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[1] nothing is whole
He was blind-drunk for this.
In his tenure, he had seen blood and death and the very worst the Capitol had to offer, up close and raw. Yet, at this most crucial moment, everything felt as distant and edited as television. Everything was finally happening; everything he had dreamed of since he was fifteen years old. The downfall of the Capitol.
The hovercraft neared the classified, protective exterior of the 75th Hunger Games arena. They were moments away from firing through the defensive cage the Capitol had created, literally and figuratively destroying the machine that bound them in slavery, and Haymitch was piloting drunk. It was the most paramount moment of his and most others’ lives, and for some reason the inspirational chant that echoed in his mind was the voice of Katniss saying, “I came for a drink.”
He allowed himself to daydream, a flashback to that fateful night. He saw Katniss, weary, vulnerable but unwilling to cop to it, sitting across from him in his Victor home. It was her face, her hard Seam eyes, that he could not seem to shake as they flew into this essential and deadly mission. Grasping at a chance at freedom, putting an innocent girl’s life on the line. No better than the Gamemakers, really.
In the chaos of explosions and crunching metal, shots fired and cables sparking, somehow the steel-cold voice of the woman named Coin blared loudly at him through the radio, “If we can’t save them both, the boy is our top priority.”
And drunkenly he laughed; a harsh, piercing laugh that hit him in his lungs. He remembered her face glowing in the lamplight of his living room, cheeks raw and scratchy red from crying, pupils glazed from grain liquor. “Peeta makes it out alive,” she had urged.
She hadn’t known then that she’d be electrocuted, hair and flesh and face singed with crisp burn marks, lying helpless on the arena floor, reaching for the salvation of hovercraft that was too busy fighting off enemy fire and clutching its single set of metal pincers around the unconscious body of Peeta Mellark to save her. Haymitch watched from the open hovercraft hatch as her near-corpse grew smaller and smaller in the distance, until it was just a dark blemish on the earth. Peeta was recovered and sent immediately to the sick bay, a stretcher zooming past him that he barely saw. The hatch doors shut with an ominous thud.
“You get your wish, sweetheart,” he whispered out loud. Katniss was gone.
[2] and nothing is broken
He was bone-dry sober for this.
District Thirteen had forced him through a detox. He’d been so ill they thought he might not actually live through it, but his stubborn, glutton-for-punishment heart persevered. Now Katniss was coming home, and he was sober. For the first time in years, he could hear his racing heart. He had already given her up for dead, but now, after Peeta’s begging and shrewd negotiating with Coin, a rescue mission had brought her home to them.
“It was almost too easy,” Gale said, dark clouds rolling across his Seam eyes. “It’s like they wanted us to find them.”
As he spoke, the gash above his eye started to bleed again.
Haymitch cocked an eyebrow and pointed. “Not too easy, though, right?” he commented. “Who did the damage to your pretty face?”
Gale’s eyes were heavy and far away as he answered. “This? Katniss did this.”
At first Haymitch chuckled; it sounded about right for Katniss. Girl had no damn sense, after all. But as the terror lingered in Gale’s hollow eyes, Haymitch realized there was something more to it. Something wrong with Katniss.
Through the tempered glass, they watched Katniss struggle against her restraints in the holding cell. The veins on her starved arms were pulsing as she screamed and writhed. “He’s going to kill me!” she shrieked, quivering in fear as she looked right at Peeta. Haymitch felt the pain in Peeta’s eyes like it was his own.
“They call it hijacking,” Plutarch tried explaining to a teary-eyed Peeta.
“We’ll make them pay,” were the first words Peeta could unclog from his throat. He turned away from her and locked eyes with Plutarch. “Let’s get started on that propos you mentioned.”
Plutarch beamed, slapping Peeta on the back and leading him to their production room. Leading him away from the horror, the shattering reality of the monster Katniss had become. Gale retreated as well, idly fingering his gun-holster. Haymitch watched for a moment longer, wincing as the medical techs pinned her down to inject a sedative into her veins.
He turned to the guard, decisively. Clear-eyed. “Let me in there,” he instructed the man at the door.
The guard hesitated, watching Katniss scream and kick. “You should give it another minute. Let the drugs kick in.”
Haymitch pushed past him with a scoff. “I’ll take my chances.”
Her shivering gray eyes met his across the clinical white room, and all at once she was calm. It was the sedatives, probably, but a part of Haymitch’s sober heart felt a flurry of pride that maybe, just maybe, it was the sight of him that was soothing.
He reached out-
“Careful, sir!” said the med tech. “She’s been biting some.”
Haymitch laughed and didn’t retreat. He touched her face, let her hot quiet tears drip over his fingers. Her skin was paper-soft from dehydration.
“Well at least you listened to me for a change,” he muttered. “You stayed alive.”
“Haymitch,” she managed to gasp, and it was the softest sound of relief. “Haymitch, thank god. Is this real, or is this a nightmare?”
“This is real, sweetheart. And it’s a nightmare.”
[3] my heart’s a battleground
He was there every moment for this.
Katniss was confined to the hospital wing for weeks. They kept her in a solitary room that was conspicuously absent of anything that could be turned into a weapon. Prim pleaded to be included in her nursing staff, but it was impossible for her to walk into Katniss’ room without sending the patient into a rage of torment.
“WHY DO THEY LET HER IN HERE?” she screamed at Haymitch, on the last day that Katniss ever saw Prim alive. She couldn’t look at her without seeing the warped memories the Capitol had given her of Prim forcing her into the Games. Erasing her most foundational memory of all, volunteering.
“She cares about you, Katniss,” Haymitch repeated tiredly, for the umpteenth time. “You care about her, too, sweetheart. You just can’t remember.”
That was one of her harder days. Bulging eyes, heaving breaths. Leather restraints were the only thing keeping her from tearing out her own eyes.
“I can’t do it, Haymitch,” she said softly, after Prim and the other nurses had left them alone. Tears streamed down her face as she stared at him. Begged him to understand. “Don’t make me do it anymore.”
Her eyes fell on the machinery that pumped daily pain medication into her veins. Haymitch knew what she wanted. Just a few clicks on the dial, and the dose that numbed her could be adjusted to send her into a long, peaceful sleep.
He pressed her face between his weathered hands, against her crying and wincing resistance. “You can’t make me give up on you, sweetheart. You should know that by now.”
She cried. “But how? ”
He stroked her forehead, a tenderness he didn’t even know he possessed until that moment. “Just stay alive. Heal. You’re done fighting, hear me? Now comes the hard part. Living. Healing.”
Everyone that Katniss had truly cherished, Prim and Gale and Peeta, learned to move on. The hijacking destroyed the memories that bound her to them, shattered every thread that had given her purpose before. She underwent hours of tedious and grueling therapy. Haymitch was the only one she could stand to be at her side, and so he was. Every long, sober day.
Sometimes patiently and sometimes with his familiar, unforgiving tough love, Haymitch tried to teach Katniss real from not real. It was agonizing, but it felt natural, too. One thing the Capitol hadn’t unraveled in her mind was the seamless way their thoughts wove together. He could still walk into the room and tell her everything with just a glance.
Sometimes there was a lot of silence, but the silence was bearable because they understood each other too well to be dependent on words.
Peeta used the movement to create distance from the heartache that was Katniss. Unable to follow her lead, the way he had survived the Games, he grew into the role that Coin had created for him as the face of the resistance. Alongside Gale, he trained with the army and gave speeches to the masses. His words rallied the people. They called him Mockingjay, donning a uniform that Portia had modified from Cinna's designs.
Intermittently, Plutarch’s crew would rally Katniss from her isolation and recovery and dress her up in her matching Mockingjay costume. No one was allowed in the production booth with her but Haymitch and the stylists, who had taken to wearing protective gloves when they painted her face. She hated it, which Haymitch found comforting, because she had always hated being on camera. She was still Katniss, somewhere deep in her rattled bones.
She would recite Plutarch’s words, clenching her fists to get through the pain of it. The propos wizards would edit her to stand by Peeta’s side, to be on the frontlines of the war. A necessary mythology to cover up the reality of what the Capitol had really done to her.
The truth of what had become of the discarded idol was kept behind closed doors, where Haymitch was the only thing she had left that she knew for sure was real.
[4] in you and I, there’s a new land
He was surprisingly unenthusiastic for this.
The war was won. The Districts were liberated. The political race between Coin and Peeta for the new position of elected leader was heated and underway. That was Peeta’s calling now: to lead.
Haymitch had been an instrument from the earliest rumblings of the revolution, an unsung hero whose contributions would never be known. He didn’t much care for cameras, anyhow. His job in this new order was simple: take Katniss home. Repair the wreckage of their victory.
That first night, they sat by the fire in her dusty Victor mansion. It was getting late, and Haymitch tried to leave. Katniss grabbed his hand.
“Stay with me,” she said. He had to admit to himself that he wanted her near, and that if he went back to his drafty house alone, he was sure to find an old bottle somewhere he couldn’t help but drain.
And maybe she meant for just awhile longer, he thought, or maybe she meant just for the night. But when he stayed, she never asked him to leave. And so he kept on staying, until neither of them could remember what it was like to be apart.
Victors’ Village was soon claimed by families who were most eager to breathe new life and normalcy into District Twelve. Young people, primed to rebuild.
Haymitch and Katniss retreated to the Seam, building a cabin on the ruins of Katniss’ childhood home. Katniss resumed hunting. Haymitch learned to cook. They kept a simple home, far away from the flourishing new republic of Panem. No television. Few visitors.
Peeta often sent money and occasionally wrote letters, which after years of torment, Katniss was able to answer, with cautious amity. She had even been able to mend her memories of Prim, and grieve her properly. There were still nightmares, always. But there was life, for Haymitch and Katniss, together in this quiet sanctuary.
Katniss sat cross-legged in front of the hearth, orange rays dancing in a halo around her let-down hair. He was watching her fingers in the firelight, as she deftly restrung her bow. It was one of those odd relics from the war that didn’t send her into fits of PTSD. Despite the terrors she had faced, clutching it for survival, it hadn’t been ruined by the hijacking.
Her weapon and her mentor, still here in the aftermath.
She stopped suddenly, feeling him watching her, and stared back at him.
“What?” she said, with a discomforted smile.
He blushed a little, because he knew it was impossible to hide his thoughts from her. She had always known what was thinking, what he wanted.
“Come here,” he growled. “Just come… come be by me for a minute.”
Something about her frame in front of the flames reminded him too much of leaving her behind in the fulminating Arena, watching her get smaller and smaller, further and further away. Since her hijacking, he’d been careful with her. He gave her the space she needed to feel safe, to feel real. But in certain moments, like then and there, he just needed to touch her. Katniss was maybe the only thing that made him weak. The only real thing that he sometimes had to question, to confirm, to test that she was still there with him.
Katniss cocked an eyebrow but didn’t argue, resting her bow on the hardwood floor and climbing next to him on the sofa. He pulled his arms around her and pressed her almost too-hard against him. He buried his face in her hair and lingered on the scent of pine and smoke. He felt her tremble as the scruff of his beard grazed her face. He kissed her forehead.
Katniss leaned back, watching him curiously. “What was that for?”
Haymitch shrugged. “Just thinking how glad I am you’re still here. How glad I am I didn’t lose you.”
He hesitated. It wasn’t often that they reminisced about the past. Survival these days seemed dependent on living in the moment. But it was in his thoughts, and once he got to thinking about something, it was hard to keep Katniss out.
“I’ve never gotten over… the Games. When they took you to the Capitol.” He paused to watch her reaction, to make sure it wasn’t triggering. She stayed serene, watching, listening. He continued. “I don’t think I’ve ever… I don’t think I’ve ever told you I was sorry.” Rare tears pricked his Seam eyes. “Leaving you behind. I see that damn door closing without you in it all the time, and it eats me up.”
Katniss put her hand on his face. He sighed at its warmth. “We can’t ever apologize for what happened in the war,” she said. “There’d be no way to keep going, if we thought about all the regrets.”
He nodded, but he felt like she still didn’t understand. Or if she did, she was still going to make him say it out loud.
“I’d spent my entire life waiting for that moment, waiting to spit right in Snow’s face, but deep down I wanted to throw it all away. I only wanted you. You’ve always been the most important thing. I never should have let you go.”
The heat between them was palpable. He felt like he could feel her heart pounding through her wool sweater, so close to him.
“I’m glad I didn’t lose you, either, Haymitch,” she responded, after thinking deeply. “They could have taken you away, like they took everyone else. Have you ever wondered why they didn’t?”
Haymitch grunted a bitter chuckle. “I’m sure I never mattered enough for them to consider.”
Katniss nodded, staring deep into her broken memories. “I guess not. I guess the way you’ve always been with me, it’s not a way that anyone could see. But you’ve always been with me. You were with me at the Cornucopia, telling me to run, telling me to ignore my demons. You were with me in that cave watching Peeta die, giving me the right words to say to keep him from being afraid. You were with me when I spoke up for Rue; you were yelling at me, sure, but you were with me. And you were with me when they tortured me, when they starved me, filled me with venom. It was your voice that kept me strong. It kept me… me. It kept me human and holding on.”
Haymitch could only exhale, watching her eyes while the crackling of the fire filled the silence. It was everything he knew, everything he had always felt. But she was always quiet, like him, so it was strange to let those unspoken truths they shared have a voice.
Their eyes were fixed and knowing, until their lips met and he squeezed her tight again. It was safe to say it, now. Safe to know it, and live it, and heal.
He was ready for this.