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Haymitch reeks of wine.
This is, of course, nothing new.
He doesn’t offer Katniss a glass when she sits down across from him. This…isn’t particularly new, either, but now, after Peeta’s baby bombshell, it holds a new weight.
He…doesn’t actually know if she’s pregnant. He only knows that Katniss and Peeta spent many, many nights in the same bed, and were always tangled up in each other’s arms by morning.
“What’re you doin’ awake?” he grumbles, taking a swig from his bottle. “Games’re tomorrow. You should be sleeping. ‘Specially in your…condition.”
Katniss frowns. Almost unconsciously, she rests a hand on her belly. There are cameras watching her every move. To them, she could be an anxious, pregnant teenager, worried about the Games that will most certainly kill her and her child tomorrow.
She could also just have indigestion, and they’d never really know.
“Can we walk, Haymitch?” Katniss says instead of an answer. “I can’t sleep, and Peeta’s dead to the world,” bad choice of words, Katniss, that’s a terrible choice of words. “I just need to…burn off some nerves.”
Haymitch sighs, like this is some chore he must complete, and stands. “Okay. Get moving.”
The roof, even at this odd hour, is abuzz with noise. The Capitol glitters in the dim grey light from the east, and car headlights and fireworks light up what that doesn’t. Katniss sits as close to the edge as she can, and waits for Haymitch to join her.
“You clearly wanted to talk to me,” he grouses, sitting down with a wine-scented grunt, “so talk.”
Katniss swallows around the lump in her throat. Suddenly, all the words that she wanted to say to him are gone, lost to the tinkling of the windchimes, the hooting and hollering below, the reality that in a week, she will probably be dead.
“I don’t want to die, Haymitch.”
“Nobody does, sweetheart. Not anybody worth keeping alive, at least,” he says, a note of dry humor coloring his tone. He takes a long pull from his bottle. “But if you want to get the boy out alive…well, your options are dying and…dying.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it,” Katniss snaps, but the heat behind it is weak, fleeting. So much for being the Girl on Fire. “I just…wish he wasn’t so damn stubborn.”
“Yeah, you and me both.” Haymitch lifts his bottle again, but it seems to be empty, so he just curses and slams it on the ground so hard it’s a miracle it doesn’t shatter. “But he really loves you, you know that?”
Katniss pulls her knees to her chest and presses her face into them. “Yeah. I know.”
“He’d die a million times over if it meant saving you. He’d face every Arena, every Games, every Tribute and Victor in history if it meant you had a shot of making it out alive.” Haymitch pauses. “You could go a hundred lifetimes and never, ever deserve that boy.”
“You’ve told me that before.”
“Well, I think you could do with hearing it again!”
“I can hear just fine!”
Haymitch laughs that same grating, irritating, dry laugh he laughs whenever Katniss is being difficult, which is apparently always. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say pregnancy is making you loonier than usual.”
Katniss is silent. Her cheeks burn. Haymitch is quiet for a few seconds before he seems to realize something.
“Wait,” he says, voice far too sober for someone as drunk as he is, “you’re not actually…”
“I…don’t know,” Katniss admits, feeling as though she has to shove the words out of her mouth. It should feel like a weight off her shoulders, but it doesn’t. It feels like yet another burden she must carry, another rock strapped across her back while the carrot of Peeta’s life is dangling in front of her. Peeta’s life, her mother and Prim, Hazelle and Gale and even Haymitch, and now, the potential for Peeta’s child.
“The hell do you mean, you don’t know? Katniss, last I checked there’s only one way to get pregnant,” Haymitch hisses, grabbing Katniss’s shoulder and forcing her to look straight at him. “Are you telling me there’s a chance?”
“Maybe?” Katniss says, “We weren’t…it just…things got out of hand, and I-”
“Spare me the details, sweetheart, and just give it to me straight!”
“It was only a handful of times!” Katniss grits, feeling her face burn hotter. “It’s not like I was ripping his pants off every time I saw him! Things just spiralled.”
Haymitch buries his face in his hands. “How far along are you?”
“I…I haven’t bled for ten weeks, but that’s normal for me. I didn’t start until I was fifteen, and they’ve never been regular.”
Haymitch makes a sound like a dying animal. “Just…let me process all this, Katniss. What the hell.”
“Haymitch, I don’t actually know if I’m…if it’s really there or not.” Somehow, Katniss can’t bring herself to say the words ‘I’m pregnant,’ even if it’s just to say she doesn’t know if she is or not. “There’s a chance, but when I say I don’t know, I really mean it. I don’t know.”
If there’s one thing Katniss hates, it’s not knowing.
“Does Peeta know?”
“Well, he didn’t tell me he was dropping this, so it’s safe to say he doesn’t.”
“He could also be playing all of us,” Haymitch says dryly, finally dropping his hands from his face. He’s only forty-three, but he looks ancient. “I wouldn’t put it past him if he knew, or at least suspected, and just…decided to use it to his advantage. He’s smart. Smarter than you, at least.”
Katniss does her best not to be annoyed by that.
“And…please don’t take this the wrong way, sweetheart, but are you sure he’s the father?”
Katniss’s blush is blushing. “Yes, of course. I didn’t ever sleep with Gale.”
“Alright, alright, no need to get defensive, I was just askin’. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had. And I don’t think Peeta would have, either.”
“Can we not discuss this while we’re talking about me having Peeta’s baby?”
“So…you are pregnant?”
“I don’t know, Haymitch! I really, really don’t know!” Katniss shouts, feeling tears well up in her eyes. She wants to wipe them off, but she doesn’t know if letting them fall or wiping them away would make her seem weaker, or more emotional, or more pregnant. “It could be something. It could be nothing. I don’t know. The…the timing would line up, I guess, but it might be nothing.”
Haymitch makes another strange noise. “Alright, let me ask it like this. Are you more likely to be pregnant than to not be pregnant? Is there anything else happening? Are you…feeling sick? Cramps? Anything?”
“Nothing I can’t attribute to the stress of the Games,” Katniss admits, “but…there are definitely other things. It’s just so hard to tell. I’ve never been pregnant before, I don’t know what that’s like for me, and it’s not like I can go up to my mother and ask her.”
Haymitch groans so loud and so long it’s a miracle someone doesn’t come to retrieve them just from the noise. “Alright, alright, Katniss, let’s just…assume you are pregnant. Does this change anything?”
Do you want me to get you out of the Arena?
“No. No, it doesn’t. I’m still going to be dead sometime in the next two weeks. Just…” Katniss trails off and squeezes her eyes shut. She can’t bear to look at Haymitch right now. “Just…when they bring my body back to District 12…”
“What?”
Katniss tries to speak, but the words get stuck in her throat. She doesn’t know what she wants to say. Does she want Haymitch to tell her mother and sister that she was pregnant? Does she want him to keep it a secret? Does she want one funeral, or two?
For someone that might not even be there, this baby sure is causing a lot of grief.
“Forget it. Pretend I never said anything at all.”
“I’m not going to do that, Katniss.”
“Why?”
“Because I watched you grow up.”
The words shock Katniss so much they nearly snap her out of her anger. “What?”
“I’m not going to pretend nothing’s happening because I watched you grow up. Your father and I…weren’t friends, but we knew each other. I saw you in the Hob before you could walk. I’m old enough to be your father, girl, and I’m not just going to pretend this ain’t happening. I respect your mother too much.” He chuckles a little. “I’m a little afraid of her, too, if I’m to be honest.”
“I wish she was here,” Katniss admits, pulling herself back into a ball and burying her face in her knees. “She would know what to do.”
Katniss knows the smell well. Wormwood, mugwort, raspberry leaf, primrose, the tonic her mother would brew to make it so that unwanted pregnancies never resulted in a birth. It’s technically illegal, but so is hunting, so is harvesting, so is the Hob.
“She’s a smart woman.”
“She is.”
Katniss wants her mom. For the first time in what feels like a dozen lifetimes, Katniss feels like a scared little girl again, and desperately wants her mother.
She wonders if her maybe-baby wants its mother, too, then forces the thought from her mind. They’ll both be dead soon enough. No point in lingering on the what-ifs.
The tears start falling before she can stop them. The wailing comes next.
“Ah, dammit,” Haymitch grumbles, then leans forward to pull Katniss into a hug. He smells like stale wine and body odor and something that might have once been a pretty fancy cologne, but he’s warm and solid. “C’mere, kid. You don’t deserve any of this. None of us do.”
Katniss.
Peeta.
Haymitch.
Their families.
Katniss and Peeta’s little maybe-baby.
None of them deserve any of this, but President Snow made sure it would all happen anyway.
Katniss is angry. She’s angry at herself, at Peeta, at President Snow, at Haymitch, at the Capitol itself. She is angry at her child, the one that might not even be there, for forcing her to pick and choose which people she can save.
Weeks later, in District 13, Katniss bleeds. She bleeds, and she bleeds, and she bleeds so much it feels like there’s hardly any blood left in her body. She presses her fingers between her legs in her hospital bed, and they come away wet and sticky with blood, smeared with clumps of something that she refuses to believe are her maybe-baby.
Officially, she has had a miscarriage. That’s what the doctors tell her, what it says on paper, what her family is told, what the people of Thirteen are told, what the people of Panem will be told, what Peeta will eventually be told, once Katniss gets him out of the Capitol.
To Katniss…
It’s better for her if she was never pregnant at all. It’s easier than knowing that her child was just one more person the Capitol had stolen from her, one more person whose death had been made a spectacle, one more person lost to President Snow and his Games.
There was never any baby. It doesn’t matter what really happened. If Katniss believes hard enough, she can convince herself.
It doesn’t make the nightmares of her baby being ripped from her arms and thrown to packs of muttations with Glimmer’s eyes and Rue’s hair and Mags’s bony fingers and Wiress’s crazed smile any easier.