Chapter Text
Clerk Carmine stumbled to a halt, shoes hitting the rocky earth, flowers hanging limply by his side. He’d come to say hello. Tell her the geese were doing well. Brought a bright bouquet of all the colors he could find, wrapped in a grayish ribbon so they could all be dove. He wanted to tell her that Tam Amber had slammed one of his fingers in the forge again, and had sworn all the way from the tip top of Thirteen to the deep down bottom of Ten, and everything in between. But the boy was there. Again. Curled up at her—
Clerk Carmine had known men who liked to own women. He knew deep down that Haymitch Abernathy was not one of those men. Deep. Deep down.
The fiddler had never much liked Haymitch Abernathy. Tam Amber scoffed and tsked and called him cranky, but he didn’t let the kid too far in either. They’d both seen well what non-Covey could do. The stomping, unbearable mess they could make, rummaging through the world as if it was their own. They held every bug, grass blade, wind note in their tight, sweaty grasps.
Coriolanus had been like that, from what he could remember. He still now refused to call the man Snow, to call him his president. In Clerk Carmine’s mind, he was still the weak, scared, barely-man they’d all laughed at for getting caught on prickle bushes and ate up by mosquitoes. “Capitol blood,” Lucy Gray had joked. “Richer than chocolate, much better than the moonshine and sweet apples running through ours.” Coriolanus had given an odd smile, and slapped his arms a bit too aggressively to just kill bugs.
He’d bled. That was how Clerk Carmine liked to remember him. Bleeding.
At least Haymitch was Seam.
Clerk Carmine had watched the games, of course he had. He’d seen a coward, he’d seen a kid abandon his kin, he’d seen a cocky, arrogant asshole.
He was also vaguely aware that that probably wasn’t all of it.
It was always vaguely unpolished when the Districts watched it live, some details cut away to, or cut from, when things got a little too far out of the Capitol’s desires. Some of the official death orders didn’t quite make sense. Some of the expressions that had been stitched onto Haymitch’s face had been too undeniably painful for a boy who’d seemingly spent most of his days alone in a veritable paradise. But no one was supposed to talk about it.
Then, of course, there was The Moment.
It had happened while Tam Amber had been asleep. Lenore Dove, still caged and quieted, had tasked her uncles to keep watch over the games without her. Alternating cooking, scraping together tasks for a bit of change, and sleeping, they did just that.
Clerk Carmine had stared at his cup for a split second, and squinted softly. All the victors had been asleep. He’d pondered the idea of a nap, and finally allowed himself a good long blink, before he was woken up by a garbled whisper.
“Buddy?”
Haymitch wasn’t onscreen, but Clerk Carmine had caught the boy speaking to the geese and sneaking to Lenore Dove’s window enough times to recognize the boy’s whisper.
He sounded like he’d just gotten sick off of rotgut, the kind that could strip your innards down to pure, fleshy white. The kind Jethro Callow had been downing like a calf with mother’s milk since Wyatt’s face had appeared in the sky. He sounded like he was about to hurl, but also… numb. Disbelieving. And quick.
Clerk Carmine had unfortunately blinked again, for a good few hours that time, because his brain had been trained to recognize faces and at that moment, there hadn’t been shit on the screen to catch him. He’d held that sensation, that feeling of utter horror in a simple solitary note, and wouldn’t understand what could’ve possibly led to that much horror in a tone.
Until a day later, when he and Tam Amber watched the skinny young’n from Three got devoured by squirrels, ripped clean to the bone.
But Clerk Carmine knew when it had really happened. It wasn’t the third day, like the Capitol tape later said in their shiny wrapped packaging. It wasn’t even the sixth day, when he’d seen it live. No, no, it had been in the before dawn of the fifth day, when he’d heard that broken whisper, he knew it deep.
Clerk Carmine knelt down, knees aching with age, and laid the flowers gently on Lenore Dove’s grave— his niece, his light, his soul, his song— ignoring the potent liquor that wafted off of the boy curled around the headstone.
That couldn’t have been comfortable.
Clerk Carmine let out a soft breath of air, watching as it took shape in the slivers of early Spring air. Lenore Dove would be pissed at him.
When was the last time he’d seen Abernathy?
He wished it was something poignant. The day Lenore Dove had died, maybe, would fuel him with enough anger to leave the young’n out to dry with the morning dew. Certainly he could rustle up enough anger from hearing the never ending wails of the murderer on their stoop each night.
But no. The last time Clerk Carmine had seen Haymitch Abernathy, he’d been down in the Hob, drinking moonshine like it was his day job, paying the man who’d sold it far more than was his worth because cash just seemed to sweat off the kid nowadays.
And he’d stumbled right into a stall table, knocking a bowl of dried meat to the ground. Hit his midriff dead on the damn thing, and Clerk Carmine knew how big of a scar stretched across that canvas. The boy’s face had looked, for a moment, human. He’d wheezed slightly, and patted the table like it was a troublemaking old friend, and pushed himself away.
Then he’d stumbled out the market, all the way home to his mansion.
Lucy Gray used to give a little rhyming do about piggies when he was younger, to calm him as they were cattle corralled. It seemed especially silly now, as it was so childlike, learning to count your toes, but the Covey had always taught to take every song, rhyme, or hum to be as worthy as the others.
Clerk Carmine sighed, this time harder, in case anyone above was watching. Lucy Gray would be mighty upset if he left this chitlin out in the wild for the bugs to get at.
And Lenore Dove…
Good almighty, if he started on thinking about what lay underneath the flowery dirt, he’d never go anywhere again.
Clerk Carmine slapped the boy’s cheek a bit. Rough, in desperate need of a shave. Haymitch didn’t move. Clerk Carmine stood up, groaning as his legs popped, and pulled the boy up with him. Haymitch wobbled, slumping against him like a…
Like a drunk.
Like a grown drunk, the kind that Barb Azure and Lucy Gray used gently tease out of the bar when it got too late, making sure they at least made it out the door and on the path home before they finally stopped their fretting. The kind they always told the Covey kids to never become like. The kind of path Billy Taupe had been dancing around like a mating bird right before his death.
Clerk Carmine shifted the body’s weight and wrapped Haymitch’s arm around his neck. No sense in anyone who’d already survived so much throwing their life away that easy.
He started to walk home.