Work Text:
It was a quiet night, like most in the train. They barely made any noise to denounce their presence, and moved like howls in the night. You know, two hundred miles per hour and all that.
Two days of conflicted emotions and timid glances, two days of bliss before thunder. The press, the parties, the apartment, getting sponsors, going around and around together, then separately, then returning to the table. To the hall. To the apartment.
They didn’t speak. He was half sitting, half lying down on a couch, a drink in hand, but it had been just standing in his hand for almost half an hour.
She was pretending to read a magazine, but her eyes were unfocused, staring into nothing, lost in considerations. He moved his hand again. Almost finished his drink. A light from a small lamp in a table was flickering. How odd, for the Capitol. Unbecoming, really. Wasn’t everything supposed to be working perfectly, especially now?
She put down the magazine, turned her eyes to him.
“Haymitch, can I confess something to you?” She asked, in a very definitive tone.
He immediately looked at her, and a genuine grin crossed his face.
“I know, sweetheart. You had a wet dream about me. That is why you were looking at me funny this morning.”
“Haymitch, what? I…” She stuttered, and couldn’t avoid blushing.
“I’ve seen that look in all those Capitol darlings getting…” This next word he dragged: “…all flustered when they see me. Ever since the first year.”
She was now looking confused, and rather disturbed, which were always a mix of emotions that made her face look really funny.
He took a sip of his drink.
“That’s not… it’s not the matter I wanted to…”
“Don’t make a fuss of it! You’re blushing.”
And then he winked at her. There was that grin. She shifted in her seat.
“I see it’s impossible to attempt to have a serious conversation with you!”
Haymitch was already up, next to the drink cart. He turned around to look at Effie and she had a serious, closed off, embarrassed expression to her whole face. So he immediately understood. She was being serious.
“What is it?”
She took a small, yet deep breath. What she always did when she was nervous, disapproving or about to give bad news.
“I watched your Games. I don’t think I told you that before.”
Now he was confused.
“So did everyone else. What were you, like, six?”
“I was nine.” She had a very, very small smile for a split of a second. She always felt flattered when he judged her as being younger than she was, and that happened all the time. But the tone in which she spoke was unvarying and serious. “But I don’t really recall them. My parents didn’t pressure me to watch them, really. In fact, I think they tried to avoid I did up to a certain age. I mostly remember you from interviews and all the prep stage.”
“So, you watched parts of it. I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“I watched them later. The recording. A few years back.” She was loosing her resolve and her voice was getting lower. “After we started working together.”
The question that popped up in his mind was why. But that’s not what he replied. He didn’t really know what to reply. He took his seat back, drink in hand.
“Effie, what do you want to say?”
“I felt like I had to tell you. I felt… I don’t feel right about it.”
He had a chance there. A chance to be unpleasant, to be petty. He indulged in it, if ever so slightly. There was a tone of mockery in his question, but also curiosity.
“You felt bad for watching The Hunger Games?”
“Your Games.”
He laughed.
“Oh, yeah, so fuck the rest of them.”
She blushed, but this time of aggravation. And yet she still spoke patiently. “It… honestly, it felt like an invasion of privacy!”
He stared at her for a moment.
“The fucking show airs live to the whole nation. How is that an invasion of privacy? Some sick motherfuckers probably keep those tapes to watch every other year!”
This comment didn’t help.
“I didn’t have to. It’s not the same, precisely as you just said. It would have been different, all those years ago. This was.. inappropriate.”
Why, he kept thinking. She looked like she was about to continue speaking, so he let her.
“I wanted to try to understand you. You wouldn’t speak to me. And you were… drinking, every day. It was… so wrong of me.”
He was about to speak. But she said:
“That was definitely not a way to try to understand you. At least not as I wished to. Or that you would have wished me to. Even if you don’t care.”
There is some part of me that cares about what you think, he thought. But he didn’t want to keep that thought for long.
“Yeah, I don’t care.” He took a sip of the whiskey. “But you do, apparently. So, I’ll accept that poor attempt at an apology you’ve just made.”
She looked relieved. He still wanted to ask why. Not why she watched the Games, that she had made clear already. But why she cared. Why she was sorry now. Why she was bringing this up. These were all questions he feared he knew the answer to, and, perhaps, he feared more the very fact that he knew it rather than the answer to all the whys about her.
This raised a lot of topics about Effie. It implied a lot. Things he was bothered to be almost sure about. That Effie didn’t enjoy, or - let’s risk going as far as saying - really support the Games anymore. That her parents didn’t raise her fully fucked up, after all. But that things still got very fucked up.
She had a lot of moral debates when she was that quiet. She was very emotionally intelligent, for she could read him a bit too well. She really cared about her “job” (Haymitch needed to think of this as a force of expression in his mind), cared enough to care about her mentor-colleague-fellow perpetrator.
Shit.
She cared about him.
“Thank you for being… graceful about this.”
She was still sitting, in a very uptight position, eyes wondering around him and the room. But her expression was relaxed, it was natural. Unconscious. Simply put, she was at ease with him.
“You want a drink?” He asked, pointing to the bar cart.
A second of silence. Of hesit…
“Yes, if you’d be so kind.”
So he got up from his seat.