Work Text:
On the morning of my fortieth birthday, I wake up shivering against the morning dew, curled up like a baby on the gray rock of Lenore Dove’s gravestone. I don’t often find myself this far into the woods anymore – torn between my desperation to forget and my need to remember – but when I do, it’s under the haze of rotgut, which has an uncanny ability to draw out the deepest hurts and shove them back into my face once I return to consciousness. Often, I won’t know what pain is haunting me during the daylight hours until I wake up the next morning on Louella’s old doorstep, or the meadow where Lenore Dove raised her geese, or the vacant lot where the Abernathy house used to be. I’m a recluse in the day, only to become a wandering ghost in the night, haunted by the past I’m unable to forget.
When I wake up in that Covey cemetery, my love’s voice whispering her name poem in my year, her body withered to bones in the indifferent earth underneath my slumped form, I know that today will be a worse birthday than usual.
My hand automatically reaches for the bottle of liquor at my side, but it’s long empty. I throw it viciously at a nearby tree, and the glass shatters into diamonds around the headstones. The sun is gently rising over the mountains, and the weight of my unfulfilled promise to Lenore Dove presses like condemnation across my weary shoulders, my shaking hands.
I stumble back home, the dead whispering in my ear with each step, and do my best to ignore the fear and dread pulsing through the very air of District 12. The rebellious slogans in orange splatters of paint are long gone, and it seems like the homes themselves are succumbing to the oppression of the Capitol, leaning inwards and groaning audibly as I pass by. Any hints of song or music – so beloved by the Covey – are dead and buried with most of them. After Lenore Dove’s death, any music I’d hear would send me reaching for the bottle in a soul-ripping need to drown the grief. But now that it’s gone, it’s like I’ve lost her all over again. Lost her in a way that I didn’t before.
The only music I hear now comes from the Capitol. The national anthem and Flickerman’s Hunger Games theme, echoing tinny through my television set. I shut them off whenever I can. I’d rather never hear music again than hear only the Capitol’s soulless melodies.
I finally reach my house, the only one occupied in the Victor’s village, and scrub my face clean of the lingering smell of rotgut and vomit using the running water of the sink. The cistern here never runs dry, but I try not to waste too much of it anyway, my Ma’s voice ringing harsh in my ear when I do.
Today feels like a milestone, in the worst possible way. Forty years old. But when I look in the mirror – something I seldom do – I look at least fifteen years older. These years of isolation have not been kind to me.
It’s not the isolation that’s aged you, Maysilee murmurs beside me, her voice sharp with disapproval.
Yeah, alright. Maybe the drinking had something to do with it.
Maysilee snorts.
Of all my ghosts, Maysilee is the one that is the easiest for me to be around, the one who can provide a modicum of comfort without drowning me in guilt. Ironic, considering how sharp her tongue was when she was alive. I will always prefer seeing my girl, but the sight of Lenore Dove can be too much for this delicate old heart to take sometimes, especially if I’m on the wrong side of the bottle. Her eyes grow more and more accusatory as we get close to the next quarter-quell. The anniversary of the games that may not have killed me, but it killed everything that mattered. And if I don’t do something soon, the games will kill two more kids in my place. But Lenore Dove knows as well as I – there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
Today marks the 74th Hunger Games. Only one year left. I don’t remember consciously setting this deadline for myself, but I certainly thought that we would’ve been able to overthrow the Capitol and stopped the reapings by the time the next quarter-quell came around. But here we are, twenty four years after my Games, and we all we have to show for it are increasingly subdued Districts, an aimless and divided rebellion, and a Capitol that’s wealthier than it’s ever been before.
“I’m sorry, Lenore Dove,” I mutter into the running water passing like blood between my fingers and down the drain of the sink. “I don’t think I can keep my promise.”
I shut off the tap and, suddenly and wildly furious, reach for an unopened bottle of rotgut and down it in one go.
-
It’s only once the actual reaping ceremony starts – with me barely able to stumble up the stairs to the platform – that I realize that I might’ve over done it. But I can’t bring myself to care. The Capitol has stolen everything else from me. Why not my dignity, too?
The opening ceremony is a blur, punctuated by me falling off the stage because the floor refuses to stay still under my feet, but it doesn’t take long for me to focus past the fog of alcohol. As much as I reach for the bottle to push back the painful memories, it doesn’t do a damn thing in helping me avoid new ones. And this moment, the reaping of two new kids for slaughter, is always one that I remember. No matter how much I don’t want to.
When Effie reaches into the large glass bowl with her perfectly manicured fingers and delicately pulls out a single slip of paper and calls out the name of Burdock’s youngest, I bitterly wish I’d brought another bottle of rotgut with me, public appearances be damned.
The girl is a tiny little thing as she walks towards the stage, favoring her mother with her blonde hair and pale skin, looking for all the world as delicate as her namesake. Maybe I’m just getting old, but she looks too young, too small to be able to qualify for a reaping. But what does age or size matter with a government that purposely and deliberately pits children to murder each other on an annual basis?
Another voice cries out from the crowd, calling out the girl’s name. For a second, I think I’m about to witness a reenactment of Woodbine’s reaping.
And I do. But not in the way I expect.
Another girl, this one older, rushes for the stage. Before the Peacekeepers can react, she steps between Primrose and the Capitol’s stage in an eerie mimicry of how I stepped in between Lenore Dove and the Peacekeeper that was attacking her.
I recognize her now that she’s stopped moving – she’s Burdock’s oldest, the one that traded game in the Hob. She’s a serious girl who keeps to herself, but has endeared herself to many with how often she feeds the hungry with her trades. Not much is known about Katniss Everdeen, but there is one thing that everyone knows without a doubt. She adores her little sister.
But I don’t think anyone realized how deep that love ran until she volunteered to take her sister’s place for the slaughter.
The energy of the crowd is palpable, and Primrose clings to her sister with a desperation that is all too familiar. Sid’s small hands tug on my wrists at the sight.
But Katniss’ expression when she’s trying to shake off her sister? That’s my Louella through and through. All toughness housed in a little girl’s frame.
When Effie calls for applause, for admiration for the only volunteer District 12 has ever had, the crowd refuses to oblige. For the first time, I see a collective act of rebellion – not the acts of a handful of rebels I’ve been supposedly working with for decades. The entire district, as one, gives her the three-fingered salute, and the air itself thrums with the electricity, the sparks of defiance.
Do something, Haymitch, Lenore Dove yells in my ear. Do something!
And so for the first time in a very long time, I do.
I stumble forward, catching myself on Katniss’ surprising sturdy frame.
“Look at her. Look at this one!” I bellow, but I make sure to place myself almost in front of her, passing it off as drunken clumsiness. Look at me, I implore at the cameras. Look at me and not her. Look at me and not the crowd bristling with anger.
Not that anything will come of it. Nothing ever does. But I can’t help but try anyway. Because finally, finally there’s someone who doesn’t let their fear surpass their love. Someone who stands up and does something about kids being sent off to their deaths, even though it’s another kid. Talk about irony.
Would I have done the same for Sid? I like to think I would’ve, but I’ll never know for sure. But this girl barely even hesitated. I can’t help but admire her fire, her anger, even as I know that it will amount to nothing in the end.
Things go dark for a while after I fall off the stage yet again, but I catch the name of the second tribute from Effie later on. Peeta Mellark. The baker’s boy.
I see him as I board the train to the Capitol, despite my attempts to avoid both tributes. He’s sturdier than most, for a boy from District 12, and his eyes are sharp with intelligence. His face is kind, and he has a way of speaking that is soothing to most. Kindness is always the first thing to go in the Games, especially for the Victors.
I reach for the bottle and welcome the oblivion that follows.
-
It’s the next day, or maybe the day after that, when I realize that these tributes aren’t going to be like the rest.
These two are older, for a start, and they so closely resemble the people of my past that it’s hard for me to look them in the eyes. But when I do – after the boy knocks my liquor out of my hands and crack him across the face in kind, Katniss plunging a knife between my fingers ever-reaching for the bottle – I see anger. I see acceptance. But I also see the fire of determination simmering within them. These two had a harder childhood than I did, with Katniss providing for her family since Burdock died and Peeta decorated with bruises in the shape of his mother’s hand, but they still want to live. They have a spark in them that I’ve long lost within myself. I can see it in the way they ask me questions, in the way Katniss wields that butter knife.
In Katniss’ narrowed gray eyes I see accusation, disgust – it’s Burdock’s face all over again when I threw that rock at Asterid.
You’re supposed to keep us alive, but I doubt you care, Katniss’ face tells me as her eyes flicker to the glass in my hand, her mockingjay pin blinding in the sun. Her obvious scorn hits like a slap across the face.
You’re supposed to help us. Don’t you want to help us? Peeta’s eyes implore as he sits in front of me, decadent food pushed to the side. His face is still rounded with youth.
Lenore Dove’s hands squeeze my shoulders.
And just like that, I set the liquor down.
-
There’s an odd feeling I get in my chest when I watch them lace their hands together during the Parade. When I watch them argue for each other in front of me, playing up each other’s skillsets. Peeta is exasperated, leaning back in his chair. Katniss is suspicious, her eyes bright and body tense.
“She has no idea,” Peeta tells me, his eyes darting away from Katniss. “The effect she can have.”
And oh, how it all clicks together after that. That look in Peeta’s eyes is sickeningly familiar – it’s how I looked whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror after meeting with my love in the Meadow. I harden my heart against it. He and I both know that if there’s going to be a District 12 winner, it’s not going to be him. Not unless he has an extraordinary amount of luck on his side. Which is possible, I suppose, but the odds are never in our favor with the Games, no matter how much Effie or anyone else in the Capitol likes to pretend otherwise.
Peeta proves to be unusually smart at playing the Capitol, using his natural charm to invite the audience’s attention and hold it in his hands like a snake charmer. Some of that attention, thankfully, spreads over to Katniss, whose natural reticence and disdain is hidden behind that sparkly dress and Peeta’s vocal admiration. I encourage them to stick together as much as possible, because it’s only when they’re together that they shine as bright as the sun, even in the darkness of the Capitol. They balance each other perfectly, and I can feel Lenore Dove’s fingers twine between my own.
But it’s only once I see Peeta rescue Katniss, and have her rescue him in return, outwitting the Capitol with a handful of berries and returning as dual Victors, that I finally recognize that odd, fluttering feeling in my chest.
Hope.