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“Can I see her?” asked Haymitch.
The doctor at least at the decency to look uncomfortable in response to his question. Shuffling around in his rebellion-gray jumpsuit. Plutarch was less fucking decent. In fact, the man was completely still, not saying a damn word.
“Well, uh, we’re at a delicate stage and it can be distressing for someone in Miss Trinket’s condition to be bombarded with—”
“Yeah, yeah, right, but I can see her though? I can see her?”
It would be stupid, right? To pull her out, to bring her this far, and then just not let him see her? Like Haymitch hadn’t spent a good chunk of the war imagining the worse, wanting to put a bit of metal rebar through his skull. But all good now, right? They found her. They got her. They pulled her out. She was fine. It was all fucking fine and dandy. He’d come to the weird realization that he’d have been ready to burn it all down if she wasn’t.
“I mean, she knows me, yeah? She’ll… recognize me. She will,” he said. His heart felt all jumpy in his throat.
“Haymitch—” Plutarch tried to say.
“No, no,” he said, brushing him off. “She will, I know she will.”
But Plutarch—in his usual, dickish way—just couldn’t let a thing go. “She doesn’t recognize anyone, Haymitch. Or anything. She hardly knows who she is, where she is, she doesn’t know what’s anything to her. She doesn’t know who I am, and she certainly won’t know who you are. That’s it. That is the reality of the situation.”
He also realized, then, that there was something worse than Effie being found dead in the Capitol underground. Way, way worse.
“Yeah? Yeah? And who’s fault is that, huh?”
“I never meant—”
“Never meant for any of it to happen, yeah? Got it.” Haymitch spit, dragging a hand over his face. “Fat lotta good it’s doin’ her in there.”
He pointed at the closed door behind them.
That was Effie’s room.
A guest room in the Presidential Manor turned recovery room. Haymitch had wanted her taken to a real hospital. The big, Capitol hospital. With the fancy windows and shit. The Presidential Manor was better, Plutarch said. Haymitch wasn’t so sure. He had an underlying suspicion that the rebellion just wanted to keep the last living escort close. Even if her brain was scrambled like an egg.
Fuck.
Haymitch felt the tears start to gather in his throat, thick and disgusting.
“I’m tellin’ you, Doc, I just…” he tried to say, he choked. “Lemme see her. Even if she doesn’t know me right away, it’ll knock somethin’ loose, maybe. That’s what they do with amnesiacs, right? Jog the ol’ memory a lil bit until it gets to runnin’ on its’ own?”
The doctor’s face was all pity, and Haymitch hated that. Hated what it meant. For her; for him.
“Sometimes. But the circumstances here are… unique. We don’t know for certain what the Capitol did to her down there—”
“We can damn well guess, can’t we?”
“But we cannot know for certain.” he reiterated, with a kind of tired resignation. “Traumatic brain injury, induced seizures, extreme stress, the use of sedatives. We also have to take into account that a great deal of electroconvulsive equipment was found in the underground. Along with the… arbitrary collection of surgical equipment. It—Well, we don’t know what it is.”
I shoulda taken her, was Haymitch’s first and most immediate thought.
I shoulda known. I shoulda fought harder. I shoulda held a gun to Plutarch’s head until he promised to get her on the aircraft.
I shoulda said all the words before I left.
The big words. The right words. The words he and Effie hadn’t bothered to exchange in those last years. Too busy, too messy. No point, no time. But he shoulda said them anyway, damn him. Because it was too late now, wasn’t it?
“Not only does Miss Trinket display all the qualifiers of retrograde amnesia, I’m also concerned about her ability to transfer new information from the short-term into the long-term. It’s… it’s like her entire memory processing ability has been obliterated. I’ve never see anything like it.”
Haymitch twitched. He couldn’t quite take it all in. He didn’t want to.
“But… I can see her, yeah?” he asked again.
Plutarch threw his hands up and turned, but Haymitch ignored him. He couldn’t help himself. His mind was full of thoughts of Effie, from the first moment to the very last. All blue eyes, freckled shoulders, rosy cheeks. A breathy gasp in his ear, lips parted, pupils turning those baby blues to black. He couldn’t let go of her. He didn’t want to.
The first time Haymitch went into the room, he wasn’t alone. And maybe that was for the better. He recoiled a little at the sight of Effie in that bed. She was so pale. Rail thin. With a decent chunk of her body bruised purple, yellow, brown. Her left arm was in a cast. Her shoulders were all scarred up, and her mouth was silent.
Till Bishop—a rebel from Eleven who had been taken up by Coin’s people for his medical knowledge—accompanied Haymitch in. He spoke first.
“Hello, Effie. My name is Till, I’m a counselor with the New Government.”
Till had been working with Effie every day since they had first pulled her out of the underground, Haymitch knew that. He still introduced himself like he was a stranger.
Effie blinked once, then twice. “You were here yesterday.”
“Yes,” the man smiled. “Yes, I was.”
Nobody brought up the fact that Till had also been to see Effie the day before yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and every day for nearly a week. It’s gonna be fine, something deep in his body told him. Just fine. Stupid thought. He couldn’t predict the future. Nobody could.
“Effie, I have a visitor with me today.”
She looked up, and her eyes met his. Vacant, but just as blue.
“Hello.” she said.
Haymitch nodded. “Hey.”
“Are you a doctor?” Effie asked with a curious frown.
He oughta say no, but then he’d have to come up with some other explanation for who he was and what they meant to eachother. Workplace-proximity associates at a job they both kinda hated—him more, her less—with a dash of inexplicable friendship and an even more inexplicable sexual chemistry didn’t really seem appropriate. Maybe later.
“He’s a friend, Effie,” said Till, very cleverly not specifying exactly whose friend Haymitch was. The counselor’s tone stayed level and warm. “You’re not in any danger. He’s come to say hello.”
Effie nodded stiffly, still looking a little spaced behind the eyes.
“Hello.” she said again.
He spent a lot more time in her room after that. A lot, lot more. “Hey, it’s Haymitch,” he said, a bad copy of Till Bishop’s tone. He sat down in the chair beside her bed. His chair, in a weird sorta way. Definitely his chair. “Your… your ol’ friend Haymitch.”
Sometimes she remembered; a lot of the times she didn’t.
Most often, Effie would have this funny look in her eyes, her expression would get all pinched, like she was trying, like she maybe remembered him, or remembered something, maybe remembered that she oughta remember something.
But then it would slip away, too quick for either of them to catch. Back to the beginning.
“I brought some things that I, uh, I thought you might like,” he said, moving slowly and deliberately as he lifted the bag up onto her bed.
Her townhouse had been missed in the bombing. Lucky Effie.
A guy with a hard-on for torture had probably spent the war jamming ice picks into her brain and zapping her with a cattle prod, but wasn’t she lucky? Her fucking walk-in closet and all her stupid, expensive tchotchkes were untouched. Real horseshoe-up-the-ass shit.
Anyway, the place was so kindly being repossessed and emptied out by the New Government. Haymitch had tried to save what he could.
“I got, um, a blanket here, ya know, for the cold.” He put a pile of pink cashmere onto the bed. “Some candles, might smell nice, this, uh, photo album, fuckin’ jewelry box, this is your watch, actually, the everyday one, and, uh…”
He trailed off, not really sure what else to say.
Effie wasn’t looking at him. In fact, she seemed entirely unmoved by his presence which… good thing? Bad thing? Hard to say. It was better than her being scared of him. It was a thousand million times worse than his memories of before. He watched as she picked slowly through the pile of shit he’d dumped of her bed.
The blanket, apparently, was the winner. She picked it up and wrapped it clumsily around her shoulders. Haymitch did his best to help.
“Thank you.” she said.
“Yeah. Yeah, ‘course.”
Effie nodded and wiggled deeper into her blanket.
It had to be better than the rebellion’s hospital-issue stuff they’d given her. It was definitely more expensive. He reached out, mostly ‘cause he couldn’t help himself. He brushed her hair back from her shoulders, made sure it wasn’t tucked in anywhere. His chest ached.
“A friend.” she whispered suddenly.
Haymitch froze. He listened. She wasn’t really talking to him, of course, just running the edge of the blanket between her fingers while she stared off into space.
“I used to have lots of friends.”
His breath caught. Like he was breathing out of shitty, hole-filled ballons instead of lungs.
“Yeah?” he prompted her.
“Mhm-hm.”
She didn’t say much more than that, but it gave him hope. Just a little. That, one day, Haymitch might walk into the room and it’d be Effie sitting in the bed. Not this blank, empty Effie-shaped person. It gave him hope that, one day, he might walk in and see something bright twinkling behind her eyes. Right? Right?
Stupid hope. Sweet, bitter thing.
He was standing, silent, in the doorway of her room. Till Bishop approached her, softly and slowly, with his clipboard and a smile.
“Hello, Effie. My name is Till, I’m a counselor with the New Government.”
“Hello.”
He held out his hand for her to shake. Hers looked so small, nearly translucent, against the tawny-brown working hands of the counselor from down South. He’d been an equipment manager in Eleven, he told Haymitch. As well as an herbalist for his community, a healer. Fixing big ol’ machine; fixing people. Couldn’t be that much of a difference.
Haymitch only hoped the man had it in him to fix his person.
“How are you feeling today, Effie?”
“Fine. I feel fine.”
“Great. That’s wonderful.” The counselor wrote something on his clipboard, and smiled. “Effie, I have three sticks here.” He held up three long, flat sticks in his hand. “Could you tell me what colours they are?”
She nodded. “Green. Yellow, and blue.”
Good, thought Haymitch. That was good, right? Till made another note.
“Excellent. Thank you.”
And he tucked the sticks away in his back pocket.
“Now, the reason why I’m here today, Effie, is because I wanted to—”
Haymitch looked when he heard footsteps in the hallway. Plutarch waited until they were within whispering-distance before speaking.
“Not good.” he rumbled lowly, crossing his arms over his chest.
“No?” asked Haymitch.
The other man shook his head. “The whole place is rubble. The neighborhood was hit hard. If Mr. and Mrs. Trinket were at home when the bombs started to drop, well…” He paused. “They’re most likely buried under a three-floor townhouse.”
Haymitch made a sound in his throat. “They might not be.”
“Perhaps,” replied Plutarch. “But, if that were the case, they would have made themselves known by now. Don’t you think?”
He didn’t have answer, so he didn’t say anything.
His eyes went back to Effie. Till had her drawing a clock on a piece of paper. The circle was shaky and disformed, like it was in the middle of being melted or something. There was a seven where the twelve was supposed to be. Only one arm. Fuck. Fuck. Haymitch swung between wanting to collapse on the floor in a big, leaky puddle and wanting to crack Plutarch Heavensbee in the jaw.
How could they do this to her?
How could he have let this happen to her?
“I haven’t given up, mind you. My people are still working.” said Plutarch. “But even if they aren’t found, Haymitch, she won’t be forgotten. She won’t be left out in the streets.”
“Of course she fuckin’ won’t be,” he spit back.
There were a million places Effie could go before living in the damn streets. There was Twelve. His place or the kids’. The bedrooms in the Victor’s Village houses were nice enough. All big, two windows. Effie could have a room all to herself. Or they could put her up in a place of her own. Whatever she wanted, right? She could go to Four and kick it with Annie. Two crazy peas in a post-war pod. And water was supposed to be good for this kinda stuff, right? She’d love it. All that ocean.
“The New Government has a responsibility to its’ citizens. All its’ citizens. She won’t be neglected. And, from what I’m hearing, Coin doesn’t want to try her.”
“Oh really? They don’t wanna put the woman who can barely remember her own name on trial for the televised kiddie-murder fuck-fest? That nice. That’s really great. How lucky are we? Fuck, I love the New Government. Do you need your dick sucked?”
“Alright.” said Plutarch, looking less annoyed than Haymitch wanted him to be.
“Incredible stuff. Democracy is just beautiful.”
“I was only saying, Haymitch, I… recognize the burden of responsibility here. I get it, okay? I can see where it falls.”
Haymitch shot him a hard look.
“Yeah,” he said. “I should fuckin’ hope so.”
He left Plutarch there, standing in the doorway with his fat thumb up his ass. He made himself known in the room. Taking big, obvious steps.
“Hey,” He put on a smile. He wasn’t as good at it as Effie, but he tried. “How we doin’?”
“Great,” answered Till, also with a smile. “Really great. In fact, we’re almost finished.” He took her terrible drawing of the clock and tucked it away on his clipboard. “Last thing, Effie. Do you remember those sticks I showed you when we started? The ones I put in my pocket.”
Effie nodded.
“Could you tell me what colours they were?”
That silence was long and hard. Almost crushing. Haymitch watched Effie as she tried to think and it made him want to be sick.
Red.
Red, again.
Purple.
Effie had been the sharpest, quickest woman Haymitch had ever known. A wit like a shot. She used to fill up these little number puzzle books by the hundreds. No one could work a spreadsheet like her. And her memory had been so fucking good. Every name in the Capitol, every face, people’s pets, what they drank and what they liked to eat, their dead sister’s husband’s cousin’s dress at the opera last week. Effie knew everything; she remembered everything.
The Capitol had trapped her in a prison of her own mind.
A prison that no one—no matter how hard they tried—could ever pull her out from.
In those few days, between Katniss’ trial and their train ride home, Haymitch tried his best to come to terms with the fact that Effie really was gone in all the ways that mattered.
Sometimes failing, and sometimes doing alright.
He spent a lot of time trying to remember her favourite colour. That specific shade of light purple she’d loved so much. But all her could ever seem to remember was making fun of her for wearing it so much. He tried to remember the long, thoughtful, only kind-of-annoying messages she used to leave him on his answering machine. In those years before he had ripped his phone outta the wall. He never did call her back. Just always deleted them without a second thought.
Haymitch spent a lot of time wishing he had kept them.
He couldn’t seem to remember any of the foods she liked, if he ever knew. Only the delicate way she used to hold her cutlery, the proper way, she would say. Images of Effie dabbing at her lips with a napkin, Effie with a small spot of cream at the corner of her lips. What was her favourite cocktail? If she had had one, Haymitch didn’t know it. All he had was his leftover suspicious that she used to order from the drink menu based on prettiness and colour. Which magazines were her favorites? He didn’t know. All he remembered was her pretty hands holding them, the sound of the shiny pages flicking. It felt like all these important, big pieces of her were just… missing. All gone. Never coming back.
It felt almost worse than death. Haymitch would know; he’d seen a lot of it.
All that’s left of her is me, he thought.
He pulled in a steady breath and opened the door. Effie’s room was filled with a slant of afternoon light. It turned the white, plasticky frame of the hospital bed to gold. He pulled in another. He sat in the chair, his chair, and tried to look at as much as her as he could.
As much of her as he could bear.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hello.” Effie wasn’t really paying attention. “I must finish.”
She had a big sketchpad looking thing in her lap. A gift from Plutarch, maybe. Or it was a Till thing. Haymitch tilted his head to look. She was working pretty hard, a pencil in one hand and a ruler in the other. But, even with that, her lines weren’t straight. Sometimes she pressed too hard with the pencil, then not hard enough. He didn’t recognize what she was drawing either.
Just a big mixed-up jumble of shaky lines and almost-squares.
“Yeah?” he asked, prompting her gently.
Effie nodded. “This is very important. I must finish.” she said again.
“Yeah. Yeah, I bet.”
Something told him to take it all in, so he tried. The way her hands moved, her eyes, all the little human bits. The way the afternoon light looked in her hair.
“Effie, I’m gonna be goin’ away for a little bit, here.” he said, leaning forward.
“Where are you going?”
“District Twelve.”
“Is that far?” she asked, still not looking up.
A big wave of sickness raged through him. “Yeah… yeah, it is. And I, uh, I dunno when I’m gonna be back.”
Still, Effie said nothing. Still drawing.
“But, I’ll tell ya what,” he said, trying sound firm as he did. Sturdy, like she woulda been if it was him. “I’m gonna leave this phone number with Till. With the nice counselor, ‘kay? It’s my number. That phone that you… you had ‘em put in. Anyway, you call me anytime, yeah? I mean it. Anytime, any reason. You call me, Effie.”
He leaned even more forward, trying to catch her eye. He wanted to make sure it sunk in. That she understood for-fucking-realsies.
“Okay?” he asked her, leaning even more.
She looked up, finally.
And she blinked. “Okay.” she said.
Then, straight back to the sketchbook like Haymitch hadn’t even said a word. It was hard, in that moment, not to turn into something greedy and mean. Because he wanted more from her, didn’t he? Was that so fucking wrong? He wanted their goodbyes with eachother to be different. To say more. All the missing words from the in-between.
Twenty-five years, and he wished they had more to show for it.
Haymitch left the note with his phone number on her nightstand. His name in big, bold underline at the top. He hoped that she could still recognize it—his name—when he wasn’t here to remind her of it every day.
He took one last minute in the doorway.
The slant of light. The out-of-place hospital bed. The shaky scratch of Effie’s pencil. He wanted to remember it all.
“I guess this is goodbye, for now. Eh, princess?”
Effie looked up, looked at him, and frowned. “Because you’re leaving?
“Yeah.” he nodded.
“Where are you going?”
He didn’t bother repeating it. If the words District Twelve had ever meant anything to her—he hoped that maybe they had, maybe—they were nothing to her now. Just like everything else.
“Home,” he said instead. “I gotta go home and take care of some things.”
Our things, he thought.
Our kids.
“Will you come back?” she asked curiously.
“I’ll sure try,” he promised her. He’d made good on a lot of his promises lately. Now, he had one more still to keep. “But call me, yeah?”
This time she nodded.
On a whim, he stepped back into the room. A sorta cloddish, jerking step towards her bed. He dropped a kiss on her forehead. He caught a whiff of the plain District Thirteen shampoo. Yum. Whatever. He’d take whatever he could get with what was left of her.
“Don’t be a stranger, Effie,” he heard himself whisper against her hairline.
Too late, though, wasn’t it?
It was hard, and hell knows Haymitch had lived through some hard times. The worst imaginable, ya might say. But those days specifically? The one after the war? Trapped in a house that’d never been anything but a tomb to him. Katniss only a few doors down, but washed and ruined in her own grief. The two people who had ever made living better for the both of them locked up in hospitals half-way across the country.
Yeah, those were some hard fucking times. Some of the worst.
It was the shrill ring of the phone that shook Haymitch awake that time. He had been passed out on the couch, sleeping under a sheet with holes in it.
“Mr. Abernathy? This is Junia from the Capitol Extended-Care Home, I’m calling because—”
“Is she alright?” He practically jumped down the nurse’s throat. Again, he was imagining the worst. It was what he was best at. “Effie, I mean, is she…?”
“She is perfectly safe, Mr. Abernathy, I don’t want you to worry.” A pretty tall order, but he didn’t tell her that. Couldn’t help but worry, could he? “Only, Miss Trinket has had a difficult day and she is currently somewhat… agitated.”
“Agitated?” he repeated, frowning. “What the f—What does that mean?”
“Well, I—”
Something in the background cut her off.
A bit of shouting, followed by some raised-but-still-calm voices, the shuffling of feet, and the clatter of something metal hitting the floor. What the fuck was happening?
“She… she’s demanding to go home.”
Oh. Oh. He felt something crack inside his chest. Maybe his heart. Maybe a rib.
“Home?” he asked, all strained and croaky.
“That’s right.” the nurse—June? Juna?—said. “She’s refusing to eat, she won’t sleep. She only insists that she must get home and I thought, since you left your phone number for her, you could—”
“Lemme talk to her,” he said, clearing his throat this time. “If I can. Please, I… I’ll talk to her.”
“Just a moment, Mr. Abernathy.”
He waited what musta been the longest twenty seconds of his life.
“Haymitch?”
“Hey, hey princess,” he said. His voice had a big-big-big-day-ness to it, even though he could hear the tears in hers. “How ya doin’?”
“I need to go home, Haymitch,” she whispered.
“Rough day, eh?”
“Haymitch, I must get home, I—I…”
He’d never heard her sound so scared, so confused, so like she didn’t know what to do. Well, maybe once. A long time ago. When he’d left her on the floor of the Sponsor Lounge and said he would be right back. The Quarter Quell playing out on the screens behind her. Fuck, he hated himself.
But he didn’t have time to hate himself. Not right now, anyway. Effie needed him.
“It’s alright, Effie, hey, hey, it’s alright,” he told her. Hopefully he sounded like he meant it. “So, uh, you need to go home, eh?”
“Yes. Yes, I need to go home.”
“Okay,” he nodded, even though she couldn’t see. “Okay, yeah. I hear ya.”
“They won’t let me go home,” she said, whispering again. From the Capitol underground, to the Capitol Extended-Care Home. He hoped there was enough left of her mind to know the difference. “They won’t let me leave, Haymitch.”
“I know,” he replied. Guilt wracked his mind and his chest. “I know.”
They both went quiet for a minute.
Static.
Crackled between the lines.
Then, an even smaller whisper, even more broken. “I just want to go home.”
Not a rib, he decided. Definitely not a rib. Haymitch had never lied to Effie before, not outright, anyway. Sure, he’d bent the truth sometimes. When their safety demanded it. He had omitted some of the fuzzier, nastier details. He’d told her nothing when he probably should have told her everything, but he’d never told an outright lie to her face.
Until that day.
“I’ll, uh, I’ll come get ya, Effie. How does that sound?”
Something hopeful and heartbreaking rose in her voice. “You will?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I will.” He tried to sniff back whatever emotions threatened to leak out of him. Game face, baby. Trinket face. “But, ya know what, princess? Ya caught me at a bad time.”
“Oh. Oh no.”
“No, no, it’s okay. But, I, uh, I just put some soup on the stove.”
“Oh.” she said again. “Okay.”
“Uh-huh. Right, and seein’ as I’m ‘bout to eat dinner, I can’t very well drive over and get ya, can I?” It was almost laughable. Haymitch had never driven a car. Let alone driven one across the damn country. What was he gonna do? Drive on the fucking railways?
“No,” Effie agreed, believing him anyway. “No, of course not.”
“So, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do,” he said. “I’m gonna let my soup cook. I’m gonna eat my dinner, you’re gonna eat yours. You’re gonna wait with the nice nurses ‘til I’m done. Maybe play a game, ya know, or yer little doodlin’ thing. And then I… I’m gonna come get ya, alright?”
“And take me home?” she asked again. Tenacious little bitch, he thought with way more tenderness than the words implied.
“Yeah. Yeah, ‘course, Effie. I’ll take you home.”
Something brushed up against the receiver on the other end. Maybe she was nodding.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” he asked.
“Mhm-hm.”
Then, nothing. A clunk. Effie, apparently, dropping the phone receiver onto a table, not even bothering to say goodbye. Bad manners, really. Just awful. Haymitch wished he coulda teased her about her.
More shuffling as a nurse picked up the phone.
“Mr. Abernathy?”
“Yeah,” he croaked, barely an answer. Barely anything. “Yeah, I’m here.”
There was no soup. No dinner for him to eat. He wasn’t gonna drive anywhere. He wasn’t gonna pick her up. There was no home to go to. Effie—for the rest of her life—would have no home except for that little room in the Capitol Extended-Care Home. She’d probably forget the whole thing by the time she was done eating. June or Juna or whatever her name was would put Effie to bed. She’d fall asleep, and she’d never know that Haymitch had lied to her.
Those years were hell, and she didn’t even know it.
Eventually, Paylor’s government opened up the railways. Not just for the supply trains, either. Or the refugee trains. These were real people trains. As it turned out, people were supposed to be able to see the world they lived it. Travel freely between this place and that place. It was kinda incredible, really. Unbelievable.
The first thing Haymitch did was board a train bound for the Capitol. The tickets were kinda expensive, but worth it. Katniss and Peeta came along too.
Effie could never come to District Twelve. That’s what all the doctors said.
A lack of adequate, full-time care, they said.
Whatever. For a few extra bucks, they could bring everything she needed from District Twelve straight to her.
“It’s weird,” grumbled Katniss.
The three of them piled into the car that had driven them from the hotel to the Capitol Extended-Care Home, and now was driving them back again. Haymitch looked up at all the rows and rows of windows as they pulled away. He tried to pick out which one was Effie’s.
“She looks so old.”
“Happens to all of us, sweetheart.”
“Still,” she said, picking at her sweater sleeve. “It’s weird.”
After that, Katniss went quiet. Haymitch watched her grabPeeta’s hand and hold on tight. He wondered if she knew how lucky she was. To have lost him and gotten him back in the end, jagged edges all smoothed over, all the cracks and gaps glued to hold. Peeta was a fucking miracle, and he wondered if she knew.
But, then again, she had always been the luckier one, right?
Just that little bit luckier.
Enough that it made the difference. Enough to give her just a little bit back, while Haymitch lived like a ghost between the Covey grave in the valley and the Capitol Extended-Care Home. Fucking perfect, wasn’t it? Snow’s final little gift to him, even in death.
A forever prison for Effie, and not enough of her left over to give Haymitch any solace.
“She seemed better, I thought,” Peeta interjected with a small smile. “Maybe she is, right? Maybe it’s progress.”
“It isn’t,” Haymitch grunted back.
“I mean, you never know—”
“It isn’t.” He said it louder this time. Loud enough to make both kids shut up and stare. “She ain’t gettin’ better. It ain’t progress. It never is. There ain’t progress to be made so there’s no use lyin’ to ourselves over it. Alright?”
A shitty, sticky silence took over the car.
“I… sorry, okay?” he tried. Fuck him, did Haymitch ever try.
“Don’t be.” Peeta said graciously.
Then, after another second.
“I guess… I just miss her. I miss her a lot, I think.”
“Yeah?” Haymitch sniffed. “Get in line.”
“What’s this?” he asked, when a waiter led him to the private backroom of some fancy, pre-war restaurant. At the table sat Plutarch, drinking something that looked a little dark for this early in the afternoon. No judgement. Haymitch was all for a little bit of day drinking. “You gonna poison me or somethin’?”
“Not at all. This is lunch,” explained Plutarch, raising his glass. “From one old friend to another.”
Haymitch snorted as he sat down.
“Friend, eh?”
“Aren’t we?”
“Nah,” he answered. “Not even a little bit.”
Still, Haymitch let the man pour him a drink. Plutarch ordered a fleet of appetizers for the table. Haymitch picked at the least Capitol-y looking one. Some sort of a cheese dip with a flat bread. He spent a good fifteen minutes just ignoring Plutarch, until the guy couldn’t stand it any longer.
“I do wonder,” Plutarch finally began to ask. “If there is anything I could ever say or do that would have you forgive me?”
“You gone to see her lately?” he asked instead of answering.
“I have.”
“And would ya say she’s better or worse than when she got pulled outta that dungeon underneath the Tribute Center?”
Plutarch cleared his throat loudly. “The same, I think. Not worse—”
“Yeah,” said Haymitch. “And not better either.”
The man never could let a thing go. “Is that a no, then? There is nothing I could ever say or do that would warrant your forgiveness.”
“You tell me,” Haymitch spit back, a little sour. He took a drink.
Plutarch hummed thoughtfully.
Quiet, again.
Haymitch woulda been more than happy to spend the rest of lunch in silence. Eat as much of this cheese-bread-thing as he could stomach and get out. Make Plutarch pay the bill. The paycheck for being a servant of democracy couldn’t be that bad. Seemed like the least he could fucking do. But Plutarch, of course, had his own plan for how things oughta go.
“I wonder if, despite our non-friendship, I could offer you a piece of advice?” he asked this time. Swirling his drink in a dickishly pensive way.
“No,” grunted Haymitch. “But I feel like you’re gonna do it anyway.”
“I read, once, a very old mantra—”
“There it is.”
“And it went something like this; keep your mind in hell and despair not. Are you sensing my direction, Haymitch?”
“Not even a lil bit, actually.”
“The author was proposing that it is only through the compulsive avoidance of our deepest pain, our need to deny it or suppress it or rationalize it away, that our lives become truly unbearable. The only sound solution, therefore, is to live in the most static pain.” Plutarch’s eyes were all wide, vindicated in his own genius. “Keep our minds in hell, but find a way to despair not.”
Yeah, he was a real sight. Fucking righteous. Preaching to Haymitch about pain from the backroom of a restaurant with no windows and a five-hundred dollar tasting menu.
It was so perfect.
He pictured Effie, laughing. He wished she was here to see it.
“You are not the first person in the history of human existence to have loved and lost,” Plutarch informed him lowly. “Effie is not the first person to have her mind ruined by war. By man’s capacity for cruelty with a metal instrument. You are both part of a long, human lineage of shattering loss and unending pain.”
“And you think that’s better, somehow?” he spit back, just as righteous in his anger as Plutarch was in his genius. “Bein’ mad at it instead of bein’ mad at you?”
The man shrugged, offering him a thin smile. “I can’t say. You tell me.”
Haymitch threw his napkin down instead. He stood up to leave. Fuck him, he was so ready to storm off. Ready to march outta that stupid restaurant and never answer a call from Plutarch ever again, not as long as he lived.
But then he spoke again, and Haymitch paused.
“Lots of people throughout history have tried to make their brains into machines, Haymitch. In floundering attempts to understand everything, rationalize everything, find a perfect and precise point of blame for everything, they tried.”
He glanced back, just for a second. “So what?” he asked.
“So,” answered Plutarch. “It never did stop the people they loved from getting sick and dying.”
Effie ended up growing old long before her time. Sickness’ll do that to a person. It all happened right there, in that little room, in the Capitol Extended-Care Center. And all Haymitch could do was visit her as often as he could and despair not.
Sometimes doing alright, and sometimes failing.
Grief was an old friend, but hard to know. Even harder to describe. Almost impossible to catch in hand and show to another person. And, for all his attempts to describe grief, Haymitch was never really sure he got there in the end. It was sorta like staring at the sun. He ended up just looking at everything around it.
She was less person-ish; more a grief-shaped, Effie-shaped hole in the world. Defined, mostly, by all the things around her.
It didn’t mean he loved her any less.
He just ended up paying more attention to everything around the hole.
Effie ate a lot of fruit these days. Like, a crazy-person amount. All these apples cut up into little cubes and tangerine slices peeled by whatever nurse was on duty that day. She didn’t have the dexterity to do it herself. She lived and ate and slept always with that blanket around her shoulders. You know the one. The blanket Haymitch had rescued from her old townhouse. Thirty-five degrees outside, and Effie was cold. Three meals a day, and Effie was so thin. A nurse named Maylin took her on a walk around the courtyard every day. Years passed, and walks turned into wheelchair rides, and then a chair next to an open window, and then her bed.
Haymitch could remember every time he had the fun of wheeling her around that shitty, concrete courtyard. An eden of scraggly topiary and uncomfortable benches. Effie’s thin, frizzy hair in the breeze. The way she had tilted her chin up towards the sky. Her smile, the wrinkles in her cheeks.
If she couldn’t remember, he would. He’d never forget a thing.
“I love the flowers,” she told him.
“Yeah?” he said. “You gotta favourite, princess?”
Effie scrunched up her brow, thinking long and hard. It was a lotta work, it took a lot outta her, even though it seemed like such a little thing.
“The lavender,” she announced eventually.
“Yeah,” Haymitch said. “Me too.”
He picked her a couple from the garden before he left. She looked pretty pleased when he started arranging them in a vase on her windowsill. He filled the thing with water at her bathroom sink.
“The lavender is my favourite,” she informed him happily.
He smiled back, even when it hurt.
“Yeah,” he said again. He’d say it a million times, he didn’t care. “Me too.”
Her little room at the Capitol Extended-Care Home was full of nightlights. All warm lamps, soft surfaces, minimal and clean. She refused to sleep in the dark, and she refused to sleep alone. There were about two or three night nurses in the city who had the kinda job security most people would kill for. They were paid handsomely by government subsidies to make sure that Effie Trinket never had to sleep alone ever again.
Haymitch watched her pour over a jigsaw puzzle, her brow all furrowed with concentration. Struggling over these big, clunky pieces that were probably meant to stump a child. It was the same face she used to make over the endless paperwork. The schedule, the speeches, the big sponsor spreadsheets. The exact same. Effie listened to a lot of music, too, she sorted playing cards into their suits, made a nurse shuffle them for her, and sorted them all over again. There was colouring, though, she wasn’t all that great at keeping in the line. And it frustrated her, it did. A lot. Haymitch could tell.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he told her one time when it all got to be too much. Fat, headache-worthy tears making their way down her cheeks.
Haymitch held her close, and he was lucky. He knew he was. Lucky that she was even there to hold. He pressed a quick kiss to her temple and let her sob, and sob, and sob.
“I-It isn’t right, it… it isn’t right, it’s not right…”
“It’s okay, Effie, it’s okay,” he said. He held her tight and close. “It’s okay, yeah? It’s okay. It doesn’t have to be right. Ain’t nobody watching.”
Nobody but him.
Seemed only right, ya know? To return the favour best he could.
Effie had spent the first twenty-five years of their tangled-together lives watching him. Doing her best to take care of him. Sometimes failing, and sometimes doing alright. Looking back, Haymitch knew that she’d done everything she could to try and keep him comfortable—keep him alive, for fuck’s sake—even when he lashed and kicked and made her sorry for even trying.
He wanted to spend the last twenty-five years doing the same.
It was a labour of love, he supposed. In its’ own bent-up way. Love on the way in; grief at the exit wound. All that time in between.
Katniss was always telling him that he was too old.
Too old to walk to the valley on his own, too old for that long train ride to the Capitol. But as long as Lenore Dove was there, and Effie was here, and Haymitch had two legs to stand on, he would keep making the trip both ways.
“I love you.”
Effie’s faint voice rose from the bed and filled the air. Haymitch looked up from the book in his lap. He felt his heart jump.
“Yeah?” he asked.
She wasn’t looking at him when she said it, but he was looking at her.
“Mhm-hm.”
His chest was so full of everything that, one of these days, he was just gonna explode. Not today, though. Not today. Today, Effie was enjoying the sun. Her bed was pushed up against the open window. Too occupied with running the edge of her blanket between her fingers to hear the tears in Haymitch’s voice.
“Love you too, princess.”
He saw her nod smally. Then, back to the blanket.
“Will you come back?”
“When, darlin’?”
“Later,” she clarified. Sun across her cheeks. “Will you come back?”
“‘Course I will. I… I always come back, don’t I?”
Effie nodded, but didn’t say anything else. This time silence filled the room. She turned back towards the window. The curtains swayed in the afternoon breeze. The sounds of the city floated up from below. And still, he didn’t look away from her. He couldn’t.
“Haymitch,” he heard her whisper.
“Mhm?”
But she wasn’t talking to him. It was a whisper meant only for herself.
“Haymitch always comes back.”