Work Text:
Haymitch hasn’t been properly sober in the better part of twenty years. Contrary to what some people seem to think, he didn’t start drinking to make memories of the Games easier, not really. He started drinking because he so desperately wanted to sleep.
There was a time in his life, for a year or two after the Games, where Haymitch never slept more than an hour at a time. The nightmares were so much worse than the memories, because the memories, at least, faded when he could focus on something else.
The nightmares were something he could never, ever stop living in. Even after he opened his eyes, it felt like the nightmares were still there, like he could still see the people in the Arena, like he could still hear Maysilee’s screams, like he could still taste the bitter, poisoned water of the streams.
He figured out soon enough that if he drank enough, the nightmares wouldn’t come, and that the same rule applied to the hangovers that came the day after.
Now?
He’s not sure if it’s age or withdrawals that make his hands shake. The nightmares plague him again, even all these years later.
He so desperately wants a drink.
He can tell Effie wants a drink too. She’s just too polite to say anything about it. The thought almost makes Haymitch laugh, but then the laughing makes his head hurt every time he thinks about it. She’d never admit it, but Effie came to rely quite heavily on drink following the announcement of the Quell. She didn’t even need to tell Haymitch for him to know. He could see it in ways only a fellow drunk could.
But hey, at least he’s not alone in sobriety here in Thirteen. As much as they bicker and needle each other, she really is good company.
“It really is nearly impossible to get a moment alone here, isn’t it?”
Haymitch snorts. Effie’s definitely not supposed to be in his room, since unmarried people are separated by sex, but he really couldn’t care less. He turns to look at Effie, who’s in her standard-issue grey nightgown, her hair wrapped up in what looks to be a tea towel, and scoots over in his bed. He hadn’t even been lying down, let alone sleeping, so the company is welcome.
“Well,” he says as Effie takes a seat on the edge of the mattress, “they don’t want any unforeseen issues. Coin’s paranoid, you know?”
Effie smiles a little, and it’s a pretty, fleeting thing. She’s got thin lips, pale pink from lack of sunlight and no makeup, and they’re starting to crack from the dry air in Thirteen. “She might have you punished for saying that, you know?”
Haymitch laughs a little. “She might punish you, too, for saying that.”
Effie’s smile grows a little wider. She’s actually got some smile lines on her face, and Haymitch wonders, for just a moment, how old she is. Fifty, at most. She seems both older and younger, somehow, without all the makeup. “Ah, well,” she says shrugging her shoulders, “it wouldn’t be the first time a rebel’s gotten me in trouble.”
Haymitch laughs again. “You’re funny, you know that, Effie? All these years, all these years we’ve known each other, and it’s just now that I’m finding out you have a sense of humor.”
Effie huffs, but she doesn’t actually seem all that angry. “Well, Haymitch, I’m a person. Of course I have a sense of humor.”
“Thought your corset had squeezed it all out of you.”
“Katniss probably thought the same.”
That draws another laugh out of Haymitch, and then his head throbs, and he groans. “Katniss thinks a lot of things. Most of them are stupid.”
Effie laughs, her real laugh, not the fake, affected, girlish Capitol titter she would use in front of important people, but the low-pitched, thumpy, somewhat guilty laugh that Haymitch so rarely got to see. It’s pretty the same way Effie is without all her makeup and accessories, womanly and warm, and there’s a not-small part of Haymitch that wishes he’d get to see it more.
“Well, our little songbird is good at many things. Critical thinking, even I must admit, is often not one of them.”
“She’s got her moments,” Haymitch says, gnawing at the inside of his lip and wishing desperately for a drink, “but they wanted her for her face and her guts and her voice, not her brains.”
Effie shifts her weight slightly. She’s always been slender and svelte, even fattened up on Capitol goodies the way she was, but rations and withdrawals have made her even smaller. Her hands shake. She wants a drink almost as badly as Haymitch does.
“You look ridiculous, you know,” he says, sitting up a little more and brushing his fingers against her headwrap. “You even have hair under there?”
Effie scoffs. “Yes, I have hair! It’s just…not as pretty as it used to be. I’ve lost a lot of it over the last year or so, and even here, even in this…dreadful place,” she gestures vaguely around Haymitch’s room, “I want to look decent.”
“You’re pretty as it is, Effie, don’t act like you don’t know it.” And she is pretty, Haymitch isn’t lying about that. Sure, she’s got a few wrinkles and her hair is probably greying and her skin is deathly pale, even without the makeup, but she’s got a certain womanly charm about her that’s magnetizing.
Effie flushes in the dim light of Haymitch’s lamp. “Don’t flatter me, Haymitch. You know, the year you won your Games? Every girl in the Capitol was obsessed with you. They thought you were the most handsome thing they’d ever seen.”
Haymitch grimaces. His mouth itches; he oh so desperately wants a drink. Wine. Ripper’s white liquor. Strong, dark brown grain alcohol shared with Chaff. The isopropyl stuff he knows Thirteen has hidden away somewhere. Anything, anything, anything. Haymitch is just so thirsty.
“If only they could see me now.”
“I think you’re much more handsome sober.”
“And I think you’re much prettier without all the makeup.”
Effie smiles again, but it’s thin, weak. “Well, we all have our tastes, I suppose.”
Haymitch nods. Finally, he says it. “You want a drink.” It’s not a question.
“I…wouldn’t say no,” Effie says delicately, and she might as well have burst out crying for a drink with how controlled her voice is. “I think everyone in this…backwoods District could use one! It could certainly make the President a little nicer!”
“Hey, do you think her hair’s a wig?”
Effie blinks, then looks around carefully, as if she’s looking to see if they’re being eavesdropped on. “Of course it is! No human hair looks like that! But apparently me having my wigs would be a sign of inequality amongst the citizens.”
“Oh that’s rich coming from her.”
“Isn’t it?!” Effie bursts, “In all the time I’ve been here, I can’t help but feel like even with all the grey, there are different shades of it.”
Ain’t that the stinking truth.
“But…” Effie trails off, then grimaces. For a just flash, she shows her age. “I must sound so silly to you. Goodness, crying about my wigs and jewels and how unfair it is that I don’t get to look how I want while the people here and in the other outlying Districts have spent most of their lives starving.”
Haymitch huffs. “Only took you, what, forty-five years to figure it out?”
“You’re not making me feel any better, Haymitch.”
“Wasn’t trying to.”
Effie sighs. She shifts her weight again, and this time, she actually lies down beside Haymitch. She stays above the covers, but she’s warm against him. “I’m being silly again, aren’t I? Looking for comfort here.”
“Comfort’s a luxury outside the Capitol, Effie.”
“It feels like even more of one here.”
“I won’t argue with you on that.”
Effie sighs and snuggles closer to Haymitch. She shuts her eyes, and her headwrap shifts. Her roots are light, maybe red or blonde or even grey, but Haymitch doesn’t disturb it to see more. Somehow, even after everything she’s done, even after everything they’ve lived through together, it feels like a violation.
“Haymitch?” Effie’s voice is smaller than he’s ever heard it before. “Was she…was Katniss actually pregnant?”
“Yeah.” No point in denying it. “Not very far along, but yeah.”
Effie screws her face up like she might cry. She tangles a fist in Haymitch’s nightshirt and squeezes at the fabric. “Oh, that poor girl. Was it…is she…I don’t even know what to ask. I just feel awful for her.”
“She’s still alive, ain’t she?”
“Do you know if she can…still have children?”
The question takes Haymitch aback. He shifts a little to get a better look at Effie, who’s holding her head up now, right over Haymitch’s chest. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. It’s not something that ever crossed my mind. I don’t even know if she really cares.”
Effie’s expression shifts, and she buries her face in Haymitch’s chest. Warmth drips onto his shirt, and he realizes she’s crying. “I never had children, Haymitch. I never got the chance. I’m too old, now, and even if I wasn’t…well. There are some things even the Capitol can’t fix.”
“You’re infertile?”
Effie makes a sharp little noise. She squeezes Haymitch’s shirt harder and buries her face deeper. The tip of her nose is icy. “Hearing it never gets any easier. They told me…it’s not that I’d never have a child, but my chances were…almost nonexistent. It’s…not the same, I know. I won’t pretend it is. Even I’m not so…shallow and vapid as that. But I know the pain. Even if she never wanted children, there’s something about being completely unable to have them that makes you feel broken.”
Haymitch reaches up to stroke Effie’s cheek. Most of it is still buried in his chest, so his fingers end up near her ear. She’s got a few scarred-over piercing holes on the cartilage, but he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her wear jewelry in them, not even when she was much, much younger.
“Did you, Effie? Want kids, I mean.”
Effie makes another wounded noise. “I think…I would have if I wasn’t who I was. If I didn’t do what I did. It didn’t leave me completely unaffected, Haymitch. I just got good at pretending it didn’t. You and I…aren’t so different, you know?”
Haymitch almost laughs at that, but Effie keeps going.
“You distracted yourself with liquor. I distracted myself with…anything I could. Fashion. Jewels. Wigs and makeup. Things that were more…catered to Capitol tastes than being an alcoholic.”
“You are an alcoholic.”
“I didn’t turn to drink until after the Quell announcement, Haymitch. I think…that’s when all of it finally came crumbling down. It’s like I was…stacking rocks on a hammock swaying over my head. Every dead Tribute, every time I saw you drinking yourself into a stupor, every time I reminded a pair of starving children that this was an honor, it was like another stone hanging above my head. It held for some time. The Quell was just a boulder the hammock couldn’t carry, and my old tactics weren’t working.”
“That’s…eloquent of you, Effie.”
“It took some time to get it down,” she says, and for half a second, there’s some of her old Capitol cheer back, but it’s gone as fast as it was there, “but I think that…that’s really the only way I can think of it. I feel so ridiculous every time I think of their faces. After Katniss and Peeta won, I thought I’d had my break. I wouldn’t have to worry about finding new distractions. I’d be going to enough parties and interviews and have enough money to keep the others from my mind. How stupid of me.”
“Yeah, it was.”
Effie’s so distraught she doesn’t even reprimand Haymitch for his snark. “And now, with poor Katniss…and everything…I wish there was some way I could undo it.”
“We all do, Effie. You’re not alone in that.”
They sit in a comfortable silence for a while, and Haymitch almost thinks Effie’s fallen asleep when she asks, “Did you ever want children, Haymitch?”
Haymitch grimaces. “That’s a complicated question. Before the Games? Maybe. But then, it’s unlikely there would have been the option of not having them. I wanted to marry Lenore, and there’s no such thing as keeping a baby from happening in the districts like there is in the Capitol. Maybe in One and Two, but certainly not in Twelve, and certainly not when you’re destined to be a coal miner. But then after? With everything else? No. Never. Not when I’d lived through the Games and watched everyone I love die when I got home. Not when I watched so many children from my district get chewed up by the Games. I couldn’t.”
Effie’s quiet again for a few moments, then, “I think…I think I started thinking of Katniss as my own. Peeta, too. It’s silly, I know. I know she has a perfectly good, perfectly living mother. I’m friends with her mother, at least I like to think I am. But…I just love her so much. It’s hard not to think of her like my own. And Peeta has no family left…” Effie starts crying again, warmth seeping into Haymitch’s shirt. “It’s so cruel of me to think of them differently than the other Tributes. I know that now. But…I know them. I could have known their child.”
“Auntie Effie, huh?”
Effie laughs, but it’s weak and shuddery. “Oh, could you imagine?”
Haymitch laughs too. “Yeah. Yeah, I could.”
“You see them like yours, too, don’t you?”
“I saw them all like mine.”
Effie sobs. “Oh, goodness, I must sound so cruel and stupid to you.”
“I saw forty-eight kids into the Games, Effie. Forty-six of them died, and two of them would probably be better off dead. You and I were both pieces in those Games. Maybe you were…a little more willfully ignorant than others, but both of us were being used. And I know it hurt you, too.”
“I remember Juniper and Ethen.”
Haymitch’s heart lurches. Juniper and Ethen were two twelve-year-olds who were reaped in the same year. Juniper was so thin she could hardly walk to the stage. Ethen cried when he got reaped and had to be physically carried up the stairs by a Peacekeeper. Neither of them were even five feet tall. Both of them were from the Seam. Both died within forty-eight hours in the Arena.
“There was nothing I could have done to save them,” Haymitch says, giving Effie a squeeze, “nothing.”
“It never felt right, reaping twelve-year-olds,” Effie manages, though she’s crying pretty hard now, “especially when they were so small. When I called Juniper’s name and saw her walk up, I thought there had been some sort of mistake. I thought she couldn’t be more than seven with how small she was. But…”
“The Capitol never cared if we starved, Effie. Not as far out as Twelve.”
“I feel awful, Haymitch. I knew, I knew, I knew, and I just pretended I didn’t care because it was easier for me.”
“It’s what you were told. Honor. Fame. Glory. Could be yours for the low, low price of murdering twenty-three other people, one of whom is from your home. It feels unreal and lucky for the people who never have to live through it, for people who never have to know loss.”
Effie laughs, but it’s clear she doesn’t actually find any of it very funny. “Goodness,” she says shakily, “I could really use a drink.”
Haymitch laughs, too. He leans down and presses a kiss to Effie’s forehead. Her skin is still soft, despite all the stress and the dry, forced air of Thirteen.
“You and me both, Effie. You and me both.”