’t have killed her too. Because you will never, ever free him from this torment. 

A noose twists around his neck and squeezes. 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

Gone are the hateful shouts that found him the night he hurled rocks at Burdock and tarnished Asterid’s pretty face. Gone are your taunts and insults, a natural byproduct of your grudge. Gone are your tears and gasps and bloodied lips, all pulled from memories which he never before took as merciful. 

They weren’t. Aren’t. But they feel a lot like mercy compared to this. Compared to your husk of a ghost. 

You’re devoid of anything real, angry as you are at him. He’s betrayed you. Again. Is that all he’s good for? You ask him that, completely indifferent. Over and over, until his yes’s turn into one long hyperventilating plea for you to stop. To pry his chest open already and tear his heart out because what use does he have for it? 

None whatsoever. 

And yet, you insist he keeps it. Mangled and shrunken and booze-soaked—it’s not a heart worth carrying around but it’s the one Haymitch has earned himself. Along with his complete isolation from Twelve. 

He gets Bascom Pie to deliver his hooch, leaves the money on the steps for him, and doesn’t go into town as far as he can help it. There are enough ghosts in the confines of his house without seeing the shells of those left behind. His nightmares of Lenore Dove, of Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber’s pain, are entirely up to his imagination, unlike those spun from semblances of the truth.

The woods are his workaround, and Haymitch wanders most nights, looking to get lost, only for you to wind up forcing him back to the fence line. But the longer you deprive him of anything real, the more you shun him with indifference, the less Haymitch listens.  

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Don’t know.” Haymitch shrugs roughly, a splash of his drink landing on the dirt. “Don’t care.” 

You whistle—it’s the most emotion he’s heard from you since the news of Lenore Dove’s execution. “Someone’s in a mood.” 

“And I wonder why.” He strides over a large branch and forces himself not to turn to you. 

“I’m the one who should be upset.” You walk in step with him. “I got glass sticking out of my stomach, a dead cousin, and you to deal with.” 

Night distorts the woods. Trees appear like weapons and hooting owls sound like screams. “You’re not dealing with me. I’m putting up with you.”

“I told you to send me away, Haymitch,” you say calmly, and it’s nearly enough to stop him, “but you haven’t. Why?” 

“I’m telling you now,” he sneers, lingering on the taste of rotgut before continuing, “You don’t belong here.” 

“You know what I think?”

“No, but you’re gonna say it anyway.” 

“It wasn’t enough to kill me.” You sigh in tandem with the rustling wind. “You need to make sure I’m never free too.” 

It hits Haymitch hard and fast and brutal, before he even has the chance to name what it is drilling the last bits of his reluctance to nubs. “I don’t want you to be free?” He digs his heels into the floor. “I’m the one stuck here, living with it!” The lid’s blown off completely, and shoving down all the horrible, hideous feelings is useless. “I tried to make things right. I tried to keep you alive. I would’ve died to do it!”

Clouds obscure the stars above, making everything darker, crueler. Your eyes are plenty dark, more ruthless than indifferent as you say, “Trying doesn’t absolve you of what you did.” You poke and prod at him with your current glare, a different yet equally disarming effect from your tender gaze.  

“You promised we’d be on even ground.” It couldn’t have been that hard to take him with you. 

“And you promised you’d stay with Wellie.” You seem pleased when he flinches. “If you hadn’t broken your promise, I would’ve found my way back to you. Maritte never would’ve had the chance to attack. I wouldn’t have been poisoned.” 

“I didn’t drop you on the glass,” Haymitch spits instantly, even as the words come out with a quiver, because his bones say that it’s true. So do his memories. 

Your mouth curves up and outrage sparks your expression, but it doesn’t cut Haymitch down. For once, he’s not looking to get a reaction out of you. “No, you didn’t. You want a prize?”

“I caught you. I made sure the poison never touched you.” But it did somehow, and now it’s in Haymitch.  “I did everything I could.” 

Your laugh chills his lungs. “Everything for who, exactly? For me? For your ma and Sid? For Lenore Dove? Let’s cover all our bases, because it sure didn’t start with the four of us, and it won’t end with us either.” 

It never will end, because Haymitch will have two new kids to fail every year for the rest of his life. Two kids like Laurel and Flint, hopelessly waiting for him to save them. The stream of loss is vast, and so is his culpability. 

“Why won’t you just stop?!” he chokes out, dropping like the strings attached to his limbs snapped right off. He yanks on his scalp in the hopes it’ll distract from the pain the way the alcohol should’ve. “Just stop!” 

You meet him on the ground, an unavoidable nightmare even after he clamps his eyes shut. “I died for you.” He’s back in the arena, every turn of events stabbing at him as you echo, “Live with it.” 

Curling in on himself, Haymitch stews in his boiling blood. He bites down on his cheek to taste the metal for himself. Spiteful words string together inside him, replacing his demand for you to end your vengeance. A distant hoot gives the final shove he needs to steel himself again. 

“Is that how you remember me?” 

Warmth, not a boil, floods his veins, a jarring contrast from the shocks of ice to his abdomen. His anger is stilted, cut short, which somehow reignites pieces of it. A paradox. The kind you are all too familiar with. 

You don’t try to ease or rile him. You don’t expect him to feel anything more or anything less than what he does now. It’s not the first time he has, not by a longshot, but Haymitch misses you. Your hands rest on your bent knees, fingers flat on the fabric of your purple skirt. Dawn is nowhere near; still, Haymitch sees those rainbow rays of sunlight in you. 

He waits to see if you’ll repeat yourself, but you don’t. Your nose bunches up. 

“Sunshine,” he murmurs, crawling on scarred hands and battered legs. The wracking of his shoulders stops him, suspends him on the floor until he’s forced to realize this is the worst crime he could commit against you. Disparaging who you are. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” 

You aren’t there to hear it. 

You’ll come back like you always do. Haymitch assures himself with the thought and other delusions long after the sun sets and rises again. He ventures further into the woods, comes up empty, the last of the liquor drained from his system. He waits another day, summons you to him with shouts and bargains and things he knows would ruffle your feathers in different circumstances. But he wasted most of his breath pushing you away. 

Why did he do that? Where was the punishment in being haunted by you? 

Not in the woods, not in his house, not in his dreams when consciousness fades away. You’ve disappeared completely, and no amount of anesthetic can fix that, can bring you back to Haymitch. Doesn’t stop him from drinking into the night, sleeping through the day, wandering every bit of Twelve you’ve touched. Wherever you might be. 

His vision is blurred around the edges, but Haymitch knows the Seam like the back of his hand. The streets are lonely, yet more alive than his stone walls. No noise except for the kind coming out of his mouth, a repetition of your name, over and over, loud enough to raise the whole population of Twelve. Haymitch only seeks to raise his dead. 

His body collapses on wooden steps, and he swallows the last syllable of his scream. 

A door opens, a soft hand presses against his temple, and low whisper commands, “Get him inside.” 

He smells berries and wet earth, and a trace of jasmine when he’s laid down on a mattress. Fingers card through his hair, brushing it back the way Ma used to when he was small and would fall ill. She hushes his whimpers now, and Haymitch hides in the crook of her elbow. “I wanna go home.” 

“Oh, sweet baby,” she says, deeper than he remembers her voice. Closer to Mags, minus the rasp, but she couldn’t possibly be in Twelve. “Burdock, bring the towels!” 

No, no, no. 

“You’re all right, son.” Sorrel settles Haymitch back down when he tries to scramble off the bed, careful. 

Nothing is all right. “It should’ve been me.” His brain flails while his limbs sink into paralysis, subdued by a wet towel on his forehead. “It was supposed to be me.”

Haymitch receives no denial, nor confirmation, in his dreams. Silka and Panache have rounded their allies and saved their torture for a later date. Ampert has a baby brother to watch over tonight; Maysilee, a sister. Ma and Pa have Sid and the twins. 

You’re in the meadow, standing on a rock beneath a willow tree, holding onto your crop of lilies and roses and honeysuckle. Lenore Dove and Burdock sit before you, blind to Haymitch’s presence. A timeless voice fills the air, not belonging to any one of you, and yet, it condemns him with the mockery of your eternal absence. 

O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?

Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,

Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?

Maybe still I am but half-dead;

Then I cannot be wholly dumb;

I will cry to the steps above my head.

And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come

To bury me, bury me

Deeper, ever so little deeper.

Haymitch jolts, startling the beige monster on his chest. Calla blinks at him languidly. Her whiskers tickle his chin as she searches for a comfortable position again. 

“How are you alive?” 

She acknowledges him with a hiss and a hop off him. She doesn’t go far though, curling into a ball where his feet dangle from the edge of your bed. 

Your bed, your room, your—

Haymitch barfs into the bucket beside the window, no doubt brought in anticipation of this exact moment. He recoils when he touches the floor, the wooden floorboards becoming hot coal. It scorches him through his clothes and licks at his bones. 

The room appears virtually untouched, still lived in, the sale of any one of your things prolonged for as long as possible. Seems cleaner than it should, too. Besides the corner by the door, where a jacket hangs off a chair like it was tossed there just last night—dust concentrates there like an incoming thunderstorm. 

Moving his focus from the limestone on your windowsill, Haymitch hobbles to the corner. 

He understands why the dust has migrated here. This is the only spot where the fire or the cold can’t hurt him. Where the hearth is gentle and kind and unconditional in its love. Haymitch figures it’s what’s kept the jacket warm and soft despite the coarse material and mismatched threads woven through repaired holes. His lungs protest, but he doesn’t care to stop breathing it in, because beneath the flecks irritating his airway, it’s meadowsweet and fresh as rained grass. 

Instinctively, hopelessly, Haymitch turns in search of you. Expects the lilt of your voice to ask if he’s coming along, to boast about climbing that maple tree. 

Footsteps thud over his panicked gasps. “Hay?” 

Haymitch pushes past Burdock, not caring about the dropped jacket, or the clatter it causes. Daylight says it’s mid-noon, but Sorrel’s in the kitchen with Barb Azure, calling after Haymitch when he whirs out the door. His daughter, his suit, his Sunday of rest—is there anything Haymitch won’t ruin for your pa?

Victor’s Village has never been more welcoming. A warped embrace that jabs and cuts at him, but he gladly chooses it over your family’s grace. 

Lucidity is purgatory, and Haymitch is unable to stay in it for long. He doesn’t savor and doesn’t ration a drop. Wrapped up in the task of forgetting and numbing, he misses the first knock. The second and the third are just as quiet. A pin drop in a torrent. The fourth rattles the windows and his nerves, and he has no choice but to confront his agitator. 

Orange splatters the sky, swirling into violet where the moon has already begun to show itself. Burdock stands on the other side of his door, holding what Haymitch recognizes as sleep syrup and a smaller jar of something faintly yellow. 

“Peppermint oil,” Burdock supplies, mouth twisting to the side briefly. His hair isn’t as long as yours was in those last days, and certainly not before the Capitol’s intrusion. But it’ll get there, just past his shoulders now, before the mines demand otherwise. “For the headaches.”

Haymitch turns around. Be it old habits or chipped armor, he doesn’t fight when Burdock slips through the crack in the door. “I don’t get headaches.” 

“You will once we dump out the liquor.”

“Who’s ‘we?’ Last I checked, this is my property, and I can do as I pleased.” Haymitch spins back to him and gestures between them absentmindedly. “And we aren’t friends.” 

“You can’t go on like this,” Burdock reasons, jutting his head at the bottle in Haymitch’s hands, then at the filth loitered around the hallway. He sets down the syrup and oil on a lamp table. “Determined to send yourself into an early grave.” 

“My grave’s a year overdue.” Be a kind soul and bury me deep. “I’m catching up, and you best catch the exit before I send you through it myself.” 

Burdock breathes out. “I’m still not okay with it, what you did to Asterid, but I—” He sounds so unusually lost, it sends a shard through Haymitch’s ribcage. “I didn’t realize how bad it was for you until last night. Lenore Dove told me. I should’ve seen it myself sooner, I just couldn’t.” 

“Shut up, Burdock.” 

“And I couldn’t be around you without talking about it.” His confession hangs overhead, and he takes a step closer. “Or without feeling guilty for wanting her home.” 

You aren’t the only one. “I said shut up.” 

“That made it easier to ignore how you were struggling. I won’t anymore, though.” 

Every dull, dark corner of the room suddenly sharpens, and the wound you’ve left blows right open. “Shut up and get out!” 

Burdock snaps back, running on his own desperation. “I’m not leaving without a good reason.”

“Were the rocks too subtle? Need me to get your twin killed again?” It’s a low, low blow, and it doesn’t work on Burdock anyway. It’d be easier getting a brick wall to listen than making strides with him. 

“Give me the damn bottle and take the syrup, Hay.” 

Haymitch holds it out, lifting an eyebrow with a simple, taunting dare. Take it and watch. 

They’ve wrestled before, playfully in the woods, during recess at school, the final morning Burdock came around sans Asterid, when Haymitch refused to eat. Nothing like this, yanking shirts, jabbing elbows, sloshing liquor. It’s coated all over the floor and each other by the time they wrangle themselves out onto the porch.

Haymitch releases Burdock, shoves him hard enough that he stumbles down a porch step and catches himself with the railing. “Well, it’s all gone now! Happy?” 

“I know you got more,” Burdock says, wiping a wet strand of hair from his eyes. He uses them to pry Haymitch open and find the broken pieces that match his own. 

“How many times I got to tell you?!” Haymitch screams, chest knotting around his heart. “Get out!”

“No!” 

Haymitch slams the bottle into the bannister, unflinching when a piece flies past his neck. It misses. He grips the spout and points the jagged, broken edge at Burdock. “Get the fuck out!” 

“I’m not losing you, too!” Burdock yells, as fearless as the day he walked up to Haymitch and said he’d be his friend. 

Haymitch walks down a step, chest heaving as he forces Burdock backwards until his feet are on the grass. He thinks he could do it. Hurt Burdock like he did all his fellow tributes in the name of self-defense and something less than human. If it meant being left alone, doing right by the person who brought more than one precious thing into his life, Haymitch could do it. “Don’t come back, Burdie.” He lowers the spout. “Neither of us needs to see her when we look at each other.” 

Cool-faced through the wrestling and the threats and the broken bottle, Burdock winces at that. He can cover it up with the pretense of healing, but the gap you’ve left in his life is there and always will be. It fuels the distance between them, stretching it impossibly far. He looks up as if the sky will have answers. Maybe he’s searching for you, too. “Cindy and Hemlock are getting hitched.” 

Haymitch blinks, oddly shocked more by the news than Burdock’s delivery of it. The bomb inside him diffuses briefly as he hears you scoff and sputter into laughter. Vivid enough to believe the sound isn’t in his head. He gives Burdock his back and the response you would’ve. “Finally decided they’re in it for the long haul then.” 

“Guess so.” There’s a lapse in his response. The clink of something placed on the steps precedes Burdock’s heavy breaths. Despite himself, Haymitch looks over his shoulder. His focus falls first to the clump of charms. He feels Burdock’s gaze burrow into him as he murmurs, “I just see you, Haymitch.” 

Cowardice disallows Haymitch from watching Burdock take his friendship with him. Curiosity forces him to pick up his final kindness. 

The bracelet glistens like a kaleidoscope, connecting six varying charms by a perfectly polished gold chain. Wrestling with Burdock shook the fog from his brain. Haymitch pieces the meaning of the first five quicker than he would’ve an hour ago. A shooting star, a pair of red tinted cherries, two identical fawns dangling from the same hoop. From there, he assigns the silver swan to ma and the copper eagle to pa. The sixth gives him trouble. 

In the dark, Haymitch can’t pinpoint the flower or the color of the petals. He pinches the teardrop entrapping them and holds it up to the porch light. They start off purple, a shade closer to indigo, and fan out into a blue as striking as the lake at sunset. 

He’s never seen one like this, never seen an exact copy of the larkspur from your book. The very color he picked as his favorite of all those they came in. The one you called his flower. Haymitch remembers that day in bits, separated from it by years and grief. But there’s no forgetting how his heart raced when he sat under the oak tree with you in the schoolyard. No scowl on your face, no reason to snipe at him, and no need to pester you at all into telling him about Larkspur Everdeen and the day she said yes to your papaw. Her name flower woven into her hair on their wedding day, a symbol of their true love.  

From the inside out, he freezes. His stomach gives out first, detaching from sensation and hunger and even nausea. The paralysis, acutely harsher than the numbness he craves, cuts off his airway. When the function of his arms and legs slams back into him, he uses them to break every part of his cage within view, lashing out in the only way he can. 

A gust blows through the front door; Haymitch doesn’t resist, panting and following its current to the ground. 

He didn’t think he had it in him to feel anything besides the guilt—he hadn’t in these weeks of your vanishing. Didn’t think he could weep like this again after Lenore Dove’s death, but he surprises himself. There are more tears to shed; more to miss. 

Consumed by the loss of your presence, how could Haymitch have known before now to mourn your stolen future? 

Pressing the larkspur to his lips, he murmurs his wants and regrets against your parting gift. Sleep comes for him once the dreams that will never be have streaked his face silver. And come morning, Haymitch reaches for the only future he has left. 

Taglist: @lovemiss-vale @aureolinb @mqrieshrt @bueburgers @dem1dearest @nikki-is-a-nerd @lovelylittlelesbianlore @jjloveshotch @inneedofcaffine @poetsandroses @kindsleybooks @ivyhaec @x-gabrielle-x @ghostlythinggoingaround @happiness2112 @sundawn1990 @starryjeongyeon @kuurbyfun @lenteheure @petrasbones @wertyuizxcvbnm @shiftingf1 @sarcasm-n-insomnia @defnotbrooklyn @harrypedro465 @rinatzsstuff @whimsybeth @youraggedybitch @poppysrin @watergirl85 @prettyandromeda @gaz0xx @marsupialnoises @madisonosidam @redshinyshoes @comfortcharacterwrites

A/N: lenore’s death in the raven is a mystery (my covey girls 😔) so that’s the symbolism in her execution happening prior to haymitch’s return. i also found it’d be worse for him to not be there for it. another thing to haunt him for years to come!

They let him keep it for longer. The white coats and gloved hands are there to prod his stitches, pour thick liquids into his mouth, switch out the bags of drugs for new ones. Not to cut out his tongue. 

Haymitch starts to feel then: the bile burning through his throat like hot wax, the churn of his guts, which shouldn’t be there at all. Completely different from his self-inflicted pain the first time he woke, so he convinces himself it was all imagined. None of it was real. He is not real. 

The nightingales return; this time, whole and awaiting their sentencing from the snake in their cage. By the time the last of them is ripped to shreds, feathers floating through the cracks and onto his skin, Haymitch realizes this must be a test. Limbo. If he survives it, if he withstands the cyclical nightmare of the nightingales and all those that follow—the rainbow songbirds, the dove gray bunnies, more mutilated Avoxes—then he will die in peace. Then he will find the heaven he was promised. 

His fantasy shatters when the white walls are traded for burnt orange. No more Avoxes in the corner, no defenseless creatures shrilling in his ears, and no choice but to confront the undeniable truth that you are dead. 

As the haze dissipates, so does the last of the numbness. 

Vaguely, Haymitch makes out Wyatt’s cushion across from him, bereft of sheets. Two makeshift beds lie on the floor, exactly as they were left. The one oddity is the pump in his chest, doling out drugs throughout his body. He smells something sweet as fruit, like the scent that clung to you during your days in the apartment. He turns his face into the pillow, breathes in the leftover sweetness, now as sickening as the arena, and soils it with his tears. 

Oh, sunshine. 

Little things died when his sisters did. Innocence, shades of pink, the comfort of cotton. Pa took a bigger slice, left a harder pill for Haymitch to swallow: no one was ever going to protect him the way he had. No one was ever going to take care of their family the way Haymitch needed to. When it was Mamaw’s turn, all he had left to give was whatever remained of his childhood. Not much. 

Every loss since has chipped away at him one by one. Somehow, Haymitch has remained standing, with fragile pieces of his heart intact. 

You take everything. Everything. Except for Haymitch. 

The crevices of his soul, the light in every room, the colors of the world. All the details that make up life. He didn’t realize how you shielded him from that before: the dullness of things. 

They should’ve let him die—you should let him. 

“Just let me go,” he wheezes, voice crackling with the strain of going unused for so long. “Please.” 

No one answers. You wouldn’t answer him here anyway.  

Acting on autopilot, Haymitch rolls off the bed and lands on his abdomen. He thinks to tear out his stitches but all that’s left of them is an ugly scar. His limbs give out twice as he clothes himself with his old pajamas. Unsteady still as he stumbles out of the room. So quiet, too quiet without Wyatt’s snoring. 

The elevator is the first place his wandering feet take him to. He presses the buttons—up, down, up, down—but there’s no response. Three more tries before he calls it quits and rushes to the windows. Each one is impossible to reach through the steel bars. 

No clocks to track his isolation, no knickknacks along the walls, no knives in the kitchen. Nothing that could be used to scrape away his skin so it matches his hollow insides. 

Only a pitcher of milk and a platter of bread in the fridge. Haymitch consumes both greedily. His hope is fruitless, proved so when the worst that happens is a fainting spell in the living room. 

At the very least, he dreams of you. 

In your meadow, the wildflowers are in full bloom. You sit among them with your back to him. Your hair is the length it was before the Games, blowing all around you in the wind, wild and free. 

Haymitch takes a step forward. “Sunshine!” 

Maybe you don’t hear him, so he calls your name louder. Runs towards you when you still don’t turn. Trips over himself and falls onto a blackened patch of grass. You’re gone when he looks up. In your place, Silka lies thrashing with her ax in her skull 

Forever a coward, he averts his gaze until he’s sure she’s gone. He lifts his head again, and there hangs Wellie’s above him. Haymitch croaks her name, then yours, caught between begging for forgiveness and seeking out your mercy. 

Another voice chimes over the chittering of squirrels, “It won’t be that easy, Itchy.” 

Haymitch scrambles for purchase on the grass, finding only a coarse rug. These are not dreams or nightmares. He is wide awake now, replaying every horrid, excruciating detail. Silka’s gurgles. Wellie’s pleas for him to stay. The blood on your lips. Your empty, dead eyes. 

Empty and dead. Empty and dead and it’s all my fault. 

The memories cycle through like the nightingales and bunnies and Avoxes. For hours? Days? Weeks? He doesn’t care anymore. They leave Haymitch crippled and couch-bound in a room you, Maysilee, and Wyatt once filled. Still alive though. 

He finds the will to move into the bathroom, fill the tub to the brim, and sink right in. The camera on the vanity stares at him now, but he doesn’t bother covering it up with another towel. It wouldn’t do any good. They’re watching, if not from that camera, then from another hidden in the walls. They won’t let him die, not yet. Maybe they have a public execution in mind. One can hope. 

Despite knowing that, Haymitch dips his head under the water and leans into the way it pushes against his lungs. For a second, the pain of suffocation distracts him, feels good even. His head bobbles up for a whiff of air before going back down. He goes on like this, his skin withering like a prune. Better yet when the water goes cold. Each time Haymitch resurfaces, he meets the camera. 

Do they have people on standby to pull him from the brink? Will they try to stop him, send a zap through the pump in his chest, should he not come back up?

If they don’t, you will. You said you wouldn’t force each other to be okay, you said you were on even ground, so why have you forced Haymitch to stay? 

“Why?” he cries, swallowing direct mouthfuls of bath water, tugging at his hair until wet strands break from his scalp. “Why? Why?” 

You answer him one night—he thinks you do—in a song. 

Haymitch doesn’t remember how he went from the bath to the couch again. He doesn’t open his eyes yet to find out, just listens to the melody that can only be credited to you. Except…it’s not your voice. The shape of it is different, though it haunts him awake just the same. 

No working elevator or clocks, but the television is just fine now, flickering right in front of him with an image that shouldn’t feel so familiar. Haymitch has never seen this before in his life. The war-era fashioned audience, the static around Panem’s insignia, the rainbow girl who is to credit for the soulful song. 

It’s sooner than later that I’m six feet under. 

It’s sooner than later that you’ll be alone. 

So who will you turn to tomorrow, I wonder?

For when the bell rings, lover, you’re on your own.

Her voice is not yours, and neither is her face, exactly. But that accent, that guitar, that glint in her eyes…

And I am the one who you let see you weeping. 

I know the soul that you struggle to save. 

Too bad I’m the bet that you lost in the reaping. 

Now what will you do when I go to my grave?

She’s not you, yet the words she sings couldn’t be any more punishing. Haymitch failed you, he killed you, he lost you. There’s nothing to do now that you’re gone besides let you haunt him through this rainbow girl. 

She drags out the last notes. The camera fades into the awestruck crowd, every one of them wiping the corners of their eyes. Among them, someone shouts, “Bravo!” 

By the old-timey clothes and mentions of the reaping and instinct in his bones, Haymitch knows no other role to give her but District Twelve’s first and only victor. And if that’s the case, if this girl really was sent off to the Games and won, where is she now? 

Amid the praise of the crowd, she takes a bow and reaches for a shadow in the corner. Hesitantly, a crown of blonde curls steps out. The television goes dark, and Haymitch is left with his own reflection on the screen. He stares at his sunken cheeks and bloodshot eyes, replacing the image with that of the girl again. Her cunning tune, her puzzling demeanor, her bright smile as she beckoned the blonde shadow to her side. 

A Covey girl, drenched head to toe to voice in mystery. A songbird, through and through. 

But the shadow at her side remains unknown. A Capitol boy, no doubt, if the flash of his snooty uniform was any indication. One close enough to this Covey girl to learn all about their ways, maybe even love them. Maybe even love her. 

“Do keep a watch on your songbird. They have the tendency to disappear.” 

Who else could it be, if not their good old President Coriolanus Snow? 

Again, Haymitch acts on autopilot. He tears through anything and everything in his line of sight. The couch pillows, the tabletop lamp, the wooden dining chairs, the pitcher of milk on the kitchen island, recently refilled. 

When the glass hits the opposite wall and the milk spills out, the memories return with a vengeance. 

He catches you before you fall. He stops you from hitting the poisoned steam. He sets you down on the primrose under a tree. Not on the glass. He doesn’t let you touch the glass. But it winds up in your skin either way. 

Haymitch doesn’t bother dodging the bullets flying through the window. They aren’t aimed directly at him anyway; whoever’s shooting them seems to know that’s what he’d want. A dart flies into his shoulder, not so different from the one that killed Panache. Maybe this is it. 

Waddling in zigzags until his legs give out, he falls atop the pillow stuffing. Not the glass. As the tape winds back to the Covey girl’s first verse, he finally hears you: 

“Don’t follow.”

Hours, days, weeks later, the ding of the elevators brings a hoard of Peacekeepers and their rifles. Finally, finally, finally. A pair of them haul Haymitch up from the floor and chain his wrists. His feet sting when they make contact with the cool marble, and he realizes they are bloodied. He did stumble over the glass after all. And as expected, you did not grant his wish. 

“Well, who’s ready for a big, big, big day?” Effie Trinket, not missing a beat, comes up behind the Peacekeepers. Her prep team trails feet away, exchanging hesitant glances as they take in the wreckage of the apartment and Haymitch himself. 

Effie’s eyes widen momentarily, scanning the same. She doesn’t comment on it though, which Haymitch is sure takes a lot of effort. When she grabs onto his hands, he forces himself to focus on her. “Haymitch, I am,” she sniffs, “so sorry for your loss. She was a marvel, and I know she’d be so proud of you.” 

You’re far from proud of the mess he’s made of things. But what else can he say to Effie besides, “Thanks.” She’s here to butter him up for the slaughter; for that, he is thankful. 

She squeezes his hands and brushes lint off his shoulders. “Now, we have little time and much to get done before your Victor’s Ceremony, so let’s say we whip you into tip-top shape!” 

Ceremony. Not an execution. 

Effie sends Haymitch to the bathroom. He sits quietly for the prep team to fix him up, more to do with his inability to do much else than any real desire to subdue the Peacekeepers’ guns. They each take on their own tasks: soaping him up, trimming his hair, cutting his nails, bandaging his feet. Turn him from monster to puppet. Is there even a difference? 

After brushing his teeth, Effie plucks around the corners of his eyebrows, Haymitch fixates on the pair of tweezers. Less sharp than a knife, but if he were to really press—

“Suit time,” declares Effie with her best mustered enthusiasm. Nothing rattles her, it seems. 

His movements are mechanical as they dress him in another black ensemble. Also belonging to Great-Uncle Silius. Effie returns his flinkstriker to him, and he briefly wonders if your bluebird was returned to you. 

He doesn’t miss the prep team’s revulsion over his scar, and he can’t blame them. Haymitch is disgusted with who he’s become, too. And honestly, that’s the least of his concerns now, because his eyes are still trained on the tweezers sticking out of Effie’s makeup box. 

How quickly can he reach for them before you stop him? 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

Between the two of them, Billy Taupe had the sharper mind for memories. Clerk Carmine credits that to him being older, not wiser. Before the turn their lives took for the worst, before the Covey entered their domino of death, he let his older brother do the remembering for him. 

It became routine—a game even, one they’d play on those winter nights when all of them huddled together for warmth in this very room. A room now much too empty, and much too silent. 

Lucy Gray would kick them off, as she did on stage. She’d tighten the blanket around Maude Ivory and Clerk Carmine, then sprawl herself across Billy Taupe’s lap. “Pipe down, and listen to your elders.”

“I don’t see any elders here,” Clerk Carmine would quip through the chatter of his teeth. The old miner who’d taken them in and died some winters prior was their elder. Not any one of them, just a handful of years older than Clerk Carmine. Even Tam Amber, the oldest among them, sitting at nineteen at the time with the quiet disposition of a man twice his age, was still practically a kid. 

But Lucy Gray had a way of getting them to quiet and obey anyway. It helped when Barb Azure, with those patient but stern eyes of hers, would narrow them at the two. So, Clerk Carmine and Maude Ivory listened. It wasn't hard to cling to Billy Taupe’s tales once he got started. They were broader than the stories he’d tell Clerk Carmine when it was just the two of them. Stories about their parents, their mama’s love of honeysuckle, their papa’s knack for the fiddle. 

These ones were all about the Covey’s life on the road. Places they’d been and performed, the freedom of their nomadic culture. More often than not, Maude Ivory would jump to finish his sentences, fill in the gaps she memorized from the very first listen in. Clerk Carmine couldn’t credit that to age, being older than her and all. That was just Maude Ivory. 

Times were good then. Good as can be with their way of life taken from them and the threat of frostbite. Took a long time to get a semblance of that back. But eventually, Clerk Carmine did. With Lenore Dove, Burdock, and you. His three little birds—what was left of the Covey’s future, mimicking their past. 

The irony isn’t lost on him.  

When the three of you were younger, learning to question and stir trouble in your own ways, giving every one of your elders a run for their money, Clerk Carmine didn’t know to be grateful for it. He just knew he couldn’t let history repeat itself as far as he could help it. Hard to do when each of you took up such distinct shapes of their ghosts. 

All three of you, always questioning. And with no more Billy Taupe, no more quick-minded Maude Ivory, Clerk Carmine had to churn out his own strength. 

No one else will remember their dead otherwise.  

He feels Billy Taupe most of all in his Lenore Dove, who carries his accordion and his pipe dreams of a different world. Gentler, softer-hearted than he was. But just as dangerous with her thoughts. 

Burdock, capable of charming anyone with a kind smile and an even kinder view of things, is an amalgamation of them all. And though he takes after Sorrel through and through, when he gets to singing, same as you, it’s straight diamonds. Like the voice that once lulled the mockingjays in their woods. 

And then there’s you…who will never again burst through these doors, free as wind, or breathe color back into their mournful stage. Whose melodies now solely belong to the birds. 

Exactly like before. It’s exactly like before. It’s— 

“C.C.?” Tam Amber crosses the doorway softly. He’s been in his workshop for the better part of the last few evenings. Gravestones don’t take much to make supplies wise. The toll they take on one’s heart is a different matter, and Tam Amber’s made far too many over the years. 

Clerk Carmine lifts his head, stopping his eyes at his hunched shoulders. He’s scared if he looks straight at him, right into his own grief, he’ll never want to leave this couch. And he has to—for his Lenore Dove, for what’s left of his family. “About time?” 

“Just about.” 

Tam Amber slips back out to give Clerk Carmine the moment he needs. 

Taking to the corners makes one observant. It’s how Tam Amber always knows what Clerk Carmine needs. After losing Billy Taupe, he wasn’t sure he’d ever know what it was to have an older brother again. He’d been slow to see the steady presence that had been there his whole life. Been there for his first words, first steps, first betrayal by the very person whose role Tam Amber filled. 

First, but not his last. 

The world has taken so much from Clerk Carmine and his people. But the world is not to blame—Coriolanus Snow is, and all men like him. 

Clerk Carmine will never know what happened to their Lucy Gray. Twelve-years-old, what power did he have to do anything more than run through the woods with Maude Ivory, screaming her name for weeks on end? To take his screaming straight on down to the Peacekeeper base, in search of the only person with a sliver of influence that he knew? To carry back the news that the person who saved their Lucy Gray had packed up the same day she disappeared? 

Maybe she’d been left for dead, maybe she escaped, maybe she found people up north, like Billy Taupe believed there to be. Maybe, maybe, maybe. 

Now, at fifty-two, Clerk Carmine is no more powerful, but he does know what’s been done to you. They saw it down at the holding cells.

Somewhere in his bones, he knew the Games were coming to their end. Seven mornings ago, during the recap of the night before, five tributes remained. More or less the typical amount left before the Gamemakers stir the pot for their big finale. Last year’s Games were different, not as much fanfare, just like the tenth Games. The earliest one Clerk Carmine makes sure to remember. 

He and Tam Amber, as became their routine, marched down to the jail with the same set of pleas on Lenore Dove’s behalf. Only one Peacekeeper was there to listen, most of them on duty or off doing heavens know what in the name of the greater good. Clerk Carmine later learned they were gathering the crowd in front of the Justice Building to watch you die. He and Tam Amber would have to make do with the dingy screen hanging in the waiting area. 

It escalated without the Gamemakers’ say-so. One minute you were standing with the Abernathy boy, the next you were lying on the ground with a knife sticking out of you. The sponsor gift that was meant to help you spilled in a threatening pool of steam. 

Haymitch ran off without you. To protect the little one you befriended, supposedly. You begged him to go, but he listened on his own accord. Clerk Carmine still doesn’t know which was worse: listening to your agony as you limped through the woods alone, or the later realization that this would be your death march. 

The Career from One found the little girl before either of you could. Your efforts to save her were mighty; Haymitch’s choice to leave her, and then you, was plain stupid. The little girl used whatever strength she had left to defend herself with that blowgun. She paid the price with her head. Over and over again, the ax came down until it popped right off. By some miracle, Clerk Carmine remained standing through his nausea. 

The Career and Haymitch went at it crazed, with the little girl’s head discarded somewhere behind them. Silka, Wellie. Those were their names. Silka only double-downed in her brutality when you arrived on the scene. Wounded as you were, you didn’t go down without a fight, leading her to that hedge where Haymitch discovered a glitch in the arena’s force field. 

Taken out by her own ax, Silka left the two of you injured to the point of death. Except you fared better than Haymitch. Far better, all things considered. Better enough to sit up on your knees and travel to him. Better than your intestines splattered on the floor. 

So then why were you the one suddenly collapsing, choking on your own blackened blood while the boy begged you not to go? Why are you dead? 

If not for the panic they elicited within him, Clerk Carmine wouldn’t have heard Lenore Dove’s wails from far inside. Unlike the day she was born, when those very cries signified a life her mama no longer had, they did not mend his broken heart. 

He had hoped, naively, that she’d be spared from watching the Games in captivity. But there is no corner on earth, no cell restrictive enough, that could save any person from them. 

The single Peacekeeper withheld Clerk Carmine from getting to her. He must’ve assumed Clerk Carmine intended a jailbreak. All he wanted was to scoop her up in his arms like he did when she was a babe and coo promises to save her from this world. Tam Amber, frozen in time, could not do much else but gasp out your name. 

“We’re here, Lenore Dove!” Clerk Carmine shouted, because that was all the comfort he could give her through the wall of the Peacekeeper and his own tears. “We’re here!” 

The Peacekeeper’s heart thawed enough to let them see and hold her through the bars while she cried out for her dear cousin. Suddenly, Clerk Carmine was twelve and thirty-six and fifty-two all at once, weeping for their lost girls. They were sent off with one comfort: Lenore Dove would be out for the funeral. 

They still don’t know when that is. The bodies have yet to arrive, and there’s no telling when they will. Lucy Gray was back a whole two days after her Games. But then, everything was different. They were surprised this morning with the news of the crowning ceremony. Seems their victor is all patched up to receive his accolades and tell his tale. 

Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber weren’t there for Barb Azure when it happened. She does not hold it against them, though Clerk Carmine does. Still, they have to be there now. He reminds himself of this as he pushes up from the couch.

On the porch, Tam Amber holds out his arm. They walk down the steps together, and Clerk Carmine wonders if the Abernathy kin will be there, too. Willamae, a force of a woman, and Sid, whose sunny smile reminds him so very painfully of Maude Ivory. He wouldn’t put it past Barb Azure to invite them back; he wouldn’t put it past the two of them to extend their own empathy in turn.

Selfishly, Clerk Carmine hopes they turned her down. He doesn’t think he can stand to look at them without keeling over from the guilt of wishing it was you coming home to them. Barb Azure stands it because she’s stronger than him. Tam Amber can too, because he’s incapable of bitterness. And because both of them, now sharing the distinct knowledge of losing a child, could never wish it upon someone else. Three decades now since the smallpox took Tam Amber’s little Henry Russet and his mama. The passage of time will never erase the memory of them dead in his arms.  

Clerk Carmine doesn’t want to wish Haymitch dead. 

He’s always known him and his rebel roots to be trouble, and he’s certainly tried to will him far away from the Covey children. But Lenore Dove isn’t the only one attracted to danger. When Burdock started bringing him around, when Clerk Carmine started noticing the way you looked at him, the way he looked at you, he knew there was no stopping it. As there was no stopping the others. 

Haymitch is just a boy, and deep down, Clerk Carmine knows there’s only so much he can fault him for. One crime he can’t be tried for is disparaging your heart. 

Though Clerk Carmine would’ve rather not seen anything at all, he can be honest in admitting Haymitch’s tenderness towards you. Different from the way Billy Taupe lauded Lucy Gray around like she was a tally to add to his list. From the way Snow looked at her like a prize to be won and claimed. Truer than the love that burned her twice, than that given to Maude Ivory by the unnamed Peacekeeper and that Chance boy. Closer to the affection Sorrel holds for Barb Azure; only, made up of more than their friendship. Something far more fatal, for Sorrel would never let their Barb Azure be anything but safe. 

The boy is not to blame. Even so…

Tam Amber halts, forcing Clerk Carmine to do the same. They’ve only made it two houses over, about a dozen left til they reach Barb Azure. But when a figure fades in with the early specks of night, Clerk Carmine sees why they’ve stopped prematurely. 

Albert is not rash, and perhaps that’s why Clerk Carmine loves him so. He makes Clerk Carmine safe when the way of things says he shouldn’t be. Right now, all he feels as Albert nears is frustration. 

“I’ll meet you at Barb Azure’s,” he says to Tam Amber in a rushed whisper. 

Tam Amber taps his hand and carries on his path. When he crosses Albert, he accepts his condolences with a saddened hum. 

Clerk Carmine doesn’t do the same. “Now ain’t the time, Albie.” 

Albert shakes his head. Is he aware they’re standing in the middle of the road? They’re lucky to be on the far end of the Seam, with no one out on their porch right now. “I should’ve come sooner.” 

“No, you shouldn’t’ve. You shouldn’t be here now.” 

The last they saw of each other was the night Lenore Dove was arrested. They met at their usual spot, where Clerk Carmine confided he wasn’t sure they could meet again in the coming weeks. 

Albert cradled his face, pressed a kiss to his nose the way he always did when he wanted to take his pain. “You got a lot on your plate right now. Don’t you fret over me.” 

“I always do,” Clerk Carmine murmured against his lips. His dearest love, who keeps him warm and whole. How could he not fret over his Albie? 

“I had to see you,” insists Albert. “I had to tell you—”

“I don’t wanna hear it,” snaps Clerk Carmine, feeling the sting behind his eyes. 

“—I’m sorry.” 

Albert carries on, but Clerk Carmine isn’t here anymore. He’s in the doorway to his room instead, looking down at your sweet face as you weakly attempt to hide the guitar behind you. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, scrunching up your nose. 

Clerk Carmine kneels. “Whatever for, little miss?” 

“I shouldn’t touch what isn’t mine.” You cast your eyes to the floor. “They tell us that in school.” 

He peeks past your shoulder to the guitar. It hasn’t felt the touch of music in so very long. Lucy Gray wouldn’t want it that way, holed up in his closet until the day he dies. “It can be yours.” 

You meet his gaze then, your hesitation blooming into something much brighter, like the sunflowers Tam Amber planted in their backyard all those years ago. 

No one is tending to the sunflowers now. No one. And it’s still too light out for Albert to be here, and anyone could see them, and he should be with Barb Azure by now. But Clerk Carmine lets Albert pull him into his arms anyway. 

“I am so sorry, my love,” Albert whispers in his ear, voice cracking in rhythm with his sobs. 

Clerk Carmine does not stay wrapped in his comfort for long, though he desperately wants to. He accepts Albert’s kisses to his nose, the wiping of his tears, and somehow, finds the strength to walk away. 

The interview has already started when he arrives. Willamae and Sid are there, but they keep to the far end of the room. 

Burdock sits between them and Barb Azure, hair unkempt much like Sorrel’s, more ashen than Clerk Carmine remembers him yesterday. Like he’s been ripped in two. Like all that’s left of him is the half that doesn’t work properly. 

My poor little bird, with no reason to sing. 

Barb Azure, to her credit, remains steady as the show goes on. The way she’d get when any one of them was sick and she’d be forced to balance her fear with care. 

They skip over pieces Clerk Carmine swears he saw in real time. Your lullaby on the mountainside and goodbye with the little boy from Three; your fall into the lake during the volcano eruption; the Covey’s funeral song, which you gifted to Maysilee Donner as she left this world. The last one is a particular spite, but there’s little room to ponder it when they near the end. 

Sorrel holds his arms around Barb Azure, the only thing keeping her upright, when they play the recap of your death. Sorrel’s own dam breaks then. So does Burdock’s. He clamps his hands over his mouth and rushes to the nearest basin—the kitchen sink—emptying what Clerk Carmine is sure to be next to nothing in his stomach. 

Tam Amber follows after him, rubs his back, and soothes his gagging best he can. 

In his corner, Sid covers his ears and buries his face into Willamae’s trembling side. Clerk Carmine fights the urge to do the same—to hide like he tried to when Lucy Gray’s name was called all those decades ago—because he has to watch. He has to remember, if no one else can. 

This, however, is not what needs to be remembered. The last moments of the Games, the grand finale, are all wrong. The lead-up is much shorter—the little girl you took under your wing is completely skipped over. How you wind up with that pitcher of hot chocolate is a mystery now, one that doesn’t matter in the heat of the final battle. After you’re stabbed by the District Four girl, like Clerk Carmine saw before, you beg Haymitch to leave you for his own sake. Not Wellie’s. And he listens. 

When the time comes, you are dead before Haymitch reaches you and delivers what is surely meant to be a beautiful goodbye. It’s not. On Caesar Flickerman’s stage, dolled up for the show, the boy looks sick with himself. Good, Clerk Carmine thinks before he can remind himself better. 

They’ve taken your last words, your final chance to hold your head up high, your brave, big heart which no one deserves. Haymitch is framed as the tragic hero, and you, the stepping stone for his victory. 

Clerk Carmine breathes in once. He tries to recall Albert’s arms and kisses, tries to steel himself with the reminder that Lenore Dove is coming home, but his mind is caught in a spiral. There is no stopping this. It’s already started. Exactly like before. 

How many more of their girls will they take? How many more of you will be erased from history? 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

Haymitch doesn’t speak, but he thinks they like it best that way. Adds to his image. Grieving lover, brooding rascal, tragic hero. Whatever it is they want him to be tonight. 

Music blasts from the overhead speakers scattered all around the Capitol zoo. Ironic that they don’t cage him this time. Haymitch should be grateful for that. All he really feels is the ache of your absence and the desperation to keep those he can from the repercussions of his actions. 

Seven nights ago, Panem bore witness to the start of his humiliation. Oh, how the Capitol audience ate it up. They were none the wiser to his attempts at rebellion or any one of his posters in the arena. Whoever was responsible for editing the Games saw to that. They didn’t need to change much to display every painfully true way in which Haymitch failed you. 

He closes his eyes and sees all he couldn’t protect you from displayed on Caesar’s stage: the horrors of the bloodbath, the volcano, the jabberjays. He remembers your numbness when he found you, not knowing what to credit it to at the time. Why hadn’t he been there sooner? 

There was a brief moment before the recap started where Haymitch believed he might get to see exactly how it played out. Did he leave you on the glass or the primrose? Did you drink the hot chocolate or not? Deep down, he knows the answer doesn’t matter, so it shouldn’t change much that he didn’t get one. When all is said and done, there’s no one else to blame but himself. 

Everyone back home will. Does. He isn’t certain yet, but he’s got a good inkling on which way it’ll go. Whatever they were shown during the actual Games is a fleeting imagination compared to the reality of their sell-out victor. Twelve doesn’t want him, and especially not now. The only people who might forgive him, who might be willing to see past his mistakes, are Ma and Sid. 

When Haymitch opens his eyes again, he’s back on that stage.

Helpless while he watched President Snow’s descent from a floating platform, and his cruel, mocking smile. “What a well-earned victory, Mr. Abernathy.”

“You would know,” Haymitch said, freshly clipped nails dug into his skin. “I guess snow does land on top.”

Snow only smiled wider, as vicious as he was when he first dangled your life in front of him. “Enjoy your homecoming.” 

Since then, he’s been carted around the Capitol like a prized dog. From parties to fashion shoots to parades in his honor. Haymitch lets it happen, lets them project whatever it is they expect from him. Pa must be rolling in his grave to see his oldest boy playing into their hands. And Maysilee… 

Oh, Maysilee, I have broken my promise to you, too. 

She was right: you were much better suited for the task. You are the one who should be going back home. There’s no shortage of people who care for you, who’d believe in you. These past nights, back in the apartment when he’s relieved from his duties of kissing ass, Haymitch thinks about every one of them. 

Burdock, Lenore Dove, your parents and uncles. People he’s known you to talk to in passing, trade with at the Hob, offer up what you can to them. Even Sid, who, if he’s still alive to feel it, may very well be overjoyed to see his brother again. He loved you, too. 

Initially consumed by his own selfish ache, Haymitch carves out time to remember that he took you from them. As much as he’s lost you himself. 

A pair of teal-haired Capitol folk pass him and point his way. Haymitch is not caged this time; he is chained to a corner by the snake pen. Keeps most passersby from approaching too close. 

He just has to get through this on his best behavior, even if every fiber of his being is telling him otherwise, because there is no world in which Snow will not punish him for his last attempt to light a fire under him. Because life without you, apparently, is not punishment enough. 

It’d be so much easier if you just let Haymitch follow. 

His view of the teal pair is replaced by the lens of a camera. Plutarch gets a nice shot from afar, and when his camera lowers briefly, Haymitch catches his narrowed eyes. Meant to express…pity? Judgement? Both, more likely than not. 

He could stand Effie’s sympathy, but not Plutarch’s, or any of those who have come up to tell him how beautiful the two of you were. 

Though he’s been recording every sordid, humiliating moment of Haymitch’s time in the Capitol, Plutarch has really only tried to speak to him during the crowning after party. He approached his cage, condolences on the tip of his tongue, and before he could speak them aloud, Haymitch crawled over to the cat-eared lady offering him shrimp. 

Now, Plutarch gives him space. Even that is a taunt. 

Haymitch doesn’t want to accept anything from Plutarch. His pity or his well-meaning distance. What he wants is to smash his camera to pieces and every one of the Capitol’s pillars with it. What he wants is to go home to Ma and Sid, crumble into their arms. What he wants is to feel your warmth pressed up against him one last time. 

His throat tightens, and right at the base of it, a lump settles. His bottom lip quivers, which Plutarch must catch on camera. He drops his lens entirely, gives Haymitch a strange look, and walks off the other way. Strange. He wouldn’t have taken Plutarch as capable of expressing any kind of guilt. 

Dawn eventually breaks over the scene, prompting most to head on home. Slumped against the corner in exhaustion, Haymitch hardly reacts when the Peacekeepers lift him by the underarms. For the first time in two weeks, he feels something close to relief when they take him down to the train station instead of the apartment. 

There, a doctor removes the pump in his chest. The teeth detach, leaving oozy indents in his skin and the aftereffects of whatever drugs they’ve been pumping into him. They wear off quickly, and his scar starts to hurt. Made worse by the deprivation of cushy mattresses or the bunk beds from before. 

The Peacekeepers lug Haymitch straight into the room Plutarch once freed him from. Wrapped in Great-Uncle Silius’s champagne bubble jacket, he finds a new corner to wallow in the pain. 

Show’s over now, but the train hasn’t budged. A couple hours pass, and the only movement is the Peacekeeper who brings Haymitch a roll and a carton of milk. Snow’s still managing his diet then. 

“What are we waiting for?” he asks hoarsely. 

“Your friends,” replies the Peacekeeper, with a nod to the window. He goes without expanding. 

A naive part of Haymitch hopes he means Mags and Wiress, that they’re coming to bid him farewell and give him the reunion they were deprived of before his crowning. But Haymitch saw the state they were in at the time. The state he put them in just by being their ward. 

Haymitch peers out the window of his cell. Sure enough, no Mags or Wiress. Three carts are being rolled down the platforms, each carrying a plain wooden box. Coffins. Your families have been waiting weeks for their beloved children, and all this time, his only comforting belief was that the three of you were already resting peacefully in your family plots. But no, the long shots of Twelve are finishing this journey together. 

His body shakes uncontrollably as he imagines the state of the bodies. Violated by blades and birds and poison. Your body—multilated by his own broken promise. There’s no indication to make him believe it, but he’s confident the last one is yours. Empty, dead, and all my fault. 

Muffled thuds and nearby door hinges signify the coffins are being loaded in the next car over. Haymitch jolts, rushing to the wall separating them. “Wait!” 

There’s a murmur on the other side, and he bangs on the wall to get them to shut up and listen. 

“I want to be with her,” he chokes out. “I want to—” 

But this is part of his punishment, to never be with you again. 

“Take me with her!” Haymitch slams his whole body against the wall, hoping to break it down completely. He’s too weak and too hurt to cause any real damage to anything but himself. Doesn’t stop him from trying, or screaming your name, or bringing his knuckles to the steel in an attempt to get to you. Even after the train rolls onward. 

Even after his knuckles split open and blood spools out.

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

Calla no longer searches for Burdock in his room. Yours is much dearer to her now. She hasn’t left it in the last two weeks. Not to wander as is her routine. Not when he tries to coax her to come out. She refuses each attempt of his, curls into a ball atop your bed, and licks at her paws lazily. 

He’s fairly certain it’s her way of mourning you. 

Even now, as Burdock sinks onto the floor beside your bed, a pair of scissors in hand, she pretends he isn’t there. Fine by him. Her lack of company is in keeping with what he needs right now. 

Every wall in this house is rotten with grief, except for these four. On that, he and Calla can agree. Mama and Papa, on the other hand, aren’t ready to come in here yet. Burdock can’t fault them. To feel your presence, in the freshness of the loss, is as much an agony as it is a comfort. 

It’s a strange thing, to be born into the world with a piece of your soul waiting for you on the outside.  Stranger still to find a way to function without it. In the weeks you were away but alive, Burdock hadn’t lost the tether that kept you connected. Changed and thinned, but still thrumming with life. 

Things will be different, once you’re back, returned to them and the earth. Burdock will know you’re at peace then, amid the birds in the sky. He and Papa will wash each other’s hair over the sink. They will begin the process of remembering your life instead of simply mourning your death. 

But for now…you are away and dead, and the only place Burdock still feels your tether is this room. 

He grips the dull edges of the scissors, examining the tip of the blade. Papa told him not to rush it. Didn’t need to be rushed, with no set funeral date anyways. But Papa took out his braid, cut his strand at the nape of his neck, that very evening. Funny how Papa could nip his piece of hair so soon but can’t come into your room. Funny how the reverse is true of Burdock. 

There was no need to do this when your grandparents died because there were bodies to bury in the Everdeen plot. His papa explained, soon after his mamaw’s death, how that wasn’t always the case. Many patches of their family’s land were empty, save for what they could give their kin. 

There will be a body to bury with you, technically. But every one of them knows you wouldn’t want to be stuck in one place for eternity. Restless bird that you are. A piece of you will be with the Everdeens; your spirit with the rest of your people, free in the woods. 

Find the willow. Talk to the birds. They have not taken you, my stubborn, bright twin. 

Burdock’s breath comes out in shudders. He tries to stop the worst of it by biting down on his cheek, but the resulting throb in his chest refuses his attempts. A whisker brushes his neck. Seems Calla has finally noticed his presence. Though she’s done it plenty of times to him, he’s sorry for disturbing her. 

“Burdock?” 

He looks over at his mama, at her blurred, sorrowful figure, holds up the scissors, and blubbers, “I’m ready.” 

She doesn’t hesitate to cross the doorway, dropping onto her knees beside Burdock. Mama pulls him close and rubs circles on his back to get him to stop shaking. He focuses on the steadiness and rhythm of her hands, ties them back to the old lullaby she’d sing the two of you to sleep. 

She’s been falling back on it as of the last few days. Hums it under her breath whenever she’s in the kitchen, or waiting on the porch for Papa to arrive from the mines. Burdock waits with her, the way he would when you got it in your head to do the same all those years ago. You were terrified that one day the mines would get him, and nothing could convince you otherwise until you saw him making his way home for yourself. 

Burdock doesn’t think Mama’s scared in the same way. It’s more about reminding all three of them that there are still people in this home. Wasn’t easy coming back to it on the day they watched you…

The Gamemakers must’ve planned for it to be the last day of the Games, because Papa received word he wasn’t to work, and most of the Seam was given the directive to head on to the Justice Building. Peacekeepers rolled down the streets in their tanks after the morning recap, calling through the speakerphones for all available and able-bodied citizens to report. 

They’ve never done that before; usually, they watch the end from wherever they are, and that’s that. But it’s a Quarter Quell, and the Gamemakers are always looking to build on their spectacle, and it’s not like everything else about these Games hasn’t been unusual. It wasn’t until they saw the cameras perched around that Burdock understood why they wanted a reaping-sized audience. 

District Twelve has never had a tribute make it to the last day, let alone two of them. Well…not in the last forty years. Burdock wondered, at the time, what she’d make of the erasure. 

A pair of Peacekeepers identified him, Mama, and Papa as the Everdeen clan. Promptly, they brought them to the front row, right next to Willamae and Sid. Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber were down seeing about Lenore Dove’s release, and good thing. If it weren’t for the cameras, Burdock might’ve found it a comfort to be surrounded by his people. 

There was no comfort in watching you die like that. 

Every gasp and murmured curse in the audience rang in his ears. The don’t leave her’s shouted at Haymitch’s departure from Wellie, the groans rippled in the air after you took Maritte’s knife to the abdomen. Worst of all—more than Willamae’s shriek for Haymitch when the ax sliced him, more than your dying wheezes, more than Haymitch’s scream for you—was Mama’s reaction. 

She was a pillar through all of it, as she’d been at the reaping. Those cameras on the stage were looking for a reaction she, Papa, and Burdock would not give. When it came to pass, when the screens went dark immediately after the victor’s announcement, Burdock almost slipped. He pinched the skin around his nails to keep from throwing up, crying, both.  

Willamae, who kept a sobbing Sid held within her arms, turned to them after the news set. Her tears fell freely, with joy and remorse in equal measure. “Barb Azure, I…”

Mama shushed her, mustered a weary smile, and squeezed the hand not stroking Sid’s hair. “Your boy’s coming home.” 

Once home, Mama’s collapse was immediate. With a thud to the floor, she let out a sharp, agonizing cry, as if she were being swallowed by the earth. Burdock thought it a miracle she held it in for so long. He and Papa followed her down. 

She hasn’t wailed like that since, but she hasn’t hid her sadness either. It seeps through in the way she holds Burdock a little tighter now, cooing gentle assurances. “Let it out, baby.”

The tremors stop long enough for him to draw a full breath. On the next inhale, Mama loosens her grip, and Burdock sections a bit of hair at the nape of his neck. 

“You can grow long hair if you really want to,” you tell him, brows pinched up. 

Burdock points the brush at you. “Mine doesn’t grow as quick as yours.” 

He keeps the strands pinched between his fingers when the scissors cut through. 

“It could.” You shrug. 

“Just turn around, will you?” 

Mama hands him the string he let fall from his lap. He’s not shaking at all as he ties it around the piece of hair.

You roll your eyes and let him get to work. When the braid’s done, you smile at him. “I still think you can.” 

It rests on the floor between them. She wipes his face, waiting until he calms completely to say, “Asterid’s here to see you.” 

“She is?” Burdock’s seen Asterid every day for the last two weeks, but his surprise comes from the hour in which she’s chosen to visit him now. The miners, his papa included, have long since begun their day, but it’s much too dark out for her to be here. 

“I can ask her to come back later.” Mama rubs his shoulder. 

She’s been outside for who knows how long, and Burdock isn’t about to let her go off without whatever it is she came here for. Besides, he needs to see her. He pockets the piece of hair and hands the scissors to his mama. “No, that’s okay. I won’t be long.” 

She nods, watching him stand. When he doesn’t feel her behind him at the doorway, Burdock looks over at her again. She’s turned away now, her head resting on your bed as she reaches a hand towards Calla. Pesky little cat nuzzles into it. 

Burdock breathes out and resumes his trek. 

Really, it’s a good thing Asterid’s here so early. She’ll give him the strength he needs to finally pay a visit to Willamae and Sid. He hasn’t seen them since they watched Haymitch’s crowning together. A whole week now, which, for Burdock, has consisted of taking to the woods, staying in your room, or seeking out Asterid. 

He hasn’t meant to avoid them, just as he’s sure they haven’t meant to do the same. On the night of the crowning ceremony, he overheard Willamae tell his mama she’d be there for them in whatever way she could, as his mama has been there for them. She wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true, but he reckons Willamae believes what they need most right now is the space. 

Sid’s reaction after the ceremony concluded must’ve been what planted that thought. 

Sweet Sid was a wreck when they watched it live in the square. Covering his ears while Silka sliced off Wellie’s head, then his eyes as you took the brunt of her hysteria, turning green when Haymitch’s guts spilled out. Rewatching it—changed and warped as the Capitol made it out to be—wasn’t any better. 

Sid ran out the second the recap ended, and before Willamae could lift off, Burdock did. He was already standing, no longer hurling into the sink. Sid stopped right down the steps, planting his feet into the dirt pathway like that might help keep him steady. Burdock grabbed onto his arms, in case it didn’t. 

“I didn’t want her to die,” Sid blurted and sniffled. “I didn’t. But I—I really want to see Haymitch.”

His confession was laced with a guilt that shouldn’t belong to someone so soft-hearted and young. 

Burdock swallowed down what remained of his nausea and embraced him. “I’m glad he’s coming back,” he whispered into Sid’s hair, meaning each word. He thought for sure neither one of you would survive. Not after the realization of how deep your feelings ran for each other. And especially not after you found little Wellie and all but swore to get her to the end. 

He was relieved one of you made it out. He is. But that relief can’t exist without the voice in his head wishing it were you. Burdock knows if the roles were reversed, he’d feel as guilty as Sid. He already does. 

The porch creeks under his boots. Asterid turns to him, staring into his eyes long enough for him to catch on to her exhaustion. In the sky, specks of stars are gearing up to turn into sunlight soon enough. 

“I’m sorry I made you wait.” 

“I don’t mind waiting.” Asterid holds up a glass jar of what Burdock immediately recognizes as sleep syrup. “I imagine you haven’t been sleeping well.” 

Burdock accepts the jar, motioning for Asterid to sit beside him on the porch steps. “Have you? Been sleeping?” 

She hesitates as she settles down and smooths out the sides of her skirt. “Mr. and Mrs. Donner gave me Maysilee’s canary. She sings quite early in the mornings. Earlier than I need to get up to open the shop.” 

For all their natural animosity, it seems there’s little distinction between cats and canaries when it comes to grief. 

“She probably misses her. Needs time to adjust to her new environment.” Needing to soothe the pain he knows Asterid keeps hidden, wanting to believe time really can bring healing, Burdock adds, “She will eventually.” 

“I thought I might just set her free.” Her chin wobbles. Easy to miss for anyone not paying attention, but Asterid always holds his. “But I figure, if she’s so used to living in a cage, will she even know how to survive outside it?” 

“Birds are stronger than people give ’em credit for.” 

She stews in his words while he stares at the side of her face, taking notice of every detail of her from this angle. Fine as she seems now, Burdock remembers the way she shut down the day Maysilee died. A reaction as volatile as any other. 

Horrific and merciless in nature, Maysilee’s death was no easier to watch than yours. Those birds came out of nowhere, and they only had eyes for Maysilee. You and Haymitch fought them off, but by the time her throat was ripped wide open, the best either of you could do was stay by her side and hold onto her.

Burdock was far from friends with Maysilee, but she mattered in her own right, and she was dear to Asterid. Dear to her own twin, who is no doubt carrying an empty weight similar to the one in Burdock’s chest.

Hearing you sing your people’s funeral song to her, there was no doubt in his mind that Maysilee meant a whole lot to you, too. Haymitch, Maysilee—you sure fooled the lot of them with your declarations of hate. When Burdock thinks back on it now, on every interaction you and Haymitch have ever had, he sees it clearer. The love. Makes it even harder to think of the state Haymitch will return in. Makes his own lungs ache. 

They erased the song you gifted Maysilee during the recap, among other things. Shortened moments, scrapped details, warped happenings. It was almost a completely different Quell than the one they watched live. Shouldn’t be so surprising, given how the reaping turned out. Given that watching it live still left things up to the imagination. Like why your blood was black in the end, if you never touched the arena’s poison. 

Burdock rationalized it with the assumption that Maritte’s knife was dipped in lake water or sap, like Maysilee’s blowdarts. It was bad enough that they changed anything at all during the recap. He didn’t have the mind to unravel their web then. If he really thinks about it now, he’ll drive himself crazy trying to make sense of it all. 

His efforts are better spent making sure you’re remembered for who you are, not how you died. Taking care of those who remind him he is still needed in this world, and life will be good again one day. You’d damn him if he didn’t.

“Asterid?” Burdock scoots over until their shoulders are touching. 

“Yes?” 

He slips his hand into hers, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles as her eyes begin to well. “Thank you for the sleep syrup.” 

She squeezes his hand and exhales slowly. 

He wants to say so much more about how much he misses you, and how her grief isn’t secondary to his, and how he wants them to heal together, in whatever way that might look like. But the ash raining down from the sky, thicker than the kind that normally exists in Twelve, stops him short. 

“Help!”

Burdock shoots up to his feet. Asterid isn’t far behind. 

“Help! Help!”

The voice is coming from at least a half dozen houses over, muffled by the blanket of ash and the sinking realization of what’s happening. 

Burdock turns to Asterid. “Stay here.”

She furrows her brows. “If someone needs help—”

“It’s a fire, Asterid.” He hands her back the jar. “Please stay here until we put it out.” 

Reluctant, she nods once. Burdock takes off. Even if he didn’t recognize the house as the very one he grew up visiting, the shrieks coming from inside confirm it for him. 

Their words are distorted, but Willamae and Sid are not quiet as they burn. 

Fire catches quick around these parts, and so, the house is already engulfed when Burdock catches up to the crowd. Cayson McCoy, who’s to credit for the hollers for help, is wide-eyed and frazzled as he calls out, “Their cistern’s empty. What do we do?”

“Use the pump from the next house over,” demands Burdock, rushing to fill a bucket. Blair runs up behind him and fills his own. Every neighbor in direct proximity rushes to their own houses and begins the labor of putting out the flames. He yells out, “If we can clear out a path, one of us can run inside to get ’em. Now c’mon!” 

They target the window on the side of the house which Burdock knows to be the main bedroom. Without any direct instructions, people fall into distinct roles: a group of them fill the buckets, the fastest runners transport them to Burdock, Blair, and the older neighbors, who fail to make a dent in the fire. 

He can’t tell how long they’re at it, but they don’t give up. Not one of them throws in the towel, even if Willamae and Sid are no longer yelling. 

“Ma!” 

Oh, please, no. Burdock and Blair run towards Haymitch’s voice. They catch him right as he attempts to cross into the fire-drenched doorway. He puts up a fight, but the two of them manage to drag him onto the ground. 

“Let me up! Let me loose, you—”

Burdock pushes him down forcefully, sitting on top of him and clamping a hand over his mouth to get him to listen. He’s vaguely aware of the dried blood on Haymitch’s fists. What were they doing to him? “It’s too late, Haymitch. We tried. It’s too late.”

In response, he sinks his teeth into his palm. With a hiss, Burdock retracts his hand and puts more weight on his chest. Haymitch only wails louder, “Ma! Sid! Maaaaa!” 

Blair tightens his grip on his right arm. Tears streak down his soot-stained face. “We’re so sorry, Haymitch. We tried. You know we did. We just couldn’t save them.”

Haymitch refuses to hear it—or maybe he can’t. Burdock’s ears are still ringing, too. “No! Let me go!” He thrashes under them, screaming and pleading just like he did in that arena for you. Burdock doesn’t let up, though his own body is trembling again. “Let me go with them! Please!” 

The fire is finally dying, a slow and stubborn process. As it dwindles, Burdock knows no one could have survived that. He should’ve come sooner. 

Today’s sunrise is a harrowing one, putting the last fourteen to shame. The ash tinges the yellow of the sky with two more deaths on top of the three they’ve already been mourning. Haymitch refuses to let up, hysterical to the point where there’s a good chance he’ll hurt himself. 

Burdock sees Asterid rushing over, and he forces himself to breathe. “Can you help him?”

She looks between the fire and Haymitch, her face bunched up. Kneeling beside his head, she unscrews the bottle of sleep syrup. “Drink this, Haymitch. Drink until I say when.”

He listens and parts his lips when she brings the bottle to them. She pours the syrup down his throat. “One, two, three, four, five—okay, when.” She pulls back the bottle and caresses his hair. “That’s right. That’s good. Try to rest now.”

Haymitch blinks languidly. “What…?”

“Just some sleep syrup.” 

“Ma… Sid…” His hazy eyes find Burdock again, and he whimpers your name. 

Such a small, pitiful sound, and yet, it breaks Burdock clean in half. He stumbles back. 

Asterid glances at him, pained, then continues to reassure Haymitch. “I know. I know. We’ll do what can be done. You go to sleep now. Sleep.” 

As Haymitch fades into unconsciousness, Burdock fleetingly thinks to take him back to his home. Mama wouldn’t deny him that, and neither would Papa. But Burdock… He has so many questions he wants to ask about things he saw and things he didn’t. Questions about your last moments and why you aren’t here. Questions that are his burden to bear, not Haymitch’s. When he wakes, he’ll have to reckon with what’s happened this morning, and with what happened while he was away. 

In the freshness of his own loss—one they share in different ways—Burdock doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stick to that understanding. He doesn’t know how not to ask. 

So, when Blair poses the problem of where Haymitch should go, he takes him to the McCoy’s. 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

The wide eyes that greet him are kinder than any of the creatures who haunted him in the Capitol lab. Much sadder, too. “Hi, sweetheart.” 

“Hi, Hay.” Louella brushes a curl out of her face. Past her shoulder, there are three other beds in the room. She moves from the floor to the edge of his mattress. “I’m real sorry about your ma, and Sid, and…” 

His chest only responds with a slight pang. He’s almost entirely numb again, and he guesses the sleep syrup is to thank for that. “Do you know what happened?” To his ma and Sid. Everyone already knows what he did to you. 

“Cayson saw the first kindlings. Shouted us all awake. We all ran to help any way we could. Well, they didn’t let me close enough to do much, but I tried.” She plays with the end of one of her braids. 

“I’m sure you did, sweetheart,” he says with as much sincerity as his heavy heart allows. She did try. More than anything he ever did for them. 

Mrs. McCoy walks in with a steaming mug of tea cupped in both hands. “Good, you’re up.” She shoos Louella off the bed. “Time to get ready, honey. Go put on your dress.” Haymitch accepts the mug, noticing the bandages around his knuckles. She sighs. “Sorrel brought a suit for you to wear. I reckon you want out of that.”

He glances down at Great-Uncle Silius’s champagne jacket. “Why do I need a…” The dread is instant. He thought he slept through the funerals. 

Mrs. McCoy breathes in. “We really did try, Haymitch. But the pump was slow, and your cistern was dry. Nothing else we could do once the house was aflame.” 

“My fault,” he mumbles. He didn’t fill up the cistern, he didn’t listen to Snow, he didn’t save any one of you. 

“You’ll be thinking everything’s your fault for a long while. But that’s gotta wait. We bury them today. You know what your ma would want. You got others who need you today, too.” 

Too numb to do anything else but listen, Haymitch gets out of bed. He dresses in your pa’s loaned suit, a blue as dark as the night sky, not the shade of your bird’s wings. The cuffs are lined with purple detailings. Each piece of cloth is a whip to his back. 

Ima, their eldest daughter, comes in with the champagne ensemble clean and folded. Her eyes are filled with the same sympathy as Louella’s, as Effie’s, as all those back in the Capitol who’d come up to mention you. Punishing in opposite ways. “We’ll leave this here for now.” 

Haymitch gives an absentminded nod. With his own clothes burned to ash, he’ll have to reuse that suit for the coming weeks. He tucks his flintstriker under his shirt. 

Outside, a single pine coffin awaits them. Mr. McCoy clamps a hand over his shoulder. “They had hold of each other. Thought we’d let them stay that way.”

Ma and Sid clinging to each other for eternity. It’s all the comfort he’ll ever get. 

Burdock comes by with your parents. In the light of day, his urgency faded to nothing, Haymitch sees him clearly. His hair looks unwashed, and the bags under his eyes give away the sorrow his stoicism attempts to hide. Your ma and pa share the same weariness. Each of them are dressed in dark colors, but not complete black. 

Sorrel glances over at Haymitch, who immediately ducks his head. Barb Azure gives a gentle call of his name, and he pretends not to hear it. 

He doesn’t deserve to see the faces who gave you yours. 

Burdock and Sorrel help carry the coffin, alongside Blair and Mr. McCoy. Yours must be at the graveyard already. Haymitch’s shame grows tenfold. He took them from you, and still, they are here for him. 

He limps behind them as they proceed. Mourners from every corner of the Seam join them. By the time they reach the graveyard, there are a couple hundred of them waiting. Most, if not all of them, should be at work. They’ll call in sick, come up with some excuse. But they all need to grieve together now. 

Haymitch scans the crowd, avoiding the eyes flickering over to him, which are no doubt casting their judgement for how he did you wrong. He focuses on the four graves already dug, on the other three coffins spread throughout the hill. One for Maysilee, one for Wyatt, one for you. Yours is next to Wyatt, though, which doesn’t make sense. Neither does the fact that Burdock and Barb Azure are still by his side while Sorrel takes a shovel to the Everdeen plot. And why is the rest of your kin missing? They should be here for you now.

As Burdock steps back from Ma and Sid’s shared coffin, Haymitch finally gathers the will to speak to him. “Where’s Lenore Dove?” 

“In jail.” 

Seems he is capable of something other than shame right now: panic. “What?”

Burdock tugs him closer by the elbow and whispers, “She’ll be there for the burial. My uncles are getting her home now.” 

“I don’t—” Haymitch meets his eyes, a different shade than yours, and yet all he’s met with is your reflection. 

He doesn’t explain further. Instead, he points to the pine coffin beside Wyatt’s and asks, “Who’s the other one for?” 

A woman behind them answers, “Jethro Callow. Hung himself yesterday when his boy returned. Couldn’t bear the shame.” 

No money to be made off Wyatt’s death then. Good. 

The mayor arrives to speak over the departed. Haymitch can hardly understand him. He listens to the birdsong instead, searches for your melody among them, tries to stand with dignity as Ma would want. 

For a horrible moment, he sees Maysilee across the graveyard, dressed in her District 12 black, and calls out to her. She bursts into tears and buries her face into a handkerchief. Merrilee. Mr. Donner sobs beside her. 

Haymitch recoils. More eyes fall on him again, taking in their deranged, selfish victor. Blair helps him back into his place. He keeps watch on those around the Donners. The mayor’s son, Asterid, Otho. Oliver Schmidt, downtrodden and crying like the rest of them. 

Would he have let this happen to you? Probably not. Oliver Schmidt, with all his niceties, would’ve given you a better shot at life. 

Coffins are lowered into the ground. Dirt falls atop them with rhythmic thuds. Burdock and Barb Azure join Sorrel by the small hole he dug, kneeling together. Sorrel retrieves something from his pocket that Haymitch can’t make out from here. He lays it into the dirt, and all three of them patch up the hole with their hands. 

A kind soul lays wildflowers on each mound. Sorrel follows with willow tree branches. The sight of them, the wailing, the lingering scent of ash is all so wretched, Haymitch wants to run and hide away. 

But then Burdock begins to sing, and the nearby mockingjays fall silent. What choice does Haymitch have but to do the same? 

He floats through the first verses in that clear, sweet voice of his. Despite the pieces his heart must be in now, he doesn’t waver. He is as steadfast and open as when you sang for Mamaw. For Maysilee. His strength latches onto the mourners, who’ve all quieted by the time he reaches the end. 

When I’m pure like a dove, 

When I’ve learned how to love,

Right here in 

The old therebefore,

When nothing 

Is left anymore.  

Unlike the Covey girl, Burdock’s melody doesn’t haunt Haymitch. As the mockingjays pick up the tune, he only thinks of the hereafter in his song. Your other world, where you’re surely free now. Where Ma and Sid are, too. 

Person after person begins their goodbyes to the dead. Haymitch presses his three middle fingers to his lips and raises his hand high, like everyone else. He glimpses at your family, now enveloped by stray mourners who’ve wandered, not to offer their condolences, but to cherish who you were. 

Once it’s over, his numbness returns. The McCoys usher people back to their place. Blindly, Haymitch starts after them. Burdock stops him, pulls him away from the crowd and towards his parents. It’s unbearable to be near them. He doesn’t want, nor need, the reminder that he has no parents anymore. He doesn’t need to know the pain he’s caused yours in order to feel it. 

He bites down on his tongue when Barb Azure pulls him into an embrace. She smells of blackberries and the dirt where some piece of you was just buried. Haymitch will not, cannot, cry. He has no right to force her into a position of comforting him. 

She pulls back and holds his face in her hands, giving him no choice but to look at her. He sees you in her eyebrows, and nose, and the way she holds herself a little taller as she says, “Come along now.” 

Haymitch can’t deny her, or any of your family, a thing. So, he forces his legs not to crumble as they start the trek out of the graveyard. He expects to see your house on the horizon, but they head the opposite way. Right towards the Covey home. 

His feet stammer, and Sorrel lifts him up before he can trip over a rock. To the side of their garden, right next to the porch, is your coffin. “I-I can’t.” 

“I know, son,” Sorrel says, choked. 

It’s too late to run when Lenore Dove comes out the door in a red dress, much darker than the one she wore to the reaping. She spots him and somehow manages to smile through her tears. Scurrying down the steps, she hugs Burdock, who immediately drops his head onto her shoulder. She doesn’t give Haymitch a chance to refuse as she reaches for his wrist and ropes him in too. 

For what seems like hours, they stand there, wrapped in their love for you. 

Haymitch lifts his gaze and sees your uncles up on the porch. Tam Amber is carrying something wrapped in a blanket. It’s more fascinating to him than Haymitch; he’s careful not to look at him. Clerk Carmine, however, can only seem to stare at the boy he always knew to be trouble. Turns out he was right. 

Burdock peels off first, and Haymitch finds himself face-to-face with your coffin again. Your parents and uncles are whispering beside it. “We’ll meet you by the fence.”

Lenore Dove nods, leading Haymitch through the meadow. The geese are free roaming, but not one of them stops to honk at him. Even they find him unworthy of anything more than indifference. Or maybe they’re too stricken by their own grief. 

Once they reach the fence, he sinks down to the grass. She kneels in front of him. Part of him wants to ask why she was in jail and if she’s okay. But it’s clear she’s not. There’s no turning off the faucet of her sadness. The only thing he can do to help is to tell her what he was too much of a coward to say to Burdock directly. “I couldn’t save her. I tried, and I couldn’t, and I’m—” His voice catches, and Lenore Dove grabs his hands. 

“Oh, Haymitch.” She shakes her head. “I don’t blame you. None of us do, and she’d be furious if you believed otherwise.” 

How does he begin to explain to her that Clerk Carmine does blame him, and so does everyone else in Twelve, and it’s only a matter of time before the odd ones out fall in line? He cannot say anything to hurt her further. So, he only murmurs, “She’s already angry with me.” 

“For what? Pulling her name from that bowl? Creating the Hunger Games to begin with? Because if that’s the case, then we’re all to blame.” She stifles a sob and wipes her face. “You didn’t make things the way they are, Haymitch, but every one of us is responsible for finding a way to change them. Now more than ever, don’t you see that?” 

He does. Of course he does. He fought to make things better. All it got him was a pool of blood on his hands that started with Ampert and ended with his own family. “She’s dead, Lenore Dove. She’s dead, and I can’t change that. I can’t change anything, because it is my fault. Every one of them—I killed them.” 

“No,” is all she says as the others near. She stands, sniffling. “You didn’t.”

Yes. I did. 

Lenore Dove and Barb Azure pry the opening in the fence for them to slip your coffin through. They cling to each other as the others carry it. Haymitch trails behind, as useless as he was earlier with his own ma and Sid. Why is he even here? 

Clerk Carmine doesn’t want him around, that’s always been clear. Tam Amber hasn’t even acknowledged him. Your parents have brought him because they’re good people. Burdock’s allowed it because he’s still committed to the friendship Haymitch broke. Aside from Lenore Dove, the only person who may have genuinely wanted him here is you. But you don’t.  

“Don’t follow.” 

They’re your kin. Haymitch is nothing but the reason you’re dead.  

“Don’t follow.”

He wants to. He wants to be free in your heaven. He wants to be with you and his whole family. He wants to beg your forgiveness, and that of everyone else who’s surely angry with him too. Instead, he’s here. Wading through the woods with those who loved and knew you best. 

“Don’t follow.”

The illicitness creeps up on Haymitch. He’s fourteen and carrying you to them again, listening to the Covey sing, intruding on something he hasn’t earned the right to witness. Up front, the blanket slips off the item in Tam Amber’s right arm, revealing the edges of a gravestone. 

“No,” Haymitch mutters, stumbling. 

Lenore Dove turns around. Everyone stops. “Haymitch, what is it?” 

“I can’t,” he repeats. “I can’t be here. Can’t follow.” 

“You can be here,” she insists, reaching for his hand again. “We want you here.” 

He shakes his head, trying to ward off the chill in his spine. Everything’s already blurred around the edges. “Can’t,” he mumbles one last time. He lets go of Lenore Dove’s hand and makes a break in the opposite direction. 

“Haymitch, wait!” Burdock calls out for him. 

He hears Clerk Carmine chide Lenore Dove as she joins Burdock’s attempts to stop him. Haymitch doesn’t wait to see if they’re running after him, picking up his pace to get far, far away. He doesn’t retrace his steps back to Twelve. He’s better off finding his own hole of earth to crawl into and die. 

The trees fade around him, and his dizziness is as much to blame as the haze of his eyes. Effectively lost, Haymitch crumbles to his knees and gags. Nothing comes out. His stomach contracts, thrumming with a hunger he didn’t think he was capable of anymore. 

He dry heaves once. Then again. And again and again. The sobs are instantaneous. He digs his nails into the dirt and rocks, slamming his head downward. He’ll wither away out here, starve to death, and that’ll be just fine. Maybe a coyote will find him and speed up the process. Or a wolf. Or a snake. There are any number of things that can put him out of his misery. 

I can’t be here.  

“What’s the matter, peach?” 

His head snaps up, searching high and low until he finds the maple tree. Finds you. Perched on a branch, in your colorless arena outfit, hair wild and free in the wind. Glass sticks out of your abdomen. The next sob lodges itself in his throat. 

You tilt your head, pouting. “Thought you wanted to be with me.”

Haymitch keels over and spills out his empty stomach. 

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A/N: and y’all thought we wouldn’t see sunshine again?

You couldn’t have gone far. You were just here. In his arms, breath tickling his neck, heartbeats in sync. Now, his gives an uneven patter. It stalls, then quickens, then stops altogether while he rushes to begin his descent. 

The blanket slips off his body, off the hammock, and lands on its target with a hmph. An exceptionally loud target for a stagnant one. 

“Watch it.”

Haymitch peers down. Past the spindly branches and crops of leaves obscuring you from direct view, your head pops out from the blanket. You stare up at him, your eyes, heavy as they are with grief and exhaustion, rivaling the starlight above. He blows out a puff of air and scampers down the trunk. 

You meet Haymitch where he lands, oddly calm despite nearly sending him to an early grave. Down here, out of the branches and on even footing, Haymitch sees clearly how little hours have passed since you climbed up together. He tightens the blanket around your shoulders when you shiver, and searches for meaning across the slightest spasm of your expression. Your cheeks are silver-streaked and the tip of your nose is pale, but you haven’t been crying again. His own face feels sticky with dried tears. 

“I couldn’t sleep,” you say before he can ask properly, wringing your fingers so roughly he has to take them within his own to get you to stop. You let him and sigh. “Thought I’d get a head start on finding Wellie.” 

Haymitch frowns. “You were going off without telling me?” 

You knit your brows together, hands freezing up. “I wouldn’t do that.” 

His heart gives a guilty pang. No, you wouldn’t. He would. He runs his hands down your arms in apology. Your goosebumps, as stubborn as the rest of you, don’t yield to his touch. “I know. I shouldn’t’ve—”

“It’s okay,” you brush him off, pointing to a patch of dirt by the tree trunk opposite you. “I was making a map.” 

The blanket droops down your shoulders. Haymitch fixes it again. “What for?” 

“To rule out everywhere we’ve been so far.” You squat in front of your sketch. 

He crouches beside you, squinting down at the dirt. “You think the arena’s a diamond?” 

“Just a guess.” You shrug and pick up a stick. “If the north and south come to a point, I figured so would the east and west.” You tap the stick against the tipped edges of the diamond map. “Wellie wouldn’t back herself into a corner. Maysilee was right about that.”  

He doesn’t miss the way your voice catches saying her name. Doesn’t miss the pit in his stomach when he looks over your head and expects Maysilee on the other side. Even more chilling than the gap she’s left is how deeply he misses her. Never before would Haymitch have guessed Maysilee Donner, of all people, to wind up someone he loved this much. 

You sniffle but don’t linger on your sadness. You draw an oval above the sketched treeline, just below a large dot, which he assumes to be the cornucopia. It’s hard to tell with the limited light. “That’s the meadow.” Another oval encompasses the space below the treeline, closer north. “That’s around where we were yesterday. If Wellie made it to the woods before the rain and mudslide, this is where she’d be.” 

“We would’ve found her then if she were there,” Haymitch reasons, shuffling when his thighs start to burn. 

You shake your head. “Not if she kept west or east. We only walked straight down the middle. And she’s just as likely to have found a hiding spot high up as she is to have found one in the meadow.” 

He considers your logic and consults the map one more time. “You really think that’s where she is?” 

“We’ll have to cross it anyway to get to the meadow,” you say, dragging the stick left to right. “Might as well take a look around. Only, I can’t decide if she’d be east or west.” 

“East.” When you look over at him, he expands, “She’d want to head towards the sun.” 

“East it is then.” 

Haymitch stands and, with laced fingers, pulls you up with him. His hands travel back up your arms, all the way to your cheekbones, where he rubs away the tear stains. If the dried drool on his shirt collar is any evidence, you at least slept some. But clearly, you’ve been on edge for longer than you’ve been down here. “You could’ve woken me sooner.” 

“It was only a few minutes,” you say dismissively. “You looked comfortable.” 

He traces your jawline. “Sunshine, that’s ’cause you were there.” 

Your skin finally warms a little. “Besides, you were fast asleep. Chatting up a storm this time.” 

Ah, right. You ungraciously informed him of his murmuring habits back in the apartment. Feels like years ago now. Haymitch is lucky not to be a snorer like Wyatt, but he drew the short end in other ways. “What was I saying?” 

You shrug, biting down on your lip. “I couldn’t make it out.” 

By the way you duck your head, a strange combination of flustered and smug, he doubts that’s true. 

“C’mon.” You step out of his grasp. “We need to get a move on.” 

You’re a quick climber—and one dead set on your current mission—so you reach your end of the hammock before Haymitch slinks up the parallel tree. Once untied, you meet each other back on the ground. You take to folding it, along with the blanket, despite the chill still visibly coursing through your body. He condenses the materials from each pack into one, and rifles through Maysilee’s in search for anything that might prove helpful for the journey. 

A jingle sounds from the bottom of the bag, under a tarp and the now empty bottle of ointment. Haymitch pulls out the potato battery kit. Huh. He figured she already made use of it at some point.  

You, on the other hand, don’t seem surprised to see it. Maysilee must’ve clued you in on her possession of the kit. “Might be good to have some light to guide us.” 

“It might. But it’ll cost a potato,” he says, looking up at you with an arched brow. 

“Well,” you suck your teeth, “I’m willing to pay the price if you are, peach.” 

His lips twitch into a near smile. 

You kneel in front of him, close enough to nearly bump your foreheads together when he reaches for the sliced potato in your hand. He lays out the pieces of the kit on the floor. Copper coins, metal wires, a single lightbulb. He has to squint real hard to get a good look at the inventory. Funny thing, needing light to make it. 

“You remember how to assemble it?” you ask patiently, forming the cuts where Beetee taught you. 

Haymitch nods. “More or less.” 

He hands you the supplies while you work nimbly to forge the battery. When he loses a coin among the dirt and sticks, he supplements it with Maysilee’s copper flower. Just as easy to use your bluebird, but it’s already melded itself into his skin. He’d rather not sully your gift in front of you, either. Even if you’d be willing to sacrifice it, he’s not. And this way, it feels like Maysilee’s still part of the fight. 

Together, you manage to replicate Beetee’s instructions in the darkness. Haymitch attaches the final wire to a tiny lightbulb, and a dim glow flickers across your faces. Hardly anything, but it’s enough to get him to hope. 

You readjust the woven cord, now detached from Maysilee’s medallion, back around his neck. Your hands linger there, and Haymitch uses the proximity and the light to take stock of your well-being. You wince slightly when he cups the back of your head. He presses his forehead to yours and murmurs, “Still hurting?” 

You nod, swallowing down the threat of fresh tears. Your head, your knee, your heart—they’re bruised and battered in more ways than one. You don’t have time to wallow in your grief, to slip through the cracks Maysilee left behind. Not yet. But you allow yourself to lean into Haymitch’s comfort for just a second. Or two. Or three. Definitely more than that. 

Slowly, the pressure pushing against your skull whittles down to a mere throb. You stay put a second longer. One hand travels from the back of his neck to your bluebird, which reflects the faint flicker of the lightbulb. You rub the charm between your thumb and forefinger, feeling the difference in its weight and its eyes. Its time in the arena has taken a toll—you don’t know to credit the change to anything else. 

“Take it back, if you want to,” says Haymitch. 

“I don’t. It suits you.” Plutarch’s request for the charm, Ampert’s reasoning behind passing it along, are long forgotten. You want him to keep it. He could take every last bit of you for all you care. Do whatever he wants, and you wouldn’t bat an eye. He’s already made himself the most precious piece of you. “And I still owe you your birthday present anyway.” 

“I don’t know,” he whispers, leaning back a bit. “I think you’ve given me plenty.” 

You haven’t. No amount of presents, no amount of perfect words sitting right on the tip of your tongue, will ever be enough to express everything he is to you. Or how deeply you wish you were in one of those better worlds with him right now. But you can try. You give the bluebird a light tug, beckoning Haymitch to you. 

A shiver sparks down your spine when your lips collide, but you aren’t very cold anymore. You can’t be, with Haymitch heating you up from the inside out. Your fingers find stability in his hair. Familiar curls tangled between calloused skin. His hands glide up your back, pulling you so close that you’re surprised you haven’t heard the crack of a broken lightbulb yet. You doubt you’d hear it anyway over the thumping of his heartbeat against yours. 

There is no space between you, no room to question, even for a second, what a world without him might feel like. When his tongue swipes your bottom lip, your body tingles from the top of your head to the tip of your toes. All your senses narrow down to this. Haymitch, and his devotion, and everything he elicits from you in turn. Was there ever a time where you felt anything but love for Haymitch Abernathy? You’re hard pressed to remember.  

You part briefly before he chases after you again. Your resulting gasp spurs him on. Haymitch sighs into your mouth; it reverberates inside your chest. He kisses you with the certainty of all you’d give him if he asked, if he didn’t. You kiss him with the intent to ease his desperation, only to make your own worse. In the end, neither of you knows how to let the other go. 

“Haymitch,” you pant against his lips, intertwining your hand with his where it rests against your cheek. When he tries to close the distance, you place the other on his chest. “We don’t have time to waste.”  

He blinks, drawing your attention to those pretty blue-gray eyes of his. In the dark, pupils blown out, his irises lean navy. “Right,” he breathes out. “Wouldn’t call this a complete waste, though.” 

You snort. Unable to resist yourself, you run a finger down the bridge of his nose just to hear his breath hitch again. “I’m sure you wouldn’t.” 

Your knee lets out a bitter crackle as you stand. Every inch of you is still buzzing, but the wind creeps back up your skin, snuffing out your need.  

He passes you the light before following you to your feet. “You ever gonna tell me what you got me?” 

“It was supposed to be a surprise.” 

“Supposed to be. But you might as well let me know now.” 

Might as well. There’d be no harm in telling him. No jinxes or spoilers. But… 

If you don’t tell him, then you can pretend there’s still the hope of giving it to him yourself. You can live frozen in time. In the moment before the Games, before the reaping, when everything you loved was within reach. Not back home, or dead, lost to you in either case. 

You sling your bow onto your shoulder, wanting one hand free to hold onto Haymitch in the dark. Because he is within reach. “Maybe once we find Wellie.” 

He leans into your side. “I’ll wait then.” 

It’s tricky retracing your steps in the dead of night. Sid’s stars are helpful as can be at first, until you remind yourself of the fact that they aren’t Sid’s. These aren’t the real thing, no matter how much you want them to be. You’ve long since shed the ability to be lulled by the arena’s faux beauty. Plutarch did say the arena’s sky would be synced with yours, all but swore it. A lot’s changed since then. It’s likely the Gamemakers have switched things up to throw you off course. Rile you up like a caged bird. 

So, you fall back on your papa’s methods and your familiarity with the plants along the walkway. Must be past midnight by the time you reach yesterday’s terrain. You recognize the tiger lilies and alder trees, the latter eliciting the memory of Maysilee’s curiosity. Your eyes begin to sting. You wonder—fleetingly, because there is no time to wallow—how things may have turned out had you become friends sooner, instead of playing enemies. 

Enemy, ally, friend. 

None are the right words to encompass all she meant to you, and continues to mean. Against all odds, Maysilee Donner wove herself into the fabric of your soul. No one can take that from you, or her. Knowing that doesn’t make you miss her any less, but it won’t be long now until you see her. 

Haymitch squeezes your hand, grounding you, like he can sense your mind skirting the edge of a spiral. “Once we pass the bee balm we’ve hit the eastern woods.” 

“Okay.” You let him lead you from that point on. He’s covered most of the woods’ expanse, and you’ve mostly avoided that neck since the jabberjays. You pick up the pace. “Do you think Silka and Maritte made it over the mud by now?” 

“Maybe one of them,” he whispers back. “I doubt they’re allies anymore.” 

Silka did seem upset with Maritte the last you saw of them, which is putting it lightly. There’s been no cannon, meaning they’re both still alive. So, either Maritte escaped Silka’s vengeance, or Silka took it easy on her. Regardless, their alliance isn’t looking too bright. “Probably best that way. For us, and them.” 

“I see how it works in our favor. Not sure how it helps them.” 

You shrug and glance at him. “It wouldn’t be any easier for them to kill their allies. Careers or not.”

Under the dim lighting, you catch the confusion across Haymitch’s expression. “I’m pretty sure they plan for that kind of thing.” 

“Maybe, yeah. I just—” You exhale slowly. “I don’t know. Forget it.” When he opens his mouth to press on the subject, you point ahead. “There’s your bee balm.” 

That gets you both on track to what matters most again. Haymitch stops, tilting his head up towards the sky. “What’s the plan now?”

You chew on the skin of your cheek. If Wellie is high above, as you suspect, then there’s only one way to narrow down which tree to climb. “Wellie!” 

“Shit—”

“Wellie!” you call out louder, Haymitch’s hand clamming in yours. You let go of him and scurry through the trees. “Wellie, where are you?” 

His footsteps aren’t far behind yours, echoing your hollers. “Wellie! It’s Haymitch!” He supplies your name, too. 

“We’re here to help, Wellie!” You take in your surroundings: the speckled stars and jagged oak trees and Haymitch calling for her. No sign of Wellie, though. You can keep traveling east, until you hit the corner she’s unlikely to be in. Or you can pivot to the meadow where, as Maysilee assumed, she probably is. 

Haymitch throws off your mounting concerns. “Did you hear that?” 

You shake your head. One more time, you shout pitifully, “Wellie!” 

“There it is again!” he exclaims, pointing north. “It’s coming from that way.” 

You seal your lips and listen for the sound. Faintly, hardly audible over the whistling wind and rustling branches and miles of distance, you hear it. 

Ring, ring! 

“Is that a…?”

“A bicycle bell.” Haymitch pauses like he’s waiting to see if it was a fluke of the imagination.  

Ring, ring!

That’s a bell, all right. Credited to human hands, not nature. Just like the kind attached to the bicycle you and your group of friends found by the road once in Twelve. Or the matching pink bikes Maysilee and Merrilee rode around the square to show off their wealth. The very kind of bell Wellie brought as her token from home. 

You yank Haymitch in the direction of the bell. The ringing leads you back through where you came, forces you to retrace your steps north. Nearly all the way to where Maysilee died.  

The two of you reach a simultaneous halt beneath a large sweetgum tree. What appears to be a sweetgum tree, at least. From the red veins along the trunk, you figure it’s another Capitol concoction. The bell rings louder. Even with the lightbulb catching shadows of the branches above, Wellie is too high up to make out.  

“It’s okay, Wellie,” promises Haymitch, voice lowered back to a whisper. “We’re right here. You can come down.” 

You wait until the lack of response kickstarts the alarms in your head. All of ten seconds. You pass the light Haymitch’s way and begin the climb. 

The height of the tree is of little concern to you—you’ve scaled taller back home, ones as spindly and sinewy as this one. But between the distance from the ground, much larger than where you slept in the hammock earlier, and the delicacy of the branches, it seems an impossible feat for someone as small and frail as Wellie. 

Even smaller and paler than you remember her to be by the time you reach her hiding spot. 

“Hi, little bird.”

She squeaks out a breath. You don’t feel any relief seeing her now, just the guilt of not finding her sooner. Wellie’s cheeks are hollow and gaunt, her entire body shivering like the last leaf on a twig. You try to steady yourself on her branch and immediately retract when it creaks like it’s about to snap. Across from you, the lightbulb pops up. Haymitch’s head follows. 

Wellie fixates on the light. A hint of life flashes across her face, which is next to nothing in her state. Haymitch sets the light in front of her. She chases it with her eyes like a cat would a ball of string. You liked playing those kinds of games with Calla. Sometimes you’d use yarn, others you’d tie a tiny bell that jingled, not rang, to a twig. Sid liked to play with her, too, while Haymitch watched from your kitchen table on the days they were invited over. 

He remembers the first time he ever met Calla, within a week of you finding her. Haggard little thing wouldn’t stop hissing at him, even in her good-as-dead condition. Not so different from Wellie’s appearance. Belly down, crack-lipped, and glassy-eyed, her bell tucked under her chin and a child-sized knife clutched in one hand. If she was scrawny before, she’s practically skeletal now. Too fragile to be moved, too scared to do much else but stare at the bulb. 

Haymitch wedges himself between a branch and the trunk. You’ve found purchase on a sturdier spot. As he searches for the remaining water jug in his pack, he can feel your worry sticking to him. Reaching over Wellie’s branch, you lend a hand when he tries to unscrew the jug with only one of his. He pours some water into the cap.  

“Try to drink a little, Wellie,” you whisper gently as you bring the cap to her lips. “Just a little.” 

Over the next few minutes, Haymitch pours, you coax, and Wellie swallows no more than a handful of droplets. Most of the water spills out the side of her mouth and down her chin. There’s no chance of getting some potato in her right now. 

She manages one mouthful of water, then two. Haymitch brushes her hair back while you get her to drink some more. “There you go, Wellie.” 

She drifts off, but sleep doesn’t erase the fear etched all over her. Haymitch sticks the water jug back into his pack and hugs the trunk when he feels the branch beneath him tremble. You shoot him a wary look. 

Clouds move in across the sky, hiding the moon from view. The air grows heavy, and it smells like the early tell of rain. 

“We can’t let her sleep up here like this,” you murmur. “We should at least set up the hammock.”

“The branches on this thing aren’t steady enough,” says Haymitch, planting his boots firmer against the bark to make his point. The thought of a rainstorm making things slippery doesn’t help. 

You motion to the tree opposite your left. “I can get to that side and tie one end to the trunk.” 

You could, theoretically. If the branches from either tree formed a nice, ideal bridge. If they weren’t one wrong move away from snapping off entirely. If the likelihood of you falling and hurting more than just your ankle weren’t very, very high. 

Haymitch doesn’t like your plan. He doesn’t like it one bit. 

But, to absolutely no one’s surprise and least of all his, you’re off before he can stop you. Crawling on your hands and knees without a care of slipping off. Haymitch doesn’t relax until you make it across and settle on a thicker branch, near parallel to his own spot. Even then, he isn’t in a relaxing mood. 

There’s about six feet, give or take, between the trunks. It takes three tries of tossing before you catch one of the hammock strings. Haymitch copies your movements, tying his own end around the tree. The first raindrops begin to patter on the leaves by the time you finish adjusting the hammock. “Pass one of the tarps.”

Carefully, Haymitch does as you command. This time, you catch the corner on the first try. 

The rain does little to slow you as you slink another two feet up the tree. Haymitch watches with bated breath. Your hair grows damp, and some pieces stick to your neck and bare arms. His own curls feel flat and weighted against his head, the tips poking at his eyes. He doesn’t think to wipe them back, too focused on your movements—on your swollen lips, a mirror to his own—to be bothered by anything. Too consumed by the intensity of your earlier kiss, by the older memory of you bathed in sunlight, the brightest thing he’s ever seen—

“Peach.” 

Not the time. “Right, sorry,” he mutters, and climbs up to fasten the other edge of the tarp. 

The two of you make something of a roof to ward off the rain. A few drops still manage to sneak into your shelter, courtesy of the wind, but it’s as good a cover as you’re going to get. 

Haymitch perches back on his branch, a smidge below Wellie’s. You crawl across the hammock this time, and he pretends his heart isn’t two seconds from giving out when it wobbles like it intends to throw you over. 

You stop right next to Wellie, propping up on your knees. “Okay, little bird,” you whisper, rubbing her shoulder. Her eyes blink open, once again drawn to the light. “We’re gonna move you somewhere more comfortable now.” 

As cautiously as the lack of space and the threat of falling to your deaths will allow, you pry Wellie off the branch. Haymitch holds up the potato light while you guide her onto the hammock. He has to bite down on his tongue to keep from flinching when she lies on her back and reveals her ribs protruding through the dove gray uniform. From the sunken look on your face, he can tell you’re feeling no less nauseated with guilt. 

You wring the knife out of her grip and trade it with Haymitch for the light. Wellie, weak as she is, manages to hold it in one hand, and latches onto you with the other. When the hammock wobbles again from the movement of her squirming into your arms, you lie back too, effectively stilling her. 

You look over at Haymitch and motion to the pack. “The second hammock—” 

“It’s okay,” he says over the uptick in rainfall, which grows so heavy he worries the tarp will collapse in on itself. And the three of you. “I’m fine right here.” 

When your lips press into a thin, unconvinced line, he makes a show of cutting up pieces of tarp and tying himself to the branch. He’s screwed if it breaks off the tree, but at least he won’t have to worry about rolling over. While he’s at it, he hands you the blanket, which you immediately try to pass back to him. 

“For Wellie,” Haymitch urges, knowing that’s the best way to get you to do anything that might benefit yourself too. 

Without further argument, you accept the blanket and drape it over the both of you. Wellie’s eyes begin to flutter shut again. Her head comes right up to your chin, and Haymitch lingers on the sight of you resting a cheek against her. 

You glance his way, the tears on the cusp of your lashes passing on a clear message: keep Wellie alive, that’s the plan now. The only one that matters, that’s anywhere near attainable. Her condition poses a difficulty, but the task of saving her isn’t as much of a longshot as Haymitch’s hopes of bringing down the Capitol. 

Twice now, he’s failed. The second time wasn’t as catastrophic as the first, but it led to a loss all the same. Maybe if Haymitch had been less fixated on the hedge, less taken by his hopeless intent to end the Games, Maysilee would be here. Or maybe not. Those birds were a pointed attack, one the Gamemakers probably had in their arsenal for days beforehand. 

Still…Haymitch has wasted so much time playing rebel with no real success. 

He fiddles with the bluebird, moistened by the rain, and drags it across the cord with a rhythm that soothes his thoughts. You’re already fading into sleep alongside Wellie. A familiar chime reels him back before he can fully succumb himself. 

The rain has shifted into a light mist. Haymitch reaches for the parachute and pulls out its contents. A cup of warm vanilla pudding and a packet of chocolate balls wrapped in crinkly festive paper. 

Someone in the Capitol has a heart, after all. 

Haymitch takes up the effort of feeding Wellie. You sit her up in your arms, keeping the blanket secure on her. With patience, he coaxes bits of pudding into Wellie. She’s able to take more pudding than she did the water. A lot of it still falls down her chin. He catches what he can with the spoon and scoops it back into her mouth. 

Save for the after effects of the rain and Wellie’s wheezing, it’s mostly quiet. Haymitch shifts slightly on the branch when he feels himself going sore from the position. Getting another bit of pudding into Wellie, he takes notice of the leaves dangling behind you. Same as the ones on his branch, of course, except they’re a darker shade of green. Not maple leaves, but close in size and shape. More star-like, though. He tugs at a vague memory of you gifting Sid a leaf like these once. He kept it on the windowsill of their kitchen even after it shriveled into a brown clump. 

“Remind me, sunshine,” he whispers as he points to the leaves, “what kinda trees are these again?” 

“Sweetgum. They seem different though,” you say, brows knitted as you stroke Wellie’s hair. 

“Hm. No surprise there.” He scrapes the last of the pudding around the cup rim. Wellie parts her lips. “Sid, my brother,” he tells her, “would like ’em. He loves anything remotely related to the stars.” 

She swallows the entire spoonful this time. You clean the dribble that sticks to the corner of her mouth. Haymitch breaks a chocolate ball in two with his teeth. 

Suddenly, in a broken croak that reminds him of a frog, Wellie mutters, “I like the stars.” 

Haymitch smiles slowly, sliding a chocolate piece into her mouth. “You’d get along with Sid then.” 

He doesn’t miss the way your lips curve upwards, too. To his relief, you don’t deny yourself the chocolate when he slips two pieces your way. 

Wellie smacks her lips lightly after he feeds her another bit of chocolate. You unwrap your pieces and savor them. It isn’t much longer before the two of you are fast asleep. Haymitch stays awake a few more minutes, chewing on his own ball of chocolate. Usually reserved for birthdays or special occasions, it’s rare to splurge on it in the Seam. And this stuff’s top-of-the-line, melting in his mouth and warming his empty stomach with its sweetness. 

He leans back against the bark and reaches for the second tarp. Repurposed as a blanket, it saves him from the worst of the cold. He’s halfway to mind-numbing sleep when another interruption snaps his head up. A sob this time. Sounds nothing like yours, and you and Wellie are still lost to the conscious world. Besides, the cry is coming from below. 

Glancing down, Haymitch notices what he assumes to be a tuft of yellow hair. Silka? He’s too blurry-eyed to fully tell. She’s not attempting to scale the tree or attack, despite the fact that she more than likely knows the three of you are up here. You may be far up, but if he can hear her, she can most certainly hear you.

And yet, she’s just there. Sobbing and shaking all over. Haymitch never took her as a crier. Then again, what does she have to be happy about? He thinks back to your comments on Silka’s alliance with Maritte. There’s no deep-sea uniform anywhere near now, so he was right about them splitting up. As Silka’s sobs rack up, your own point dawns on him. 

Silka is entirely alone, and for all her bite, she’s probably scared, too. Alone, scared, grieving whatever losses she’s had in here. Because Haymitch doesn’t have a monopoly on that, does he? Every one of you, Career or not, have lost enough allies, friends, kids, to last a lifetime. 

Silka isn’t his ally, but she isn’t his enemy right now either. 

Haymitch digs into his pocket. He rolls the chocolate ball in his hand before he drops it Silka’s way. Her sobs putter into confused hiccups. Briefly, he worries that he dropped it in the wrong direction, but then he hears the crinkle of the wrapper. The hiccups turn to sniffles until they’re nothing at all. 

The Capitol would have every last person in the districts believe otherwise, but for what’s left of the night, you’re united in your struggle. Haymitch closes his eyes and finally falls asleep with a strange sense of pride. 

Not a bad poster at all. 

His next comes unexpectedly, at the turn of sunrise when the morning light momentarily blinds him. Once Haymitch gathers his bearings, he checks on you and Wellie. She’s curled into your side, and you—you look strangely peaceful. The most you’ve been in the last weeks, since long before the reaping. No need to wake either of you yet.

Silka’s gone, which isn’t shocking. Her vulnerability was a one-off—Haymitch guesses District One frowns upon their Careers exhibiting any trace of humanity. She might’ve gone to the Cornucopia for supplies or set off to hunt Maritte. But she’ll be back to kill you soon enough. 

He steals another glance at you. Still cold to the touch when he reaches over to brush your hair back. Haymitch tucks the blanket firmer around you and Wellie. One of your arms is wrapped around her; the other tucked beneath your chin, which is smudged with black ink instead of drool. 

Huh. 

Haymitch touches your wrist, tries to unfurl your arm to find the trail of ink, and is instantly thrown off track when he notices the smudges on his fingers. They didn’t really register in the dark, and they can’t be credited to the tree bark. Or the tarp. What else did you both work with last night? The potato battery, sure. Maybe that’s it, but…

Absentmindedly, Haymitch holds the bluebird between his fingers. Its beak indents the skin of his thumb, reminding him of how you held it, held him. The way you pulled him in for that kiss. That brain-fogging, breathtaking, one-of-a-kind kiss. The bluebird’s dry now, but the cord still feels slippery from the rain. 

A whole bunch of light bulbs flicker inside his head. Ampert’s possession of the bird to begin with, the residue on his hands after he rigged the fuse at the tank, and Beetee’s final advice at the buffet—

“In the event a backup is needed, or if Ampert fails to show at all, we’ve planned for two failsafes—” 

Peeling his hand back, he pretends to fiddle with the water jug lid. Sure enough, his index finger and thumb are both covered in black residue. Did you know their intent with your charm? You must’ve, and that’s why you gave it away. The timing of when is still an issue, but that’s the least of his concerns now. Haymitch wonders what other pieces of the plan you know that he doesn’t. He figures he’s privy to some that you aren’t. 

Maybe the two of you can fill in each other’s blanks. Maybe you can make something of this parting gift. One last chance to blow the Capitol sky high. There’s one sunflower left, after all. 

He can’t be one hundred percent sure until he can unwind the cord and check for the blasting cap. Until he ensures you are on the same page. Until he figures a way to keep Wellie from the fallback, because there is no longer a world in which you and Haymitch aren’t doing this together. 

He unravels the charm out of the cord, then himself from the branch. Quietly, so as to not wake Wellie, he murmurs your name. 

Your eyes adjust to Haymitch before they do to the sun. He’s got a tight grip on the trunk, boots dug into the bark. 

You frown, too hazy from sleep to fully register much else but the sight of him readying to leave. “Where’re you going?” 

“To get firewood,” he answers softly. “The only way we’re getting some potato into Wellie is if we boil it. Couldn’t hurt to warm her up, too. And you.” 

As if responding to his words, goosebumps prick the skin of your neck. Not like they ever left anyway. You’ve been freezing all night. “Yeah, okay. Don’t go too far.” 

Haymitch nods and slides something into your free hand. “I need you to hold onto it again for me.”

“And why’s that?” 

He taps his collarbone, where all his cords rest. Except the one previously attached to the bluebird. “They’re starting to tangle together. Don’t know how Miss Donner managed hers, but the cord fell when I was trying to detangle it.” 

That’s about the lamest excuse he could give. You tighten your hold on your bluebird anyway, a little more awake now. “All right.” 

“I’ll be real quick.” He presses a quick kiss to your temple and scales down the tree. 

You try your hardest not to spiral when he disappears from view. Especially when Wellie wakes minutes later and asks, “Did Haymitch leave us again?” 

“He went to get firewood,” you tell her quietly. “He’ll be right back.” 

Panic flashes in her eyes. “Are you sure?” 

“Positive,” you promise, rubbing her arms to generate more heat on her skin. 

She doesn’t seem very convinced, but she leans closer to you without another anxious word. Her joints poke your abdomen, and it takes even more effort to not recoil from the shame of ever letting her get this bad. 

You pinch the bluebird between your fingers and listen to the sound of Wellie’s halfhearted breaths. No way did Haymitch lose that cord. You look around for something long enough to be used as a substitute. A vine, ideally. You wind up picking three leaves from a branch within arm’s reach, and scrape them until all that’s left is the stem. It’s no different from making wildflower crowns, the very kind you’d weave with Lenore Dove and Burdock on the days it was just the three of you cousins in your meadow. Perfect days, you used to call them. 

Once they’re tied together to form a makeshift necklace, you loop them through the ring atop your bluebird’s head. Momentarily, you’re thrown off by the black smudges on your fingers. You look closer, seeing that they’re splotched around the copper. It’s not dirt. This is thicker, more fluid, like mud but not exactly. Nothing close to the dried splotches from yesterday’s mud bath. Closer to pen ink, or oil. But even then…neither is quite the right texture. 

You’ve dirtied your hands plenty. In the woods, in class. Digging roots from the ground, or drawing with charcoal, or breathing in the soot that covers just about everything in Twelve.

You remember when you were little, after the mine explosion that took Haymitch’s papa and others with him, how much you hated watching your own go out that door. You’d wait on the porch all evening for his return, only moving when prompted by your mama to eat or bathe. If it got real late, the promise of her lullaby was all that’d get you to bed. Burdock would wait with you, both because he shared your concern and because he never really left you alone in those days. Except when it was time for his own bath. Sometimes, Lenore Dove would wander over, and she’d soothe your nerves with an exchange of poems. 

Whenever you spotted your papa heading down the walkway to your home, tall and mighty, it was like catching the first rays of light after a storm. He’d laugh as you threw yourself into his arms. “I’m getting coal dust all over you, maple leaf.” 

“I don’t care,” you always said in return. As if you weren’t already perpetually covered in dust by living in the Seam. You were just happy to have him home. To be lucky enough to still have your papa. 

Your heart gives a heavy pang, weighed less so by the familiar longing for your family and more by the grief you realize they’re in for. They’ll carry on without you, keep you with them in whatever ways they can, you’re certain of it. You just…don’t want to be a smudge on their lives. 

“That’s pretty,” mutters Wellie, a weak finger lifting to point at the bird. 

“My uncle made it,” you tell her. “Where’d you get your bell from?” 

“My mom,” she whispers sadly. “It was a defect from the factory, so they didn’t want it. But I like it.” 

“I like it, too.” You get the feeling it’d bring her more discomfort to talk about it, so you don’t pry about her family or District Six. 

You run your thumb over the bluebird’s face, attempting to clean the mysterious residue. It only winds up smeared across the wings. As stubborn as soot, sullying Tam Amber’s craftsmanship. You’ll need water to wash it off. How’d Haymitch manage this anyway? There hasn’t been another volcano or cloud of ash. Not a person or inch of land would’ve been spared if it there were. Instead, the residue is isolated to the bluebird and your fingers. 

The bluebird and your fingers. 

You jolt upwards, rumbling the hammock and Wellie, who lets out an eek.

“Sorry,” you say immediately. “Sorry.” But your mind is moving too fast to catch up with whatever comes out of your mouth. 

Your thoughts come in flashes, in images and memories: the coal dust on your papa’s face, those field trips to the mines, your teacher’s brief lessons on explosives. Above all, Plutarch dangling a free world like a ripe carrot right in front of you. 

You’ve been north, you’ve cut through the hedge in search of some missing piece to some secretive rebel plan, and you’ve come up empty. Until now. 

So, this is how you blow up the arena. This is how you end the Games. With your bluebird, which doesn’t look anything like an explosive. There would’ve been no time to rig it into one in a single night, either. Then again, you don’t have Beetee’s mind for tinkering. But you highly doubt that’s the case. So then what’s—

The cord! It has to be. How, you have no idea. You only know Haymitch made a show of “losing” it for a reason. 

You chew on your bottom lip. Haymitch hasn’t gone off to complete this task—through whatever means, you still aren’t completely sure—on his own. Not this time. You made a deal, one you trust him not to back out of. And he wouldn’t have clued you in like this if he didn’t intend to see the plan through together. 

Yet…the longer he takes, the worse your head hurts. And the louder Wellie’s stomach growls. Your own isn’t exactly quiet. It grumbles and collapses into itself with an ache so familiar you have to shut your eyes to wish it away. 

“Anyone in the mood for a baked potato?” 

You look over at Haymitch, grateful to whatever angel has answered at least one of your wishes. “If that’s the best you’ve got.” 

He grins. Slowly, he hoists Wellie off the hammock with your help. She stares at him wordlessly, like she’s surprised he came back at all. He gives her a reassuring pat on the head before maneuvering her over his shoulder. It’s not the most ideal carrying position, but it’s the only way you’re getting her down the tree. 

You stretch your limbs as soon as you’re back on solid ground, shaking away the stiffness in your bones. 

Haymitch sets Wellie down against the trunk and gets to work on the fire. You take a seat beside her, lifting the blanket over her each time it slides off her shoulders. 

The potato is nice and baked within minutes, soft enough that it melts with ease when Haymitch uses a fork to mash it into easier pieces for Wellie. To your relief, she’s responsive to every bite. And though she requires a break halfway through eating, what she’s managed to keep down does her wonders. 

You watch Haymitch nurse the fire as you chew on the chocolate ball he forced into your hand. It’s all you’re willing to take. Wellie needs the fuel more than you do. He pokes at the fire with a twig and bounces back when a spark flies near his feet. You stifle a snicker. 

“Breakfast and a show,” you muse, leaning over to Wellie. “Aren’t we spoiled?”

“Very,” deadpans Haymitch, dropping the twig into the flames. 

Wellie, whose color is slowly returning to her, giggles. The sound lightens both of your shoulders. Taking a deep breath, you reach into your right pocket. Now’s as good a time as any to broach the subject. 

You tilt your head, staring straight at Haymitch. “You got dirt all over the bird, you know.”

All he does for a second is blink your way, caught between the relief that you’ve picked up on what he has, and the dread of realizing there really is no way to keep you out of this. “I’ll take better care of it from here on out.” 

“You better.” 

“I found the cord though.” 

“Did you?” You hold out a necklace made of stems and your bluebird. “I already made you a new one.” 

“I like it.” He takes it from you and loops it over his head. 

You shrug. “No point letting the other one go to waste.” 

Agreed. He pats his pocket where the unfurled cord and blasting cap rest. “Got it right here.”

You nod and turn back to Wellie, who's been eyeing you both curiously. “Ready to try some more?” 

She sniffles. “Aren’t you guys hungry?” 

“Oh,” you pretend to grimace, “I’m stuffed from all that chocolate.” 

“Me too,” Haymitch groans, throwing his head back. He mashes more bits of potato. “It’s all yours, sweetgum.” 

Wellie wrinkles her nose, unconvinced, but doesn’t argue against the next bite of food. She’s much more agreeable than you are, that’s for sure. As she swallows down the potato, Haymitch thinks of how to best steer the conversation. It only took close to a decade, but he’s finally got a hang of your riddled manner of talking.  

“Silka was skulking around here last night,” he says nonchalantly. 

Wellie tenses up. You soothe her by running your fingers through her hair. “She was?”

“Skulking’s not the right word.” Sobbing in a fit of anguish is a more accurate description. “But yeah, she was here.” 

“We should move then,” you sigh out. 

“And head where?” 

“Where do you think?” 

“I’m between the meadow and the hedge. What’s left of it anyway. I never did get to show you my trick with the force field.” At the reminder of why that is, at the memory of Maysilee’s bloodied body, his fingers clench. Clearing his throat, he continues, “But if we head to the meadow, we can scour the cornucopia for food.” 

You hum pensively, toying with your pearl charm. “Well, the cornucopia should have something left. We could at least get a show, if not more breakfast.” 

“That was my thought, too.” The horn of plenty for some, a symbol of despair for all. How glorious it’ll be to set it aflame. 

You boop Wellie’s nose. “What do you say, little bird? You up for the trip?” 

She squirms, and though Haymitch isn’t fond of seeing her so nervous, he’s grateful she’s gaining some movement back. “We’re staying together, right?” 

He locks eyes with you, and he’s brought back to your shared helplessness last night. Protecting Wellie is still the priority. 

“For as long as possible,” you say. It’s all you can guarantee. Even without an underlying rebellion, you and Haymitch would have to leave her to take up the victor mantle on her own. 

Wellie gives a nod, loosening up slightly. 

“The cornucopia it is,” declares Haymitch, clasping his hands together. “I’ll start packing.” Not that there’s much to pack. Just the hammocks and tarps. Maybe he should leave the fire going, create a diversion for Silka while you find somewhere to hide Wellie. 

“Okay. I want to check the snares around here before we head south. Maybe try to find game, too.” If you’re to leave Wellie while you carry out the plan, you need to make sure she has some sustenance. Really, you and Haymitch need to eat, too. 

“Why?” he blurts out, unable to conceal the wrinkles between his brows. 

“I assume we won’t be coming back north, and it’d be nice to take protein for the road,” you say casually, trying to alleviate the anxiety on his face. 

“You think we caught something?” he asks, eyes flickering to Wellie as she takes the last bite of potato. She might be able to handle something heavier once the potato’s settled as much as it can in her stomach. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to find some meat for her sake. But—

“Worth checking.” You clean the fork and hand it over to Haymitch. 

When you move to stand, Wellie grabs onto your wrist. “You can’t go,” she whispers.  

Haymitch stretches a hand out in her direction as if to say, Thank you, Wellie!

“We don’t know if there’ll be any food at the cornucopia,” you tell her gently, easing her into releasing her hold on you. “I need to at least try to find us some now.” 

“Then take us with you,” she says, frowning. 

“I’ll be quicker on my own.” 

Yeah, okay, that’s true. Haymitch is well aware that Wellie still has a ways to go before she’s even halfway recovered from her emaciation. She can’t go with the two of you, and she’s not going to get any better without more food. Or at least something to hold her over until the Games end and there’s no other choice but to declare her the victor. 

You tighten the blanket around Wellie, tying two corners together to keep it properly secured. Your efforts do little to reassure her—you can tell by the way her shoulders refuse to drop—but you try to leave her with the promise of a speedy return regardless. 

Haymitch pushes up on his feet when you stand with your bow. “Are you sure—” 

“You got the firewood,” you say, pointing between the two of you, “I’ve got the snares.” 

“Checking the snares will take longer. ’Specially if you plan on hunting, too,” he counters. 

“It won’t be as long as you think.” 

“Well you shouldn’t go off alone.” 

“Hi, Pot, have you met Kettle yet?” Your own hypocrisy isn’t lost on you, but you care more about getting Haymitch to let you go right now. 

“You’re hilarious,” he snipes. 

Tugging him by the elbow, you pull him a foot away from the fire and lower your voice. “Wellie will only slow me down, and someone needs to stay with her.” He opens his mouth, and you bulldoze over his next argument, “And I’m the better shot.” 

Haymitch clamps down a scoff, because for all that you’re right—you are a better shot, you will be quicker without extra bodies to carry, you can hold your own—he only cares about all the things that might go wrong without you by his side. 

You rub the crease between his brows. It’s a tall order to ask him not to worry. Your thumb stops short of the bridge of his nose before pulling back entirely. “I’m not going back on our deal. I’m asking you not to follow me this once. Please.” 

He bites his tongue, runs the tip of his teeth along the buds. “Okay,” he relents in a grumble. 

You extend your pinkie. At his hesitation, you take a step closer into his space. It’s a second longer before he loops his own around yours. With a sigh of relief, you peer past Haymitch to shoot Wellie a soft smile. “Keep an eye on him for me, yeah?” 

She tries to return your smile. 

Haymitch is staring at you with wounded, pleading eyes when you focus on him again. Lighter in color this morning—no longer navy, but a muted wild blue reminiscent of a gnatcatcher—they pull you back to his warmth. All-encompassing and dizzying. He reads your thoughts, follows them all the way down to your lips. You allow yourself the indulgence. For both your sakes. 

Full of an entirely different need from last night—one built on promises both spoken and unsaid, on hopes tender and steadfast—the kiss seals your resolve. 

You pull back right as Haymitch lowers his arm to cradle your waist. Suddenly, the urge to give him more, the instinct to stow him inside your heart next to all those little things you cannot yet say, overcomes you. Swallowing down the instinct in exchange for a more necessary directive, you brush your forehead against his. “Look after her. I’ll be back before you can miss me real bad.” 

“I’m holding you to that,” he murmurs, kissing the tip of your nose. 

It takes all you have to suppress the shudder creeping down your back. Even more to walk away. 

Haymitch doesn’t move an inch. You leave him with another quick smile over your shoulder, then you disappear entirely. Deadweight on legs, he takes your place on the ground next to Wellie. She doesn’t need his wayward worry infecting her, so he tries to sound confident as he says, “Think we can hold the fort down?” 

Wellie nods, not torn up as he expected. Instead, she comes off incredibly amused for someone still one strong wind gust away from blowing off. 

“What?” 

“I thought you weren’t together,” she says, her mouth twitching. 

Haymitch clicks his tongue. “We weren’t.” 

“But you are now.” 

“Sure we are.” How else does he explain to her that it’s complicated, and you haven’t really defined things past kissing, and under different circumstances he’d ask you properly to be his? It’s true enough to just say yes. You’ve been entwined by your roots for longer than either of you have cared to admit. 

Wellie regards him suspiciously. “Relationships are weird.” 

He snorts and throws another dry branch onto the fire. “Tell me about it, kid.” 

Seconds trickle into minutes. It was much easier not to jump to the worst conclusions when Maysilee was here. In between distracting Wellie and fueling the fire, Haymitch keeps his attention on the gaps between the trees, willing you to return. 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

The sun beats down on your face mockingly, as if reminding you of those counting on you to come back to them soon. Time racks up to longer than you anticipated. Longer than you promised you’d be. 

You shouldn’t be surprised when there is nothing in most of the snares you set, but you are disappointed. No game of any kind in sight, no trails to track down. You know it’s a message from the Gamemakers: they’re growing restless and bored. 

They’ve drawn things out long enough. In their minds, that is. It’s only been a week, and Games past have lasted longer with fewer tributes. Forty-eight children, and forty-three dead in seven days. How could they possibly be bored? 

You retrace your footsteps to the very last snare, not too far from where you’ve left Haymitch and Wellie. A halfway point between them and the scene of Maysilee’s death. You call it quits when you come up empty again. 

If you were back home, or if it was just a couple days earlier, you’d spend more time venturing the terrain. Patience is a virtue for most, and a necessity for hunting. Your papa always made sure to remind you of the fact when you’d groan about Burdock’s prodigal talent. So did Clerk Carmine when he first passed on your guitar. Lucky thing you picked up on that much quicker. 

Impatient as quicksand, Haymitch is surely expecting you back by now. You’ll have to settle for the hope of another sponsor gift. This time, you wouldn’t be too upset with a feast. 

You keep your bow clutched in one hand, crossing another over to rub away your goosebumps. They fade to nothing, but your bones stay frosted over. Today’s sun is only for show, it seems. 

Mags and Wiress must have a way of reading your mind, you decide, when a parachute floats down from above. Instead of a feast, nestled in a snowy linear napkin, you find a pitcher. A brilliant white china, resting within a spiral staircase. An eagle sits atop the lid. You press the eagle’s tail, and the lid pops open. Hot chocolate steam curls up your nose. 

You fall back on the familiar pattern of those first days on the mountainside, on the inclination to riddle-solve, and make quick work of connecting the dots. Plutarch’s final message couldn’t be any clearer: you’re right where you need to be, finally doing something of substance, making an actual rebel of yourself. His past instructions were a stepping stone for what’s to come. What you now know to be the real plan. 

Holding the pitcher in the nook of your elbow, you quicken the pace back to Haymitch and Wellie. 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

Haymitch grows restless by the fourth story he tells Wellie. He’s already detailed everything there is to Twelve that makes it worthwhile. It was a short run-down. Every time he asks her questions about Six, or anything she’s fond of, she supplies him with minimal details and the request for him to keep talking. You’d be much better suited to fulfill her wants.  

But you’re not here. The fire’s fickled down to pure billowing smoke now. And still, you aren’t back. 

He distracts them both with another memory, recounting the day Sid was born, the happiest baby to ever grace the Seam. Born on the sunny side, Mamaw used to claim. 

“Your pa was the same when he was little,” she once told Haymitch while putting him to bed. “All smiles and optimism and mischief. You got that last part from him.” 

Haymitch believed her. Hard not to. His pa was a fortress of a person, steady and strong and constant. He was soft in all the ways that mattered, too. For all that the world whittled down on him, it never could harden his heart. It never could change who he was and what he believed. 

He feels certain that you would’ve gotten along. You would’ve understood each other to that extent, at least. 

Pa only met you once before he died. Haymitch was more likely to pay your household a visit than Burdock was to play at his in the early years of their friendship. And when he did trickle on over, it’s not like you’d ever want to. Even though you and Burdock had yet to outgrow the need to go wherever the other went, Haymitch’s house was the one place you’d never willingly travel to. On account, of course, of Haymitch being there. You made that plenty clear. 

One evening, when Barb Azure was teaching Burdock and Haymitch to play a game of cards, you spent most of it on your porch steps. That was your routine whenever he was present: you’d find somewhere else to be. Halfway through the game, with Haymitch in the lead, Sorrel breezed through the kitchen with a tiredness in his posture. Exhausted as he was, he rallied to greet them with a smile. 

He kissed Burdock’s head, then Barb Azure’s cheek, and patted Haymitch on the back. “Your pa’s here, son.” 

They finished the game within minutes. If his pa was in a rush, he would’ve called out for him. Haymitch won, leaving with spoken thanks and goodbyes and the anticipation of telling his pa all about his victory. 

He never got to, his plans interrupted by a strange, melodic sound that grew louder as he walked outside: your laughter. 

Out on the porch, his pa was kneeled on a step below yours, staying eye level with you. Upon seeing Haymitch, he smiled widely, and you dropped yours completely. Jaw dropped, Haymitch could only peel his eyes away from you once prompted by his pa saying, “There you are. Let’s head on home.” 

He had to manually remind his feet how to work. They remembered pretty quickly once you glared daggers at him for blocking the doorway. You walked back inside, bidding his pa farewell with a lighthearted wave and Haymitch with a sour, “Night.”

On the path to their house, Haymitch worked up the guts to voice his curiosity. “How’d you get her to laugh?” 

His pa gave him a peculiar smile. “I told her about my day.” 

“What was so funny about your day?” asked Haymitch, scratching his nose. 

“Nothing,” he said, “but then she told me about her day. And you. Had a lot to say about you, that one.” 

“Me?” Oh, he could only imagine all the insults you spewed about him. It was plenty fine when you directed them straight at him—he took them in stride, in gratitude when coming from you—but he didn’t want his pa converted to your side. “What’d she say?” 

“Not a thing I don’t already know.” 

Haymitch blanched. How could he say that? “Pa, she hates me.”

Pa laughed, a hearty, joyful melody much like yours. “Oh, my boy. You’d be surprised.” 

His laugh sounds different now in Haymitch’s head. Faint, muted by too many years gone by without hearing it. He wonders if that’s what’ll become of him in Sid’s memories, and Ma’s. A distant illusion. 

The thought cracks his chest wide open. He wants so badly to be home with them right now. Home with you, too. 

“She’s been gone a while,” murmurs Wellie drearily, following his line of sight. “You don’t think…” 

“We would’ve heard a cannon,” he reminds her, and himself. 

A haze falls over her eyes. “Atread was dying a long time before his cannon went off.” 

Wonderful point. What a vivid image it produces. He clamps his eyes shut, and when he pictures Atread, another of his soft-spoken doves, you pop up too. Writhing in pain, dying alone. “I’m gonna go get her,” he blurts. 

“Okay,” she agrees and wiggles out of the blanket to stand, only to immediately buckle down. 

He catches her instantly. “No, Wellie, you have to stay.” 

She wheezes, panicked, “Don’t leave me.” 

Haymitch squeezes her shoulders lightly to calm her. “It’ll just be to bring her back. I’ll make sure you’re good and hidden.” 

“Don’t. I can’t be alone again. I’ll go with you.” Her bottom lip wobbles. 

“It’s okay. You’ll be okay. Look what I’ve got for you.” Haymitch hangs Maysilee’s blowgun around her neck. “This was Maysilee’s. It’s all loaded. All you do is take a deep breath, blow real hard in this end, and a poisonous dart comes flying out. She killed Panache with this. Saved our lives.” 

“Maysilee’s dead now, too.” Wellie hugs her knees. 

His throat tightens. “Yeah, she is. But she’d want you to have this. She thought you’d make a good victor.” 

“She did?” Her eyes widen. “What did she mean? A good victor?” 

A great question, an even harder one to actually answer. “It means that you’re good to your core. You never stop being a Newcomer.” 

Wellie tears up, ultimately settling into her determination. “I can do that. For the others. For her.” She whispers your name. “Hide me.” She holds out her arms for Haymitch to carry her. 

Nearby, he pinpoints a tree almost hidden by wild grapevines. Tucking Wellie behind them, he arranges the cascading vines into a curtain that’ll conceal her. 

“Remember,” he tells her. “You’ve only got one dart, so make it count.” 

She lifts the blowgun to show him she understands how to use it. 

He taps her chin with the knuckle of his index finger. “Atta girl. Now, sit tight and I’ll be back before you know I’m gone.” 

He intends to make good on his parting assurance. And when he spots you after covering a half-mile of woods, he’s relieved to know he will. 

You’re not carrying any game, but you aren’t empty-handed. Haymitch can’t quite tell what it is you’re holding from afar—he knows to credit it to a sponsor gift. You are also evidently, expectedly seething when you notice him. 

“Why are you here?” you demand, not bothering to keep your voice quiet. 

“I got worried,” Haymitch answers candidly as he approaches you. 

Of course he did. That’s expected, understandable even. The absence of your ally, however, is not. “And Wellie?” 

“She was worried, too.” His eyes hone in on the pitcher, and he goes completely still. 

“Was she?” you snap dryly. “If you’d waited a few more minutes, she wouldn’t be, because she’d have both of us there.” 

He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even look at you, more taken with what you have in your arms. 

You stomp your foot, childish and petty and completely warranted in the heat of your frustration. “Honestly, Haymitch, is it gonna take a real blood oath to get you to listen to me?” 

He snatches the pitcher from you suddenly. “You didn’t drink any, did you?” 

Are you kidding me? “No,” you scoff. “Obviously not. I was bringing it to—”

Your huff comes out muffled against his chest. Haymitch holds you close, tight enough to stop the breath in your lungs. “What the hell?” 

His lips brush the shell of your ear, and the shudder that passes through you, too involuntarily to contain this time, almost quells your anger. Almost. What really does it are the words he whispers: “It’s not from who you think.” 

Pulling back, you search for answers in his expression. He gives you the one you need, the one you already assume deep down, with a quiver of his chin and a furrow of his brows. 

You take a deep breath and plaster on a scowl. “I don’t think you should get any hot chocolate.” 

He blinks, then pouts. “Oh, come on now.” 

“You don’t deserve it,” you say sharply. “I mean, you accuse me of hogging it.” 

“I only asked if you tasted it without us. That’s a fair question.” 

“And you left Wellie after you agreed not to.” 

Haymitch tucks your hair back. “I missed you too much, darling.” 

A cover or not, your stomach bubbles. “And you’re just plain annoying me right now, peach.” 

He laughs, tugging you to him when you take another step away. “Forgive me.” 

You narrow your eyes, a smile playing on your lips. “I—”

It all happens so fast from there. Too fast for Haymitch to pick up on the details. He only hears the way you cut yourself off. Only notices when you whir around, notching an arrow on your bow and lodging it into Maritte’s collarbone. Only sees when her knife flies into your lower abdomen at the same time. Only feels the drop of the pitcher, the fear clawing at his ribcage, the weight of his dagger before it finds the space of her neck, finishing her off.

Haymitch catches you before you hit the floor, before you land on the pile of broken glass and spilled hot chocolate. He props you against a berm of primrose. Blood spools around the dagger like the tendrils of a poppy. The black of your uniform can’t hide the shape, or the texture of the crimson. Thick as strawberry juice. 

“What do I do?” He all but spits out. “What do I—”

“Get Wellie,” you gasp, feeling nothing but the urgency to get Haymitch back on track. 

“Do I pull the knife out?”

“Get Wellie,” you repeat through gritted teeth.  

“No, you’ll bleed to death.” His voice cracks on the last syllable. “How do I stop the bleeding?”

“Haymitch.” You dig your nails into your palms to keep from wincing. “If it hit anything important, I wouldn’t be speaking right now. Go get Wellie.” 

He shakes his head. “I’m not leaving you alone.”

“Silka’s around here somewhere.” 

“Exactly why I can’t leave you!” he exclaims, exasperated and scared and on the verge of something far more painful than tears. “I can’t.”

“Haymitch, you promised!” you choke out through the lump in your throat. 

The threat of your scrunched nose, the evocation of his promise—that absolute, binding pinkie promise—cuts through him. 

“Please,” you croak, finding solace in the dirt beneath you, scraping the underside of your nail bed with rocks and twigs. “Go.” 

Your face begins to blur, and Haymitch realizes he’s in danger of breaking out into those horrible, wretched sobs that only overcome him when someone’s died. And he can’t let that happen right now because you need him. Wellie needs you both. “I’m getting her and coming right back, you hear me?”

You nod. “Go.” 

He cradles your face and presses a long kiss to the crown of your head as if that’ll bring his wishes into existence. Your hands clutch him, pushing him away. You shove your own dagger into his grip. It’s only after Haymitch backs off, running with all his might through the trees, that you allow yourself to cry. 

Every breath you take inflames the bursts of ice shooting up your side. You can feel the blade brushing against your insides, forcing you to confront just how much pain you’re in. 

It sits right above your hip, perfectly content where it is. You’re no Asterid, this is not a deceptive laceration, and it hurts a hell of a lot worse than a sprained ankle. But you can’t pull it out. Haymitch wasn’t wrong—you’ll bleed out, send yourself to an earlier grave than the one you’re already in, if you do. 

You try to slide up the trunk, push yourself to your feet, but your limbs protest angrily. They resort to going numb, a roundabout paralysis where you still feel every single sting.   

Shedding the numbness, your mind detaches from your body entirely, guided first and foremost by the boom of a cannon. 

Hissing, you push forward and hold out your hands before you can collapse face-down. 

“Ah!” You lift a hand back, burned by the hot chocolate, no less steaming than how you received it. You wipe yourself on your pant leg and assess the spillage, laid out in a stream of glass in front of you. You’re quickly reminded of the river at the base of the mountain, of the snake swallowed by its own foamy blood, of the frail man perched on a frail throne. 

“It’s not from who you think.” 

And if you were wrong about that, if it’s from who Haymitch would have you believe… 

What’s the point in dwelling, in waiting, in trying to redecipher some grand rebel plan that isn’t going to save you now? Silka is alive, and so is Haymitch. It’s a feeling as true and palpable as the stinging. 

You pocket a piece of hot chocolate soaked glass and lift yourself off the ground. 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

That cannon wasn’t for you. He just left you, breathing and alive. Injured but alive. You’re right—you wouldn’t be talking if the dagger was lodged anywhere truly fatal. You’d be gone by now, and you aren’t. 

You’re not dead, you’re not dead, you’re not dead. 

But Wellie is when he reaches her. A dead, headless baby dove. Another casualty of a broken promise. Another image he’ll never be able to scrub clean in his memories. 

“What did you do?” he hisses. 

Silka holds up Wellie’s head defensively, drawing attention to the blood spatters on her snot-green uniform. “She attacked me.” 

Haymitch notices the poison dart hanging from her blousy sleeve. Wellie tried to protect herself, tried to stay strong, tried to uphold the Newcomer honor. And as she feared he would, Haymitch abandoned her. Oh, Wellie, what have I done to you? 

“She had to go. You have to go,” Silka continues robotically. “It’s the only way I get back to my people.” 

“We all have people. You think yours will ever be able to forget this? I know mine won’t.” He hopes Sid disowns him, curses his weakness, spits whenever he hears his pathetic brother’s name. 

“I’ll tell it how it was, when I get home,” she says. 

“Oh, you’re not going home, Silka.” He pulls the ax from his belt. You should hate Haymitch all over again—you will. You’ll hate him when you return home for letting this happen, for leaving Wellie behind in the first place, for forcing you to fulfill Maysilee’s deathbed demand on your own without so much as a goodbye. And he’s at peace with that. It’s what he deserves. 

Silka tosses Wellie’s head aside, no regard or compassion for her even in death. Her callousness does wonders for Haymitch’s resolve. Even more so when she spews, “Where’s your ally?” 

“I’d worry more about yours,” he seethes. His ax feels right at home in his hands. “Who do you think that first cannon was for?” 

Nostrils flaring, eyes welling, Silka’s first stroke comes straight down at his head.

The clash of metal echoes across the woods. You follow the sound with an agonizing hobble. The clangs and grunts lead you back to your campsite, ravaged in the wake of a hateful battle. Beyond Silka’s attempt to dislodge her ax from a tree, and Haymitch’s quick swipe at her thigh, and her retaliation, Wellie’s head lies detached from her body. 

Your feet stammer, and a low hanging branch provides stability. Nothing in your stomach but a knife, you force yourself not to keel over. 

Later. There will be time to feel it, to hate yourself, later. 

“Hey, snot-face!” you call out, raising your bow. Your papa would chide you for startling your prey, but you want her looking at you when you land the arrow. 

Silka shrieks when it strikes through her shoulder, immobilizing her left arm. You grab another arrow, but she runs your way, rams your body to the ground, and sends the arrow aimlessly through the wind. Your bow slips from your grasp. 

At the impact, the tip of the blade digs deeper. Your yelp is cut short by Silka’s forearm pressing down on your throat. You claw at her face, taking chunks of skin and blood, but the only thing that gets her to let up is a dagger to her eye. Her howl comes with a blind swipe behind her back, in the direction of the culprit. 

Haymitch, consumed by his rage for Silka and distracted by his one-track-mind for you, fails to jump back. He pays the price with a giant gash across his lower abdomen. His grip loosens on his ax as he scrambles to keep his guts from spilling onto the floor. 

You elbow Silka in the nose and make a dash for Haymitch. “Nice eye!” you shout over your shoulder as you yank him away. 

Wounded and weaponless, his intestines twisting in his fingers and your abdomen burning with each step, your sprint sputters into a staggered zigzag. You come to a stop where the alder trees make way for the burnt hedge. 

Haymitch leans back against one of them, his legs shaking like they’re about to give out. You hold him up, keeping your attention on his eyes, his nose, his lips. Anywhere but the very fatal injury. 

“What’s the plan?” he strains to say. 

Your chest heaves. “Force her to split her attention.” 

He can’t fathom leaving you again for more than a second, doesn’t want to, but there’s no good alternative. You’re running on fumes and borrowed time. Haymitch knows that as well as you do. Why couldn’t you just stay put? 

Why couldn’t he?

He gives a curt nod and dashes towards the cliffside, both hands cupping his wound now. You find cover among the trees, where he hopes you’ll be safest. 

Back pressed against the jagged bark, pinecones dropping overhead, you look down at the only weapon you have access to. You wrap your trembling fingers around the handle of the blade. Like ripping off a bandaid. You don’t stifle your cry; you need Silka to find you. 

And she does, with a fist to the face, paying you back for bloodying her nose. One eyed and all, Silka is a master at regaining the upper hand. You swipe the knife at her throat; she strikes your wrist and knocks it out of your grip. Knuckles will have to do then. You lift them and swing, spent as you are, because you’ll drag her down with you by any means before she ever gets the chance to reach Haymitch. 

Silka doesn’t bother with her ax. She punches you instead, square in the jaw. You go down, but not without punting her in the shin. Dodging your next attempt, she grabs a fistful of your hair. You shriek with indignation as much as with pain. 

Dragged like a rag-doll by the roots, you go kicking and screaming the entire way through the hedge’s boundary. Up until you’re both feet away from Haymitch. 

“Let her go,” he coughs out. “Let go!” 

With a curse of her name, a shout of yours, Haymitch tries to run your way, only for his knees to buckle entirely. He resorts to throwing whatever rocks in his vicinity at her. Does she plan to make him watch? Is she so sick in the head, so poisoned by the Capitol’s need for spectacle, that she needs to draw it out for them, even now? 

Silka throws you down, unphased by the stone that hits her in the chest. Weakly, you lift your head, hold it up high, and spit out a curdle of blood. Right at her feet. She’ll have to look you in the eye and live with whatever shame she’s capable of. Same as the very people who’ve turned each of you into pawns. 

But she doesn’t care about you right now. No, not at all. Silka has another target in mind. A different, equally vindictive parting act. 

She wants you to see Haymitch die first. 

“Kill me,” you croak, rolling onto your stomach, pushing up on your forearms. Kill me, kill me, kill me. Not him. You make a play for her ankle, and Silka steps on your fingers, cracking them in half. 

Your scream doesn’t stop her ax as it flies through the air. It never reaches its target, though. Haymitch falls forward on his face before it can, narrowly dodging the impact. You breathe out, relieved. What a pity she’ll have to settle for you. 

Silka stands over you, her hand against her eye socket, seemingly contemplating how you should go. Her momentary setback hasn’t derailed her confidence. She has time, the upper hand, and—

The ax lodges in her head with a sickening squelch. 

She writhes on the ground across from you. Your head snaps Haymitch’s way, in the direction of the glistening illusion of a force field behind him. Some trick. 

You scramble onto your knees to get to him. You fall back down when Silka stops gurgling, the cannon sounds, and it sinks in that the worst of your fears has come to pass.

Haymitch is alive…but so are you.

Your fingers are surely broken, and you’re set to bleed to death any second now, but you’re a lot better off than Haymitch. Still face-down feet away, his guts splattering out of his body, good as dead. 

He’s as good as dead. 

So you don’t think about home, or about notions of revolution, or about Wellie’s decapitated body, or about the millions of things you have yet to feel and do. 

You just reach for your failsafe. 

Haymitch is slipping, literally. In-and-out of consciousness, intestines coiling around his palms like a snake. You should be by his side right now, yelling at him, scolding his audacity, kissing him goodbye. You wouldn’t deny him a deathbed wish. And yet, you’re nowhere near. 

He raises his head, feeling the weight of a dozen dumbbells threatening to push him back down. He finds Silka’s dead body, the reflective ax sticking out of her head. And you. Slightly closer, curled on the ground, frozen completely. 

Why aren’t you moving? 

His incoming death means nothing now. Haymitch comes to his senses, alert and desperate as he drags himself across the dirt with one hand. 

Your tears, trickling out the corners of your eyes, are all Haymitch sees after you roll onto your back and he props up on an elbow. He’s slow, too slow—he shouldn’t be this slow—to notice the change in your blood. From crimson to pitch black, same as the veins running in spirals across your abdomen when he lifts your shirt. An abnormality credited to foul play. To poison. 

No. No, no, no, you said you didn’t drink the hot chocolate. You didn’t have any. You didn’t—you would’ve already been dead. And you weren’t. You aren’t. 

Sunlight glistens off a piece of glass stuck to the edge of your wound. How did— 

Haymitch was careful setting you down, wasn’t he? He’d been panicked and frantic, but he was careful. 

You rasp, “H-Haymitch, I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize, sunshine,” he croaks. “You aren’t—” You aren’t dying. You can’t be dying. You can’t—he can’t—how can he stop this? He needs to stop this, needs to save you, needs to—

Your fingers twitch like you’re attempting to grab him. Attempting to wipe away those telltale wrinkles. “Should’ve…said it sooner.” 

He shakes his head. “Just—just wait.” 

“Should’ve shown it,” you breathe, a ragged whistle of a note.

“You did. You do,” he says hopelessly, truthfully, piecing the fractures of your puzzle. “B-but you gotta hold on. You have to stay with me.” 

You try to tell him that you won’t be apart, not really. You’ll be with him forever. But the promise comes out in a strangled sputter, which he leans in to will away. Your bluebird brushes your shoulder, reminding you there was never a chance of escaping this. Not from the second Haymitch was damned to your side. There is peace in accepting your fate. There is freedom in the world that comes next, where every last one of your people awaits. Where the ones around your neck will find you someday. 

My sweet family, my formidable kin, know I fought like all-fire. Know we’ll meet in the meadow. 

You can’t make out his pleas anymore, just his horrid, haunting gasps of air. It’s all that hurts you now. Whatever strength you have left is used for one last attempt to tell Haymitch all he means and all you want for him in lieu of a life together. “Don’t follow.” 

The sun fades around the corners of your vision, leaving you with only Haymitch. I love you forever, in every world, and then some. 

Haymitch presses his lips to yours, trying to breathe into you, attempting to give you what’s left of his life because it’s yours anyway. He’s yours. Everything he is, everything he feels, belongs to you. “I love you.” He tastes salt mixed with metal. “Please don’t leave me,” he pleads against your frozen skin. “I love you, I love you.” 

He opens his eyes to the empty look in yours. Once brilliant, now lost to him forever. The agony builds and builds until it scratches his throat raw with an unending scream. But it’s not enough to numb the rest of him. He sobs, closes your eyes with shaky fingers, buries his face into your hair. “I’m sorry.” 

And it’s in the despair of the words that Haymitch realizes it’s okay. It’s going to be okay. This hole in his heart, this anguish in his body, is temporary. Because he has a much more fatal, much more literal gap dragging him down beside you. Even ground, right? 

The hovercraft fades in from afar, no announcement of the victor as far as Haymitch is aware. But it’s coming. They’ll drag him out of here, resuscitate him from the brink, stop him from following you. Just like you want. 

He acts on pure instinct when he digs for the makings of the bomb. The sunflower, the blasting cap, the quartz, his flintstriker. Thank you, Ampert, Wyatt, Maysilee, Lenore Dove, for laying the groundwork. The Gamemakers’ warnings fall on deaf ears and a grief-stricken heart. Keep your head up, Sid. Don’t fret for me now, Ma. I won’t fail again, Burdie.

Haymitch manages with one hand and his set of teeth. He rolls onto his back, tears the blasting cap, shoves it into the sunflower, dodges the stray bullets from above. Driven by a sole purpose, and the bonus of another. 

Forgive me, sunshine, for I cannot live without you. 

He’ll tell you himself when he meets you again. He’ll take your anger in stride, as he always has, because he knows where it comes from. And it won’t matter so long as he has you. You and everyone else who’s found their way to your heaven. Losses of old and those yet to pass. Pa, Mamaw, his unnamed sisters. Haymitch believes it, he feels them all waiting. Any second now. 

When he launches the sunflower into the canyon, it’s for every loose cannon, every person back in Twelve, every life the Capitol has tried to twist into nothing. It’s for you. 

Black specks dot his eyes, blocking out the arena’s artificial light, and so, he finds you. The last thing he ever wants to see in this world, the first he’ll wake to in the next.  

His brilliant, dazzling sun, keeping him warm, singing him home, as the earth crumbles beneath him. 

✶⋆.˚꩜ .ᐟ˙⋆✶

Haymitch wakes later, not to the lull of your voice or the greetings of his lost loves, but to stark white walls and gloved hands on bare skin and half-eaten nightingales filling the absence of your warmth. The sorrow he sought to ward off, the loss he fought with all his strength to avoid, crashes into him at once. Permanent, wretched, vengeful. Inevitable. And he knows you have not forgiven him. 

You never will.

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A/N: so how y’all feeling?