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He knows that tune.
It’s the first thought Haymitch has, stumbling down the hall in Snow’s mansion after taking a wrong turn from the washroom (why anyone had allowed him to go alone, he has no idea; but then again, he’s learned Capitol security isn’t really all that). It’s faint, the strumming of the guitar — the roar from the victor’s celebration gives it some camouflage, but not so much that he doesn’t start to hum along.
Stupidly, he follows it. It’s not like he could possibly get into anymore trouble, after all.
One of the many imposing doors of the mansion is slightly ajar, warm light trickling into the otherwise dimmed hall. Haymitch ceases his humming and peers in. A woman, with wild, dark hair sits with her back turned. Facing her, a boy, seemingly around Sid’s age, sits and listens to her play. His dirty blond ringlets make him look like a town kid from 12, but, of course, he must be one of President Snow’s kids. Probably the youngest, Haymitch assumes.
“… Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Luc—”
“Ma! The victor!” The boy interrupts, his finger flying to the cracked door. Haymitch gapes and stumbles back. Sure, it would be just his luck to come across the Snow family and get caught eavesdropping.
“What?” the older woman’s head turns and Haymitch gasps. Her eyes widen and Haymitch is frozen where he stands as she approaches, the guitar set gently aside.
“So, you’re the victor from 12–”
“You’re her,” Haymitch blurts.
He may be on a powerful cocktail of painkillers and overstuffed with fine food, but he knows that face instantly. The mysterious singing girl in the rainbow dress. District Twelve’s first victor. She’s clearly in middle age, but the voice and the eyes…
“Get in here,” she yanks Haymitch’s arm, to his surprise. He trips over his shiny shoes. She turns to the boy and smiles, nervously but with some poise nonetheless. “Franz, darling, I think it’s time you scooted off to bed, no? You’ve got school tomorrow, and you know your Pa’s driver isn’t going wait too long for you…”
“Alright,” the boy, Franz, rolls his eyes, but hugs the woman. “Night, ma!” She kisses the top of his head and he scrunches his nose, before shuffling out of the room.
“What are you doing back here? You aren’t supposed to be here,” the woman rounds on Haymitch immediately. “Heaven preserve, I thought I’d kept my distance this year, and here…” She huffs through her nostrils, settling back into the chair she’d been in before Haymitch had been spotted. “You’re not…”
“I… I’m sorry, I just… I know that song,” Haymitch explains weakly. “My… my girl, back in 12, she’s Covey.”
The woman sits ramrod straight at the mention.
“Covey?” she echoes.
“Yes ma’am,” Haymitch confirms. “Lenore Dove’s her name. You… You’re Covey too, aren’t you?”
The pause that settles between them is heavy and loaded, like the air before a storm back home.
“Listen—” she begins, but Haymitch blurts:
“At least tell me your name!”
“Lucy Gray,” she grits out before grabbing Haymitch’s forearms. “But you can’t — you can’t talk about me back in Twelve. You hear? As far as anyone’s concerned…”
“As far as anyone’s concerned what?” Haymitch is baffled, and so asks the leading question.
“As far as anyone’s concerned, I’m dead. Now get back to your party.” She doesn’t meet his eyes and Haymitch protests, which earns him a firm shove. “Get. Back. To your party. And don’t you tell a soul, Haymitch Abernathy. You’re already in enough danger as is.”
When Haymitch returns to the festivities, the twisting golden birdcage seems doubly full.
***
When Burdock takes him to Lenore Dove’s grave, he notices the slate one covered with moss.
“Do you know what happened to her?” he points, even though he knows exactly what did. Dead to Twelve, indeed.
Burdock shrugs.
“No clue.”
***
“Dead to Twelve, indeed,” Haymitch mutters to Lucy Gray the following year. He sneaks away from one of the luxurious parties for the former victors, and finds her again in what seems to be her music room.
“Don’t talk on things you don’t understand,” she chides.
“Oh, sure, Mrs. Snow,” Haymitch sneers. “Tell me all about how it was so hard to choose to run off with your mentor to a plush life in the Capitol, with your glorious instruments and fine clothes and comfortable children who will never be reap—”
Smack!
Haymitch’s cheek stings and he’s unsurprised this woman once dominated shows at the Hob with that speed and strength behind her. She certainly could’ve controlled a crowd even on its rowdiest nights.
“You aren’t much for listening, are you?” Lucy Gray scolds. “Don’t talk on things you don’t understand, Haymitch. I sure do know what it’s like to worry about… oh, hell. I don’t know why I’d bother explaining myself to someone so sure about me. Like leading a horse to water.”
She retreats from him slightly, gaze soft and out-of-focus. Haymitch is fairly sure she’s about to cry, but watches with a modicum of respect as she steels herself.
“I’m going to tell you how I ended up here. But you aren’t gonna speak on it to nobody nowhere, not even to a ghost. Do you understand?”
Haymitch nods.
***
“Coryo… the president and I,” her voice drips pure acrimony at Snow’s title. “Met when he was assigned to be my mentor. In the 10th. We… We made a good team, at first. He made sure I won, no matter the cost. It cost him a lot, for a time. Long story short, he ended up a Peacekeeper out in 12, an assignment he claims he requested to be closer to me. And I… well, he wasn’t like any boy back in 12. I sure liked that about him. He… but he’s always been ambitious.”
Lucy Gray stares at her hands as she recounts her tale, while Haymitch stays fixated on her face.
“He… He did some things that made me unsure about him. But we decided after a time that it’d be worthwhile to strike it out on our own, to go… North. That plan spiraled out to paranoia and he, well, shot me and believed me dead. Clerk Carmine found me out in the woods and managed to get me stitched back up,” she lifts her fine, shimmering silk blouse to reveal a puckered scar, just above her hip. “I laid low for a while. Wanted him to believe I was dead. But Coriolanus had left me with more than just a bullet wound.”
Haymitch’s brow furrowed, wondering just what she meant at first. Lucy Gray looked up at his befuddled face and rolled her eyes.
“Men,” she sighed, and motioned at her stomach in a rounded way. Haymitch’s jaw dropped.
“Not so easy to lay low when you’re a slow-moving target,” Lucy Gray sighed. “I dared go to the Hob, to pick up some smuggled antiseptic from a Peacekeeper delivery, and one of his little birds told. Coriolanus was at the University by then, but he was on his way to Twelve in a matter of weeks. Typical of him, he arrived at the Covey’s house when I was in just about the worst of my pains.”
“You… had a kid in Twelve?” Haymitch questions. Lucy Gray nods.
“I still do, far as I know. She was a beautiful little thing, had her pa’s hair and all. I figured we were both goners… that Gaul woman had done a number on Coriolanus’s mind already. But he… well, he was relieved there was nothing ‘wrong’ with me, in that way, you see? So he whisked me back here not hours after… after I’d had our girl.”
Her voice wavers and Haymitch is half sure she’s about to cry.
“What happened to her?”
Lucy Gray finally looks up at him and a tight-lipped smile graces her face. She shrugs, throwing her hands up in defeat.
“He let me name her. And then we… we agreed she should be left with one of the families in the Seam who I knew had been struggling to have any little ones of their own. The O’Malleys. Nice people. Good people.”
“Layla Rose!” Haymitch exclaims. Lucy Gray smiles a tight smile again and nods. Haymitch remembers the O’Malley girl well; she went with Burdock’s uncle Jamie.
“Yes,” Lucy Gray confirms. “Layla Rose.”
The realization settles on Haymitch eventually; it’s the painful truth about just how twisted a and demented their president truly is. He’d let — no, no, made — the woman he supposedly loves sit through six years of waiting to see if their firstborn would be reaped. Haymitch is certain, knowing Snow intimately now, that he’d never let Lucy Gray miss a Reaping. She’d outsmarted him, after all. And Haymitch knows quite well where that leads.
“Why… Why stay?” his eyes look at her, pleading. He wonders the same thing himself; why not just take care of Snow’s dirty laundry now?
“Hope,” Lucy Gray shrugs. “Plus, we’ve got four more babies now; and while I hate they’ll never know their sister — and I couldn’t give them proper Covey names — I’ve gotta make sure they see the sunrise.”
Haymitch has researched the Snow family since their last encounter. Per official records, Snow’s wife is a woman named Lucilla — a sickly woman who’s almost never made a public appearance, but has managed to birth him four children: Antonin, Johannes, Maria, and Franz. Names that, with a little help from Clerk Carmine, he’s learned aren’t song names but are surely great musical names. The Covey naming tradition won out, even in the Capitol.
“I hope that as much for the rest of us,” Haymitch states. Lucy Gray reaches out and grasps his hand tightly.
“Me too. And when it finally does, maybe the snow will melt.”