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The last flame went out.
The room settled into near-darkness, relieved only by the faint moonlight that sifted through the scattered cirrus clouds and the tattered curtains. Haymitch barely registered the change. It was the night before the Reaping and he had allowed himself a full bottle of white liquor, plus the dregs of the bottle he hadn’t finished yesterday.
The candle flames had tormented him, as they always did. Cheap tallow candles. His mother had used them because they cost less, even when the electricity was working. The very smell of the fat—goat, probably, he thought—drew him back to childhood, before the fires that had ended it.
First his father, dead in a mine fire. Some said he had set it as an act of sabotage. Others said he was the target, killed by the Capitol as an example to dissuade other potential troublemakers. Haymitch didn’t know. Didn’t care. Either way he’d lost his pa too young.
Ma and Sid’s deaths were worse. With them, it was certain murder, burned alive at the orders of President Snow, to punish Haymitch. If he’d died in the Games, they’d still be alive.
Even their deaths weighed lighter on his conscience than Lenore Dove’s, though, since he’d fed her the poison candy himself all unknowing. At least hers had been quick. Just time enough for him to promise the impossible to ease her dying.
He should have died too. Died like the flame of the tallow candles lined up on the table, melted into nothingness, the last remnants of the wicks like the candles’ scorched bones. Haymitch shivered, an image of the pearly stripped bones belonging to Ampert, who’d helped him in the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the “brain” of the arena, rising unbidden to his mind.
How many deaths were on his head? Not his pa’s, thankfully. The other tributes he’d killed, though, Silka at the very end, and the two from District 4, whose names he couldn’t now remember. Louella, his sweetheart, dead before she ever made it into the arena. The Newcomers he couldn’t save. Ampert. LouLou. Maysilee. Wellie. Those four for sure, since he was there when they died. And Ma. Sid. Lenore Dove. Then the tributes he’d mentored, pair after pair, year after year, scarcely any of them who had had even the slightest chance of surviving to join him in the Victors’ Village.
Not that he would have been happy if any had survived. He’d been spared some of the worst torments reserved for the victors, if only because Snow had been in too great a rush. There was no one left that Haymitch loved, at least not that anyone could tell, which meant no leverage against him.
Snow had learned, though. Haymitch was the warning to other victors of what could happen to them if they refused to go along with being prostituted to the highest bidder in the Capitol. Even the Careers suffered that. Especially the Careers. Some of them might have had hopes of being accepted into Capitol society, but they soon learned that they were valued only as playthings, sources of sexual amusement, pawns in the omnipresent games of status.
Haymitch had never bothered to warn any of the tributes he mentored about that likely consequence of victory. Time enough if any of them survived the Hunger Games.
It was nearly dawn. Another year gone. Another year alone. Another birthday he was half-surprised to see. Another Reaping to attend. He tilted the last drops from the bottle down his throat.
Effie would shriek if he showed up like this. Haymitch winced at the thought of a shower, but it was better than enduring her tirades, and he had to admit they were merited after that one year he had boarded the train wearing overalls stiff with a month’s worth of sweat and grime.
He admitted, in the privacy of his own mind, that it felt good to be clean. All those kids had to show for the Reaping in their best clothes. Maybe he owed it to them to wear something decent too. He found a clean shirt and a suit that had only a small rip under one arm in his closet and wondered how long ago he had put them away.
After that effort he deserved another drink. He’d be on the train to the Capitol later today and there would be plenty of liquor available there, better stuff than his usual supply here in District 12. He could afford to open the last bottle on the counter.
The minutes ticked past. Haymitch heard the town clock strike: ten, eleven, twelve, one.
Just before two o’clock, he took a final deep swig, coughed the phlegm from his throat, and headed out, weaving unsteadily among the latecomers hurrying along the dusty streets to get to the Justice Building. No one wanted to go, but no one dared to be late either.
He squinted in the bright sun. There was Mayor Undersee, of course, up at the podium, droning his way through the obligatory recital of the rebellion and the Treaty of Treason. Effie’s hair blazed pink this year, a bizarre tulip flowering in that spring green suit. He wavered his way up to the stage and collapsed into his seat just as the mayor read his name, Haymitch Abernathy, District 12’s only living victor.
Ladies first! Why? Haymitch had never understood that. Especially since these weren’t ladies, not even women, just hapless, terrified girls, some of them barely twelve years old, like Burdock’s little girl, what was her name now…
Primrose Everdeen. He heard Effie call it out. He scarcely had time to wonder how he could bear to mentor that child before her sister volunteered in her place. Katniss. Katniss Everdeen, who looked so like her father.
Somehow he was on his feet, bawling defiance, yelling at the Capitol through the camera even though he doubted they would let his words be broadcast. Then he was stumbling, pitching off the edge of the stage, seeing Katniss’s face still numb with shock under those dark braids.
May the odds be ever in your favor, sweetheart, Haymitch thought, just before he struck the ground and his vision went dark.