Chapter Text
Haymitch
By the sixth nightfall, there are only five of us left in the arena.
My new sister takes the first watch, and I’m too tired to argue.
I tell Maysilee to wake me in two hours, and she tells me to shut up and hit the hay.
At first, I don’t realize I’m dreaming.
I’m standing in the dark forest, completely alone.
I need to find Maysilee, I think to myself.
But as I walk, I realize it’s not the arena.
The trees are like nothing I’ve ever seen before, rising impossibly high above me. Their trunks are pale and slick beneath curtains of moss. Broad leaves overlap so thickly overhead that I can barely see the sky, trapping the heat beneath them. The air is heavy enough to drink, and within moments, my shirt has begun to stick to my neck.
Vines twist around the trunks like snakes, some thin as a fishing line, others as thick as my arm. Somewhere, beyond my sight, insects whine and click in an endless chorus. The entire forest...no, jungle, smells of damp earth and rotten fruit.
Nothing like home, where there’s space between the trees, and a bed of pine needles beneath your feet.
Then, I’m pushing through the thicket of broad leaves, batting a vine away from my face, and suddenly, I find a clearing. Five unfamiliar figures stand by the largest tree, talking amongst themselves.
They don’t notice me though. No one does. Even when I start to approach, they go on like I don’t exist.
Their faces and clothes are smeared in dirt and blood and draped with weapons. All of them are clad in matching jumpsuits.
I know immediately what they are.
Like me and Maysilee, they’re tributes.
It’s all hazy and unfocused, like my dreams usually are. I am lost in the world until she comes into focus.
Her shiny black hair in one braid instead of two.
Louella.
In this world, Louella is not lucky enough to have been the tribute that escapes the arena, but somehow, she is lucky enough to be older when she goes into the Games. No longer a baby mockingjay, no, she is closer to my age, and worry creases her brow. A golden quiver is slung over her shoulder, a delicate bow in her hands.
Perhaps in this world, she wasn’t reaped, but I have already gone to the Quarter Quell and died, so Burdock started to bring her to the woods with him in my place. I never did get a hang of the bow and arrow, but Louella handles the golden weapon with a practiced care that only he could have taught her.
I try to call her name, to reach for her, but she doesn’t react.
She must be talking to the other figures, but I cannot make out what they say. Finally, when she reaches out and touches one of the other tributes, he comes into focus too.
Terror grips my heart.
He, so pure and kind, is so incongruous with this evil place that it is almost unfathomable that they could coexist. Even though this stocky teenager’s only resemblance to my tiny baby brother is his kind eyes and sandy blond curls, I’m overcome with such a deep affection when I see him that my heart knows it could only be him.
Louella and Sid hug each other, and then she walks away from him, leaving him alone with the strangers. I try to tell them to stay together, to not let go of one another. It’s no use.
They both fade into fog, leaving me alone in these woods so unlike our own.
I wander, floating among nothingness until she comes back to the clearing.
When Louella returns, she is alone and disoriented. She creeps through the forest, pawing at her head, bleeding profusely just as she did when our chariot crashed. I want to go to her, to take her in my arms, but I’m powerless in this world.
I follow her, nothing more than a ghost, as she calls a name that I do not recognize.
Eventually, she comes back to the clearing, where the body of one of the figures lies. Dead, probably. I can’t make out their face, but I can tell enough to see that it’s not Sid.
I don’t understand what she does next. She kneels next to the body, fumbling for a spear wrapped in metallic cord. She then wraps the strange wire around her arrow and loads her bow. She points her weapon at the sky and for a dreadful moment, waits for something I cannot place. Then, all of a sudden, as if she’s received a signal, she releases it into the night sky.
Lightning strikes the tree and she’s thrown back. I’m screaming as loud as I can but no one can hear me.
Her arrow connects with what must be the invisible bounds of the arena. The sky blinks, showing daylight for just a second, before it fries completely.
The dream ends as the arena rains down on her, the clawed hand of the hovercraft scooping up her body.
I wake up disoriented, feeling more confused than frightened, although my heart beats frantically in my chest.
Maysilee stands over me. If I was sleeping fitfully, she doesn’t bother bringing it up. She's let me sleep through the whole night, even though she should have rested hours ago.
I shake off my drowsiness, and try to push the dream from my mind. There’s not much time to dwell on it, anyway. The arena keeps finding new ways to kill us, and Maysilee and I somehow keep finding new ways not to die. By the time we fight out way through the last of the hedge and reach the cliff at the edge of the arena, Louella’s golden bow and the strange forest have almost faded entirely from my mind.
The smoulders of the holly bush that lined the perimeters of the arena still float down around me, as Maysilee and I stare over the cliff at the generator below.
“That’s all there is to the arena, Haymitch. Let’s go back.”
I know she’s right, so I let the dark grief well in my heart. Another dead end. Two failed arena plots.
But I don’t want to go back into the arena. The best form of resistance I can come up with now is a blanket refusal to go back into that poisonous cage. If the Gamemakers want me dead, they’ll have to come out here, and kill me in the real world.
“No,” I tell Maysilee, flatly. “I’m staying here.”
There’s a long pause.
“Alright. There’s only five of us left. May as well say goodbye now anyway. I don’t want it to come down to you and me.”
“Me neither,” I say, swallowing the lump in my throat.
“Okay.”
Then, she really starts to leave, and my heart starts to break. I force myself to not watch her go.
A canon fires, and both of us whip around to stare at each other, expecting for the other to be dead.
Neither of us have time to hide the anguish on our faces.
“Are you sure you want to split up?” I ask her, despite myself.
“The only thing I’m sure about right now is that I don’t want anyone to steal our potatoes,” she admits. “We should get them, then we’ll weigh our options.”
I lift my hands in defeat, “Well, if you’re going to drag the potatoes into it, how can I say no?”
Maysilee shrugs, and turns to go retrieve our things.
Watching her leave, I can’t help but remember my dream again. The broken look on Sid’s face as Louella walked away into the forest. How she died with that lightning strike, and never saw him again.
I run to her and grab her wrist before she can disappear completely into the hedge.
“I’ll come with you,” I tell her.
“What, scared I’ll poison them?” she asks, teasingly.
“Something like that,” I say, smiling.
We walk through the hedge, and the first thing I see is a flash of pink.
Mutts.
Some kind of water bird, maybe two dozen of them, staring us down. Long legs, sword-like sharp beaks, bubble-gum pink feathers.
Slowly, so I don't startle them, I draw my axe. Maysilee reaches for her darts.
Her hand must slip. She drops one to the ground, and all hell breaks loose.
I hack away at the birds, and next to me, Maysilee’s drawn her dagger and is cutting them down too. I try to shield her right side, to focus some of the birds on me, but it’s like they don’t know or even care that I’m there.
Just like the golden squirrels were for Ampert, they’re programmed for her. A personal punishment for killing the gamemaker.
I behead another bird, and I’m actually getting a pretty good collection of them at my feet, until behind me, I hear Maysilee shriek in agony, and then collapse to the ground.
Automatically, I shield her broken form with my body. I don’t bother surveying her injuries before I grab her and sling her over my shoulder, like we were taught to do in a mine accident.
The birds follow, but only ‘til the hedge ends. After that, they just stare at us and maliciously honk, which should be ridiculous, but is actually chilling.
I turn my attention to Maysilee. There’s blood everywhere.
It’s already soaked through the shoulder of her white shirt, bright red spreading so quickly that for one terrible second, I can’t even tell where it’s coming from.
“Maysilee?”
“I’m fine,” she gasps.
She is so obviously not fine.
I kneel beside her and finally find the wound. One of the birds caught her high in the shoulder, close enough to her neck that the sight of it makes my stomach roll. Its beak punched through the thick part between her collarbone and shoulder and tore its way out behind her. The hole isn’t enormous, but every beat of her heart pushes another wet pulse of blood through her shirt.
A little farther over, it would have gone through her throat.
A little lower, maybe her chest.
I don’t let myself think about it anymore, so I clamp my head over the wound.
Maysilee screams, and the sound is so sharp that I jerk away as if I’m the one who’s been hurt.
“Sorry! Sorry.”
“Pressure,” she manages, through clenched teeth. “You need pressure.”
“I know!”
“Use the cape,” she whispers.
It takes me a minute to figure out that she’s talking about the ridiculous little smock the Gamemakers dressed us in. My hands are shaking, and I end up tearing it off so violently that one of the fastening snaps. I bunch the fabric into a pad a press it against the front of her shoulder.
She sucks in a breath and goes completely rigid.
I help position her good hand over the cloth, and crawl behind her to check the other side. Blood has matted her hair to the back of her neck. I can see where the beak came through. Smaller than the entrance wound, but still bleeding.
I tear a strip from her cape and wedge it against the back of her shoulder. My hands come back red.
Sweat beads along her hairline, and her lips have started to lose some of their color.
She doesn’t cry, maintaining her dignity, even though she’s halfway to death. Just like she wanted, she does not beg or plead for her life. Her head is held high, even as her face grows waxy from blood loss.
I, however, don’t have that same level of attachment to my pride. Huge tears fill my eyes, and the words start tumbling out of my mouth. “Please don’t die. Please don’t die.” I hear how young I sound and hate it.
She stares at me with her burning blue eyes, grabbing my pinky in hers. A reminder of our promise.
“No, no, I’m right here, okay?” I tell her, basically babbling at this point. “You’re not dying. And we’re not splitting up anymore. Ever. I’m your brother, you’re my sister, and we’re sticking together.”
“Together,” she murmurs.
For a while, there’s nothing to do but sit there and watch the cloth turn red.
When it gets too wet, I get a fresh one, and when the blood seeps through that too, I press even harder.
Slowly, so slowly that I think I might be imagining it, the bleeding eases.
Maysilee’s head starts to droop.
I tap her cheek, and her eyes flutter open.
“No,” I instruct.
“No, what?”
“No sleeping!”
She gives me an exhausted glare. “You got to sleep earlier.”
“That was a very different situation.”
Her eyes drift shut again.
“Maysilee!”
“You know,” she says, faintly opening one eye, “I didn’t sleep at all last night. At some point, I’m going to have to rest.”
“Please don’t die,” I tell her again, like a broken record.
“We stopped it from bleeding,” she tells me, softly. “I just want to rest. I won’t die.”
I hate everything about it, but she’s coherent, and she’s right about the bleeding having stopped. And I can’t keep her awake forever just because I’m afraid that if she closes her eyes, she’ll disappear.
I spread out our tarp for her, and help lower her onto it. She can’t lie on the injured side, so I prop her partly upright against our packs. I tuck the remaining fabric around her shoulder to keep the pressure in place.
Within seconds, her breathing evens out.
She’s not peaceful, nothing about her looks peaceful, with her pinched eyebrows and her occasional soft cries in pain, but she’s alive.
I sit beside her and count every breath, thinking about how close I was to losing her. If I hadn’t chosen to follow her, would the birds have killed her right there? Even if I had only been a few seconds later, would it have been too late?
I can’t help but stare at how the blood flows down her white over-shirt, mingling with dark particles.
Wait, what is that?
I squint my eyes at the odd, black smears that mingle with her blood.
And then it all clicks.
I remember what Beetee told me when he was telling me about the explosives in the arena. How Wellie came up, stopping us from talking, right as he was trying to tell me about a back-up, in case Ampert never made it to me. I reach for some of the blackness, and rub some of it between my fingers. The same greasy smear I remember from when I assembled the bomb to blow up the tank.
Am I really that lucky?
Could one of her necklaces actually be a fuse?
I decide I’m probably still on camera, so I refrain from grabbing it off her neck and unwrapping it for all to see.
I don't want to get my hopes up, but as I stride over to the edge of the cliff, I feel myself becoming convinced that it’s true.
But still, what does that do for me? What could I possibly do with another fuse? The flamingos are already gone, there's no way to find their mutt portal and get back into Sub A. And even if I got there, I already destroyed the brain, what else is there for me to do? I stare over the cliffside, desperately trying to assemble the puzzle.
My shoe accidentally pushes a tiny, red pebble off the side. It disappears into the abyss.
Then, it’s back somehow, hitting my shoe with a little thump.
I bend down to pick it up, staring at it in wonder.
I hold my hand out and drop it over the cliffside again.
Down it goes. One second. Two.
Then, it stops.
Not like it’s hit the ground. More like it’s changing its mind.
The pebble shoots back toward me and I step aside so it doesn’t smack me.
I stare over the edge at the machine in the depths of the canyon, which I can hear the faint whirring of. The engine. The beating heart that keeps this whole place alive.
They have a forcefield surrounding it. Of course, they have a forcefield around it.
I failed to destroy the brain, and now that I’ve finally found the heart, the Gamemakers have wrapped the damn thing in something I can’t even see.
Still, something about it makes my heart race.
I sink to my knees and squeeze my eyes shut, begging my tired brain to come up with some way around it.
Behind my eyelids flashes a gold arrow disappearing into the night. A strike of lightning. For a brief moment, a blue sky where darkness was only seconds before.
That strange dream from this morning was probably just delirium. Some sick invention of my imagination.
But what if I can use it? Because Dream Louella didn’t go around the invisible wall in the sky, she’d hit it straight on.
Beneath my feet, the heart of the arena keeps whirring.
I’ve spent days trying to get past everything the Capitol has thrown in my way. The cameras, the hedges, the Gamemakers. Now, the forcefield.
But what if I didn’t have to get past it? What if I could hit it straight on, just like Louella in my dream?
I kick another pebble down and count as it falls.
One.
Two.
Up.
Behind me, Maysilee shifts beneath the tarp and my heart lurches.
I run back to her side and kneel next to her.
She's so pale. Too pale. But when I touch two fingers to the inside of her wrist, her pulse is still there, fluttering stubbornly beneath her skin.
I look at the blood on her shirt again, and the black streaks mixed in, and I can't resist figuring out the mystery any longer.
“Mays,” I whisper, shaking her as gently as I can.
She groans.
“Maysilee,” I plead.
“If this is another attempt to keep me awake,” she murmurs, without opening her eyes, “I'm going to kill you myself.”
“Your necklace.”
One blue eye cracks open. “Which one?” she asks.
“The flower one. Can I see it?”
Now both eyes open. “You choose now to admire my jewelry?”
“Just—please?”
Something in my voice must convince her, because she lifts her good hand to the clasp, but her fingers shake too badly to manage it.
“Careful,” I warn. “Just let me do it.”
She clearly hates not being able to do things for herself, but she begrudgingly lifts her head as much as she can, which isn’t very much. I reach behind her neck and fiddle with the clasp until it clicks open.
I take the little necklace in my hand. Then, I start to worry about what the cameras can see, so I bring some of the tarp up so it goes around her shoulders like a blanket. I get so close to her that if I reached my hands out, we could be hugging. Maybe that's what the audience will think, that I'm hugging Maysilee for what I think is the final time.
Instead, in the cover of the tarp and our bodies, I rip the cord off of its hook and start to unwind it.
“Hey!” she says, probably trying for a commanding voice, but she’s so weak it only comes out as pitiful.
“You can re-tie it later!” I hiss to her, even though it’s not entirely true. If this is what I hope it is, there won't be anything to re-tie it around.
I could cry with relief when I see the fuse wrapped inside the braid, and a tiny blasting cap with it.
“What the hell?” Maysilee asks, quietly.
I don’t bother answering her, I just grab for my backpack and find the last District Nine sunflower. I grab our water, and smash the sunflower in my hands, mushing it into a paste, just like Beetee told me to.
“Alright, this is it,” she says, bewildered. “This is finally the most insane thing you’ve ever done.”
“Maysilee, do you remember when the arena went haywire, right before the volcano exploded?” I don’t wait for an answer and plow through. “It was me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it before–”
“No, I get it,” Maysilee says, her eyes sharp with understanding as she surveys the objects in my hand. Even though she’s from town, and is so wealthy that she’d never have to work in the mines, she had to take the same classes about explosives that I did.
I feel a burden lifted from my shoulders now that it’s not my secret to bear alone any more.
“I failed before, but the generator is down there,” I confess, “And with this, I think I can–”
“Do it,” Maysilee orders, with the same serious voice she used when she and Maritte killed the gamemakers.
I don’t wait for further instruction. I pack the explosive beside the fuse. Enough for one good blast.
“Just stay here, okay?” I say, as I separate myself from her.
“Oh, absolutely not,” she says, weakly grabbing on to the only part of me that she can reach, which ends up being my pant leg.
“Maysilee–”
“You said we weren’t splitting up anymore! That it’s you and me.” She says, flashing me a glare from the ground.
“I'll be in eyesight the whole time! Plus, you can barely sit up!” I argue.
“Then you better do the lifting,” she says haughtily.
I stare at her.
She stares back.
We don’t have much time, and there’s no point in arguing.
My new sister is an insufferable person.
I grumble and grab her under her good shoulder, and basically drag her for the fifteen or so feet to the cliffside, placing her down a couple feet away from the edge.
"Are you okay? Did your wound re-open?" I ask her.
"Stop fussing, you're acting like my mother," she grumbles back.
I doubt Mrs. Donner is often involved with rebel plans to destroy arenas, but of course, I don't say that.
I lay my entire little collection out in front of the tarp, blocking it from the cameras view with my body.
Fuse.
Blasting cap.
Explosive.
My flint striker.
A rock to strike with.
And one of the bloody pieces of cloth.
Maysilee eyes the cloth.
“And what do we need that for?”
I talk as I assemble the charge, “I don’t know, I just want to make sure it stays all together.”
I wrap the explosive in the long strip of cloth.
Maysilee watches me work for about 5 seconds before she suddenly says, “No.”
“What?”
“Your knot.”
“What about it?”
“It's terrible.”
“Well, it's not like it's going to be around long!” I hiss back.
“You said you didn’t want it to fall apart! Give it here!”
She reaches over with her good hand.
“You're wounded.” I say, staring at her.
“And you're bad at knots.”
I sigh, and hold the axe steady while she reties the charge with one hand and her teeth.
“There.”
I inspect it, and find that annoyingly, she's done much better with half of her motor skills than I could have done with all of mine.
“Show-off,” I scoff.
“District Twelve's final tributes,” she says solemnly. “Defeated by flamingos and decorative braiding.”
I snort and hold up the fuse. At the tank, I watched it burn. I mean, I was about to start running for my life, so it’s not like I got a good long look at it, but I think it’ll take around five seconds to burn through.
“We throw it on three,” I tell her.
“What if you’re wrong about the timing?” She asks, hurriedly.
I don’t bother trying to hide what we’re doing anymore. As soon as they could get to us, we’d be blowing the arena sky high.
“Well, it either goes off too early and blows up the side of the cliff, or too late, and comes back.”
“At us?”
“Probably.”
“Lovely.”
Then, I hear the sound of boots, running towards us. Who is it? Silka? Maritte?
It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. I strike the quartz, and a spark jumps, catching the fuse. A tiny orange ember hungrily eats its way down the black cord.
“One,” Maysilee whispers.
I start to reply, “Two–” but then someone crashes through the hedge.
“STOP! DROP THAT NOW!” A man’s voice, not a tribute’s.
I turn to find a Peacekeeper with his gun trained at my head.
“Fine,” I tell him, dropping the bomb over the cliffside.
For a heartbeat, everything slows.
I look at Maysilee, accepting that hers will be the last eyes I ever see. It’s nice to be with family at the end.
Then—
White.
The blast isn’t loud at first. It’s just bright.
A sheet of blue light races across something invisible all around us.
A dome. The entire arena is surrounded by a dome.
The sound arrives, and the earth bucks beneath me.
My head hits the ground hard.
It's like my entire brain is ringing.
Warmness creeps down my face, and blood covers my left eye. I paw at my forehead and the blood just keeps flowing.
Somewhere, Maysilee is screaming.
I look up, and all I can see is the sky changing.
Day.
Night.
Then, for one second, there’s no sky at all. Just metal, lights and beams. The ugly underside of the Capitol’s beautiful world.
Then, the distant hum of machines stop. It’s just dead silence.
“Maysilee?” I cry.
“I'm here!” she screams.
I lift my head, and fight to make my eyes focus. I find her only a few feet away.
I reach for her, almost close enough to grab her hand, when the ground trembles again. A crack tears through the cliff between us.
I scramble toward her, but the earth gives way. “Maysilee!”
She slides backward, grabbing at the ground with her good hand.
I throw myself forward, towards the widening gap between us and catch her wrist. Pain shoots through my arm and my stomach as a particularly sharp edge cuts through my shoulder, and another cuts through my abdomen.
For one second, even though I feel like I'm being cut open, I have her in my grasp. I don't know what we're going to do, but for one tiny second, we're together again, and it all feels like it might be okay.
Then another explosion erupts from below, and my fingers slip.
She falls, not off the cliff, but onto the other side of the widening break in the ground, only ten feet away.
But ten feet may as well be ten miles.
“Maysilee!” I scream again, my voice growing hoarse.
“I'm fine!” she calls.
Of course, she's not fine.
Blood has soaked through the cloth on her shoulder again.
I survey the rocks, hoping a way across might reveal itself, but I can't figure out how I could do it without getting myself stuck between the boulders.
Above us comes a loud whirring. The sound of hovercrafts.
The lights flicker weakly back to life around us, and an alarm starts shrieking from somewhere deep inside the arena's stomach.
A claw drops from the belly of one of the crafts, straight toward Maysilee.
“No!” I scream, leaping toward the gap between us, even though I know there's no use.
It’s too far.
I fall into the gap between us and try to scramble to regain a hold on the cliff.
Even though my hand finds a rock to hold onto, I hear a sickening snap and my vision goes white with as pain engulfs my right leg.
Pathetically, I reach for her.
“Maysilee, take my hand!”
With her good arm, she tries, but the injured one gives beneath her.
The claw closes around her, and she screams my name.
"Haymitch!"
“Maysilee!”
She fights against the claw as it lifts her.
For one moment, our eyes meet, and I can only think, She's alive.
Then something grabs me from above. Another claw. Another hovercraft.
With whatever strength I can muster through the agony of my injuries, I thrash wildly against it.
“No! Let me go!” I swing at metal, kicking at air with my good leg.
Maysilee gets farther away.
“Haymitch!” she screams, one last time.
“I'M COMING!” The lie tears out of me automatically, but the truth is, I’m not. I'm not going anywhere.
The arena falls away beneath my feet, and above me, Maysilee disappears into the belly of the other hovercraft.
The last thing I see before something sharp enters my neck is the broken sky above us, blinking uselessly between blue and black.
Then nothing.
I jolt awake.
My first thought is the terrified look on Maysilee’s face.
My second is that I can’t breathe.
There’s a mask strapped over my face, and I rip at it. Before I can get it off of me, someone catches my hand.
“Easy, now.”
Rage courses through my veins. I know that voice. My eyes flash open.
Plutarch Heavensbee stands by my bedside.
Of all the faces in Panem, save for Snow himself, his is the one I want to see the least.
“You did it,” he tells me, in a voice he must think is soothing, but I can only hear it as condescending. “You broke the arena, Haymitch.”
“Where is she?” My voice comes out muffled beneath the mask.
“I’m sorry, Haymitch,” he says, looking down at his polished shoes. “We didn’t get her in time.”
My heart drops in my chest.
“Shut up.”
“The Capitol craft reached her first,” he continues. “We couldn’t get to her in time.”
I don't know what he means by we, and my muddled brain's too cloudy to sort it out or even care what's happening to me.
All my brain can figure is that something has gone terribly wrong, and just like how Ampert paid the price for my first arena plan, my sister will now pay for my second one.
“She's dead?”
“We think she’s alive,” he says, simply.
I lunge upright which makes pain tear through my entire body at once. “Then I have to go back.”
“You can’t.” Plutarch says plainly.
“We have to go back to get her!”
“We couldn’t do that, even if I wanted to," he says, his voice neutral and unflinchingly cruel.
I can't make any of this make sense. The only thought my brain can summon now is that I want to kill him.
And what do I have to lose now?
I spring forward and grab his throat in my claws, pressing as hard as I can into the veiny flesh of his pudgy neck.
His tiny eyes go wide with fear.
Hands appear from somewhere, pulling me away from Plutarch. A needle follows, pressing deep into my flesh.
“She's alive!” I scream at him as they restrain me. “You said she's alive!”
“She is,” he says, through a cough, rubbing where my hands have left angry marks on his skin.
“Then go get her!” I plead.
“Haymitch, listen to me—”
“You left her!” The words crack apart in my throat. “You left her there!”
The room begins to blur and Plutarch's face swims in front of me.
“I'm truly sorry,” he says, now finally letting sadness creep into his voice, as he does that horrible thing he always does to me. Trying to make me feel like a person, like he actually cares about what's happened to me.
Oh, how I hate him.
How I hate all of them.
The last thing I manage before the darkness takes me is a final question.
“Where are we?”
Plutarch's answer follows me down.
“District Thirteen.”