Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I thought the end of the games would be the worst. Not twenty-three other kids mown down for the Capitol's entertainment, using my hands to shed the blood, but forty-seven. Forty-nine, if anyone bothers to count Woodbine and Lou Lou.

I thought sitting there in front of Caesar Flickerman would be the worst. His mock solemn features as he stared into the camera offering a close up of his face before I was even revealed to be sitting there on the stage beside him.

"This has been..." he'd said just before I appeared, in a low voice, offering the first of his many significant pauses. "An unparalleled-" Pause. "Historical-" Pause. "Unforgettable Hunger games." Pause. "This year's Quarter Quell has offered us as devastating a reminder of the Dark Days as our country has ever witnessed. Wouldn't you agree-" Pause. "Haymitch Abernathy, winner of the 50th Hunger Games!"

No more pauses. Caesar's microphone is shoved into my face as the crowd begins to clap and I've no doubt the camera shot has widened now to include me on the shot - a fact I'll have confirmed when the seemingly endless reruns to follow show me exactly that.

So I don that beloved rascal's smile that's been my reliable mask through these Games. The standing ovation confirms that, rather than 'jackass' is the version of myself this mask has won for me. I nod my head as though I never had any doubt the Games would end this way and I would be crowned their 50th Victor.

This is the moment I get to realise, in a brand new way, just how hollow that victory is.

"It certainly has been, Caesar," I answer all the same, leaning towards the microphone slightly for it to pick up every word before Caesar guides me to the upholstered chair where we'll stage the rest of this horrendous interview.

Caesar's smile is just as bright as he begins a recap from the reaping in District 12. I can't help it. My eyes wander now the cameras aren't as focused on the current performance of me. They're more interested in the past. The rigged reaping.

The only other person, the only other man, who might have any anything to do with how this Hunger Games played out, other than me, is standing to the side of the stage. His hands are clasped in front of him and he's already meeting my eyes when I look his way.

Plutarch Heavensbee.

My pasted on smile almost falters. I have to look away immediately.

After that, I thought returning to District 12 would be the worst. I don't, for a second, believe President Snow's parting words were completely sincere.

"Enjoy your homecoming," he'd said. I hadn't known at the time that Lenore Dove had never been released from prison. But every moment afterwards was filled with imaginings of the worst possible things that could have happened to her there. And that was only juxtaposed by her bravery in letting me believe otherwise before I went into my Games.

I tried to force myself to believe those words were just something President Snow said that to every so called Victor. There was no especial significance when it came to me. Maybe none of the worst things I'd been imagining had actually happened to her. Even if she hadn't been released, that meant she was still alive.

But there was also facing, for the first time, the families of Louella, Wyatt.

Maysilee.

How much of my mask have they actually believed? The Capitol might have pegged me as a beloved rascal, but the option of jackass, or even cheater, is still a likelihood for me here at home.

It would almost be easier, I think, if I was relegated to nothing more than a jackass. That I only won my Games because I cheated. Either one fits better with the label of 'murderer', alongside the heavily edited timeline in the version of the Games that's been spun.

The Gamemakers might have been scrambling to control the narrative as it was happening, but they certainly got one over me in the end. There's no hint of rebellion to explain any single one of my actions over those six days.

And I did nothing other than offer my implicit agreement of their version of events when I offered them nothing but silence. Great for the Capitol. Terrible for me. Another thing to flagellate myself over.

Would I have been able to do anything different in that interview if Plutarch had managed to get me in another aside beforehand? Had he known what version of the Games was about to be screened during that interview? Did he allow me to be blindsided?

He's Capitol, I remind myself far too many times. He's from the Capitol. How could I ever have believed him to be anything other than a snake? The idea that anyone there other than Mags, Wiress and Beetee was ever there to truly help me is ludicrous.

Once, I thought looking into Merrilee Donner's familiar features might be the worst thing.

I never had to look Jethro Callow in the eyes, in the end. But the silent questions from the McCoys ended up being worse than the judgement I had predicted.

The truth is, I had no fucking idea what the worst thing would actually be. Really. It's embarrassing, actually, how little idea I had. I thought I was braced and oh so prepared for what was about to come. Almost smart to hold myself so prepared as I did.

Once, I thought identifying the false glow of sunrise I saw rising over District 12 would be the worst thing.

Then there was the moment I recognised it for what it was. Only after that did the smell of smoke hit my nostrils. Different from coal smoke. So damningly different. Even if that hadn't given it away, I could tell by then how much closer it was than the mines.

My broken, scarred body fell into a run that was nothing like the speed or grace it had been capable of before. Just another thing the Hunger Games had taken from me; the least of it by far.

I couldn't make it to the home I'd grown up in with Ma and Sid in time. I wasn't even the first one there. Neither could anybody else.

Carson McCoy, Louella's own brother was the first to see it. There's a particularly kind of poetry in it that I think President Snow would enjoy.

"Enjoy your homecoming." The President's words whisper through again my mind almost the second I stop crying out Ma and Sid's names.

Once, I thought seeing the Donners labelled gumdrops Lenore Dove held weren't the ones I'd left behind with Sid would be the worst thing. The way that juxtaposed so cruelly with the likelihood of the two of us actually having the opportunity to ever stand in front of each other again.

But, no, we'd made it. I felt the truth of it in my bones as my hands found and then clung onto hers. She was here, and I was here, and whatever she'd gone through, whatever she'd been put through, she wasn't alone. We'd both have scars we had to work through. We could do that together.

Once, I thought watching that daring grin change to her perplexed look would be the worst thing.

(Maybe the two of us had both ended up more broken than we'd started, but now we were here and free in District 12 again and we could meet whatever might come. Because we were alive. We were both alive-)

Once, I thought the sight of that blood-flecked foam bubbling up over her lips would be the worst thing.

"Don't you... let it... rise... on the reaping... Promise." Her final words. The last of Lenore Dove's words I would be left with. The last things she would ever manage to gasp out.

Once, I thought merely considering a life without my Lenore Dove would be the worst thing.

Once I thought...

That's the problem. I spent so much of my time thinking. Before. Too damn much of it.

Thinking I could stop the Games. Thinking I could take on the Capitol. Thinking I could get the better of President Snow.

And Lenore Dove encouraged it. Thinking, thinking, always thinking.

No more.

Chapter Text

I don't wake up gradually with the sun anymore. I don't wake up gently.

I wake up as though I'm still in the Games, with a silent start and wide eyes and a hand grasping out towards a weapon that isn't there. My breath comes to me fast and more loudly as I slowly recognise that I'm alone here in the room. In the bed.

And then I realise... does the air smell sweeter in this house in the Victor's Village than in the home I used to share with Ma and Sid?

It's fucking offensive is what that is.

I've got no patience for the blankets that cover me. Nothing threadbare like the rest of what I've been used to my whole life here in District 12. There's no holes for me to stick toes through. It smells fresh, recently laundered, but that isn't the smell my nose is picking up.

I walk slowly, gingerly, but so carefully watchful as I leave the bedroom and step into the living room. A room designed for those who are still living. Am I allowed to entertain here, I wonder? My throat huffs out a bitter laugh without consciously thinking about it. Anyone I invite over here will just be added onto the hit list designed by President Snow, and he's already made it very clear how adept he is at killing.

Far better than I am.

I wince at the thought, but not before a spark of colour catches my eye. There. On the wood table. Wood polished so well there's still a sheen on it. And, above that...

"What the..." I mutter, my shoulders only lowering slightly from up by my ears.

There's a vase holding flowers on that table. The flowers themselves are nothing special, just wild flowers that grow near here. But the vase itself... the glass is clear, which is strange enough. It wouldn't be anything more expensive than glass, no here in 12, but even this is more than I'd expected to find.

The flowers are responsible for the smell I woke up to. Did flowers always send their scent so thoroughly through a household. Is it just that the houses in 12's Victor's Village are that much further away from the mines that other smells don't quite get in the way?

I know then that this 'home' will never be home like the one I once shared with Ma and Sid.

"Hey."

I start at the low voice drawing my attention to the fact that the flowers aren't the only alien thing in this alien room.

It's Burdock. I see that it's him. I see Burdock sitting there calmly and with hands up harmlessly. I see there's nothing at all threatening about his posture, but I can't quite manage to relax the shoulders that have gone straight back up to my ears again.

"It's okay..." Burdock speaks to me as though he's speaking down some kind of wild animal that's come across the town center and made itself a nuisance. Not that it happens often, but Burdock's manner shows he'd have a way with any that came.

It seems like he's aged like I feel I've aged. Or maybe it's not about him at all. Maybe it's only interaction with me that's brought it out in him. Just another thing stacked up against me now.

So I nod jerkily and try to make things just a little easier on him.

"I know," I say, and even I can hear the moodiness in those two words. I shake my head, as though that'll help calm me. When that doesn't work, I reach for the only excuse I have. Well, the only excuse I wanna use anyway. "I only just woke up, is all."

"Sure," Burdock says easily. Then, sparing me his ongoing stare, he looks around us and gives a low whistle. "It's actually nice in here. Never knew anyone who dared come into one of these houses over the last decades."

"Yeah, well I earned it," I answer darkly.

Burdock nods grimly. "Yeah..." he echoes. There's something beseeching in my friend's eyes, but I speak up before he can say another thing.

"I don't wanna talk about it."

"Sure," Burdock agrees just as quick. He shrugs, as though me not talking about it isn't anything. "I probably saw enough to understand most of what you went through. We all did. It looked harrowing."

But me keeping silent again is not nothing. It's another choice for me to keep alive the propaganda put together by President Snow's Gamemakers. Everything Burdock believes is true from what they watched in the mandatory viewing was faked.

Yet, what's my other choice?

I do come as close as I get to launching into some of the mess that was this year's Games. He already knows I wasn't meant to be reaped, of course. Isn't that enough to let him know that some of the other footage might have been faked? I would have told Lenore Dove everything, if she'd lived long enough. I would have told Ma and Sid; it wouldn't have occurred to me not to.

Would I have felt more or less wracked with guilt if President Snow's strikes had come after I'd shared information that I knew was meant to be sensitive?

But then I remember what I was thinking just before I caught sight of the flowers he must have brought. Not something Burdock would have thought of himself, now I think of it. More likely, Astrid somehow organised it on behalf of District 12's only Victor.

I almost gag.

Burdock looks as though he's about to stand up from the chair he's made himself at home in. Worry lights up his features. I can't deal with that. I can't deal with any of that.

"You gotta go," I tell him, trying to sound strong. Trying to sound like my knees don't wanna give out underneath me.

"I... what?" he asks, clearly confused. I wasn't exactly welcoming before, but I'm outright hostile now.

I don't care that he's confused. I just want him to live. I just want him alive. That means I can't tell him anything. I can't even see him!

And, for that, he can't stay here.

"You gotta go," I tell him again, firming my mouth more to ensure my point gets across.

"Haymitch..." Burdock starts.

"I don't wanna hear it and I don't wanna talk about it," I say. My eyes are burning into his and there's a part of me that hopes he understands what I'm trying to say even as I send him away. That he can understand why I'm doing this and maybe he won't hold against me what's necessary. I gotta take care of Burdock now like I couldn't take care of Sid or Ma. Of Lenore Dove. Of Maysilee. Of Louella, Wyatt, even Lou Lou.

Man, my body count just here in 12 is getting too damn much. I can let it keep creeping up.

"GET OUT!!" I scream and, finally, Burdock leaves.

The flowers stay behind them.

I pick up the vase, the no doubt expensive vase that might have come from Mayer Undersee's own home for all I know. I pick it up and throw it against the wall with a yell, where it promptly shatters. Waters, flowers and shards of glass fly everywhere.

“Used up all your wits in the arena, huh, Haymitch? Look at you now.”

It isn't only President Snow's words that whisper back to me at the oddest times. At least I can be thankful that Maysilee's words from the arena have waited to come until I'm alone in this ridiculous house that I've earned.

The Capitol sure has an odd way of celebrating those it hadn't managed to kill. I still wasn't part of the Capitol, far from it, no matter that I'd won their Games. I almost wish I could have stayed there. In my current mood, I think I could actually pick up the kind of games Plutarch was fond of playing.

At least, if I was in the Capitol still, no one else I cared about would die.

But I wasn't truly part of District 12 now either. Not like I had been before. It wasn't just the evidence of President Snow gunning for me. It wasn't just that he'd so swiftly managed to kill just about everyone I cared about here in 12. Even if the existence of the Victor's Village alone wouldn't separate me, the fact I'd be the single individual from District 12 to ever come home made that point clear enough.

I wasn't part of anywhere.

"Lenore Dove..." I whimpered, pushing memories of Maysilee, of Burdock, away for memories of the far more recently dead.

I don't end up back in the Capitol on my timeline. In the wake of the 50th Hunger Games and Second Quarter Quell, the Capitol's taste for blood has been sated for another year. I'm not a Career, to just insert myself into the Capitol afterwards, as I've heard some of the Victors of Districts 1, 2 and 4 have started doing. I'm not actually sure how the Capitol would react if I actually managed to convince a Peacekeeper to send me back up to the Capitol, even if I am their most recent Victor.

I have my place in the Victor's Village, after all. That's everything I'm owed from the Capitol for my part to play. The Capitol has no further responsibility to me now.

Burdock isn't the next one to try finding me in the Victor's Village. I refuse to call it home, even though it's the only place I have to sleep.

Not that I'm sleeping well.

I'm sitting out the back of my place looking over the trees and wondering if it's this direction Lenore Dove's people once came from, when I hear footsteps behind me.

"Go away!" I call out, without so much as turning my head.

"Not gonna do that, Haymitch," comes the reply.

It's Blair's voice and I recognise it easily even though we were never quite so close as Burdock and me.

Instead of answering, I hold onto silence and keep staring out towards those trees, thinking he'll grow bored of being ignored and maybe even go away on his own. Either way, he's not a threat to me. No matter how much my brain keeps throwing up threats, nothing in District 12 is a threat to me now. Not even the Games pose any significant threat now that I've won them. If I was inclined to being more optimistic, I might even think how I don't need to dread my birthday anymore.

Other kids will get reaped after me but now... I'm safe forever.

From the Games at least. President Snow is another matter. I don't think I'll ever be safe from him again.

Slowly, I register a soft, repetitive sound coming a little way behind me. It's not Blair's footsteps anymore. He's hardly moved his feet since the last time he answered me. But, when I turn to tell him to knock it off, I find that he's got some kind of stick in his hand and is sharpening it with the familiar knife he often used when we'd play together.

As though he can feel my gaze on him, he lifts his head and smiles.

At least one of us is still capable of smiling.

"I brought another one," Blair said, and there's a twinkle in his eye that says, for him, we might as well still be the two boys we once were playing knife games together. That he'll put aside his whittling if only I say I'm willing to play again now.

"You don't wanna put a knife in my hand." I try to make it sound like a threat. Like I'm the first Victor of 12 and that makes me a killer and Blair could be in danger from me.

But I know that's a lie. I'll never kill, or be responsible for the killing of another person in District 12 as long as I can help it.

From the completely blasé expression on Blair's face, it seems like he knows this as well.

"Sure I do," he answers smoothly.

"You're an idiot."

"Come on, Haymitch," Blair replied, still sounding amiable enough. "Don't sound like that. I only wanted to help keep you company. You're spending a lot of time out here on your own."

"Yeah? Well that's what happens when there's no other Victors from your District," I tell him, as though he needs reminding.

Blair just gives me a long look. "Just because you live out here now, doesn't mean you need to keep yourself separate from the rest of us. There's still the whole rest of the District. A lot of us guys are just grateful that you went, after... Woodbine..." Blair trails off as though he realises he's skimmed too close to what Haymitch doesn't wanna talk about.

Haymitch wonders if Burdock's already told him and others in town that he doesn't wanna talk about this.

Blair all but confirms it a moment later when he says, "But we don't need to talk about that. We don't need to talk about anything. Just know everyone's only proud you came back. We wanna keep seeing you. Hattie, I think, wants to see you most of all. Have you even talked to her again... since you came... back?"

Most of what Blair just said, I don't reply to. There's only one thing I feel the need to answer.

Doesn't mean you need to keep yourself separate from the rest of us.

"Yeah, I do," I tell Blair solemnly. "I do need to keep myself separate."

Then I get up. I walk straight past him as he calls my name and I step inside the only Victor's house currently being used in this so called Village. Then I close the door behind me.

Chapter Text

The first time a Peacekeeper comes to slide an envelope of victor winnings under my door, I jump and have to bite back a cry. The second time, I think it might be Blair or Burdock not getting the hint that I wanna be left alone.

The third time, I listen for the growing familiar sound of boots on the outside step. A shuffle as they pull out both money and food parcel. And then, without so much as a knock on the door, whatever Peacekeeper's been assigned this thankless job turns around on their heel and walks away back to the town.

I prefer it that way. It means I can wait until the Peacekeeper is gone before collecting the bounty I've earned, before going out to collect it. So doing, I pass many weeks without ever talking to anyone. I make sure to start locking the door after Burdock's intrusion. I take to pretending I'm not at home when people either knock or call. Not that there are a lot of them. Burdock, Blair and Asterid come around the most. The McCoys come once or twice. I even think Merrilee came by on one occasion, but she didn't speak. There was just the sound of sniffling outside after that knocking, as though she was desperately trying to hold her tears back. And failing.

"Come on, Haymitch." Maysilee stared at me with disapproval in my mind. "You just gonna stand there?"

It probably wasn't Merrilee. I've never either seen or heard her cry apart from that time when they were burying Maysilee. (And Ma, and Sid, and Louella, and Wyatt.)

"You hear that?" I mutter more than once at Maysilee's ghost when I can't stand the haunting. "You're buried. I killed you."

I'm not sure it's me or my imagined Maysilee that's more surprised at how vicious I have learned how to be.

There's no doubting it. Lenore Dove was the best part of me. It wasn't the Hunger Games that killed that part of me dead. It was putting Lenore Dove in the ground and knowing nothing would ever bring her back.

There are times when the silence gets so loud I almost wish for Maysilee or Lenore Dove or almost anyone's voices to echo back at me. But I don't go outside until night time, after I'm sure no one will come all the way to the Victor's Village cause they're too busy getting abed for the

Only I don't need to work. Only I have a lifetime guarantee of food and funds.

Sometimes, I stare at the milk and meat and various parcels and wonder what it would be like if I just... didn't eat them. Or, if I lied and said I had enough, but offered them instead to families with more need. The McCoys, maybe, would appreciate it. Clerk Carmine and Tam Amber as well.

I could starve myself while pretending that any amount of food I could ever offer makes up for what I've taken. From them, from myself.

I don't though. That would mean I had to leave the fortress I live in now instead of a home. Not only that, but I made a promise to Lenore Dove. It was the last one I'll ever make, which means I can't break it.

"Don't you... let it... rise... on the reaping... Promise."

I just... don't know how to honour it. Honour isn't a thing that seems to exist within me much these days.

I end up falling asleep outside. I suppose its inevitable since I keep going out there at night. The sun's already up, signalling a new, hopeless day no different to the one that came before it.

"Haymitch?" Asterid's voice is hesitant, like she isn't quite sure she wants me to hear her calling, or like she didn't expect to find me during this visit, I'm not sure which.

Her eyes are bright and she looks nothing like Lenore Dove, except she reminds me of her because, to Burdock, I know she's what Lenore Dove was to me. A smile moves her mouth and I blink too many times before determinedly looking away from her. I can feel my eyes are too bright, my face too flushed. It's the first time I've seen Asterid since she gave me that sleeping syrup after my Ma's house burned down. I was smart enough to start locking up before she ever arrived by Burdock's side.

"There you are..." she says, and she sounds so unutterably sad. The thing is, a rising anger in me says she has nothing to be sad about. Her whole life with Burdock is still ahead of her. Kids, if they wanna bring them into this damned world. Her parents are even still alive, I think.

What does Asterid March have to be unutterably sad about?

"Did Burdock send you here?" I demand gruffly, still avoiding her eyes and trying to blink dry my own.

"Of course not. We're friends, aren't we?"

I pause because... were we really friends before I went to the Hunger Games? Or was it just that we were around the same age and Burdock liked her that meant we spent any time together at all? I thought she was nicer than Maysilee once, but that was about all.

"Of course," I say wearily, because I don't actually have the heart to hurt her right now.

"Since you're out here," Asterid says, increasing in confidence with every moment that passes, "I was wondering if you wanted to come with me and we could see Burdock today. Just hang out. Like we used to?"

"I..." My hand rubs against the back of my neck. The tiredness I'm feeling isn't feigned and I'm doing my best not to scratch at what I'm fairly sure are mosquito bites. "I actually fell asleep out there last night, and don't think I slept too well."

Sympathy immediately lights her eyes, and I find sympathy over this small thing easier to bear than sympathy over that big thing that looms over everything else and changed my life forever.

"Of course. No, of course. How are you sleeping?"

"All right," I grouse, because that doesn't sound like sympathy over just one night's sleep anymore.

"I just meant... well, we had extras, at the apothecary. And I thought you might... well, they might be useful for you." She lifts her chin up and stares me in the eye for a long moment before I think to look down at what she's holding in her hand.

"I don't have anything to trade," I say immediately, because that's the way it's been between us up till now. It's the way it is here between everyone in 12. Nobody gets anything for nothing.

Apart from, apparently, the lone victor of District 12. I am uncharted territory in what this District is willing to offer.

"That's okay," Asterid says, confirming what I'm already thinking with a short nod. "Take it. It's yours."

I don't say no a second time. I still remember the dreamless sleep I had the first time Asterid offered this to me.

I haven't slept as well since.

"And Merrilee..." Asterid starts. My jaw hardens, knowing already what's coming. "I think Merrilee would appreciate it if you came over to talk to her about Maysilee. About what it was like for Maysilee. We both would, Haymitch."

"I'll think about it," I tell her. The sleep syrup is already safe in my hands and I can't get away from her fast enough. The door slams behind me. I forget to lock it in my hurry to down the syrup and earn some actual peace for a change. It doesn't matter, though, because I've been effective enough already at pushing people away that no one else comes to my fortress that day.

But I should have known just speaking to Asterid would be enough to bring both her and Burdock back to my door. They were holding hands as they arrived. Holding hands. In plain sight of me happening to just glance out the window. As if I didn't already have enough of my own to deal with.

Setting my jaw, I grabbed what was already an empty bottle of sleep syrup from the same table Burdock and Asterid's flowers had once sat on. There were still shards of glass on the floor, I was sure, but none of them close enough that I would step on them. Not anymore. I'd cleared at least that much, sick of the small cuts that kept appearing in the soles of my feet.

When I pull open the front door, I take in Burdock and Asterid's shocked expressions for just a moment before I pin Asterid with a hard stare and shake the bottle in her direction. "Come back with more of this already?"

Asterid recognises it immediately. I see when it dawns on her a moment later that the bottle's empty. "That... should have lasted you weeks."

"It lasted a week," I tell her. "So that's pretty much the same thing."

"Haymitch..." Burdock starts.

"No, it's my fault. I didn't..." Asterid swallows, and I realise then how dishevelled I probably look. Bare footed, still in the clothes I slept in, hair unwashed and unbrushed.

I shove some of it away from my eyes and just glare back at them both. I didn't ask them to come. In fact, I did the exact opposite.

"I didn't properly explain the dosages it should be taken in," Asterid finishes a moment later.

Burdock looks at her then turns back to me with a short nod. "Well, maybe that's something we can go over this time, seeing as how we're here."

I just stare at Burdock. Does he really think, after having blissfully dream free nights this last week, I'm gonna do anything different at all if I get my hands on another bottle of that stuff?

"Yeah, maybe," I say with a scoff.

Burdock narrows his eyes. "Look, we both know you've been through a lot. More than anyone here in 12 can ever get-" he starts.

I take a step onto the porch. "No, you don't know. All you saw is a fabricated version of events that the Capitol wanted you to see. That's all you know. Which is nothing at all! I was there." I punctuate this with a hard thrust to my own sternum.

"Fabricated version of events..." Burdock shakes his head. "Haymitch, what are you talking about?"

Just as I'm readying into another proper rant, I realise abruptly... This is quite possibly the stupidest thing. Right now, the three of us are standing together in the Victor's Village—a village off District 12 literally built by the Capitol for those who have one Capitol Games—and I'm shouting out Capitol secrets as though President Snow will never hear about it.

Quickly hiding my discomfort, a trick I learned in the very same Games and now I'm stuck with it, I turn my expression into a sneer. "Of course you don't know what I'm talking about. When did you ever know anything, Burdock? You're only some miner living in the Seam. What do you even see in him anyway?" I asked, turning my attention whip quick to Asterid. "Why don't you find someone from a nice merchant family to give your heart to? You gotta know moving from your parents' house into the Seam is gonna be a lot poorer than you're used to."

"That's enough." Burdock's voice was hard and low. He was still my friend in that moment, but he wasn't playing around anymore.

Well, either was I. It was because Burdock was my friend that I did what I needed to do next.

"Hardly!" I scoffed again, taking another step onto the porch and closer to them. "You two come here, holding your hands as though you've got anything to be proud of. I had something to be proud of. I had a life waiting for me when I got home. I made promises..." My throat catches here and I'm crying even though I try to stop.

"Haymitch..." It's Asterid who says my name this time. She lets go of Burdock's hand and is the first to move towards me while Burdock stays back, eying me warily.

"We both know, after everything you went through, what happened with your Ma and Sid, not to mention Lenore Dove-"

"There you go again!" I cried out. "Speaking about things you don't know anything about. Because you don't, Burdock!" I bent down to the pebbles right out front of the porch. There was a whole bed of pebbles in place of anything more colourful like pebbles. "If you knew anything at all, you'd stop speaking!"

I threw that handful of rocks in Burdock's direction. Not satisfied with that, I bent down to pick up another handful, readying to throw it too when I realised that one of the rocks I'd thrown had hit Asterid. Her hand had already lifted to touch it and come away with bright red across the fingers.

Burdock muttered a curse before racing up to her side. Asterid only stared at me with a wounded expression as the blood poured down her otherwise pale face.

It was more blood than I'd seen since the Games.

"This is out of line, even for you, Haymitch," Burdock yelled.

I opened my mouth, but I had no idea what to say.

What could I say? Mine had been the hand that had willfully injured Asterid. Snow hadn't even made me do it this time. Friend or not, Burdock was right. I had been way out of line.

Problem was, I had no idea how to get back in line again. It wasn't like I could take what I'd just done back.

After a long, terrible moment of silence, Burdock put his arm around Asterid's shoulders and led her away.

When I went back inside, I placed the empty bottle of sleep syrup very carefully on the table. I wasn't adding more glass to the floors, not today.

Chapter Text

"Burdock's still real mad with you," Blair said sometime after that day.

"Uh huh." I had pretty much expected that. I hadn't heard anything else about Asterid, though, which must have meant her parents patched her up and nothing worse had happened other than a scratched up face.

It was worse than anything I'd done in the Games for so many reasons.

"I think," Blair said slowly, "if you apologised to Burdock, and Asterid of course..."

Blair let his words trail off. I let them go unanswered because, honestly, I wasn't thinking things a good friend should have been thinking right then. I wasn't worried so much about Asterid as I was about getting hold of more of the apothecary sleep syrup. It didn't seem so likely she'd wanna give it to me after what happened. Unsure what her parents would think. If the rock had marked her face, and she let them know it was me...

It was still an embarrassingly long time before I considered I had access to an alternative. I have only the excuse that I'd never been a drinker. It had been part of what had made me such a good partner working with Hattie. With the exception of the bottle she'd handed me for my birthday, I'd never had any of it for myself. And even what Hattie had given me for my birthday, I'd ended up trading to Asterid.

But I didn't wanna think about Asterid, or Burdock, right then.

It was time to go see Hattie.

"Was wondering when I'd see your face again." Hattie leans away from the white liquor she's in the midst of distilling, crossing her arms across her more than ample chest. For a moment, softness enters into her eyes as she looks at me. "Now that you're back. Wasn't sure that was gonna happen."

"Yeah, well." I shrug. I'm back. She knows I'm back. She knows where I live now and, presumably, what happened to Ma and Sid.

And Lenore Dove. Yeah, she'd definitely know what happened to Lenore Dove.

I sniff. "Find someone else to train up as partner while I was gone?"

Hattie snorts. "You know I didn't."

I nod. That is what I expected. A casual look around shows empty pint bottles waiting to be filled with wine, shows mash in the lean-to, shows every piece of what I would have expected to find here in Hattie's stall in the Hob before I got reaped for the Games.

There's a part of me that exhales in relief at this proof that some things haven't changed. But then I remember that isn't the reason I'm here today.

"I can help out again, if you like," I murmured.

Hattie eyes me, and it's like she can see the things I'm choosing not to say behind the things I am. "That so?"

I nod again. "You can pay me in white liquor. You know, seeing as I don't need a wage anymore."

Hattie's jaw tightens and any lingering softness that remained in her eyes with the sight of me vanishes then. She nods once, looking away from me as she does it. From her stance, it's as though this is exactly what she had been expecting and, now it's happened, she's telling herself she shouldn't be surprised.

Well, she shouldn't. What should she expect from the only victor of the Games currently in District 12?

I stand tall and force myself not to shrug or look away. "I'm a man now," I say, reminding her. "If I'm old enough to make it..."

"Yeah yeah." Hattie waves away the beginnings of my argument as she turns away with clear irritation. "I know what I said."

"So?" It's taking every effort in me not to fidget. I need her to answer soon. I need the certainty of knowing where my next source of medicine is coming from.

Somewhere along the line, my shoulders have lifted up around my ears and they don't really loosen from that placement when Hattie continues, still facing away from me, "I have no interest in supplying you with an alcohol habit on top of what you've already been through."

"It's because of what I've already been through that I need this!" I burst out. Surely she can see that! Or would be able to see that if she just turned around and looked at me again.

She may not be looking at me, but I can feel the drips of sweat popping up under my arms and sliding down my sides. I can smell the stink of desperation surrounding me. Maybe Hattie can too. She doesn't need to look at me to use her sense of smell.

"I heard what happened with the Covey girl," Hattie says, and my breath heaves out of me in a whoosh. Only Burdock so far has tried to get me to talk about Lenore Dove. Sure, Asterid tried to get me talking about Maysilee, but that's a different thing. Maysilee got reaped into the Games, same as me. Even moreso, considering she wasn't a last minute replacement after the one who should have been reaped was killed by Peacekeepers instead.

Lenore Dove hadn't had the same odds as us in the Games. But she was still dead, and I was still here.

I can't figure if it's worse or better that Hattie didn't use her name. I can feel my jaw tightening just the same and now Hattie looks at me again. "As well as what happened to your family. Haymitch, I'm sorry. But this just isn't the way."

"So all that talk you gave me about training me to be a partner one day...!" I say, as though bringing up her previous words will work better for me this time than the last.

It's too late, because she's already shaking her head. "I think we both know that dream ended the day you got reaped."

"But I'm back!" I yell these words out, but I'm still with it enough to notice the way my raised voice causes Hattie to flinch. Just slightly, but it's there. I force myself to modulate my volume. "I'm back," I say, and it just comes out sounding weak this second time.

Hattie stares at me with that eerie way of seeing beneath what I'm saying out loud again. "Are you?" she asks.

With a growl, I turn away from Hattie before I do something else I'll regret. There aren't any rocks in here, but there are worse instruments. A distillery—especially one that's meant to stay quiet and unobtrusive enough for the Peacekeepers to believably turn their blind eye—is not the kind of place for me to lose my temper.

Blair somehow falls into step with me as I leave the Hob behind me. "You visited Hattie?"

The grunt I give is my only answer.

"That's good," he says anyway. "Get back to your old routine. Obviously you're living somewhere different now, and... things are different all over the place, but all the more reason-"

I turn on him. I held back from losing my temper in front of Hattie. I didn't want to chance a repeat of what happened to Asterid staring back at me whenever Blair crossed my path. But the temper I felt inside the distillery is still riding me. I wanna punch something already and now Blair's here just talking about things he doesn't know anything about.

"Old routine?" I sneer. "You think if I go back to working with Hattie, things will go back to normal again?"

"Well..." Blair started, taking half a step back, probably at the fury that's alive in my features. I can feel it burning through me and god it feels good to give into all this useless rage I'm feeling. Rage I can't direct at the one man in Panem who truly deserves it.

So, Blair will do in his place.

"Nothing is going back to normal for me," I told him. The first word exploded out of my mouth with force enough that Blair's head shot back.

It was too much like the way I imagined Asterid's head must have shot back with the impact of a rock striking her. I stared at Blair in horror then, without another word, spun away from him, shoving my hands in my trousers before I could actually give in to the urge to punch something.

To punch him.

I knew Blair didn't deserve it. I knew Blair was the last person I was angry at.

Hattie was right. The Haymitch Abernathy everyone in District 12 had known before the 50th Hunger Games was not the Haymitch who had come back. It was a quelling truth to realise about myself.

"Haymitch."

There was a quaver in Blair's tone as he called for my attention again rather than just letting me run away.

"What is it, Blair?" I sounded tired. I felt tired. It wasn't a tiredness borne from not sleeping enough. It was the weight of everything I have to hold bearing down too hard against my shoulders. The guarded way I had to hold myself against everyone who had ever mattered. The way it felt like, even though I was free of the Games, it felt like I was living by the whims of a Game still. I felt I might collapse with it.

What would happen then? If I just... stopped being able to bear this weight?

"I just wanted to say... I understand." I started shaking my head while I still had my back to Blair, but he seemed to recognise the inanity of his initial statement and immediately moved to adjust it. "I mean, I understand that I can't understand what it's like for you. Not the Games, not surviving them, not coming back here afterwards. No one in 12 can."

I turned around then. I'm not sure why.

Blair's eyes were shining and, as I watched, twin tears overflowed and fell down both his cheeks.

"Because you're the first person in forty years to manage it. You must be so brave. So strong. But I understand where you're coming from. Why you have to separate yourself from everything you were before."

My throat felt thick with tears just as real as the ones Blair was openly shedding. I couldn't tell him about President Snow, about how he'd almost certainly arranged the fire that had killed Ma and Sid. The way he'd definitely sent the gumdrops that had killed Lenore Dove. I couldn't tell him any of it, but Blair still seemed to understand enough of things that were real despite that.

"I'm not who I was before," I say, putting the thought into words for the first time.

Blair sobbed. "You're not who you were before."

And then, as though sensing that the worst of the danger at my hands had past—at least for the minute—he darted forward and wrapped his arms around me. It was the first embrace I'd accepted since Lenore Dove's last embrace. I don't know what it was about this hug that was different, that allowed me to give up the mantle I'd been guarding against anyone replacing the feeling of holding Lenore Dove.

The embrace didn't last long, no more than a couple of seconds. Blair darted away. He was wiping his eyes and his nose even as he turned away without looking at me another time.

That was that, then. Without Blair, without Hattie, without Burdock or Asterid, without any of the ghosts that still surrounded me... who the hell was I?

Without aid from Asterid's sleep syrup, without Hattie's white liquor, I begin to visit old Bascom Pie.

We'd never talked before the Games. There'd been no reason to. I worked with Hattie before and he probably assumed I shared her scruples. Now, she'd denied me liquor as easily as she'd once denied the crazy Chance boys - Woodbine and his brothers.

Bascom Pie never showed such scruples then. Whether I had them before or not, I certainly wasn't above going to someone like him now.

Chapter Text

No matter how I inwardly or outwardly beg, Lenore Dove never releases me from the last promise I made her.

"Don't you... let it... rise... on the reaping... Promise."

Things get worse after I find orange spray paint on a wall that I read as being in her hand writing, or as close an approximation as spray paint can be.

"You promised me," blinks back at me from behind my eyelids each night before I sleep. Before I knock myself out into unconsciousness. I barely notice the mosquito bites that cover my now healed skin. I look almost normal on the outside. The worst of the scars now hide beneath the surface.

I'm not even sure whether Lenore Dove's message was real or imagined and I don't have the courage to try to find it or read it a second time. I try to ignore it.

The rest of that year after the Quarter Quell trickles on by no matter what I do, or don't do. I'm alone, alone, so alone, with only rotgut and my own self-pity for company. It's no good company at all, but at least it's safe. President Snow has made it clear he wants to see me continue to live, at least, so that means I'm the only company I'm safe to keep.

And then... there's Effie Trinket, right in time for the Harvest Festival.

My lips part when I see her standing above me. At first, I think she's one of my ghosts come to haunt me, before remembering she didn't die. I open my mouth to ask if Snow killed her after I was out of the Capitol but words won't form. If she's dead and sent here to haunt me, the longer I can put it of the better.

If Effie was sunshine and optimism in the heart of the Capitol, there's nothing of that in her now. She's twitching her fingers and looking around my fortress in the Victor's Village as though even the very best of District 12 is beneath her high standards.

And I realise this is the first time I've seen disapproval in her features or tone.

"Good to see you too, Effie," I mutter, before wincing at the sound of how raw my voice sounds. When was the last time I had any reason to speak to anyone out loud? Five days ago? A week? Two?

Effie scowls harder, as though the very sound of my voice earns new disapproval on top of the general state of me.

I shrug. Can't please everyone. Or anyone, apparently. I'm sorely out of practice at doing either.

Last year was the longest of my life and this year isn't proving different or better. My birthday's still almost six months off, but a reaping is the last thing I have to worry about right now.

When was the last time anyone in 12 had to acknowledge the beginnings of a Victory Tour up close and personal? Watching it on Capitol News is one thing. This year, it's gonna start in District 12. With me.

I'm sure I'd have more of a feel for other District 12 opinions on seeing that train coming into the station months earlier than the reaping if I still spoke to anyone with regularity.

The first I even know about their arrival is with an exclamation from Effie what I judge to be near the front door. Effie isn't alone in coming to me in District 12. Proserpina and Vitus' familiar faces hesitate in the doorway of the bedroom where I'm just waking up from passing out the night before. I wonder how all three of them would have reacted if this had been one of those mornings when I hadn't found my way back inside before the sun rose? They don't actually know how dark and bitter it gets. They think this is the worst of it when it's only the surface.

I stagger out of bed, dimly aware of the way both Proserpina and Vitus take half a step back towards the front door, even though they're far further away than Effie. They're weak in constitution and couldn't have handled a fifth of what I've been through. Even that's generous.

Effie rather stubbornly continues to stand her ground.

"Enough about me. What'd I miss up at the Capitol? I'm sure you know all the good gossip."

Effie squints as the ripe smell of rotgut travels between my unwashed mouth and her pristine, made-up nose. The diamantes on the ends of her eyelids quiver as if in judgement she can't bring herself to speak. Or maybe she's sparing my feelings. Because she thinks this is the worst of it too. She remembers the Haymitch Abernathy from a year ago and doesn't realise yet how much has changed.

I've been at least eighteen different versions of myself since returning to District 12, in my victorious triumph. Each one has been worse than the one previous. I'm well on my way to making Bascom Pie a moderately well-off man. Far from respectable, though. The rest of 12 still looks down on him as much as they're beginning to look down on me.

"This just won't do," she murmurs, multiple times, always accompanied with a shake of her head and a delicate little sigh as though, eventually, I'll realise how much I'm putting her out with all my drunken bad breath, my determination to have gone unwashed and unshaven up till now. My hair is long overgrown, even by 12's standards, and I can't remember the last time I did more than rinse it under the water.

A shower isn't enough for Effie. She sends Proserpina to fill the tub and the woman looks, frankly, glad to be offered a reason to step out of my company. Only when the tub's full, and I'm in it, does Effie actually begin to tell me any of the gossip. It takes me a minute to remember I asked, and that she must have taken my question literally.

I do my best to pay attention, more out of the habit of listening to my team while in the Capitol than anything else. She tells me of Drusilla's hip injury and Plutarch suggesting her as a viable replacement. I can't help but think how, if anyone broke a hip here, it would almost be kinder to shoot them rather than let them be a burden on the rest of the family. Drusilla is probably living the high life even still within the Capitol, having others cater to her every whim even while she recovers from the best medical attention available.

But Effie is beside herself with glee at the opportunity, completely unaware of the differences between Capitol and 12 even as she stands within this District. I must smell better by now because she's no longer scrunching up her nose and delicately turning her face aside each time I decide to say anything in response.

And, as much as I hate to admit it, it feels better to scrub off all the dirt, to shave the beard that had grown all the way down my neck. A drop of soapy water falls from my hair and into my eye and it stings a little, just enough to cement me in the present. To remind me this moment is actually real rather than imagined.

I don't feel like myself again so much as I don't feel so much like a good for nothing screw up who's going to end up offering a death sentence to anyone he's close to.

President Snow wouldn't kill people from the Capitol who are actively employed to help me blend in within his precious Capitol.

Would he?

Would it matter to me if he killed Effie?

I tell myself no, sternly. She is from the Capitol just as much as Plutarch who put her in the coveted position she currently holds.

I try to harden myself as I hardened myself against Burdock, even after he showed me where Lenore Dove was buried.

Effie and I have inherently opposing views. She, like Plutarch who appears on the train to fulfill the contract that says he'll record my Victory Tour, is here for a job. I'm here because it's the place in the world where I was birthed. We aren't the same. Can't be.

Still, I can't deny that Effie's carefree and bubbly personality doesn't fill me with something like yearning. It would be easier if I let myself believe the world was the way Effie sees it.

For the sake of the Victory Tour, I determine to usher back a return of that beloved rascal who publicly won the most recent Games. It's who everyone watching is going to expect to see. Only District 12 will know the truth of the shame I've descended into this year.

That's part of what the Capitol achieved in separating us into our segmented Districts. For once, something he's done is to my benefit.

I'm gonna need a lot of alcohol to manage this. Thankfully, alcohol is not something the Capitol lacks and what they brew tastes a damn sight better than the rotgut I'm used to.

The 39th Victory Tour starts with a brief interview in my fortress. Plutarch stages and calls it my 'home' and I don't correct him. What would be the point? In front of this many cameras, he won't say anything real to me anyway.

In the train carriage from 12, Effie and I embark on our first battle of wills in the attempt of keeping me sober. She loses. Plutarch looks amused. There are a few times on the way to the Capitol when I lift a glass in his direction and think I see that amusement as a mask that's covering something else.

So what. This is the Capitol and a train line that runs by the Capitol's grace. We all wear masks to protect ourselves, or it.

The hardest stop is District 11, where Lou Lou came from. She's the only one from another District that I had anything to do with in the Games. Even if everyone thinks her Louella from District 12, I know better. Somehow, despite everything I've seen and done, that still matters to me.

District 11 is where Plutarch's bland amusement comes to its end, temporarily at least. It's the first place we've been that isn't bugged. It's the first place we've stood alone since the last time I was in the Capitol.

I want to ask him whether he knew ahead of time the way the Gamemakers would rewrite the entirety of my Games. I want to demand he does something to make this, any of this, better. But he surprises me with demands Lenore Dove would have been proud of.

"Don't you... let it... rise... on the reaping... Promise."

The path I'm set on is one committed to doing exactly what I promised her I wouldn't. As I return to this place that was the last place I say Maysilee, that the ghosts of both girls come to me with vicious recrimination.

"Well, your gal's full of surprises. Guess she got the jump on us after all."

"You promised me."

Thankfully District 11 is visited and then out of the way after the first stop.

Effie writes me cards to read from before each of the tour stops. I have no reason to deviate from them, when I can read them correctly. I come to learn there's a certain amount of alcohol in my system that leaves me numb enough to smile and say the pretty words but not so much that it leaves me tripping over them.

Effie always smiles the prettiest when I've made the fewest deviations from her script.

Whatever alcohol I hold myself back from during the day, I double down on in the hours before passing out. It's the only way to make sure my dreams are free of Lenore Dove's face glaring at me with condemnation.

Chapter Text

It would be easier if I let myself believe the world was the way Effie sees it.

It's funny how, the first time, being carted around the Capitol for those ten days after I was announced victor of the Quarter Quell hadn't even rated on my list of worst things. At worst, it had the thing putting off my getting home to Lenore Dove sooner. My Covey girl.

(It had been the thing putting off my letting her eat the gumdrops that killed her.)

It's no surprise anymore that no one knows how the Games really went, just like no one outside 12 knows I wasn't originally reaped. The Capitol, President Snow, has killed everyone I ever would have told. And, to keep everyone else alive, I've told no one else. Around the time I think about it, that's usually when I pour myself another drink.

I'm drunk during my first conversation with Caesar Flickerman after the victor's interview. We're both at the same party. Everyone seems to be at this party. It's by far the most lavish celebration I've seen in the Capitol. I'd naively thought they'd pulled out all the stops after I was crowned victor, but this is something else.

Caesar claps me on the shoulder as though he's pleased to see me. As though it might've only been a week since the last time we spoke, rather than almost a year. He looks exactly the same. And I...

Well, on the outside, I suppose I probably do look pretty close to the last time he saw me too. I've been bathed, oiled, perfumed and dressed anew since arriving in the Capitol, where I found that an entire new wardrobe had been commissioned for me by a proud faced Effie who waits with baited breath to hear my gratitude for the gesture.

"Thanks," I told her.

Effie's hands were still clasped together when the rest of her went still. She blinked once, then a second time upon seeming to realise that was it. That really was the extent of any gratitude I would show.

"Well, really!" she uttered with a huff, throwing up her hands and staring at me as though guilt was an emotion she could actually inspire in me.

And it was around that time I remembered my intention to allow myself to believe the world was the way Effie saw it and tried to manage to be a bit more effusive towards the efforts Effie had made.

I pulled that intention around me like a blanket the second I saw Caesar walking towards me at the celebration I'd been whisked to almost immediately after finishing the interview.

"I know some of the victors, Haymitch. Some of them are my friends." Caesar looks more solemn when he's not in front of the cameras. Different again from when he's offering serious news to his loving fans. "I hope you will be as well, as the years go by."

It sounds so much like something Asterid once said to me that I can't help the initial instinct of flinching. But I turn it swiftly from a grimace into a blinding grin. It seems as though Caesar is none the wiser.

"Of course, Caesar," I say, and the rascal settles on me completely with the words. It's a relief, the purest escape from my real self. Any one of the eighteen selves I've been over the past year. I shake my head as though offering him a very slight censure for what he implies. "Here I thought we were friends already!"

Caesar offers a grand laugh at that, the kind of laugh that sort of makes it so you can't help joining in the laughter too. I think, in the moment, that I could stand to allow myself to believe the world was the way Caesar saw it too. So many people believe it, it can't be wholly a lie.

Lenore Dove's words are so much softer in my mind since I started forcing them into quiet. Maysilee is actually the harder of the two to drown out. The Capitol reminds me of her as District 12 never did.

"Mr. Abernathy."

Another man intrudes on my conversation with Caesar. His is a voice I would recognise anywhere, anytime. His low timbre is unmistakable, as is the almost playful menace. I can tell he'll be wearing an amused smile, amused at my expense, even before I turn around. Before I see Caesar raise his crystal glass in deference at the same time as bowing his head.

I turn, and suddenly President Snow stands in front of me.

His eyes are trained on me, rather than on Caesar. Those eyes are cold, like a snake's, and they pin me in the same way. Facing President Snow is like facing a man out of my nightmares. In every nightmare I've had since exiting the Games, the spectre of this man has been hovering there, even if he's never there in person. In all of the different people I've pushed away during the same time, he is the singly common reason.

I'd once thought he might be on his way out, but there's no sign of that now. A moment of weakness only. Devastating because it's clearly over now.

It's surreal to be standing in front of Snow again, though I should have expected it. This celebration is occurring in his mansion. I suppose I deluded myself into believing he'd decide there were more important people than me to talk to all night.

Apparently not.

"Enjoy your homecoming."

I'm hard-pressed to pull up my rascal's grin, but I cobble it together all the same, bolstered by Caesar's presence and the entire celebration around us. There's only so much he can do to me here, and he's already done everything he can back at home.

Damned if I'm gonna let him see the ways he's broken me.

In answer, Snow's smile is a mocking one, as though he has a good idea of exactly what it's cost me to pull together this mask of a grin.

"I hope you are enjoying this celebration in your honour. It's the high point of the year for many of the Capitol's citizens." His voice is smooth, rich and cultured, without the raspy growl it had in it the time I saw him in Plutarch's conservatory, before my coronation as victor. He lifts an arm expansively, as though all of this fuss and spectacle has been put on for me. For my sake. For the second winner of District 12.

It's not.

But I play the game. It's not one of the Hunger Games, but what I've ended up in since is a game of a different sort.

"These citizens should be grateful to your generosity," I answer evenly.

His smile widens. "It has been gratifying to watch you speak at each District of your gratitude to me and to the Capitol as a whole for our generosity. You are very welcome, Haymitch."

The last time he used my given name, it wasn't to speak to me at all. It was to introduce me to his own, remade Louella McCoy. Lou Lou. The thought of her causes a sensation like punch to the chest. There are simply too many people I've lost for me to keep them all front of my mind at all times. The informality of President Snow addressing me by my given name shocks me. But, thankfully, I've been shocked a lot since our last proper conversation. I've had more to drink, too.

"Thank you. Coriolanus."

Snow's surprise at having me address him so informally is enough to shake the smirk from his expression for just a moment. It feels better than the moment I realised I'd won the Games.

Caesar abruptly starts coughing beside us. Snow's head darts in his direction, and that's all the time he needs to regain control of his features.

"Be careful now. Wouldn't want you getting yourself in trouble." There's a knowing look that passes between me and Snow, because only he and me know the truth of what happened to Lenore Dove.

Lift my chin and almost ask him what more he thinks he can do to me. But a small voice in the back of my head says I've probably already said enough for one evening. I held my own this time in front of President Snow. That's not nothing.

"Well," Caesar says with false lightness after President Snow has left us with no more acknowledgement than a nod of his head. "That was certainly exciting."

"That's how you like things, isn't it, Caesar? Exciting? Entertaining?"

Caesar gives a small chuckle and lifts his drink to his lips. "I suppose you have me there, Haymitch."

It's not until three Hunger Games later that I'll see the exact same laugh Caesar gave me at the 39th Victory Tour celebration. He's sitting across from another of the victors, a man called Lyme from District 2, representing a resurgence of Career stranglehold in Hunger Games wins. That's when I recognise it for just another of Caesar's performances.

Fatefully, by then, I'd long since stopped attempting to believe the world was the way either Effie or Caesar saw it.

Caesar's a friend to no one other than himself. Half a step above President Snow, but directly in the palm of his hand. Caesar and I will never be friends. But I'll never be able to show that. What's one more false thing within the Capitol's borders?

Towards the end of the 39th Victory Tour, my Victory Tour, Plutarch continues to be difficult for me to read. From the way he chooses when and how often to speak to me, it's frighteningly clear that he's got more of an idea of where cameras are placed than I'll ever manage. It's entirely possible that the Capitol, and Snow, have no idea Plutarch and I have ever spoken. Certainly he's clever about it.

We don't speak properly until when the tour concludes back in District 12. The dinner's been held, as well as the victory rally, and all that's left is for Plutarch to do their final style piece before starting to turn their attentions to whatever's involved in the pre-production for the upcoming reaping.

It's four months till the reaping by the time I get back. It's only after returning from the Capitol, gazing again at my fortress, that I realise this place isn't a fortress at all. It's not a place built to keep other people out.

It's built to keep me in. It's built to help Snow and the Capitol contained.

I have another drink.

Chapter Text

Four months goes by like it’s nothing. I see Bascom Pie more often than I visit Lenore Dove’s grave. Bascom Pie doesn’t ask or demand anything other than me beyond coins that have been rendered almost meaningless to me by how easy they are now to come by.

I do visit the graves of Ma and Sid, of Maysilee and Wyatt and Louella just by virtue of their all being gathered in the same resting place.

I weather the glares that turn eventually into concern from Asterid as time goes by, mostly by ignoring it. That doesn’t mean I don’t notice it one time when Asterid looks almost as though she might break the frosty silence between us since I threw those rocks. She doesn’t get far before Burdock pulls her back with a stern shake of his head.

For that, I’m grateful. I don’t need anything like that softening my resolve. Not with a renewal of Snow’s intent towards me so new in my mind.

“Wouldn’t want you getting yourself in trouble.”

It’s wonderful how these words have settled into my mind, eclipsing his previous well-wishing of my homecoming and echoing just as often. A reminder to me that I haven’t escaped his attention.

If anything, my reckless words in the Capitol have only stoked new ire.

I try to tell myself I don’t care. I don’t worry about it. Sometimes, when I’ve drunk enough, it’s even true.

When the train from the Capitol next arrives in 12, Effie’s a little more wary of me this time. It’s immediately obvious I’ve descended right back to where she found me last time, no matter the generosity the Capitol has shown to me. No matter her personal attempts to lift me up out of my descent. I’m sure to her, these last four months seem like no time at all.

I’m expected to be there when Effie meets with Mayor Undersee. A temporary stage has been set up before the Justice Building. Every reaping I remember, there have been two chairs on the stage created, side by side.

This year, there are three.

That third chair is for me. I know this without being told. I’m the most recent victor, after all. Although the days in which I can say that are almost over. Will be over almost as soon as this year’s Games begin.

The 51st Hunger Games.

Strangely, that thought doesn’t fill me with relief.

The square gets increasingly populated since everyone in District 12 is mandated to be present for the reaping. I find, after meeting the gazes of a few of my peers who might still get reaped this year—even though we’re back to only one girl and one boy again—I can’t keep looking at them. Whoever’s picked, I’ll know them.

The entire population of District 12 is less than eight thousand people. Safe to say I know everyone around my own age.

I don’t look for Burdock. I won’t meet Asterid’s eyes. I look away before seeing Blair. I try to tell myself the Donner family couldn’t possibly be unlucky enough to lose both daughters in back to back Games.

Instead of torturing myself further, I finish walking up the steps to that stage. One foot in front of the other until I’m standing in front of Effie and Mayor Undersee. The mayor’s nose scrunches up, out of habit. It must be, since Effie has cleaned me up enough that my usual stink of rotgut doesn’t surround me like an aura. Still, it’s clear he expects it to be there.

Guess I can count Mayor Undersee as one person part of this farce who won’t play into the narrative that I’m some almighty victor. Actually, that thought does fill me with relief. Being seen for how I really am, the newest town drunk and all, allows some of the tension to ease from my shoulders. No need to perform for someone at least.

Then the mayor turns away from me and towards the camera crews. Effie smiles so brightly, first to both of us and then out towards the crowd that now overflows the square. There’s nothing in that expression that shows she ever greeted me with anything other than open arms and jubilation. She’s half a step behind the mayor when he begins to intone the lines expected of him.

“It is both a time for repentance and a time for thanks,” he starts.

Each year before now, the list of past District 12 victors has been one person long. Lucy Grey Baird. This year, the line for that part of the script changes.

“… and Haymitch Abernathy,” Mayor Undersee continues. He still can’t quite wipe the disappointment of what I’ve become out of his features when he half turns on the stage to begin clapping in my direction. Sure, I’m the only living District 12 victor, but that doesn’t make me someone to be proud of. I’ve ensured that, and Mayor Undersee shows just how bitter a pill that is for him to swallow. His is a slow clap, wholly without energy. No one in the square joins him – only Effie’s hands join in with his in clapping, faster than the mayor, as though she alone can drum up energy by her manner.

My face feels wooden at the sight of it. The Capitol’s cameras are on me and it’s the first time I can’t bring myself to pull up the bravado required of the rascal they’ll expect me to be.

It’s clear both Effie and the mayor expected something else of me only after the clapping gives way to an awkward pause I do nothing to fill. Thing is, even if I hadn’t spent the lead up to this morning drinking myself into blackouts, there’s nothing I could have done to prepare myself for just how awful this moment feels.

Who would have thought the only thing worse than being reaped yourself would be knowing you were going to lead these people you’d grown up around into going through the same thing you just did.

Fuck, I’m glad it never occurred to me. It’s only in this moment that this particular doom looms over me.

Effie lets out a small laugh as she turns her perfectly coifed features back towards the cameras. “Happy Hunger Games!” she says sunnily, “And may the odds be ever in your favour.”

The odds are never in our favour. That’s the point. The only thing that’s interesting is that Drusilla used to say these words after the tributes had been reaped.

Effie just said it beforehand. That change gives the catchphrase a different meaning. From Drusilla, I always interpreted the words as relating to the unlikely chance of getting out of the arena alive, once the reaping had happened.

From Effie, it sounds more as though she’s speaking of the odds against being the ones reaped.

This is the first time Effie has ever played the part of escort here in District 12. Maybe it’s a mistake, her saying it this early. If she’s nervous, there’s no sign of it. Her makeup’s painted so thick that it would blank out any micro-expressions anyway. With her over the top gestures and clown-like smile, there’s no telling about any nerves behind it.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever disliked Effie Trinket. For want of anything more comfortable to feel, I hold onto that feeling.

Despite this early deviation from script, everything else runs through exactly the same as every other reaping I’ve been to.

“Ladies first,” Effie announces, before dangling her fingers delicately, almost teasingly, into the glass ball in front of her. It’s as though she’s putting off the reaping for dramatic effect. This reaping, her first reaping. It doesn’t matter that everyone in the square is holding their breaths, waiting to find out whether it’s them who will be reaped, or whether it’s their family that will be devastated by this day.

To Effie, it’s clear this moment is an honour. She doesn’t have the sadistic glee Drusilla used to. I grit my teeth grimly. This time, it’s not a moment where I can’t help myself. This time, I think of the cameras and I’m deliberate when I give them nothing.

“Ash Hawthorn!”

The girl tribute’s from the Seam. Of course it is. The odds are never stacked in their favour. Even her best clothes look threadbare enough to scratch against the skin – something all us poorer kids know well by the time we reach reaping age.

Or, formerly poor kids in my case. Thing is, I know Ash well enough to realise this is the last year her name would have been included. It’s only three months until she turns nineteen.

I can’t think she’ll never turn nineteen now, but I also bite my lip against the hope that maybe she, like me, will be able to push against the odds set against her. That maybe her age will give her an advantage. That maybe I, the first District 12 mentor, can do something that would help her get out at the other side.

Maybe I could even do it without earning Snow’s ire. Without her earning his ire.

“And now for our boy!” Effie continues, seeming oblivious to the dismay around her.

The boy tribute is Mayor Undersee’s younger son, Bernie. Two years younger than my seventeen years.

I hate myself for the relief that fills me then. I hate myself for being glad it’s not Burdock or Blair, despite how unlikely it is for a member of the mayor’s own family to be reaped. Even more unlikely than Maysilee last year. Enough to make me wonder just how random this reaping really is.

I have to shut down such thoughts. They won’t do me any good.

That’s it. The reaping’s done for another year.

Ash and Bernie join the rest of us on the stage. I can’t help but look at them now. They look shell-shocked. Nothing went wrong in this year’s reaping. Nothing needed to be edited out. Everything went as smooth as a textbook reaping.

Somehow, that just makes the whole moment feel worse.

Just as smooth as the reaping, Mayor Undersee takes back the stage and he begins to read out the Treaty of Treason as is expected of him.

Finally, finally, the whole ordeal is over. The anthem of Panem begins to play. Shortly thereafter, Plutarch and the rest of the Capitol TV crew begins to pack up to move onto the next filmable opportunity. I remember, abruptly, how it was with Plutarch on one side of me and both Ma and Sid on the other, this day just last year.

“If I can get a useable reaction shot from you, I can give you a minute with Haymitch. We clear?”

My eyes turn to Plutarch’s finally. He’s not looking back at me, too busy instructing his crew on where he wants them to be next, what shots he wants, most likely. I know all too well the circumstances under which the Undersee and Hawthorn families will now get to say goodbye to Bernie and Ash.

No, I was wrong. The ordeal isn’t over. It’s only just beginning. Just one ordeal after the other.

Chapter Text

The sun has risen on another reaping. The beginning of the train ride back to the Capitol is utterly silent until Effie’s the one to break it.

“What an honour,” she says, putting emphasis on every single word, and it’s immediately the wrong tack to take with one broken victor and two tributes all from 12. “To be the ones chosen for your country, out of all the possible tributes in District 12.”

“Effie.” I shake my head. “Don’t.”

Somehow, she’s still surprised. The Capitol really does a good job on brainwashing the ones lucky enough to get to live there.

“What?” Her eyes are wide circles, as though I’m the one being unreasonable here. Fair call, that. Except, this is the time I’m not being unreasonable.

I turn to Ash and Bernie. My eyes stay on Ash longer, cause I actually have more of an existing relationship with her than . “Do you feel honoured?”

Ash stares back at me, as though she’s torn between her honest answer and the retribution she fears from the Capitol if she speaks the unpatriotic words out loud.

“Haymitch.” Effie’s voice is filled with censure. “There’s no need to put the girl on the spot like that.”

“Ash Hawthorn,” I tell her, voice hard as I turn my gaze from Ash back to Effie. There’s no more gentleness in my tone for her. “If you’re going to bring her to the Capitol to die, have the decency to at least remember her name.”

This is the harshest I’ve ever spoken to her. We’re getting to learn all sorts of things about each other in this extended acquaintance of ours.

“Ash Hawthorn,” Effie repeats slowly, as though committing the name to memory. Maybe she realises the truth of how unfeeling she’ll come across otherwise. But I don’t know it for certain. There’s such a divide between us that we’ll never be able to cross it. “I’m sorry, dear, I didn’t mean to come across as unkind.”

Ash stares at Effie in blank shock. I know how she feels. By virtue of being part of the Captiol, by virtue of having been the one to pull her and Bernie’s names out of that glass ball, Effie Trinket is a great deal worse than ‘unkind’.

“Besides,” she adds, when Ash doesn’t open her mouth to utter a single word, “It’s not impossible for you to win. Look at Haymitch, after all. He had worse odds than you.”

Beside Ash, Bernie huffs. “That’s real nice,” he grouses.

“Excuse me?” Effie blinks several times in surprise.

“I’m right here,” Bernie tells her imperiously.

“Yes, you are,” Effie says, still not getting it.

“I’m right here, and you’re over there telling Ash she’s going to win the Games. Which means I’m gonna lose. So thanks, for that.”

Although I don’t know him well and don’t have much reason to like the mayor’s younger son, I can’t argue that Bernie doesn’t have a good point when Effie turns stricken eyes to me.

“Well,” she says, extending the single word into at least three syllables. “This isn’t very celebratory.”

She leans forward to fill herself a glass of sparkling cordial, which makes me feel the need to wander towards the drink cart for the bourbon I know they have on board. Or maybe some of the champaign. Then I can argue it’s in the effort of the celebration Effie wants so much to believe in.

But that’s the moment when Ash finally decides to speak up. “No,” she says, meeting my eyes. “I don’t feel honoured. Did you?”

I swallow. Her rebounding question makes me realise why it took her so long to answer the question I so flippantly cast out.

“Nope,” I answer shortly, before giving in and reaching for that bourbon.

We reach the Capitol where we’re all separately primped and preened and put together for the Capitol’s standards for what they expect to see on their televisions.

“You are still last year’s victor,” Effie tells me pertly when I try to tell her this year isn’t about me. “There are certain obligations that come with that. Though, I suppose you can’t be faulted for not knowing that.”

Because 12’s never had a victor in my lifetime, she means.

“Sure,” I say, instead of what I’m thinking.

I give another interview with Caesar that I watch back later. The beloved rascal has made his resurgence and, though Caesar does comment on my somber expression that’s clearly visible in the content filmed from District 12’s reaping, he can acknowledge it must be hard setting myself up for being the first mentor from District 12.

“How does that feel?” he says, putting the microphone in front of my mouth.

It’s not a question I can answer honestly. I flick through several possible responses before settling on, “Strange. I wish there was someone who could mentor me on mentoring.”

“Well, it seemed you made friends with mentors from other Districts last year,” Caesar remarks. “Perhaps some of them could help you.”

It’s a good point, and it makes me think of Mags and Wiress. How they’re recovering. If they’re recovering. Caesar didn’t mention either of them by name, so it’s possible they weren’t the ones he was meaning.

Once the thought comes to mind, I can’t escape the thought that I never saw them once I arrived in the Capitol during the Victory Tour, and I don’t see them now either. Neither of them seem to be mentoring a different district this year.

I’m the only one mentoring Ash and Bernie.

When I realise that, I immediately take it up with Effie.

“What can I say?” Effie says, spreading her hands in a way that shows she has absolutely no say in who or how many are chosen to mentor, and that she can’t change it either. “I suppose it was merely decided a single mentor from the same district would be more effective than two from elsewhere.”

I wonder if this is another of those strings Snow’s pulled in the background. Setting this year’s District 12 tributes with a useless, inexperienced mentor to ensure a repeat of last year doesn’t happen.

This only makes me more determined to at least try. I even dry out for it without Effie’s urging. She’s pleased to see me sober for more than one day at a time, I can tell.

It’s not other mentors that I go to first after that. While Ash and Bernie are still trying to orient themselves in this Capitol, I start reaching out to potential sponsors for them.

“Come on,” I say, “It’s a brand new day in 12. If I can win the Quarter Quell, what do you think they can do? One of them, at least. Don’t you wanna be first to support the district of the reigning victor?”

I manage at least seven individuals all on the hook of being the ‘first’ to support the district of the reigning victor.

I even manage to speak to Plutarch in public view of the cameras, because what we’re discussing has nothing to do with sedition. This is part of the Game, and I liked to think I was starting to show myself as a bit of a contender in all these various Games that kept being thrown at me.

In this case, it’s only my own wellbeing on the line. It’s Ash and Bernie’s.

“Of course I’ll be a sponsor,” Plutarch says, and he smiles a little as he says it, a smile that actually reaches his eyes. “It’s good to see you back in the game again.”

I shrug and play his words off, as though they don’t ping back to what he said to me after my Victory Tour. “What other choice is there?”

“What other choice indeed?” He lifts his glass in a toast. I’m drinking too, because this is a celebration and one doesn’t win friends in the Capitol by being the dreary sober guy from District 12, victor or not.

In the end, despite all my efforts, both Ash and Bernie are dead before the Games truly begin.

They’re dead in the initial skirmish that happens at the Cornucopia. My jaw falls open and my eyes fill with tears before I impatiently brush them away. But not before Effie sees this evidence of me falling apart in front of it being televised.

“Haymitch,” she says, and it’s as gentle as she’s ever spoken to me. “It’s only your first year as a mentor. Think of how much you’ll learn and grow before the next time. It will be better.”

My next one. The idea of it haunts me for the full eleven months in between.

That following year, the 52nd Hunger Games, the first thing I say—early as the train ride into the Capitol—is to avoid the Cornucopia at all costs. Effie eyes me watchfully, deliberately silent.

I promise them I’ll get everything they need from sponsors. It’ll only become more difficult to do if my tributes keep being among the first to die.

They both still die anyway.

My position is completely pointless.

Chapter Text

On the day of the reaping for the 53rd Hunger Games, I turn nineteen. That’s it. If I’d never been reaped, I would have aged out. Burdock’s already turned nineteen. This is the first year I won’t have to worry about him being reaped. We didn’t talk at all this last year, but he still matters. Him being alive still matters to me.

The walk up to the stage from the Victor’s Village has an awful feel of sameness. This is the third time I’ve done this now. Nothing has changed from the first two times. Effie’s still standing on the stage beside Mayor Undersee. Plutarch’s behind the camera making sure the Capitol doesn’t miss a moment.

The mayor speaks hollowly the lines he’s meant to say. He hasn’t seemed well since they buried Bernie. Thankfully, his older son Cashma, a year older than me, was never in danger of being reaped afterwards.

It’s limited comfort, but it’s more than what I have and I’m still here. As a result, I have pretty limited sympathy for our mayor.

As always, my name is paired with Lucy Grey Baird’s. I never thought of her much before, certainly never knew her. It felt like both her and most of her Games were wiped from memory. Not even Lenore Dove knew much and they shared the same last name.

But from now until after I’m no longer around to hear it, I suppose, my own name will be paired with Lucy Grey Baird’s every year before new tributes get reaped to die.

As always, Effie’s voice follows Mayor Undersee and the juxtaposition between them is just as striking as ever. There’s no doubting how bad 12 has it when even the mayor seems so beaten down.

“Ladies first!”

She’s twelve, the girl who gets reaped. It’s unbearably bad luck. Her name couldn’t have been in that glass bowl more than once.

She’s the first person reaped that I’ve never spoken to before. I keep my eyes lowered and my hands clasped in front of me.

“And now for the boy,” Effie continues, ever cheery, as though reaping a twelve year old into death doesn’t phase her at all. I still like Effie sometimes, but I can’t make myself look at her now. “Blair-”

A ringing sets into my ears. No. No.

There’s only one person named Blair in all of 12, but it still can’t be him. My eyes jerk upward, staring towards the part of the square where I know he’ll be standing, not far from Burdock, and across the partition from Asterid and Merrilee.

Yet, even as I watch, Blair squares his shoulders and lifts his chin. A muscle works in his jaw, and then he starts to pull himself away from the rest of the crowd, all of whom seem to pull away from him. He’s different from the rest of them now, at least for the next year. He’s condemned.

Both tributes step up onto the stage. I only have eyes for Blair.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he murmurs under his breath, beneath the notice of the Peacekeepers who we all know don’t like any of us talking out of turn.

My mouth’s too try to form words. Blair’s smile is thin and he nods once as though he expected nothing more of me. I’ve given him no reason to expect anything more.

In my head, all I’m thinking is that I’ve stood by uselessly while watching my first two sets of tributes die horribly and all too damned quickly. I came out here today already resigned to seeing the same thing play out in front of me this year.

Now I’ve got Blair beside me? I can’t…

That can’t be the way it happens again this year.

Once on the train, I find out that things are different. I’m about to take Blair over to the food cart—he doesn’t look like he’s eaten in days and at least this much I can do—when I see a familiar figure out of the corner of my eye.

“Wiress?”

I can barely believe it. It’s definitely her. Black hair, young. But she’s hunched over now, as though protecting her middle.

When I look closer too, I see there are streaks of silver running wild through her hair. And the look in her eyes, when she turns at the sound of her name, is just as wild.

It’s only been four years, but she looks like she’s aged at least ten. I take a stumbling step towards her. I knew they tortured her but… what did they do to her.

“Surprise!” Effie’s voice is enough of a surprise to me that it makes me jump. When I turn to her in horror, her hands are lifted and spread and there’s a broad smile across her features. “Guess who finally got another mentor on their team for the 53rd Hunger Games.”

“Effie…” I breathe. “What…?”

“You asked, and I provided,” she said, proud of herself. “And I even got you one of the mentors you’ve worked with before.”

Blair’s standing right beside me on the carriage. He can see something’s wrong, but he doesn’t understand what. Of course he doesn’t. He never saw what Wiress looked like before.

But Effie has. How can she not have questions? How can she think this is a good surprise?

Is this like Lenore Dove’s ‘appendicitis’ again? What story has Effie been told to explain Wiress’ current state?

“Wiress, are you okay?” I ask cautiously, opening the door for Effie to fill in the gaps about what, according to the Capitol, has happened here.

Wiress blinks her eyes once before turning back to what she’s fiddling with in her hands. She starts muttering to herself but it doesn’t sound like it’s an answer to my question.

“It is a shame,” Effie supplies, as I knew she would. “An accident in District 3. Some said her heart stopped for too long in the electrocution. Others say it was an issue with her brain. I don’t pretend to know about those kinds of things.”

Of course not. That might lead to things like questions when Capitol spins didn’t make sense. I can’t stop looking at Wiress.

“It’s still possible she might recover more fully than she has so far,” Effie continues. “Our president was personally of the opinion that returning as a mentor might help her brain functions. Because it’s familiar to her.”

And there it is, the evidence that President Snow still hasn’t forgotten about me. ‘Our’ president has a longer memory than that.

“And, of course, when I suggested that District 12 could use another mentor…” Effie says, raising her hands extravagantly again. “Ta-da!”

“Help me,” I say desperately to Plutarch, after gaining entrance into his manor.

The conservatory is exactly as I remember it from three years before. A standing relic of a family more rich and connected than I can ever imagine. In it, Plutarch looks exactly the same, as though these four years I’ve known him haven’t touched him. Not like they've touched me. Not like Wiress.

“Help you how?” Plutarch asks mildly.

“Help me help Blair the way you helped me in the Quarter Quell,” I tell him urgently.

Plutarch just stares at me for a long moment before turning away with a sigh.

“People are being watched more carefully since your Games. The resistance is still there, but it’s more underground,” he murmurs. “Things are different now.”

“Then make it less different!” I yell, not wanting to hear him, not wanting to be pushed back; barely willing to listen to reason.

Plutarch stares at me. My raised voice doesn’t have any effect on his calm. “It’s not that easy, and you know it. If it were easy, don’t you think things would have changed by now?”

“I just…” I close my eyes and try to force my breathing to slow down. “I just need Blair to live. I just… need not to be the only victor in my district.”

When I open my eyes again, Plutarch’s looking at me with something resembling sympathy. “What do you think will change if you’re not the only victor? If Blair joins you in the Victor’s Village?”

I open my mouth to answer, but I haven’t thought that far. No words come out.

“Let me tell you what I think will happen, if two District 12 victors emerge in only four years, after forty years without a victory,” Plutarch says, and I have a sinking feeling because that hadn’t occurred to me. I already know the general idea of what he’s about to say. “He’ll think, rightly, mind you, there’s some sort of conspiracy within his own Capitol. He’ll look to the Gamemakers first, of course, cause they’re the ones with the most power over the Games. Then he’ll start looking among the escorts, the stylists, the ones who crew Capitol TV, the sponsors.”

He eyes me firmly, as if to make sure I realise he belongs to half of those groups.

“After that, he’ll look to the ones from the most influential families; the ones most likely to think themselves untouchable.” A third group. “And then he’ll come to District 12. Because he’ll have evidence of not one victor, but two, who had their fingers in a Capitol conspiracy. What do you think will happen then?”

I don’t answer him. I have no words.

Plutarch continues. “Haymitch. I want this revolution as much as you. I’ve been fighting for it these past two years when you haven’t been able to see beyond your district. But this is bigger than your own district.”

Another long stare. And then, finally, Plutarch turns away from me.

“Come back to talk to me when you’ve realised that.”

There’s no help coming from Plutarch. I realise that now. I even understand it, a little. Still, it makes me furious. For Plutarch to hold onto so much power, for him to be so unwilling to use it because of what he stands to lose.

I’m fuming by the time I return to the new Tribute Centre. Its unveiling happened during this year’s Victory Tour. I was invited, as one of the past victors, to attend. I declined. So this has been my first time seeing it, just as it was my first time seeing Wiress again. What a year the 53nd Hunger Games promises to be!

I don't watch the Games with Effie this year. I raise a drink to hide my tears as soon as Blair's killed, and then don't stop drinking until the end of it six days later.

There's still no sign of Mags by the time I'm on the train back to District 12 with two new caskets in the carriage with me. It's hard to know what to feel about that when the dead just keep piling up around me.

Chapter Text

Something breaks in me after the 53rd Games. Blair’s death isn’t the worst I’ve suffered through. Nor is he the first boy I’ve mentored to his death. There’s no rational reason for the over the top anger that takes hold of me from the time I return to District 12 again.

It’s like something animal has woken up inside of me.

I don’t remember the 54th Games. I don’t remember Effie speaking to me. I don’t remember if Wiress mentored in my place. I don’t even remember the names of the two tributes that year. I don’t know that I sobered up long enough to form memories. And I don’t think the Capitol wanted someone that drunk and raging on their TV cause I never saw any interviews I gave from that year.

Around a week before the 54th Hunger Games, I hear that, somewhere during the year, Burdock and Asterid got engaged.

Burdock and I are both 21 years old – at least, I’ll be 21 in a week’s time. He and Asterid are both safe from the reaping and it seems as though they’ve chosen to celebrate by announcing their intension of getting married.

I wonder what Asterid’s father thinks of that, given what that will mean for her living situation.

I wonder if Asterid is prepared, at all, for going without.

Despite myself, I feel myself being drawn into what it would be like to talk to Burdock about his plans for the future. I don’t want to. I’m done with him. I’m done with all of that. This life I’m on is completely separate to his by necessity.

If I want Burdock and Asterid to have the slightest hope of a happy life together, I need to stay away.

Yet, still, I can’t help imagining myself speaking with him like we used to.

“Asterid…?” I say. “You’re really thinking of marrying her?”

Burdie offers a slight smile, dipping his head. “I’m gonna try.”

“What do her parents think?”

“It’s not up to them, is it?” And then, “Hey, Haymitch! She said yes!”

“That’s good, man. We need some happiness around here.”

The wedding is meant to happen before the Harvest Festival. Before Capitol TV is filled up with inescapable news from the latest victor’s tour.

The same Capitol TV that’s my only consistent company. On all the time, every day, whether I’m sober or drinking, or waking up hungover and considering my first drink.

This news for Burdock and Asterid brings me back. At least enough that I remember Effie speaking with me by the end of this year, the 55th Hunger Games. It reminds me that what I’ve done… it’s worth something. Burdock and Asterid are still alive. They’re going to have a life together.

I haven’t managed to kill everyone I’ve ever come into contact with yet.

That year during the games, I see Mags for the first time since my Games. I know the moment that she sees me because she smiles broadly and opens her arms wide to offer me a hug. It’s like the first time I stepped into the Capitol. I was as lost as this year’s two tributes, and she offered kindness that made my harsh reality just that little bit less harsh.

“And who do we have here?” Mags asks, looking across at my District 12 tributes. They’re playing things safe, not drawing attention to themselves.

To be honest, I’ve forgotten both their names. They’re getting younger and younger each year. I haven’t kept up. These aren’t kids I grew up around anymore.

Mags looks at me sadly. “Haymitch,” she says softly. “You’ve got to do better than this.”

“How?” I ask, voice raw.

She shakes her head. “You just have to.”

“What happened to you?” The words pass my lips without me planning them. Technically, this isn’t a conversation we’re allowed to have. In the still new Tribute Centre, there are cameras everywhere. My question’s both dangerous and stupid, but I have to know.

Mags smiles ruefully. “The Capitol showed its generosity,” she answers, and I know exactly what that generosity stands for.

“More to Wiress than to you?” I ask, pressing lightly. She’s not here again this year, and I’m back to mentoring alone. Obviously returning as a mentor didn’t have the effect on her brain functions that the president was expecting.

Mags’ lips thin. “She was softer. Gentler.”

I remember then what I already know of Mags against what I remember of Wiress. Wiress won her Games through hiding.

Mags won hers through a fierce desire to protect her district partner combined with her willingness to use fish hooks against any other tributes from other districts that came too close.

Put like that, it makes sense that one of them came out of the Capitol’s ‘generosity’ and the other…

I straighten my spine as I stand in front of this woman, the first victor after 12’s first victor; the first victor who ever went on a Victory Tour. Mags Flanagan has probably seen more cruelty than I can imagine even before she experienced at the Capitol’s hands more directly.

“I get it,” I say.

“You must do better, Haymitch. There isn’t another choice.”

I imagine, if I still had Hattie or Ma in my life, they might each have each said something similar.

In that year between the 55th and 56th Hunger Games, Maysilee’s twin, Merrilee, marries Cashma Undersee.

They didn't have a long engagement; I didn't even hear about it - not that I'm the one to rely on for such news. Mayor Undersee's taken another turn for the worse. He's lived longer than many. But the air quality here in District 12, on top of the grief for his youngest that never left him, it all takes its toll. It's hard to grow old in District 12.

Merrilee Donner becomes Merrilee Undersee. Thirteen months later, she steps up into the position of wife to the Mayor of District 12. Maybe she'll be one of the ones to grow old in District 12.

It seems like everyone I grew up with is either dead, or else growing up, moving on and pairing off.

Everyone except me. I just can’t make sense of it. Why would anyone bring a child into this world?

I wonder if she ever thinks of her sister at all. Her twin.

I talk a lot to Maysilee that year. How she would have interpreted the way our friends just… seem to be able to forget the Hunger Games exist around the rest of the year. I think she would have understood this in a way Lenore Dove lacked.

Lenore Dove’s understanding and loathing of the Games always came from a distanced place of having never been in them before. Maysilee had stood beside me in the thick of it before she’d died. She wouldn’t have forgotten about these endless iterations of the Games anymore than I can.

Rumours begin to circulate around 12 that I might have finally gone mad. That’s what all this drinking rotgut has inevitably led to. Crazy miner without the actual mining as an excuse.

But I’m still sane. I still know what’s going on around me. That’s why I drink. I know exactly what’s going on around me, except when I’m too drunk to pay attention.

The 56th Hunger Games is the first time since my own win that a district other than the Career districts 1, 2 or 4 win. The victor is a boy called Blight. He’s from District 7.

Blight finds me before we both go back to our respective districts. “Plutarch said I should talk to you.”

“Why?” I ask.

It’s been another year when District 12’s tributes have been among the first to die. It’s starting to become difficult for me to encourage anyone to sponsor them. If things don’t change for my district soon, I’m not going to be able to give them the option of avoiding the Cornucopia anymore.

Blight shrugs. “He said you’d understand.” Then, after a pause, “Being another Newcomer victor.”

The word sets off something in my body. Newcomer. I haven’t heard that word since…

Oh, I understand, all right.

“Plutarch,” I repeat. Plutarch helped Blight win his Games. He helped Blight win his Games after refusing to help Blair, then sent this boy to me thinking… what? What kind of resistance can I begin to form, just the two of us? Unless… “Mags? Did you meet Mags?”

“She was my mentor this year,” Blight said.”

Oh. Oh, that’s not an accident. Careful, Plutarch. If I can see the pattern here, are you so sure Snow won’t?

But I don’t say that. Not to Plutarch and not to Blight. If this is the way Plutarch wants to play the game, I’ll go along with it. Not like I have much better to do other than drinking anyway.