Work Text:
Never mind all the antics I’ve seen him pull at his own expense, through years of watching him at the Hunger Games; I didn’t expect Haymitch Abernathy to keep his house in this condition. It’s hateful. It’s worse than what Avoxes have to deal with the morning after feasts. It’s the waste of one man without an earthly care in the world, accruing over two decades, climbing his walls like art.
After I get over the stench, I think it suits him. And he suits it.
“The hell do you want,” he says, slurs really, and his eyes glare up at me like they’re burning through the bags underneath them.
“I want you to answer your phone,” I say, “but maybe it’s better to do this in person anyway. Cinna Ward,” I introduce myself before he asks, and hold a hand out into his doorway so he can choose not to take it. “Your new stylist.”
“I hope you mean for the tributes.” His breath is somehow less rancid than the reek pouring out his front door. He goes on before I can answer, “They finally scare Troy off?”
“He retired. Officially.”
Haymitch grins. His teeth are as yellow as his skin. I can’t help wanting to fix him but I don’t think he’s actually broken. “About time,” he says.
“You’ll forgive me if I think so too.”
“I’ll forgive you if you burn every single one of those skimpy coal miner uniforms he shoved the kids into since my time.”
“About that,” I say, and step away from the door, down to the first step of his porch. “Why don’t you come out here and we can take a look through my sketchbook?”
I can’t blame him for looking me up and down, for searching over my shoulder for whoever he thinks I came here with. “What’d you do, train in from the Capitol?”
“With today’s food shipment,” I explain. “They do have passenger cars, sometimes.” I take a bag of cookies out of my satchel. “Bought these in the square. The baker’s wife gave me directions.” I can’t think of many other coded ways to say no one important knows I’m here. Maybe he’s too drunk for innuendo.
He looks at the cookies and scrunches up his nose, but he does step out the front door and make his way onto the porch. He’s carrying a bottle of white liquor with him, which I can’t imagine will enhance the flavor of the cookies at all, but I didn’t buy them to bribe him. Instead of sitting, though, or leading on, he leans right into my face, and I’d say he sniffs me like a dog but I don’t actually see his nostrils move. He’s sizing me up. I guess that’s deserved. I wonder what he’s looking for.
I know what I see, though. I see dark hair that hasn’t been washed for weeks or cut for years. I see shabby clothes that are more a concession to the weather than to the quality of their construction. I see, or more precisely, smell, someone who has money and time to burn, and what he burns it on. I see a man who probably prizes the faint scruff on his chin because it took him twenty-three years to grow it. I know what skin and hair treatments are done to male tributes before they enter the Games, so that they stay children through the ordeal and so after, if they survive, they always have that reminder that the Capitol can and did get under their skin. Haymitch would have a full beard if it wasn’t for that. He’d look more like what he should be and less like what he is.
And he looks at me and sees Capitol, which of course he should. Healthy skin, eyes lined with gold.
“Let’s take a walk,” he says, and that’s fine with me.
The Victor’s Village in 12 is—well, I’ve never seen any other Victor’s Villages before, so I can’t compare it to anything else. But it’s like the parts of the Capitol that surround the parks, even if the houses are much smaller, only two stories tall above ground. Haymitch’s house is the only one that’s in any state of occupancy, and he hasn’t taken any particular care with it. There are benches in the little park, facing in toward bushes and ponds, or out toward the woods that separate it from the District town center. He sits on one that faces us toward the town, and leaves almost enough room for me. I take it. He can move over if he needs to.
“Cinna, was it?”
“Cinna. The stylist.” Not Cinna the conspirator. It takes two to conspire. So that’s still true.
“Right,” he says. “How’d you get stuck with us? Just the bottom of the pole?”
“I volunteered. The Gamemakers also offered me 3 and 11.”
He scoffs. “You turned down 3.”
“What can I say? I find you inspiring.”
I expect him to laugh or roll his eyes, but instead, he drinks. I eat a cookie. They’re frosted like the apple blossoms from the tree behind the bakery, but I didn’t think they’d have apple flavoring as well. It’s not very rich. I don’t think there’s butter in it at all. Cheese, maybe. Goat’s cheese. Strange, for a cookie.
“Inspiring,” Haymitch says when he’s done drinking. He didn’t blink when I mentioned the Gamemakers. Maybe he simply doesn’t think I’m serious. Or maybe I’m being too subtle and he’s too drunk. I’d bet on that. “Let’s see those sketches.”
I offer him the cookies, and he takes the bag off my hands so I can get into my satchel. I’ve marked the sketchbook at all the relevant places, clipped photographs and swatches or pasted beads on wherever it’s relevant. The first of the designs is easiest to find. “I work with Portia Gibson—she was on District 9’s prep team last year, if you remember her?” Haymitch doesn’t. I go on. “Anyway, when I told her that I was thinking, not coal but fire, she told me she’d been working on a synthetic fire for costumiers for a few months already. It should be ready in time for the Games this year, we still have a few weeks. If you’ll just look at this sketch here—”
“Why are you doing this?”
He’s not looking at the sketches. He’s not looking at me either. He’s not looking at anything at all, his head is hanging and that entire statement falls like a sigh. And that could mean anything; it could mean he knows what I want, or it could mean he just thinks I’m wasting my talent, or it could mean that I’m wasting this time. So I have to play to all of those options, to all of the meanings that question could take.
“Because I want to create a spark,” I tell him.
I wish I could see his eyes. I can’t, he’s still bowed forward, leaning on his knees. If I could see his eyes I’d know whether he’s laughing at me. But I can’t ask.
“Here,” I say, and I shove my sketchbook into his lap. The corner hits his bottle, but nothing splashes down. I point. “We want your tributes to get attention. What’s the thing that stands in Twelve’s way year in, year out? Lack of sponsorship. Lack of interest. No one from Twelve has even made it to the final eight since you won. For that, the Capitol has to care about you. And to care about you, they have to see you.”
“They’ll see us when we’ve got tributes worth seeing,” he says.
The words are dismissive, but the tone is not.
He looks up. He turns the page, away from the parade outfits with their tongues of live fire, to the interview clothing built of rare burning gems, the kind you come across only in the tightest knots of the earth. “But who knows?” he says, and looks to me sidelong. “Save these until I bring you a contender.”
He’s listening, then. He knows what I am.
“Could be this year,” I say.
“Could be the next,” he says. There are gems pasted on to the corners of the page, and he rubs one with his thumb, scratching a bead of dry glue away. “Hope you don’t mind sticking around.”
“I hate those skimpy mining uniforms as much as you do.” That’s true.
He takes a long while looking through the sketches after that, even goes back and assesses the parade outfits. “Synthetic fire?”
“It must seem despicable to you.”
“Does, but I’m not the one you have to convince.” Nodding, he slides the sketchbook back into my lap, and takes a swig of his liquor. “Gotta play their Games,” he says, in the dry gasp that follows. “All of them.”
I know he understands me, now. I know I’m not just pitching my designs. I open the sketchbook to a blank page, just after all the new 12 designs, and take a pencil out of my satchel. “Not all of them. If we were I’d have to fix you up too.”
He laughs, and drinks, and points up into the trees.
A mockingjay alights on one long bough, faces us. It’s close enough for me to see its eyes sparkle in the sun. I’ve never seen one live before, only on television.
Good thing I got my pencil out in time. I prop the sketchbook up on my knee and make a quick detail of it, shade half its wing, sharpen its beak.
“You’ll spook her if you keep scratching like that,” Haymitch says.
“Then keep her here.” The bird’s turned her head the other way, so I start a new sketch, larger this time, trying to actually capture her eye.
I hear Haymitch put his bottle down in the grass. Then I hear him whistle. Not a long siren sound, a tune. It’s simple, the first phrase of a song. He waits a moment, and then the bird coos it down at us, note for note. “Of course the bird knows that one,” he mutters, and then whistles the air again, drowning out the sound of my pencil on the paper.
When the whistling isn’t enough to keep the bird’s attention, he sings.
Listen for the whistle of the earth’s own heat.
Listen for the echoes underneath your feet.
Listen for the silence when the caged bird dies.
Then follow my voice and we’ll take to the skies.
It’s not a fine voice, not by anyone’s standards, least of all mine. But by the time he’s done, my page is covered in mockingjays.