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They’re both Seam kids. Of course they are. He’s only 12 and looks just like Sid should look, legs just starting to grow longer, dark hair always mussed, worn clothes and shoes that should’ve been replaced two winters ago.
She’s Seam too. She’s only 14. My ma bought soap from her mother a few times. She’s so thin and small she could pass for a 12-year-old.
Did Snow special choose them to punish me? Or did he not even need to punish me now? 12 kids always looked like that. Louella certainly did. All legs and elbows, with the only fat being in her cheeks.
In the train car they’re staring at me. I offer them some food, and both of them tuck in at a slow cautious pace, eyes never leaving me. I’m not sure what they think when they stare at me, besides,’ why couldn’t I get a real mentor? And not the town recluse?’
Effie is dressed in a frilled silver outfit that is so reflective I can see all around the train car and even my own distorted face in the shiny fabric. The lights bouncing off it keep shining directly in my eyes, which makes my headache even worse. I hadn’t left my house to eat anything for a good three days— didn’t want the looks. I drank though.
I probably should drink water, but that would require leaning across the table right into a real bright sunspot.
“Is there anything we should do? You know, when we’re in there?” one of the kids asked. Both of them have the same high childish voice, and I haven’t been willing to look up at them, so I don’t know who said it.
“Haymitch,” I hear Effie prod.
Right, that was for me. I’m a mentor now. I’m supposed to know stuff. I’m supposed to be able to tell them how to survive like I did…
I want to say ‘let me know how you wanna go, cause there’s not a chance you’re gonna survive.’ I might as well hand paint the gum-drop-red target on their backs myself. Snow would never let them survive. Not when they were my tributes. Not so soon. Maybe if I keep my head low enough and prostrate on the ground his attention will wane— but that isn’t happening this year.
“Avoid the bloodbath at the cornucopia, find water, and find shelter,” I rattle off, thinking of Mags’ advice. I would ask them what they want in the arena, but I know there’s no way I can give it to them. It would only raise their hopes, and I’m not going to artificially do that. That’s Effie’s job. I’m a marked man, and I have a feeling plenty of people know it.
When we get to the Capitol, I spy Beetee and Wiress ushering their tributes from their train. They both make to catch my eye, but I quickly avoid their glances, and keep my eyes on the ground.
The days are painful as two kids keep asking me questions, and I have little to help them with. I try my best, though. Neither have much they can do, but hide. The girl is okay with a knife for widdling and cooking, but that doesn’t make you able to wield it as a weapon. Effie wants to play up how adorable they are, like a little duo of raccoons. All I can think is how I’m about to watch them die. I’m going to watch as life drains out of their eyes, and it’s all my fault. I just hope it’s quick when they die.
For the boy it is. He tries to run from the cornucopia then trips over a prairie dog hole into some cactus. As he fumbles and tries to disentangle his foot, his head is nearly decapitated by one of the Careers who looks like she could be related to Silka. Maybe she is? I’m pretty certain Effie told me something about that. She was rattling off lots of information, taking her new job seriously. It wasn’t as detailed as Wyatt’s numbers, but it might as well have been, as dazed as I find myself.
The whole thing is a daze of violence. The girl manages to survive till the second day. It’s cold and she’s freezing, and I did my best to try and get sponsors to send her anything to keep her warm in the cool desert night. The next morning, right as I’m about to finally convince somebody to send her a tarp for warmth and water collection, she gets bitten by a snake under my watch. She panics, and tries to suck out the poison, but it doesn’t do anything. Her leg grotesquely swells and starts to slowly turn purple then black, and she spasms alone, cool skin thawing, then slowly burning in the hot sun as it takes hours and hours for the life force to leave her body.
There are no comforts for either of my tributes. Never are. The deaths are always brutal no matter how short or long. The faces are always too young.
Instead of helping escort their bodies back to District 12, the train goes without me as I’ve been requested for a few parties. The woman with the cat ears I’ve seen a few times requested me for another one of her parties. They love to touch my scar. They love to hand feed me food. They love to touch me in places Lenora Dove had only fleetingly caressed as we kissed in the woods. They use me up like tissue paper.
I don’t even care.
I don’t care how they hurt me, or violate me, or whisper filthy things in my ears. I don’t care about anything they do to me.
At the next Reapings I’m tired and feel sick at how young they feel. They always feel young. Even when they’re 18 and strong as a skinny mule, with wiry muscles in their arms, they are so so young.
My hope pricks every once in a while. I’ll see a strong kid with a will of iron come in, and I hope maybe this is it. Maybe this is the one who might make it. I try to stop drinking when that happens. My hands shake and my whole body aches and flushes. I have to drink for it to not shake. And of course they die. They always die. They die and they die. And I’m useless. I can’t stop it.
I try not to care, but it hurts every damned time.
I try not to care at the Capitol parties when they hurt me. But they can’t make me hurt anybody, no matter how much some people try to make me. There is no one at home to threaten me with. I start drinking more than before at these events.
Throw up on enough important people, then they lose interest pretty fast. Well, after seven years or so the interest for old Haymitch Abernathy finally seems to be drying up. The occasional rich person who hasn’t seen my repugnant persona up close might give me a whirl, but I’m boring enough, drunk enough, and I’m starting to lose my looks enough that by the time I’m 26, the Capitol is well and truly done with me at parties and secret rendezvous.
I’m so drunk I can barely stay upright after my tributes both die at the Cornucopia.
“How are you Haymitch?” asks Mags. I’m embarrassed for her to see me like this. I’ve long stopped being embarrassed in twelve, as you feel that long enough every time you leave the house, it wears out. It’s not really embarrassment when you want to be a pariah. Every once in a while though, I’ll catch someone who knew me before, staring at me. I feel tainted. I know it must be painful to look at me at times. I see how they look at me like someone who has a trick knee— stopping in their place to wince before gaining their footing and moving on. Honestly, it’s better that way.
“Oh, you know me,“ I say to Mags, giving her a grin that is more a grimace. She looks at me with so much kindness and so much soul and pity, it burns me. I wish she wouldn’t. I wish she would avoid me, but she always checks in with me at least once a year at The Hunger Games.
This year she has a little tribute who is going to win this thing, if the amount of gifts he’s received has anything to do with it. He’s a good looking bronze-haired kid. I hope the Capitol won’t gobble him up too soon. He’s young yet, so maybe puberty will take its toll on his look so he can escape being used and passed around.
Unfortunately, he just gets better looking overtime. I’m grateful I am so past my prime that they don’t make me have to be part of his abuse. He’s a nice kid. It’s hard to see his expression harden every year, see him twitch away from the men that stand too close and the women that touch too readily. Over the next two years he gets really good at pretending he doesn’t mind, but I can tell by the twitch in his jaw and the vacant look in his eye how much pain he’s in. He’s a good actor and only lets the mask slip when no one else is around. He has family that are alive, so has to stay in line. I can’t do anything to stop his pain, just like I can’t stop the kids from dying.
Another year and this year my girl had an attitude. She’s smart. Maybe if there’s a clever way for her to survive in the arena, she’ll be able to win this thing. Turns out smart can’t outrun a tsunami.
“Haymitch, you really ought to watch your drinking!“ Effie exclaims, trying to help me to my bed. She’s in a pair of ridiculous heels, and my face hurts. I’m not sure if it’s because when I passed out my face hit something, or because it’s being scratched by hundreds of sharp sequins on her shoulder pads. My face has been planted on her shoulder for the past five minutes. I can barely stay upright, and those damned armadillo shaped heels of hers are not helping us.
I none-too-gently push myself off her and fall face first onto the velvet chair, my knees stinging at the sharp impact on the hard floor. You would think they would learn to better pad my floors at this point. I say as much to her, letting out a wheezing laugh. She harrumphs and helps me when I can’t get my belt buckle undone.
“Do you need help getting undressed?”
“Why Miss Effie, you tryin’ to proposition me?“ I slur.
She wrinkles her nose at me, but is kind enough not to tell me how disgusting I am and how no one would proposition me at this point.
“Would you prefer I get an avox?” she asks, but she knows what my answer will be. They creep me out. Beyond deliveries I don’t want to interact with them.
“Naw, I’m fine here,” I grin. My back hurts. And my side hurts. Is that where my liver is? Or is that just a stitch from throwing up so hard earlier?
“I don’t like leaving you here, Haymitch,” she frets, long flowery nails clacking as she wrings her hands.
I hate her in this moment. I don’t want anyone looking at me, pitying me, giving a shit about me. It makes me want to care back. It makes me want to connect and be held and helped and the second it looks like I care about them too is the second their lives could be in danger.
“Effie, stop being polite, trying to act like you care about me, and fuck off already.“
For some reason that actually seems to hurt her feelings, even though I’ve said things like it many times before. It does convince her to leave me alone, though. After that, she follows me less and less when I get belligerent drunk. She’ll intervene enough so that I don’t aspirate my vomit or something, because even when I wake up with putrid sick all down my front, I’m not dead.
I am never dead.
My Tributes are. They keep getting Reaped. They keep getting dead. It never stops.
Other people’s tributes who survive… are they really any better off?
One of the tributes from seven looks like she’s about to make the rounds like Finnick, when all of a sudden she stopped showing up in the Capitol.
I tried to ignore it, but I finally ask Chaff about it. Apparently she put up too much of a fight, embarrassed the wrong people, and they killed her whole family. Poor kid. Wish there was something I could do, but all of us know there’s nothing we can do.
“Haymitch.”
“Plutarch,” I nod back after he gives me a nod across the way. He’s one of the main Game Makers this year. Still stuns me how he thinks he’s a good person, and yet he can come up with the most fucked up shit imaginable to massacre kids.
This one is like an ice age, complete with mutts that look like sabertooth tigers and mammoths. There’s a lot of other creatures there too, but I wouldn’t rightly know any other names. One of my kids gets trampled to death. The other one gets hurt by a pack of Careers, all armed with spears made of stone and sticks and old rope. They made them all into a bunch of cavemen. I guess that’s how they see us. Plutarch can pretend he sees us as human, specially when he’s rubbing elbows with us and offering us something to drink from his collection, or talking books with us, trying to hide his surprise that we can read. He makes a face bordering on concern when he sees me, and acts like he’s real sad about the kids. But then he has cave drawings come to life in a wave of some sort of dark ink-like cloud that kills one of my tributes. Good people don’t pull this shit in the arena.
Mags puts a hand on my shoulder, and lets out an unintelligible stream of words that I think means ‘I’m sorry about your tributes.’
She had a stroke the year before. Not entirely certain it was natural, but she hasn’t been able to tell me anything about it. I do know that no one heard from her or Finnick or that Annie Cresta for a few weeks, and then after Mags couldn’t talk anymore besides short little grunts. Annie said they are working with her to regain her speech, but I have a feeling the Capitol would prefer that she not be able to speak. It’s too bad. She was one of the most comforting voices a person could hear. Not to me anymore, but I bet it was nice with the tributes that came her way. The tributes for four had a good time of it, with Finnick as a way to entice gifts, and Mags to sagely lead them. Annie was pretty useless, but I couldn’t blame her— not when I was ten times more useless than any other mentor. 22 years, and I hadn’t managed to win once with my kids.
Another year passes. Another pair of Seam kids. The Capitol machine keeps on turning, and I keep on failing my kids. Not that I really am trying anymore. There’s no point. Our district’s kids are just too skinny, too weak, and too burdened by an incompetent mentor who is so drunk on the daily, his hands shake if he can’t get enough alcohol to make a yak stumbling drunk.
I look in the mirror the morning of the 74th hunger games, just making sure my buttons are straight. I think they are. Hard to tell when I’ve been drinking since before the sun came up.
“Happy birthday, Haymitch,“ I rasp at my reflection before hocking up a big old wad of spit that lands on the edge of my sink. It’s slowly trickling down the dirty porcelain. At one point it had been a clean white sink. Now I don’t think it could be clean and white again if it was scrubbed for a good two years solid.
Effie is there and I’m a bit jovial seeing her. One of the only people I talk to, and I’m supposed to.
“Heyyy you’re heeere!” I slur as I hug her. “And piiink!”
“Ugh, Haymitch really?” she say, fending me off. “You could at least wait until we’re on the train!”
I curse under my breath when Burdock and Asterid Everdeen’s little daughter is chosen. But the pit my stomach really begins to fall out when her sister volunteers to take her place.
When the district starts to give her salutes I hear more than see the gloved hands of the Peacemakers start to tense. I picture Woodbine Chance and his ‘riot.’ I picture Plutarch making my mother act out her horror take after take after take after take.
“Look at her!!” I slur, moving up to get the cameras on me. It’s a struggle when there are two of her. I say something at the camera, can’t rightly remember what, and shit my feet are… this is gonna hurt. I trip and fall.
I’m not fully unconscious, but I’m okay with the stretcher that takes me away. My bad side hurts so bad I can’t tell if I’ve bruised it or if it’s my liver. I don’t bother to check. Later as I push myself up to stand, the pain flares sharp and hot, but the pain is welcome. It’s a nice distraction when I find out the other tribute is Otho Mellark’s youngest. What a fucking shit day.
I can’t be around either of them.
Both of the tributes are good ones. I’ve seen them. They’re both respected enough that even without my history with their parents, I hear em talked about, see them doing things around town.
I drink and drink and the carriage bends and jostles me more than it should as I walk towards the food coach.
I hear them making fun of me for being drunk- nothing I’m even ashamed of at this point- it’s just a fact. Effie is trying to defend me… This is the kind of thing that makes me stay fond of her.
“Did I miss supper?” I ask, before everything in my stomach leaves me.
I can’t remember much else of the evening. But it hurts just as bad the next day.
The boy is kind and certain, so dedicated to her in every glance. They don’t seem to be sweethearts, but I can tell he is fond of her. He watches her every move with eyes all soft. He’ll be torn to ribbons. If he were to win, the Capitol would use him to sop up all sorts of messes.
And she’s so strong willed— I can’t see how her mother and sister could possibly survive if she won. Or maybe not… Maybe I would have to watch her sacrifice herself year to year like Finnick… Good thing she is fiery and barely able to keep her disdain from showing. That might keep them at bay…
The hardest part is they are so strong! They aren’t just sitting there, waiting to die. They're staring at me like they don’t know they’re already dead. Like they might actually believe there is a way they can win.
It’s stupid. Naïve. I should know better. This is the kind of thinking that gets my kids killed slower…
But… I know them. I know their roots, anyway. Everything in my body tenses as my conscience screams at me to stop, to not give them even a blush of hope, but my mind it whirring at the possibility. They’re fighters.
I’m giving advice, and thinking like what we do matters. Let the bruise show. Can they do anything with that knife? They could look good enough to get sponsors. I need to talk to some other mentors, get my head on straight. Who is the stylist this year?
As I throw water on my face, slap it a few times, trying to get the gentle blur of booze to focus, I see some movement to my side and quickly turn, ready to punch whoever it is.
“It’s me,“ says Effie, already in another outfit. “Number 12 is certainly making a splash this year!”
I grunt, heading back into my room to get my couple of suits together in a beat up bag I bought at the Hob.
“Honestly, Haymitch, you ought to get some real luggage!”
I don’t bother replying as we both know she’s just making chitchat.
“I really think they might have a chance this year,” she says, much more sober.
I sigh. I hate that I think so too. It’ll hurt so much worse when they die.
I continue packing, folding my clothes with much more care than I ever have before so I can think of how to say it.
“I want you to make the rounds. See what sort of sponsors we have this year,” I mutter into the wrinkled clothes. “And… and try to only give me a bottle of vodka a day in my room. That should be enough…”
I glance up and she’s already smiling ear to ear.
“Don’t,” I tell her.
She nods, but her smile is a little infectious.
“Well, I have a lot to arrange before we pull in. There is such a tight schedule this year, I just know I’m going to forget something no matter how often I check the schedule. Nobody else seems to be checking theirs! There are so many lists and appointments, but most treat it like it doesn’t even matter! Honestly, no matter what I do, it feels like they let standards slide more and more every year.”
“Oh yes, our standards matter so much at the ritualistic slaughter of children,” I snort.
“You laugh! But it can make a difference!“ she says. She looks me over and straightens my collar. “It’s good to have you back, Haymitch.”
Her Capitol inflection is almost gone when she’s sincere like this.
I grunt again, checking my flask as she totters to the door, neon heels sky high.
“Oh, and Haymitch?” she says, voice almost at a whisper. “Happy Birthday.”