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In the soft light of afternoon, he watches her from the shore, wading out with the other girls. Katniss walks ahead of them while Effie holds Katniss’s daughter’s hand, making sure to lead the girl only where she herself has already walked so she doesn’t fall in a hole or trip on anything she can’t see.
Effie squeals or makes some silly noise with every step, and Haymitch chuckles to himself. Even after fifteen years in Twelve, she still has many of her Capitol sensibilities about things. She can’t stand the feel of the wet mud between her toes, and she needs the house swept practically every day because she hates the feeling of gritty dirt under her feet. She eats everything with the proper cutlery, even when her hands would do just fine, and she keeps her pinky up when she drinks her tea. It drives him crazy sometimes, but he wouldn’t have her any other way.
Katniss calls them over to the patch of water plants she’s standing near, and they trudge slowly through the water, pausing only for Effie to lift the girl when it gets too deep for her. Pulling gently on a fistful of leaves, Katniss picks the plant her father named her for to show her daughter, accidentally splashing Effie in the process.
Effie gasps, and the girl giggles, pushing her hand through the water towards Effie, splashing her deliberately and making her gasp again. Soon enough, they’re all splashing each other and laughing, and Haymitch laughs with them from the shore.
“Careful out there, sweetheart, you don’t want to mess up her highness’s hair,” he calls out to them, earning a fond sort of glare from Effie, whose hair rests over her shoulder in a single long braid that she’s been letting fade to gray since he told her he thought it looked dignified last summer.
After they’ve gathered their fare, he walks with them back up to the house, letting Katniss link her arm in his as Effie and the girl walk ahead, hand in hand.
“If you told me twenty years ago this would be my life, I wouldn’t believe you,” Katniss says, smiling in a way he knows all too well, though he has yet to accurately name the feeling that goes with it.
“You’re telling me,” he says.
“You know, there were some days that felt like this, before,” she said. “Like sometimes life was so simple that I thought, What if it could stay just like this? Or it seemed like you could see the way the world could be. There was always that dread, though.”
“Knowing it couldn’t stay like that,” he says. “I know.”
She sighs. “Sometimes it still feels like it won’t. Sometimes I think I’ve made all this up, or I think it won’t last. Is that crazy?”
“Maybe,” he admits. “But I don’t think so.”
“Hm,” she intones, smiling as Effie lifts her daughter over a felled branch that’s lying across the path.
“It’s the same for me,” he says. “I have nightmares about poison, raids… other things. Stuff that because of you…” He looks at her, and her brow furrows. “…that little girl, and the little one you’re carrying right now won’t ever have to worry about.”
Katniss lays a hand on her stomach.
“They’re my reminder that it’s getting better,” he says, hugging her arm closer to the side of his body, a brief squeeze to remind her of what’s real. “Because I know they wouldn’t be here unless what we were fighting for worked.”
“Yeah,” she murmurs, then asks: “Do you ever wish you had kids?”
The corner of his mouth quirks up, only for a moment. “There’s no sense in wishing for that now,” he says, shaking his head.
“You know what I mean,” she says. “Did you ever want them? At any point in your life?”
He sighs. “Yeah,” he answers. “I wanted a family with Lenore Dove, the girl I was with before… before all this. There are times when I think Effie would have made a good mother, and I know she wishes she could have had a couple babies. She’s good with yours.”
“She is,” Katniss agrees.
“But it’s too late for that now,” he says. “We can’t. And she told me one time she couldn’t, ever, but maybe she could have found a doctor who would’ve let her try. I don’t know a whole lot about that; it’s just something she said once, a long time ago.”
“Oh,” Katniss says.
“We’re happy, though,” he says.
“So am I,” Katniss says as they step from the dirt footpath onto the gravel drive that leads up toward the house she shares with Peeta.
They watch Effie and the girl kick off their muddy shoes and race into the house, pausing at the bottom of the steps.
“Hey, walk, please,” Peeta says just before emerging from inside the house. He smiles when he sees his wife and their old mentor. “What took you so long?” he teases.
“You try walking fast when you’re seven months pregnant, bread boy,” Katniss says.
She and Haymitch lean on each other as they heft themselves up the steps onto the porch.
“Okay, fair,” Peeta chuckles, pecking her on the lips as she passes him on her way into the house.
“Evening,” Haymitch says, and he and Peeta pat each other on the shoulders in lieu of a hug.
“What’s for dinner?” Peeta asks.
“You’re not cooking?” Haymitch counters, and they both laugh.
Perhaps sometimes life can be this simple. Most days now, it is.