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Of course Haymitch knew it wouldn’t end well—of course he did. Chaff had practically replaced greeting him each July with a repetition of the same stock warning, and Plutarch never failed to inject a pointed inquiry or two into all conversations from the most benign to the most dissentive. Besides, he was Haymitch Abernathy of District Twelve—if there was anyone in Panem who knew things didn’t end well, it was him. But yeah, okay, he could admit he was pretty taken aback by the way it blew up in his face. For one thing, he’d triple-checked she was asleep before saying a single word.
The mess in Eleven had been miserable, but Haymitch’d be lying if he said he hadn’t expected the girl to stumble one way or another. He couldn’t remember the last time his shoulders had been loose he was so constantly primed for a PR catastrophe around her. So without a flinch, without a hiccup, his mind had slipped into managing the fallout, into making sure the kids played their parts perfectly for the rest of the evening, into fitting the mask which he hadn’t dusted off in decades right back on his face. As if he’d spent most of his life managing this crap rather than doing his damnedest to melt his innards into toxic sludge, he knew what to do: say the right stuff, behave the right way, go to the right place, and whatever you do, only show the right feelings.
But gods damn it all, after having that talk with the boy—in defence of the girl, of all things, even if it was true that she’d only been keeping secrets at Haymitch’s behest—his head had gotten all muddled. And even though the Peacekeepers had them locked down tight, even though every single one of them must be on camera right now with Snow probably personally poring over every second of that footage, Haymitch didn’t stay in his quarters that night.
The full force of his common sense came back to him seconds after Effie’s door clicked shut behind him. She lay there so serenely, even as she embodied chaos itself. Arms akimbo, one leg sprawled to claim half the bed all on its own, the other bent almost up to her chest, real hair spread out like a halo. Snoring in that strange, strange way of hers; not delicate, not thunderous, not even all that periodic. Just…familiar, and precious. His fingers tingled to tug up the blanket that had gotten tangled around her outstretched leg, to make certain that no chill would plague the limbs she’d left open to the air with those ridiculously dainty spaghetti straps and pretty little sleep shorts and—and—and he’d brought the Capitol’s scrutiny here.
It was too late to backtrack. If they’d seen him seek her out, he couldn’t make them unsee. The most he could do now was not make it worse. Make it look like he’d just come for physical release, for some fun, not…not anything real. He stepped towards the bed, sketching out a plan for how to wake up Effie in the most “coworkers with benefits” manner for the bugs in the room. Between his expectation that there were no cameras more private than the hallway and his certainty that the dim lighting would mask any emotions on his face regardless, he didn’t worry too much about putting on a visual show beyond swearing to himself he wouldn’t spend the night, would very clearly leave the room in an hour. Looking disshevelled and pleased with himself, of course, but he was sure he wouldn’t have to fake that.
At least until he sat on the bed, facing his escort and half-leaned over, ready to kiss her awake. Because the moment the mattress dipped under his weight with a squeak, Effie’s makeup-bare face scrunched, her soft lips screwed up in a little whine, and his heart gave out.
How could he wake her up?
“Sorry, princess,” he said, voice hoarse but not too low. “Forgot your rule. No funny business on the Victory Tour.”
She had no such rule—as if she could expect him to be able to keep his hands off her for that long—but bugs were for catching people in what they had said, not in what they hadn’t said. He’d covered for them; all he had left to do was get out.
Whispering a goodnight—now that he thought about it, they’d been so swept up in their first dinner of the Victory Tour that they hadn’t gotten to trade farewells earlier that night anyway—he brushed away some hair that had crawled across her cheek into her mouth, seizing the rare opportunity to caress the soft, product-free skin under her eye with the pad of his thumb, and—and—how could he leave?
He cursed. All this lovey-dovey nonsense was messing with him. Why hadn’t they gone with a “long-lost siblings” story last summer again? But he stayed his grumblings once he noticed Effie twitch and mumble.
“Damn, princess. Shoulda known you’d catch my language even in your sleep.” He couldn’t help but smile at the thought regardless of his complaint. Of course, he wiped it off his stupid face the second he became aware of it. “Nobody but you, Trinket.”
Years ago, maybe those words would have been an accusation, a curse of their own. But today they made his heart squeeze in a way that was as drugging as white liquor.
“Yeah. Not like any other escort, any other Capitolite,” he murmured, his thumb roving to the tips of her ears now. How the hell was she so adorable? Did anyone realise how damned cute her ears were, or did the bright wigs and extravagant makeup provide sufficient cover for that? Crap, maybe he oughta be glad she wore so much of that garbage after all. He suddenly didn’t want anyone realising how damned cute her ears were. “I don’t know how I got lucky enough to land you”—as an escort he meant of course; she wasn’t his in any other sense—“but it’s…good. ’S’good I did. Wouldn’t trust anybody but you with—”
His blood froze, his muscles tensed, with his hand hovering over Effie’s jaw, so close her body heat seared his palm. With everything that’s going on right now, he’d wanted to say. And he’d stopped himself not because it’d be incriminating—the Victory Tour would have been an unimaginably worse disaster without her, after all, and the Capitol would probably be pleased to know one of their own was so gracefully wrangling the poor District freaks—but because he’d realised it wasn’t entirely true. ‘Everything’ didn’t just mean what the bugs were supposed to think ‘everything’ meant.
“This has to stop. Right now. This game you play, where you keep secrets from me like I’m too inconsequential or stupid or weak to handle them.”
Sighing, he let his thumb finally touch, then trace her sharp, delicate jawline. Lightly, lightly, as lightly as his shaky, roughened hands could manage.
“After all we went through, don’t I even rate the truth from you?”
“I wish I could…I wish you could…know. Understand, I mean.” He held his breath for a moment. He was treading a fine line here. “But some things…you Capitolites just can’t ever get. The way it has to be, yeah? Even though you’re my escort. My—” A fine, fine line. “My teammate,” he finished lamely. Not the Capitol’s, he didn’t add. Not their princess, not their mindless drone, not their expendable little soldier. Because he knew that would blow the fine line to smithereens, and he was never quite drunk enough to risk that, despite the fact that he was almost more pissed off by the idea of the Capitol thinking of Effie as theirs than that of their thinking of him as theirs. He’d learned to live with being their plaything at the same time he’d learned to live with the constant churning in his gut from the inadvisable ratio of alcohol to solid food inside it. But her?
Her?
The sharp pain through his sternum, a spike above the dull, flat ache that textured his every waking moment, finally jerked him out of whatever trance his princess’s ridiculous snoring had pulled him under. He yanked his hands away from her and scrubbed at his face, suddenly feeling the weight of fatigue from the catastrophic day clinging to his skin. With another few choice words under his breath at his stupidity, he dragged himself off of her bed and backed away to the door. At least he hadn’t slipped so much as to call her his partner or something. Though whoever was monitoring the bugs might let that kind of wording slide, it would never do for him to develop any bad habits. Effie would be far from pleased if he used that in her hearing. This thing between them was no-strings-attached. Which he could manage. Which he must manage.
Especially now.
“This Victory Tour,” he cursed quietly as he let the door click shut at his back. “When will it be over?”
At breakfast, Effie gave him a strange look that was distinctly—at least to someone who was well acquainted with her various glares and glowers—unlike the ones he usually received for arriving to meals tardy and/or disshevelled.
“What?” he blurted, perhaps a little defensively.
The soft edge to her stare vanished as she straightened up. “Your coarseness never ceases to amaze, Haymitch. Would it kill you to speak in full, polite sentences?”
Rolling his eyes as fully and politely as he could, he flopped into his seat at the table. “What is the matter, princess?”
An even stranger look passed over her face, but before he could enquire or she could explain, the kids shuffled into the car. Somehow he didn’t feel right pursuing the matter with them on the scene.
But all throughout their time in District 10, Effie continued looking at him. He didn’t quite know what to make of it. He’d call it calculating if that didn’t sound too malicious. He’d call it meaningful if that didn’t sound too inane. Something in between, then. By the time they’d moved onto District 8, he was so busy steering the star-crossed lovers down President-pleasing paths with one hand while passing along notes and incentives to Plutarch’s contacts with the other that he didn’t have the capacity to puzzle over his escort’s behaviour. What was so weird about a Capitolite being weird, after all?
It wasn’t until District 4 that he realised her stares had been gradually replaced by a more and more haggard look about her.
“The woman works too hard,” he grumbled to himself even as he placed the mug of milk he’d heated up on a little saucer. (He’d long learned his lesson about carrying open containers with hot contents when he wasn’t sober, and he wasn’t ever sober.) He’d considered just telling her to get some damned sleep or perhaps locking her in her cabin until she did, but in circumstances as delicate as these, he ultimately opted for the coaxing tactic that he normally reserved for less advanced stages of Trinket Sleep Deprivation. Given how restrained he was being on that front, he gave himself leave to burst past her door without knocking and simply declare, “The Tour’s runnin’ us all ragged, princess. What makes you so special? You do still expect the rest of us to be bright and bouncy, don’t you?”
Effie had let out an undignified noise at his entrance and hidden her face as well as she could behind the sleeve of her robe, until she’d recognised his voice and openly turned to throw daggers at him with her eyes. “Haymitch,” she growled, and he couldn’t resist the interest that shot down his spine: damn did her voice do things to him. “Haymitch,” she repeated, a little more exasperated than straight-up irate, a little more of a smile fighting through her words, as though she knew exactly where his thoughts had gone.
Pushing his advantage, he held out the warm drink to her and pronounced, “Milk.” Not coffee, which made her jittery. Not tea, which she only liked in the mornings. Not cocoa, which apparently had too much sugar to even countenance. Gem of Panem this woman was picky. “Now get some goddamn sleep, Trinket.”
The nascent amusement on her face shrivelled away. “Haymitch…”
“Not that I don’t like hearing you unable to say anything but my name over and over again, princess, but—”
He flinched, almost spilling the milk from where he’d been setting down the mug on her side table, when the window slammed open and the wind from outside came screaming in.
“What—?” he started to shout.
“What are you keeping from me?” In stark contrast to him, she spoke quietly, precisely. Their cabins weren’t the roomiest to begin with, but she had come right up against him, almost cornering him if not for how she angled her body to give him a clear exit path.
She knew him well.
“You said you wished you could tell me something,” she went on when he hadn’t gathered his wits rapidly enough for her tastes. “That night of the Tour, after Eleven. You said you trusted me.”
Obviously, too well.
He’d said no such things, not outright. But she’d been able to read between the lines. She’d been awake to read between the lines, apparently.
He said the first words that came to him. “I do.”
Her eyes blazed. “You know as well as I do that the engineers have been alerted a window’s been opened. Someone shall be here soon to tell me to close it, so Haymitch, do not waste these precious few minutes.”
Irritation sparked in his chest, but he pushed it aside with a sigh. “You don’t deserve to be dragged into my messes, Eff.”
“I care about you.” Somehow, she sounded even angrier; her voice was tighter, her eyes brighter, at any rate. “I want to be.”
“Well,” he scoffed, “I don’t deserve that.”
“I am well aware you will only accept the”—she choked on her words—“care that you think you deserve, but I also trust you more than anyone else. If I am your teammate, are you not mine? You— You cannot simply—” Her voice cracked a negligible amount, and she swiped at the corner of her right eye too fast for him to really see anything, but suddenly he understood. He understood she wasn’t angry, or at least not merely angry. He understood just how badly his weird behaviour had worried her. And he understood he absolutely detested her being upset or anxious.
So taking her face between his palms, both of them already chilled to the touch from the whipping wind outside, he explained as concisely as he could the tensions the Seventy-fourth had stirred up in the Districts and the snippets of a plan Plutarch had deigned to tell him for taking advantage of those tensions. And even in full awareness of the irony, he watched as her stress lifted with every word and felt as his weighed more and more heavily on his shoulders.
Oh, hell. What had he done? What was he doing? This wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t the plan at all. Effie wasn’t supposed to know—he wasn’t supposed to tell her. That was the beginning of the end, and it couldn’t end well.
His gaze darted to the door. Were those footsteps he’d just heard?
Damn, damn, damn it all to hell. Effie was in danger. He’d put her in danger.
“Haymitch?” He hadn’t realised he’d been staring off into space, staring at the door, staring at the silhouette he could swear was of the person about to barge in and ruin everything, until Effie wrapped her soft, adept fingers around his wrist. “Darling?”
“Effie,” he choked out, looking back at her, focusing on her again, drinking her in for the last—
“I know you are now worried about things going wrong,” she said, even more under her breath than before. Knew him too well. “But I trust Plutarch’s plan. He knows what he is doing, you do realise…”
His building panic, that coiling memory of fire-smoke-ash always ready and waiting to suffocate him, ignited the spark of irritation from before. “Plutarch,” he spat, voice low and rough. “Plutarch? You’re mine to protect! Not his! Not anyone’s but mine.”
Effie’s jaw actually dropped a little, the weight of it sweet and perfect in his palms where he still cupped her face. He might have enjoyed the sight of her unladylike reaction to his outburst if not for the poisonous, poisonous sensation in his lungs. He hated this feeling. She was his to protect and he hated it. His mother and brother had been his to protect the second his father left, and they were fire-smoke-ash. Lenore Dove had been his to protect and he’d gotten himself dragged into the Hunger Games because of it. Nothing good ever came of him having something to protect.
Effie’s eyes flickered to the door then. With the blood rushing through his head, he hadn’t heard anything, but if she had this time then he trusted it. Trusted—
And then those eyes locked on his. “I don’t want anyone’s protection but yours.” She surged up to kiss him—hard, fast, too right and too real—but before he could react to either her words or her embrace, she was out of his arms and throwing the cabin door open to stick her head out and laugh airily at whoever was in the corridor.
“Thank the Capitol someone competent has finally shown up!” she said, her escort’s voice in full force. “I just wanted a bit of fresh air, you know, it gets so stuffy in here, but then I couldn’t pull it shut again and I had to get Haymitch for help but he was no use…”
Hoping that his ‘stunned speechless’ face passably resembled his ‘annoyed glower’ face, he watched Effie usher in and charm the socks off of the train attendant who’d been dispatched to deal with the not-so-allowed open window. Slowly, the panic receded and the blood rush quieted and coherent thought returned to him. And he might not have the words to speak aloud, but just as slowly he accepted this: if she trusted him more than anyone else, then like hell would he let anyone else be in charge of her safety. She was his.
