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Plutarch's party stretched across three floors, each louder than the last, each more desperate in its celebration. Everyone wanted to believe they’d won. That survival meant victory. That glitter could cover blood.
Haymitch didn’t believe in much anymore. But he believed in whiskey. And maybe—just maybe—in her.
He found her before he meant to. Or maybe she found him. Effie always had a way of appearing just when he thought he’d gotten comfortable in his misery.
Tonight, she was incandescent.
Gold from her lashes to her heels. Her dress clung in places it shouldn’t and shimmered in places it didn’t need to. Her smile was dangerous. The curve of her neck, fatal.
She’d always been too much . Now she was everything .
Effie swirled through the ballroom like she belonged to it, like the whole Capitol spun on the axis of her heels. She laughed with diplomats, clinked glasses with designers, and left a trail of glitter and hearts in her wake. Haymitch sipped from his glass and tried not to watch her.
He failed, of course.
She was magnetic. And he was tired of pretending otherwise.
“Haymitch,” came her voice, warm and teasing, sliding up beside him like a secret. “You’re brooding in corners again.”
“Maybe I like corners, princess,” he said.
She arched her brow. “Or maybe you’re scared of the spotlight.”
“I’m not scared of anything,” he grumbled, which was almost true. Except it wasn’t. He was scared of everything. Of joy, of peace, of whatever the hell it meant when his heart stuttered every time she looked at him like this.
“Dance with me,” she said.
“No.”
She didn’t listen. She never had. And because one of the Capitol guys came to ask her to dance and maybe leave with him, even though she was close to Haymitch, he just dismissed the little shit and said: “She’s with me.” and he felt the power of his own words when he stared at her.
Then, Effie grabbed his hand—cold fingers wrapped in fire—and pulled him toward the dance floor. He let her. Of course he let her.
The music shifted. Low and slow. A beat that pulsed under the skin. A voice crooned about something not being love, and Haymitch couldn’t breathe.
Her hands found his shoulders. His hands—traitorous things—found her waist. The world shrank to two people and one shared rhythm. She was close enough to kiss. Close enough to ruin.
“You’re staring,” she whispered.
“You’re glowing.”
She laughed, soft and surprised. “That’s the champagne.”
“No,” he said. “That’s you.”
The words left his mouth before he could kill them. He felt her still in his arms, just for a breath. Then her smile returned, a little smaller, a little softer.
“I missed this,” she said. “Not the parties. Just... this. Being seen .”
“I always saw you,” he said, voice rough. “You never let anyone look away.”
“Liar,” she replied gently. But she leaned in, just enough for her perfume to invade his lungs again. Effie always smelled like something expensive and something kind.
Effie spun in the middle of the room, surrounded by too much light and not enough shame, her dress flaring out like a solar flare—too bright, too untouchable. She tossed her head back mid-laugh, arms in the air, a champagne flute balanced dangerously in one hand, and for a moment, she looked—
Unreal.
Not the Capitol. Not rebellion. Just alive in a way Haymitch hadn’t seen in a long, long time.
And it hit him—not like a thought but like a feeling , that Oh, oh feeling, the kind that makes you grab your glass tighter and stare a little longer because “ what the hell is that”?
She was the party. Not attending it. Not performing it. She was the reason it existed. The house of fun. The number one. The party anthem they’d all forgotten they needed.
God.
That was it.
It wasn’t her dress or her voice or the way she moved. It wasn’t the Capitol or the rebellion or the whiskey.
It was her .
It had always been her.
Effie Trinket, with her ridiculous laugh and her thousand-piece smile and the way she threw herself into the moment like it didn’t matter that they’d once all wanted to die. They might still do at some point. But tonight? It doesn’t matter, not anymore.
She was the song. And he'd been too drunk to hear it before.
He didn’t know what made him do it. The music. The whiskey. The unbearable truth that he wanted her more than he wanted to stay numb.
He kissed her.
Not the kind of kiss people expected from Haymitch Abernathy. Not a warning. Not a weapon. Something softer. Something real .
Effie froze. Just for a moment.
And then—gods—she kissed him back.
The crowd melted. The noise dimmed. The Capitol could’ve burned down around them and he wouldn’t have noticed.
When they finally broke apart, she looked at him like she didn’t know whether to slap him or kiss him again.
“Don’t do that unless you mean it,” she said, flustered, voice barely a breath.
“I do,” he said. “I think I do.”
“You think ?”
“I know,” he admitted. “I know I love you like that, Trinket. Like a song stuck in my damn head. Like I’ll lose something if I stop listening.”
She blinked. A soft breath escaped her lips.
Then she smiled, slow and quiet, like a sunrise.
“About time,” she murmured.
He didn’t kiss her again. Not yet. But he didn’t let go either.
It was only the beginning.