The glass felt wrong. It was too light—a hollow, transparent shell that mocked the heavy, suffocating pressure behind his ribs. Haymitch turned the bottle slowly, watching the final, amber smear of alcohol cling to the curve of the glass before it surrendered, sliding into nothingness.
Nothing changed. It never did. That was the cruelty of the clock; it kept ticking forward, dragging the rest of the world into a future he hadn't been invited to. He was a ghost inhabiting a body that refused to stop breathing, a man anchored in the silt of a four-year-old bloodbath.
Four years since he’d felt the grass of the arena. Still, his muscles coiled at every floorboard’s groan. Still, the silence of his house felt like a predator holding its breath. And still, Lenore Dove found the gaps in his armor, slipping through the cracks of his brokenness as if she’d never left.
She came to him in orange. It wasn’t the soft, hazy orange of a District 12 sunset or the comforting flicker of a dying fire. It was the aggressive, impossible orange of the lilies in that arena—the ones that had smelled like a funeral before the bodies were even cold. It was the color of the sky just before the hovercraft arrived to harvest the dead. It was a violent, vibrant stain on the grey canvas of his life, a reminder that the Capitol hadn't just taken his family; they had colonised his very sight.
He ground the heel of his hand into his eye socket, trying to crush the image, but the pain only made the orange brighter.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he rasped. The words didn’t carry the weight of a command. They sounded like a plea, thin and jagged, the sound of a man drowning in air.
The room remained cold. The shadows didn’t shift.
Not with a voice—he’d forgotten the exact pitch of her laughter, a loss that felt like a second death—but with that look. That steady, unbearable clarity in her eyes. She looked at him the way she had before the horn sounded: like she could see the coward, the survivor, and the drunkard all fighting for space behind his ribs. She looked at him as if he were still whole, as if he hadn't traded his soul for a victory that felt like a slow-motion execution.
His throat constricted, a physical ache that tasted like copper and salt.
The bottle slipped. It didn't shatter; it just hit the floor with a dull, muffled thud and rolled a few inches, exhausted. It had given him everything it had, and he was still conscious. He was still here.
Haymitch didn't move. He didn't reach for another bottle, not yet.
He kept his eyes wide open, staring into the dark. Because if he closed them, the orange would stop being a memory and start being a haunting. If he closed them, he’d have to face the version of Lenore that didn't know he was going to let her die. He wasn't sure he could survive the way she still looked at him—with a hope that he had long ago turned into ash.
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