Archive of Our Own

"Good Morning Haymitch! Are you ready for a big, big, big day?"

Effie burst from the cold air of Twelve in January into what she'd expected to be a warm, charming little home.

It was not at all what she expected.

At the recommendation of the peacekeepers, she hadn't bothered knocking since apparently Haymitch was not one to answer his door, and had simply led the team around to the back door and let herself in, expecting to give him a little surprise, but instead she was the one surprised by the scene before her. For one, it was somehow colder inside than it was outside, which was a rather impressive feat with the snow and ice whipping about in the wind outside. And it was dark. All the shutters were drawn, keeping the daylight from penetrating the murky interior of the house and not a single lamp was lit. Effie could only really make out the few feet into the kitchen that were illuminated by the bright light of a frigid winters morning that streamed through the open door behind her. She could see a plain wooden kitchen table, with a single chair overturned beside it, laying forlorn and forgotten on the dusty cold tiles. There was a partially unwrapped parcel on the kitchen table. She took a few steps forward, peering at its contents through the gloom.

Food.

It was food. A loaf of bread, a few apples and carrots. Three of the smallest, most pathetic potatoes she'd ever seen, and some kind of dried meat sat, still partially wrapped in brown paper, utterly untouched. There was, however, an empty clear glass bottle that had clearly been torn out of the same brown paper packet sitting discarded on its side on the floor a few feet away. By the withered state of the apples, the food had been sitting there, untouched, for a few days, maybe even longer, given the refrigerator-like temperature inside his house.

She knew something wasn't right.

Her escort training course had briefly covered disaster situations, like a dead or incapacitated victor. It happened, at times that the poor child couldn't live with what they'd been through, with the things they'd seen in their arena, and they took their own life. It had happened to the last quarter quell victor. He couldn't keep living in the district that had chosen him to go into the Hunger Games, poor thing. The idea of that sweet boy who'd chased her lipsticks down the hall to return them to her hanging from a chandelier by his thin neck, or laying in a dried pool of his own blood with a knife at his side, or with a clean but deadly gunshot in his head and empty unseeing grey eyes flashed through her head, chilling that last inner part of her that remained untouched by wind and snow to the bone.

She could hear her sister's voice approaching, though her exact words were lost to the wind, and the sharp trudge of Plutarch's cameraman's heavy boots. No. Whatever she was about to find in this frigid, dark house wasn't for their eyes. Even if he was dead in there, she was his escort now. Seeing to him was her duty. Hers alone. So she whirled around on the heel of her bright pink snow bootie and smiled down at Proserpina, Vitus and Plutarch, who were just about to ascend to the back patio.

"Plutarch, do be a dear and take the prep team back to the car to wait? I'll call for you shortly but I think my Victor and I need a brief moment of prep before the beautification begins and there's no point in you all freezing!" She chirped, surprising the three. Plutarch opened his mouth to say something or ask a follow up question or God only knows what, but, having no convenient answers as to WHY she had a gut feeling that she wanted them gone, she merely spun around, pink coattails twirling around her, and closed the back door, latching it behind her.

It took a few seconds of rapid blinking for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, and even then, she could only just make out the vaugest shapes of furniture. She began trying to pick her way delicately across the room, careful not to disturb anything or trip on the slightly uneven tiles. The house was silent as the grave, so quiet that, were it not for the howling of the January wind, Effie was sure she'd be able to hear her own heartbeats.

Wait. It wasn't quite silent. If she closed her eyes and strained her ears, she could hear something. A whisper soft sound like a sob. It was emanating from a gaping black void between the cabinets that she took to be a door to the next room.

The tapping of her heels, which had practically echoed through the silent kitchen, were suddenly muffled as she stepped through the doorway. Carpeting. There was carpeting. Some sort of living room, perhaps. And without the tapping noise she could hear the soft sobbing sound a little more clearly. It was coming from directly in front of her. So with her hands out she slowly started stepping into the darkness. Finally, her hands collided with a lamp. Gloved fingers slid up the metal till she found a pull cord, and with a tug, she lit the bulb and made a small island of light in the sea of darkness.

She was standing in a small, modestly appointed living room that looked like a hurricane had gone through it. All the trinkets and knicknacks had been thrown off the built in shelves and shattered on the floor, then swept into one corner. The sofa had been dragged to the center of the carpet with the single lamp beside it, and the coffee table overturned to block the front door, preventing its use. There were more of those same empty glass bottles everywhere. The only thing that seemed relatively untouched was a small collection of books that was lovingly shelved near the kitchen door.

And in the middle of this hurricane, lay Haymitch, fast asleep and sobbing softly. Effie felt a massive weight lift off her shoulders, seeing his thin chest rise and fall with breath. He was alive.

But he didn't look well. He was somehow thinner than he'd been last time she'd seen him. His ribs were practically visible through the thin cotton shirt he was sleeping in, and even asleep she could see the dark hollows beneath his eyes. He was curled up on the sofa like a lost dog, shivering, the blanket that should have been tucked around him to keep off the chill was thrown over the back of the sofa. There was another of those clear glass bottles on the floor a few feet away, that had clearly slipped from his dangling hand when he fell asleep, and Effie could smell the alcohol fumes wafting off the clear liquid that was leaking out of it from where she stood.

So he was drinking. Excessively. At sixteen. Wasn't there someone assigned to check on the victors? She'd been told in her training that in the case of a lost family, like Haymitch's, someone would be assigned to look after him. To come feed him and see to it that he was healthy, at least until he was a little older, but if anyone had been looking after Haymitch, well, they needed to be disciplined for doing a terrible job of it. Or better yet, fired outright.

She took the knitted blanket off the couch and tucked it around him. The soft sobs stopped a few seconds after that, and the slight tremble of his breath slowed. His head was pillowed on an open book of poetry, which she slid out and replaced with one of the decorative sofa pillows, and in doing so she saw the little folding knife he was clutching in his hand. Well that certainly wouldn't do! Really. She'd have to talk to someone about finding the person who was supposed to be looking out for him. Sleeping with a knife! She gently pried the thing out of his sleeping grip and folded it up, looking at it. It was old. The handle was slightly charred, but his last name was scratched into the handle by a clumsy hand. She almost put it aside, but at the last second tucked in into the pocket of her dress. Maybe it was significant to him, something from a relative that brought him comfort and that's why he saw fit to sleep with a sharp object! It would definitely be confiscated from him, but she wasn't ever searched. She could let him have in the controlled environment of the train as a little comfort from home, since the security team insisted that he be locked in his room at night, which was just rude. She paused a moment as she stood to tuck his unkept curls behind his ear.

He had been such a sweet young man.

There was a trash can in the kitchen that she gathered all the bottles into, and the broken decor from the living room went with them. Plutarch's cameras didn't need to see him like this. Then she went back to the door and waved the team in. They had a victory tour to commence after all and her Victor was the star of the show. 

I wasn't hiding.

Truly hiding wasn't possible in the custody of the Capitol. Everywhere I turned, there were cameras and not just the ones being shoved in my face on the shoulders of Plutarch's ever present cameramen. They were well and truly everywhere. Subtle little cameras, hiding in the decorative molding of ceilings, and the patterns of wallpaper. Obvious cameras in transport vans and holding rooms that Effie Trinket threw fits if they chained me up in between victory tour events. Cameras strapped to the chests of the frowning peacekeepers that followed my every move as I was shuffled from district to district, shaking hands and making carefully prepared speeches in front of even more cameras.

When the tour was in Three, Beetee pulled me aside beside a buffet table of what were apparently local fruit delicacies. I hadn't tried any. The bright colors were off-putting somehow. There wasn't time for comforting words, just a simple touch on the shoulder, that looked casual from six feet away, where my personal platoon of peacekeepers were standing, staring at us with disinterest. One little squeeze. I hoped it meant he'd forgiven me. That he understood what it meant to be in there. But I had no way to know for sure.

Beetee was the one who showed me how to see the cameras. In the few seconds we had, he quickly explained how to look for the slight sparkle of a lens as light moves across a surface, and how to tell which way they were pointing. How to look for blind spots. How to stand in a blind spot. We were standing in one.

"The game is changing, Haymitch." He whispered as we both saw his Mayor approaching with a broad fake grin stretched over his fake teeth. "They're watching everything we say and do."

I wanted to ask him about Wiress. I wanted to know if my mentor was okay or if I'd destroyed her too, but the Mayor of Three's bony hand clapped down on my shoulder so hard I felt the jarring in my scar and dragged me back to the center of the room before I could say anything. Later I saw a woman with a baby in her arms approach him. A baby who would never know his big brother.

I spent the rest of the trip seeing cameras everywhere I looked. They flashed out at me from papered walls and carved stairs and marble statues and pointed rooftops. Beetee had been right. They were everywhere. Watching everything. It was at its worst in the Capitol than the districts. At least there I was outside sometimes. It's not like the Capitol could bug the clouds themselves.

They could in the arena.

I had to shake that thought off as I followed along behind Effie, who trotted us from photoshoots to interviews to luncheons, staring at the hundreds and hundreds of lenses winking at me. She did most of the talking, which was a relief, as I don't have much to say anymore, and I have less to say to folks who are only interested in rehashing the same deaths that I already see night after night. I think they were all more interested in what Effie had to say about me anyway. They stared as her gobsmacked, as she lead me around, dressed in a series of her great-uncle's peacock colored suits not a handcuff or chain in sight.

"How are you doing it?" A woman who seemed to be comprised mostly of orange bubbles and glitter gasped, like I was a particularly well trained dog. Effie just pursed her already tiny lips even further and answered the same way she'd been answering everyone before bubble lady:

"We are meant to be SHARING the wealth and generosity and civilization of the Capitol aren't we? With our lucky victors? And how can we do that if we treat them like animals! It's just NOT in the spirit of the games!"

I have no idea what that nonsense meant, but the people she was talking to always ate it up with claps and oohs and it allows her to sweep me off to the next conversation. And she was serious about that no handcuffing thing. If a peacekeeper so much as looked at me with a set of cuffs in hand she'd shoot them down with a disapproving look so withering it could strip the leaves off an oak tree in June. They still locked me into my room at night on the train, but it was a nice room. It was all plush and silk, with its own bathroom. There used to be a bar built in, but Effie stripped it of anything worth drinking, replacing brandies and whiskeys with brightly colored fruit juices. I couldn't stomach those either, nor could I sleep without a fifth of something strong silencing my thoughts anymore, so I just rattled around the train car like a ghost till dawn broke. If was lucky then I usually managed a few hours rest before Effie flounced back in announcing breakfast, with a new suit and schedule for the day.

The Capitol was worse. Parties happened at night in the Capitol. Strange parties. Parties I had to go to alone. Parties I didn't want to think about ever again.

I was glad to get back on the train back to Twelve alone, without Plutarch and his cameras, without the crowds and the waving where I could just sit in the little blind spot I found in the back of the observation car with the remaining bottle of gin I found hiding under the peacekeepers station and disappear till I got back to Twelve. I had my knife, the one Effie smuggled to me my first night on the train with a wink and a stern reminder to keep it hidden, and was trying to pry the seal off the bottle of gin when the door to the observation car wooshed open. Expecting one of the peacekeepers, I quickly snapped my knife shut and shoved it into the waistband of my pants.

Imagine my surprise when it was the opposite of a silent, swappable, surly brute, Effie Trinket.

I'm pretty sure my mouth actually fell open as she trotted in, looking around her at the car critically, before her gaze landed on me, tucked up as I was in a pile of blue and grey silk cushions, and her perpetually pursed lips softened, then spread into that near to manic grin she'd worn for most of the trip. She sat down primly on the opposite edge of the sofa I was occupying one corner of, and the blinding buttercup yellow ruffles of her skirt nearly swallowed her whole body up in their volume, like she was being completely consumed by a sentient yellow marshmallow. The whole effect was patently ridiculous, and when paired with the disapproving purse of neon blue lips at the bottle I was holding, it almost made me laugh, if I wasn't still so surprised to see her.

"What are you doing here? I went home alone last time." My question was blunt, but I had no other way of saying what I meant.

"Well, I don't think that was very hospitable." She said with finality. Like that meant something.

We both sat there for a long time, staring out the windows at the sun, disappearing behind the ever shrinking mountains. I got the knife back out and managed to get the seal off the bottle of gin, and got a dissaproving frown for my troubles, but that was all. We just sat there, me with my bottle, her with a small notebook and pen, in an unexpectedly companionable silence, until the moon was high in the sky, transforming the endless rolling fields we sped through into a rolling sea of silvery waves. Eventually, she closed her notebook and looked up at me. I had put nigh on half the bottle inside me at that point, and my head was starting to to swim, twisting moonlight into strands and those strands into words and those words were wrapping around me, cradling me in the memory of voices and sounds that I couldn't force myself to forget, no matter how hard I tried.

   “'Wretch,' I cried, 'thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee

    Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!'

            Quoth the Raven 'Nevermore.'"

Effie made a little choked sound that shattered the silver moonlight words I was wrapped in, and I realized, on a slight delay, that I had spoken the words aloud. I didn't know what to say. She just looked at me, wide eyed and curious, like there was something on the tip of her tongue. Then she spoke, very quietly:

"The sweet Lenore hath gone before,

With hope, that flew beside

Leaving thee wild for the dear child

That should have been thy bride."

I frowned.

I didn't remember that line.

That wasn't in the ballad. Was it? Had I forgotten a line? There was no way. But I capped the bottle and put it aside, just in case.

"S'not from the Ballad." I accused.

"No. I believe you were reciting The Raven." She said primly. "I never liked that one. Annabelle Lee, however? Or Lenore? They're tragically romantic! Do you like poetry? I can't claim any expertise but I did go through a phase in the Academy when I found Poe's poetry quite romantic. Do you like poetry, Haymitch?"

My head was swimming. I wasn't entirely sure what she was talking about, but she knew Lenore Dove's ballad? How? How the hell did she know? There couldn't be a person in the world more different than my Lenore Dove, my wise, beautiful, resilient girl, than this clueless confection of a woman, but here she was, spouting off bits of her ballad that I couldn't seem to remember. I felt a little sick.

"It's her ballad." I said, pushing myself up unsteadily. "How do you know her ballad?"

"Who? Edgar Allan Poe?"

"Lenore Dove!" I blurted her name out, and it came out as more a cry than individual words. Effie's candyfloss head cocked like a confused mutt. Then recognition lit up her face.

"Haymitch, was your girl....was her name Lenore?"

"Lenore Dove." I confirmed, her name ever transformed into a mourning wail on my lips.

"And The Raven? You know it because....it has her name in it?" She continued. I nodded.

"But you don't know Edgar Allan Poe's other poems?"

I shook my head.

"Would you like to?"

I didn't know what to make of that. I just blinked back at her, looking as dumb as the Capitol types thought we were, I'm sure. Seeing I wasn't going to answer her, Effie spared us both the awkwardness and kept taking as she got out her notebook and started scratching away again.

"If you like, I can send you some books. Poe. Other poets if you like. Anything you're interested in. It would be good for you to have a hobby, don't you think?"

She seemed to want me to respond, so I nodded. There was that pleased little look again.

"Well...would you like that, Haymitch?"

Would I?

"......Yes." I managed.

At the very least, I'd have her ballad on paper.

Effie went back to scribbling in her notebook happily, and I took my bottle back up, trying to wrap myself in that pleasant oblivion I was on the edge of before she spoke....but I couldn't quite get there. I just felt sick. Sick, then sleepy, then I felt the bottle slip out of my hand, but couldn't bother to care. My eyes fluttered shut and my head fell against the cool glass of the window and I felt myself drifting away. The staring eyes of the dead and blinking lenses of a thousand cameras were waiting on the edge of my consciousness for me to join them.

The last thing I was aware of before the nightmares swallowed me was the sensation of a pillow sliding under my neck and a blanket being tucked around me.

In early February, there was a small box on my doorstep, beside my money and food and precious drink. It was a lot heavier than I thought a