Work Text:
SOLSTICE
Effie Trinket has heard that the summer solstice can do strange things to people. That the increased hours of sunlight feed the emotions. That this in turn makes people feel more deeply, imbuing them with an intense positivity and motivation. With a certain recklessness, a compulsion to strike out on courses of action they’ve previously forsworn.
Effie Trinket has laughed at this notion. At the mere thought that anyone could act on such a dubious whim. This is not her way. She is practical, she plans ahead. She has always weighed up every decision in a meticulously documented list of pros and cons. She has been teased over the years, mostly affectionately, for her love of a schedule, for her fierce opposition to acting on impulse, but carefully measured consideration is in her blood, it has been the only way for her.
This why she is at a loss now to explain how she has ended up on a train she had no plans to catch, on midsummer’s eve, rushing her away from the Capitol, the only home she has ever known.
She has told herself she is being ridiculous, has promised herself repeatedly that she will get off at the next stop and turn back, put an end to this madness. Except she knows she won’t. She’s going to the end of the line. If there’s one person on Earth who makes her spontaneous, rash, impulsive, illogical, then Haymitch Abernathy is it. The war has changed many things, but not that.
She hasn’t seen him for a long time. Not for six months, not since the final day of Katniss’s trial.
As they’d said goodbye, she hadn’t been able to help feeling a little relief mixed in with the sadness. He’d been different since she was rescued. He was the one to carry her from her cell, who refused to let her go, who delivered her personally to the hospital in his arms. He never left her side, except to see to the kids. He was full of guilt, of apologies, of lengthy hugs, of affection.
Blindsided with shock at her release, Effie hadn’t known how to react. She’d wished for so many years for Haymitch to be tender with her, to hold her, to cover her with kisses, to squeeze her hand in his while she slept, only to find herself longing for his harsh and witty put-downs, for his disdain, for a good old-fashioned argument. Anything to feel normal again.
She hadn’t known how to deal with this new Haymitch Abernathy, hadn’t known how post-war Effie felt or wanted to act. Not about anything. She’d thought it was over between them. That what she’d thought of as her great passion, her one true love, had perhaps after all been nothing more than a vehicle to get her through that time in her life. That it had no place in the new order.
They’ve kept in touch. Not much at first, but later on, once she’d sent Peeta back to them in the spring. She’d taken to calling Haymitch for progress reports, once a week on Sundays. Though now it’s Wednesdays too. And sometimes he calls her in between.
She’s been seeing a therapist, working through her issues. It’s going to take time, but her head feels clearer, her nightmares are less frequent, less intense. She’s had surgery on her knee, the one left so badly damaged by the guard’s boot and her doctor is pleased with the result. She’s been committed to her physiotherapy and can feel the joint strengthening with every day.
Haymitch has been doing his own kind of therapy, but this time it’s not just liquor-based. He’s told her about his headstrong flock of geese, entertains her with tales of their latest scrapes. He’s been working on a memory book of lost friends with the kids. It’s hard for him to talk about and she’s touched that he wants to tell her. The children are doing well and, reading between the lines, he derives a lot of strength from their tenacity.
Their conversations have become easier with time. They’ve re-found their old style, mixed it with something new. Haymitch has begun to tell her about the books he’s been reading and she’s found herself seeking out copies in the Capitol so they can discuss the content on their next call. She’d forgotten how intelligent he was, how insightful, and they have come to love each other’s critiques of what they’ve read. Usually they don’t agree and that’s the best of all - insults are thrown, witty banter and teasing pepper their reviews and it’s like old times again, except it’s only the best of the old times, without the cruelty, without the toxicity.
She’s realised that it’s still there, that spark they’ve always had, and she’s sure that he has too. The calls have turned decidedly playful, they are flirtatious with one another. She’s found herself brimming with anticipation for their next contact, revising clever things in her head that she knows he’ll like, planning on how to deliver them for maximum effect.
These past few days she hasn’t been able to get him out of her head. The trauma of her imprisonment has lessened and no longer dominates her every waking hour, nor is it anymore the sole topic of her dreams. The pain of her physical injuries has faded as she’s healed. She’s learned to feel normal again, or a new kind of normal at least, and she’s realised her new normal has a large, victor-shaped hole in it.
Her dreams are not always nightmares of violence and filth and degradation. Some nights they are filled with longing for the embraces and touches that so confused her after her rescue. There has been phone sex recently, born out of an innocent comment one night when she had raced to the phone straight from her shower and culminating in her straining to hear the groan of his release by his own hand through the receiver, coming against her own fingers, wishing they were his. She pictures running her hands over his broad shoulders, down the strong muscles of his back and beyond. Like the increasing summer heat, it is building every day, consuming her.
She has been to her therapist this morning. Haymitch is not a topic she usually raises in any detail, even though she is continually told that her sessions are her safe space, that there will be no judgment here. She likes the kindly middle-aged woman and she thinks that she likes her too. She hasn’t wanted to taint her view with her tales of a lengthy and often unhealthy obsession with the quell victor she worked alongside. Today it was unavoidable. She’s been so distracted, and the therapist can tell. So Effie has told her. How they were together. How it changed with time. How she didn’t know what to feel after the war. How she misses him now, how she can’t get him off her mind, how much she looks forward to their calls (she has omitted the part about the phone sex).
Her therapist has listened intently, then asked her if she would like to see him. Of course, is the obvious reply. So why doesn’t she go? It isn’t that simple. He might not feel the same way. But he might, comes the response. What is there to lose?
Everything, thinks Effie.
She’s mulled it over on her walk home, dismissed it as a foolish notion. So how is it that, barely twenty minutes after walking through the door, she is leaving again, two hastily packed suitcases at her sides? Arriving at the station, buying her ticket and clambering aboard the only through-train of the day with just seconds to spare? It must be the summer solstice, she decides as she looks out at the scenery rushing past. What else could it be?
X
Haymitch Abernathy has heard that the summer solstice can do strange things to people. That it rebalances faulty circadian rhythms. That it makes people think they can achieve their heart’s desires.
Haymitch Abernathy has laughed at this notion. What chance of rebalancing circadian rhythms when everyone around you has always spent their days deep underground in a coalmine, summer or winter? What chance of achieving your heart’s desires with the reaping on your doorstep every June? And, even in peacetime, that idea is ridiculous. He is too pragmatic, too logical for such foolishness.
This is why he is at a loss now to explain how it is that he can see Effie Trinket in his backyard as he stands on his porch in the late twilight.
He would say it must be the drink. Strong white liquor has caused him to hallucinate before. Except it can’t be that because tonight he is practically sober. His supplies will only arrive on tonight’s train; he can’t collect them until tomorrow. Perhaps it is withdrawal that is making him see things, though he has none of the other usual signs – the sweats, the shaking. It doesn’t affect him so much anymore these days; he doesn’t hit the bottle anything like as hard as he used to. Maybe it is his eyesight. He blinks hard several times, but she’s still there so he closes his eyes, grips the porch railing for support.
He misses her. He misses her so much it hurts him in his chest, like he’s been punched, like he’s permanently winded.
When she was found alive - more than he had allowed himself to wish for because he’s never been that lucky - when he’d secured her exclusion from the purge, when the most pressing of her injuries were no longer life-threatening, he’d hoped. Hoped that she’d want him to be to her all the things he’d never allowed. But she was different. Effie Trinket, always so confident and driven, hadn’t known how to act with him.
He’d assumed at first that she was angry, that she blamed him for her ordeal and with good reason. But that hadn’t been it. He’d tried not to show his disappointment. He knows better than anyone how a trauma can leave your connections with those close to you bruised and broken. After his Games, he’d found himself unable to speak to friends, neighbours from the Seam. He hadn’t been able to figure out how to act in his new life, with all the old constructs torn down, didn’t even start to try.
He’d wanted to ask her to come with him when he left for Twelve, but he’d known what the answer would have been. Still, he’d hoped, when Peeta came back, a childish hope as the boy arrived in the village, looking behind him for another figure. He can’t deny he’d been crushed. But then the phone calls had begun. Awkward at first, factual. But they’ve grown away from that. These days they are the best thing in his life. He doesn’t drink on Sundays or Wednesdays so he can stay sharp for her, so he will be able to recall their conversations and play them back to himself in the days ahead. He loves that their banter has returned, loves the flirtation, and now that that spark is back, he finds himself dreaming of her most nights.
They’re good dreams, vivid. He can smell her perfume, hear her laughter, feel the touch of her skin, silky smooth under his big hands. He hates waking up from them, the repeated sadness of realising they’re not real, but tonight isn’t the same. He must be in some kind of trance, sleep-walking maybe, because he can’t wake up, the vision of her still doesn’t disappear. He touches his hand to his heart to check it’s still beating. It is. If anything, it’s beating too fast. Perhaps Sae and the other old women from The Hob were right about the summer solstice, perhaps it is this balmy midsummer’s night which has fooled him into imagining his heart’s desire has come true. He closes his eyes again, tries to drift away in an attempt to halt this pointless, painful daydream.
He feels her now. Small fingertips stroke his calloused knuckles where his hand grips the rail and his eyes fly open.
The vision has moved. She’s right there in front of the porch and she looks the way she always does in his dreams, the way he always liked her best, without the extravagant costumes, the garish make up, the wigs. Slowly, tentatively, she mounts the steps and stands in front of him, a girlish, pleading look in the cornflower blue eyes that are even brighter than he remembers them.
“Effie?” he tries to ask, but his voice is strangled and he only manages to get out the first part of the word.
“I’m here,” she says softly, taking another step forward. She holds her arms out shyly at her sides, but he is frozen to the spot, so she slides them cautiously around him, draws him in with the gentlest of pressure. She tilts her head and leans forward on tiptoes and he knows what’s going to happen, it’s happened so many times in his head these past months - it’s the part where he always wakes up.
This time it doesn’t stop. This time he feels the warm touch of her lips on his and they’re perfect, full and soft and they fit so well to his, just as they always have. He lets her deepen the kiss, sliding his own arms around her and pressing her familiar frame to his chest, letting her overtake all of his senses at once.
When they eventually come up for air, she rests her head on his shoulder and he tilts his own downward to anchor her there, his left ear pressed to her right.
“You’re here,” he states simply. He still can’t quite believe it and he sways slightly on his feet. “I don’t know what to say.”
She pulls away a little, reaches up, cups his cheek in her hand. “Then don’t say anything.” She leans in, pecks his lips with longing. “Show me.”
He doesn’t need asking twice. He sweeps her off her feet, carries her to the expansive lounger that sits at the corner of the porch. His head is spinning, but not like it does with alcohol. Rather than being muted, his senses have come alive. He can feel himself buzzing with want for her, with need. The way she kisses him and runs her hands on his skin tells him it’s the same for her.
They make love long into the night, the sun disappearing at last, revealing a generous silvery sprinkling of stars and a full, fat moon. Effie gazes up at them after, bone tired but determined not to let this midsummer’s evening be over, Haymitch’s fingers stroking the bare skin of her spine as they lay facing one another, the warm summer wind breathing lightly over their naked bodies. He raises himself a little on one elbow, nuzzles the hair behind her ear, and that’s when it happens.
Three little words are whispered against the shell of her ear, soft and quiet, but unmistakeable. Effie fights to stay calm – she’s waited so long to hear those words, wished so hard, but she’s afraid of her reaction shutting him down. She knows how very hard this will have been for him; his background has always meant that love is synonymous with death. She can’t cheapen his words by repeating them back to him now, so instead she brings her lips to his, kisses him with a passion that will leave him in no doubt as to how much this means to her or as to her reciprocity.
He holds her more tightly against him and he knows that he will never have enough of this. His entire body is tingling and he feels weightless pressed against her. The release of those words he’d held back for so long, that he’d denied to himself for so many years, has not sent his heart racing or a panicked sweat breaking out on his skin after all. He feels calm, peaceful, content.
They lay in silence for a while, basking in the bliss.
“I’m so glad I came,” murmurs Effie eventually.
Haymitch tightens his grip, presses a kiss to her temple. “What made up your mind?” he asks.
“I’ve wanted to come for a long time,” she tells him. “I wasn’t brave enough until today.”
“I’ve wanted to ask you,” Haymitch confesses. “I’ve wanted to ask you since that day I left with Katniss. I didn’t think you’d agree.”
“I wouldn’t have back then,” she admits.
“Things have changed, huh?”
She props herself up to look at him. “No. The exact opposite. Nothing’s changed. I just had to heal before I could see it, before I could know it. The way I felt for you back then – it’s still there, just as strong. Stronger. I’ve known it for a while.”
“So why today?”
“A compulsion,” she replies. “Spur of the moment. I just threw some things in a bag and caught the train.
He chuckles. “Effie Trinket going off schedule? No grand plan?”
“I know.” She laughs a little too. “Want to hear something silly?”
“Sure.”
“On the train I kept having this foolish notion it was to do with midsummer. People in the Capitol used to say the sun gave you the courage to do the things you were too afraid to try.”
Haymitch laughs again and shakes his head.
“I told you it was silly,” she says, a little embarrassed.
“The old women in the Seam used to say the summer solstice had the power to make you achieve your heart’s desire. I always thought it was ridiculous. But tonight, when I saw you standing there in the yard, I thought maybe…”
“The sun had conjured me up?” she suggests, amused. “Where is Haymitch Abernathy and what have you done with him?”
“I know, I know,” he says, brushing off her gentle teasing. “But who am I to argue with the solar system? I’m going to make the most of you while I have you, whatever brought you here.”
“And how long do you want me?” she asks tentatively, not sure she is ready for whatever his answer might be.
“Oh, I was thinking roughly… forever?” he suggests.
Forever. It’s madness, but she knows there’s nothing she wants more. She fights to contain her joy, because she needs him to be sure. “You know we’ll argue every day? You know I’ll drive you crazy, don’t you?”
She looks up at him and his face splits into the widest grin she’s ever seen him wear. “Sweetheart, I’m counting on it.”