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The old man takes a step onto his back porch with his morning coffee. The strongest drink he can have these days. And trust that he makes it as strong as possible. As soon as the back door shuts behind him, his girls get to their honking. Echoing through the cool damp morning air.
They know he’s out here, but now that means someone else does too.
Just on the other side of the split rail fence, his neighbors of nearly two decades are working in their garden. The boy is spreading mulch with a rake, and he can see his sweetheart on the far edge of the yard staring into a garden bed with her hands on her hips.
He can hear her before he can see her. The high voice shrilling across the grass, “Papaw! Papaw!” A tiny head covered in dark curly hair pokes around a wheelbarrow, “Tickies! Papaw tickies!” she shouts her short chubby legs running as fast as a person who just learned to run can do.
“Is 'at my baby girl?” he calls, setting down the mug to shuffle down the steps as fast as he can manage now. Haymitch Abernathy may be only 60 years old, but his body, and more so his spirit, is much older.
“There she is,” he thinks. “The reason I’m alive.”
How can one tiny body contain all the joy necessary to save a life?
—
It was almost two years ago exactly now.
Asterid Everdeen, visiting for the impending special occasion, grabbing his chin in her hand and tipping his face toward the firelight. “You need to get to the hospital Haymitch.”
He waved her off and settled further into the armchair, “I don’t go near that damn hospital.”
She was right though. The pain was becoming unbearable, he hadn’t been able to eat for days. They’d tell him later he’d fallen asleep there in the chair and they couldn’t wake him.
His next hazy recollection feels like someone else’s memory. Because it’s as if his eyes had been watching from the ceiling. His puffy lifeless body on the table, the arm hanging limp off the side a sickly yellow that almost looked green. The doctors in their bright blue uniforms cutting off his clothes with scissors and holding open his jaw to stick tubes in his throat.
And the piercing sound rising above all the cross talk and chiming equipment, his sweetheart screaming, sobbing, “You have to save him!”
Her crumpled face wet with tears, her belly straining the buttons on her nightshirt. Shrieking and clawing at the boy who was trying to get her to sit, gentle reminders of “Katniss, the baby” barely breaking through her wails.
Then there was darkness.
He tried calling out into the endless void. If this is the Hereafter, they must be here. He called for them all, for Ma, for Sid, for Lenore Dove. But there was no answer.
26 days he was asleep.
The facts presented to him when he rejoined the waking world were grim. The drinking had finally caught up to him. His liver was failing and trying to take the rest of his organs with it. The room was filled with machines that were keeping him alive. That, and the constitution of a horse, apparently. Nothing more could be done for him in Twelve, but his friends in high places could get him exorbitant treatments in the Capitol that would save him. All he had to do was say the word.
But he felt long past saving.
Stuck to the bed, weighed down by heavy drugs and a swimming confusion that even a professional soak like him had a hard time fighting through.
The boy was first to visit, his grave concern fighting against the bursting joy of his news of a baby girl. The new mother will visit later, he promised. Just tired, lots of sleep lost in the last two weeks.
Hours passed, days probably, phone calls came in from the Capitol that he refused to take. The doctors came in to try to convince him, try to gently guide him to make a different choice. The boy, still visiting alone, did the same.
But he never really heard them. He'd been given a remote with a big button that delivered the emptiness straight into his veins that he could press whenever he liked. A privilege only reserved for the dying. One he abused at every opportunity.
Hoping every time it would be the last, enough for his stubborn body to finally quit, so he could finally be free of it all.
But he kept waking, day after day, the noisy machines and pain that still crept through sometimes keeping him too present in the room.
Then finally, after days of excuses from the boy finally turned into confessions, "She doesn't want to come. She's really angry with you."
His sweetheart came to visit.
She stood close to the door. Looking half the size she did the last time he'd seen her. She looked bright, dewy and renewed— albeit tired. Her arms were folded angrily, protectively.
"Who sent you those?” She asked, gesturing toward the gaudy blue and purple flower arrangement taking up half the bedside.
“Effie,” he croaked.
She cocked an eyebrow, “She didn’t want to save her money for the funeral flowers?”
“You’re being very mean to me,” he whined, “I really thought motherhood would have softened you.”
“Guess you don’t know anything about bears,” she spat.
“Oh and am I a threat to your young?”
She steeled her gaze on him and he waited for her to start shouting. But instead her lip started to quiver and she collapsed into a chair, head in her hands. “Why won’t you get the surgery Haymitch?”
She had heard his excuses already, relayed to her by her husband and the doctors. The recovery would be long, potential months in a Capitol hospital. Medication forever. And most importantly, not a drop of alcohol. Not ever again.
“I guess it’s just my time,” he tossed off, turning his head away from her.
She stood and stomped around the bed to force him to look at her, “They told me even if you refuse treatment, you won’t die for weeks, maybe even months.” Her voice rose as her eyes began to well with angry tears, “Is that really how you want to go? Slowly and painfully in this fucking windowless room?”
He didn’t answer her because he didn’t have an answer. Wasn’t this exact outcome he’d asked for when he chose his slow suicide?
Her tears kept flowing as she pleaded with him. “I had a baby Haymitch. We have a baby in this family now." He watched as she struggled for the type of words that were never easy for either of them to come by, "I want you to know her. I need you to know her.”
Seeing her cry was threatening to crumble him. “No one needs to know me.”
But she continued past his attempts at downplaying his value, “She’s going to need to have somewhere else to go when she’s mad at me. Someone who will always buy her candy.”
“Aw c’mon you know the boy will buy her whatever she wants.”
“Haymitch!!”
She spun away from him with an exasperated screech and stood facing the wall, shaking hands tugging at the braid over her shoulder.
He tried to shift himself in the bed, away from all her emotions. But every small movement sent waves of pain and nausea through him. He wanted to go back to the nothing.
She turned back around resolutely and bent down next to the bed, took his hand gently, “We’ve only lost people. We’ve lost so many people," she whispered, trying to reach the softest parts of him, "But now there’s a new person." A small hopeful smile and an encouraging nod of her head.
"She can replace me then. This place is getting too crowded anyway."
She didn't even dignify his response with an eyeroll. She only took a slow steadying breath and stared him dead in the eyes, “You’re getting the surgery or you’re never going to see her. Or me. I will not watch you die here. It’s not now. Not like this."
She dropped his hand on the bed as she stood and turned on her heel. Leaving him there without a goodbye.
At the closing of the door behind her, he pressed the pain button with every bit of strength he had left and waited to slip back into the warm darkness.
But on this trip into the eternal nothingness, he was finally met by another traveler on his path.
He looked somehow older than the last time their grey eyes had met, but he'd know that face anywhere.
"Burdie?" Haymitch asked into the void.
"That's Grandpa Burdie to you," he smirked.
"What are you doing here?"
"I should be asking you that question," Burdock replied easily.
"It's time for me to go," Haymitch told him.
"Like hell it is," he scoffed.
The old man couldn't help but try to press him for information, "Why hasn't Lenore Dove come for me?" he asked.
"Everyone here will see you when we see you. Got all the time in the world."
"But have had my time!" he argued, "Too much of it!"
"My baby still needs you, we don't." Burdock said, slowly floating further from him, fading back into the blackness. "Keep taking care of my girls Haymitch. Stay here with our family. Just a little while longer."
The next time he regained enough consciousness to speak, he told the first figure that walked in the room that he'd do it.
Everything had moved quickly then. The people who still cared for him in the Capitol, along with plenty of strangers who respected his contributions to the bloody history of Panem had moved hell and high water to keep him alive.
A hovercraft landed in Twelve for the first time in years to rush the victor of the 50th Hunger Games Haymitch Abernathy to the best hospital in the nation.
The next month flowed through a watery state of disorientation and pain and they tried to rebuild what they could of his rotten insides. Dozens of surgeries. Maybe less. He can't remember any of it and didn't care to listen when they explained it all to him later.
All he knew for sure is he'd been given another chance.
The final months had been the hardest. When they had to start weaning him off the drugs and he was forced to deal with the pain. To endure being treated like a baby when they helped him try to walk again after all the time in bed. The endless days alone in the bright room with his dark thoughts.
But somehow he'd made it home. Stepping off the train weighing 30 pounds less, sober and full of fresh organs and new perspective. And his sweetheart had been waiting for him on the train platform.
She walked straight into his arms, hugged him gently around his middle like he was made of glass, "Welcome home, Haymitch."
"I'm so sorry, sweetheart," he murmured into her hair.
She let go of him, shook her head, waved him off. Sniffed hard to suck back tears he knew she didn't want to cry.
"I didn't even miss you," she deadpanned.
"Good, that's how I like it."
"Let's go meet the baby," she beamed, looping her arm through his and starting toward home.
Back at home he was greeted by the proud father, and a very wriggly baby with wide, curious blue eyes and a swoop of black hair atop her head.
He was struck by a sudden aching, pulling at his heart, "She's so big. I missed too much."
"I promise she was boring before, she only just starting doing interesting things." Katniss mused with a slight giggle.
Maybe it was because he hadn't seen them in months. But the pair looked fresh and new to him. Their scars look faded, the dark clouds behind their eyes cleared away and replaced with a lovely sunrise.
They excitedly rushed him into his armchair. He had to hold her, he waited so long, they'd said.
"Do I gotta… cradle her head or somethin'?" he grumbled nervously.
"No, she holds that up herself now. But she hasn't got the hang of how heavy it is, so she tries to sit up and tips over." Peeta laughed with the giddy wonder of a new parent, "She might cry though. It's been touch and go with new people."
They placed her into the crook of his arm, the baby blinked up at him, chewing on her knuckles with her gums. She looked just like both of them. His kids.
He could see their spirit behind the wonder in her eyes. The light and the hope of everyone who came before her. The promise of the future she would get to have.
The future that he helped her have. That maybe now he'd be there to see.
"Hello little one," he cooed, surprised by the gentleness in his own voice, "I'm Haymitch. I'm here to look out for you."
She reached up with her little fingers and splayed them across his chin. Flexing her fingertips curiously over his stubbled skin that hung looser off of his jaw now. He dipped his head to catch her palm across his lips and blew a raspberry into it.
The baby tipped her face back, mouth widening in a big, gummy grin.
And she laughed.
A tiny hiccup of a sound, but an unmistakable laugh nonetheless.
"How's that for interesting," Peeta chucked with amazement.
"She's never done that." Katniss gasped.
"She must be real happy to finally meet you." Peeta said, stepping over to squeeze his wife who was now trying to stealthily swipe tears from her eyes.
"I'm real happy to meet her too." He'd said. And he really meant it.
—
Just two years later, that tiny giggling baby has become a funny little girl who now calls him "Papaw". He didn't ask them to do that, they insist they didn't teach her to say it. But he secretly doesn't mind at all.
She keeps squealing in between her slightly decipherable babble as her father lifts her over the rail of the fence, chubby legs already running before she's set on the ground.
"Peeta, she doesn’t have shoes on!" Katniss screams.
"Why does that suddenly matter?" he lobs back.
"Because this side of the fence isn’t covered in goose shit!"
"Language!" Haymitch scolds with a laugh as he scoops the toddler into his arms.
He begins to walk her toward the box on the porch full of fluffy chicks she loves to squeal at.
But her mother roars again, “Don’t you take her near those chicks Haymitch! Your demons are going to attack her.”
He knows they would never. She’s one of the goslings after all. “The demons are in their pen!”
She continues, “Until they knock that crummy fence down!”
“Hey, I built that fence!” Peeta chimes in defensively.
Her shouts are now thick with tears as she stomps toward their house. “Fine! You’re both taking her to the hospital when she gets her finger bitten off!”
“My girls have never bitten anyone and you know that!” Haymitch hollers back before the door slams behind her.
The boy comes through the gate to join the old man and the baby. Anxious hands running through his messy curls.
“Ooooh wee boy, you are in trouble.” Haymitch teases when he reaches them.
Peeta holds up his hands defensively, “I didn’t do anything, I swear.”
But Haymitch remembers this particular shade of madness all too well, “Oh I think you did plenty.”
His eyes widen for a moment before crumpling into a resigned grimace, “Please don’t tell her you figured it out.”
Haymitch clicks his tongue and shakes his head, “She hates being pregnant. She was madder than a wet hen with this one.” he recalls, bouncing the toddler on his hip.
“It’s already worse this time," the boy sighs, "Like she’s angry in anticipation of being miserable.”
“Well, congratulations,” he slaps him on the back.
A shy smile. "Yeah, thanks."
"It'll be fun having another one a' these around," the old man says, tickling the baby's side. "Won't it? You gonna be a big sister?" he asks, his voice slipping into the strange high one that's just for her.
But she keeps on twisting her body toward the ground, "Go! Go go go!" she grunts.
"I know, I know. You wanna see the chickies," he coaxes. He turns to her father, "Why don't you head in and try to calm down your wife. You're always the best at that. I got this one for a little while."
The boy glances back toward the house and back at the old man with a tentative smile, "You sure that's okay?"
"That’s what family is for right?"