To Build A Home
Summary: When she came back, there was darkness. | In response to prompt #33 for the Hayffie Fanworks Challenge: you're not alone anymore & prompt #12: you must provide your own light to your darkness. | A rewrite and expansion of my own Nightly.
Rating: T for swearing, mild mentions of torture.
Notes: It's 3AM, I'll edit out every mistake later okay. Peeta/Effie friendship (kind...of...?) and Hayffie, of course.
Xxx
"Thirteen won't save you."
"They will."
"Thirteen is a lie. It's destroyed. It's been bombed. It's gone. Your little heaven won't save you any longer."
"Then what do I have to lose if I keep up my silence?"
Xxx
She felt cold.
Her senses fell victim to the rolling, furling frigidness that filled her cell to the brim.
She saw cold. She heard cold. She touched cold.
It wrapped around her whole. It took control of her entire self. Pretty soon, she was convinced it was her.
Why else would God be punishing her if she were not a coldcoldcold woman?
What she learned, however, is that cold brought darkness.
So cold.
So dark.
Xxx
She was drowning in a sea of darkness. Each wave that crested over her brought a new, foreign - yet strangely, indubitably familiar - sort of pain. It itched, bothered, relished and was unforgiving. A lash of rope or a burning splash of oil could not do it justice.
This pain festered deep underneath her skin.
Beyond, wherever she was (was it hell?), she heard screams. Shrieks. She heard everything and anything she did not want to hear, and they knew it. They knew it hurt her more than any beating could.
One night, the screams stopped. The frequent, wicked lullabies ceased to sing her to sleep.
The absence of sound scared her to death.
Xxx
The next day she asked to see the singer. She had hoped that the poor soul was released or, maybe even better, dead.
The guards brought in Peeta Mellark that morning.
There was a darkness in his eyes, a furrowing, questioning black that stretched over his previously coveted blueblueblue eyes that were just like hers. Peeta Mellark was not her tribute anymore. He was not a friend. He was not Katniss's star-crossed lover. He was not Peeta.
"This is Effie Trinket, Mr. Mellark," the guard prompted. "Do you know her?"
Peeta stared at her. A flame ignited in the blackness and it swallowed the darkness. She stepped back; she was grateful that the bars separated the boy from her.
Boy? Or a Capitol-created monster?
"Peeta?" she ventured to ask.
He softened at her voice. Seeing this, she moved closer, her hands wrapping around the steel bars. She pressed her face against the bars, wondering if she was making a right decision in trusting the once amiable teenager. He came even closer to her, close enough for her to hear the ragged, tiresome breathing and unreliable murmurs of awe. Is this the boy I used to know?
"Are you real?" he asked. His fists clenched at his sides and he froze, almost apprehensive if not for the opalescent expression growing against the darkness.
Real?
Am I real?
"I..." she started. She backed away as he came closer, the fire catching in his eyes.
The flame erupted.
He gripped the bars and shook them, almost animal-like in his actions. "You're not real are you? You're a-you're a fucking liearen't you?" He reached for her, through the bars, a broken boy wanting to touch something, someone real to him. Tears started to fall, on both his and her cheeks, and he struggled against the hold of the guards. He didn't want to leave her, she saw it in the flames. Always the hero he was, just as she was always the martyr.
"Peeta..." she whispered. Her voice was burning. She was burning. She was trapped in the flames in his eyes.
"What did they do to you, Effie?" he yelled, shaking off the men attempting to sedate him. "What did they do to you, damn it!"
The needle stuck in his neck. The thrashing, the yelling, the screaming stopped. She was still shaking, still watching on. In his eyes, the fire burned out. Darkness returned once more.
There was a minute of absolute silence.
"This is Effie Trinket, Mr. Mellark," the guard said once more. "Do you know her?"
Peeta shook his head, his stare running right through her. "Who is she?"
That was the answer they needed. That was the answer she needed.
She drowned in the darkness in his eyes and wondered if she was going to end up dead or a monster.
Xxx
There were explosions outside and the burning fires put the old city lights to shame. The screams, the wails, the eminent pain and ongoing darkness returned to her like an old friend, except it was under different circumstances.
For three days she listened to raging war and thought she was to be abandoned.
Had the rebels won? Must be so. It was the only thing that explained her loneliness. She wasn't so useless after all. She could die accomplished. Starve without it being in vain.
She felt...almost elated. It had been months since she tasted happiness. Was it bad that she was unsure of it now?
She greeted death as if an ally and celebrated her fleeting life in a party for one. It was all a big game, a game she'd been losing until now. Now she was a winner. Now she was on top. All there's left to do is leave the game as graceful as she was before. In death, in peace, not in an extended suffering. There was a cracked piece of glass on the floor next to her. There was an escape.
One cut, as much as she could remember how to make it fatal.
And so she was dying. She felt her heartbeat slowing. She—
"Shit, shit, shit, shit—I need a medic! A medic!"
"Mr Abernathy—"
"God damnit, did I stutter? A medic, boy, a fucking medic!"
She opened her eyes for the first time in days. There was light, and there was the drunk, and there, there was hope.
Or was this another hallucination?
Is this real?
Am I real?
"Haymitch..." she whispered, reaching out to touch him. She ran her hand over his, gripping him with the little strength she has to feel something real, something she could hold without letting go.
"Hey, Princess," he whispered back. She felt his hand cup her cheek, his thumb brushing over scars, cuts, and bruises. She held the hand that held her face, breathing in his scent, his being. It was...different. Nice, even. Better than the musty smell of sweat that the usual bout of men she had encountered for the past several months.
"Are you real?" It turned out, that just like Peeta, she doubted everything that's too good to be true, too.
Haymitch laughed, sadly, almost disappointedly. "Yes, yes I'm real, Princess. I'm here."
Effie closed her eyes, smiling, ignoring the flustered, angry protests of the drunk. If she were to die, might as well be in the arms of a man she knew.
Xxx
"Is there anything you'd like to say about your time spent in prison?"
Effie slouched in her seat, the leather sticking against her skin. It was hot in Thirteen. Hotter than she imagined it would be. She picked at her bandages wrapped around her wrists.
"Miss Trinket?"
She looked up. The doctor stared at her, waiting for an answer. Waiting for something not already written down in his record books. She bit her lip.
"Miss Trinket, please, this could really help your case."
Effie learned in the short twenty-four hours she had already spent in Thirteen that Coin takes no mercy on Capitol citizens, even those proven to be allied with the Rebels. What's the point if she is going to have to serve a sentence anyway? She shook her head. There was nothing worth in pity.
"Nothing, nothing at all? Are you sure?"
She nodded. There was nothing she wanted to admit to. Nothing they didn't already know and nothing she wanted people to know anyway.
"Seven months is a long time in captivity, Effie. There has to be something."
Effie looked down. She ran her thumb against the sore but finally healed tattoo on her wrist — the prison number they had carved in her skin many months ago that refused to scar. She resented it. It would take years to remove it.
What could she tell him? The pain of seeing her family being tortured to death because of her unity to the Rebellion? The endless days without food, water, showers? How about the nights she was assaulted by a rogue prison guard? Or how about the days she was asked the same question in which she responded with the same answers, only to be beaten to sing a different tune?
What could that possibly help her with in any way?
But obviously the doctor wasn't giving up so easily, not without something new to write on his notepad to show Coin or whoever that he did well. That he broke the Capitol rebel and no one else had before him.
Might as well humor him.
She said her words slowly, hitting each syllable with emphasis. "It was...dark."
The doctor let her go back to her hospital bed. She left him sitting at his desk and holding his head in his hands in utter defeat.
Xxx
"Hey."
Haymitch stood at the entrance to her hospital room, his arms crossed around his middle. She looked up.
She wanted to smile. Wanted to thank him (even though she wasn't thankful, not at all). But her voice was stuck at the base of her throat, her lower lip quivering and the tears threatening to fall from her eyes, and damn it, she wanted to be strong.
Haymitch does not stand for tears.
He clenched his jaw; arms still crossed, he made his way towards her. She inadvertently flinched when he took a seat on the edge of her bed.
Was this the instinct now, assuming everyone is going to hurt her?
Effie stared at him, waiting for him to say something again. He was different, she noticed, in the way he moved, in the way he talked. His skin was yellow, saggy, tell-tale signs of withdrawal and lackluster abdication of his alcohol. Haymitch wasn't the same...but then again, she wasn't either. But his eyes were grey, still. At least that didn't change.
"Are you going to talk to me?" Haymitch asked. "Or to anyone, at all?"
Effie rolled her eyes at this. She drew her knees tight to her chest, leaving room for him to scoot in closer. She waved it off with her bandaged hand, saying, "Did Dr. Aurelius put you up to this?"
"He might have mentioned it, yes," Haymitch said.
She considered this. But she really didn't have the will to continue with this talk of the doctor. Nor did she even want to answer his question. Or anyone's questions, really. "Has anyone told you need to take a shower?"
He laughed, shaking his head. "A couple of people have said so, but I haven't exactly have had time to."
"And why might that be? Too busy looking for more of your vodka?"
Above everything - above the sight of sun, the sound of laughter, the kiss of water - she missed this. The playful banter between the mentor and the escort. The teasing. The no-pity-party, no mercy, best-comeback-wins-all game.
It wasn't the worst game to play, anyway.
"You caught me." His smile was sad. Stricken with another kind of sorrow. A little bird tells her he was looking for someone else, not a something else. She hated it, this whole "let's feel bad for the escort;" not even the drunk can make light of it all. "Are you okay?" His hand found hers, above the bedsheets, above the cascading nostalgia.
She held it tightly.
"Yeah, of course," she lied.
No, of course not.
He sighed. "Just..."
"Just what?"
"If you ever feel alone, you know...don't turn to anything else...just, just turn to me, okay?"
She shook her head, wetting her lips. "That won't be necessary, but thank you, anyway." She exhaled, then added, "I'm being discharged next week...hopefully."
"That's good."
His thumb ran over her knuckles, smoothing the bones over and over, and she lifted her eyes once more to look at him. Effie nodded. "Well, tomorrow's a big day, you know."
"What's tomorrow?"
"Nothing in particular...but it's good, Dr. Aurelius said, to have something to look forward to."
Xxx
She felt alone. And it was still dark sometimes.
That's what she told Dr. Aurelius.
"You're not alone, Effie, you have me."
Obviously, that didn't please her. Sham therapist, he was, with a superiority complex shoved so far up his ass.
She glared.
He reiterated.
"Well, you have Haymitch."
For some reason, that was enough light to make do for the next day.
Xxx
She had a nightmare again.
She woke the entire ward up.
Xxx
"A little bird told me that your lungs are entirely capable of working, so why won't you open your mouth and talk to me, huh?"
Haymitch was angry, go figure. Well fuck, she was angry too. Who was the big idiot who chose to save her? Who made them God and granted them the right to choose who lives and who dies?
Haymitch paced back to her and stood in front of her. She looked right through him.
"Effie! Fuck, woman - you can talk, you have a voice."
She fiddled with her thumbs.
Her heart beat accelerated just a tad.
"I have nightmares too, woman, I know they're not pleasant, so I'm trying my hardest to help you - hell, we all are - and you're refusing it! You're refusing the goddamn help I wish I had! Ungrateful...that's it, ungrateful."
He walked closer, closer, closer. She clenched her jaw to keep from screaming, from saying anything she would regret.
She looked away.
"Effie, damn. I'm so sick of trying to help you."
It began in a whisper. "Then why did you rescue me?"
He stopped.
Her heart beat right out chest.
"If you hate me so much, if you feel obligated to help me - and I know you do - then just stop. Stop coming to me. Stop trying to heal me. You're not helping anyone by trying to force - force whatever it is on me."
"I'm just trying to help you - "
Effie balled her fists at her sides, her voice rising with every word, "I don't want your help! I don't want you, I don't want any help!"
"Then what do you fucking want, Effie?" he yelled back.
Truth has consequences.
She started to sob, her shoulders shaking as she buried her face in her palms. She couldn't cry...not now...not with him present.
But it just happened. A lot of things just happen with her.
So she let him wrap his arms around her and kiss the side of her head, as long as he let her cry without worry of reaction.
Xxx
"I don't hate you," he told her when she moved in her compartment down in the lower levels of Thirteen. They're separated by several floors, but there is reason to visit, he said. He gave Coin that much in his report.
"I know."
He nodded. "Good, then."
Xxx
"Here, put this on. We managed to make some replicas of your old dresses just for you. We couldn't use the old ones by your cell - soiled with blood, Fulvia couldn't get it out - but, we did the best."
Plutarch was never indirect, but he meant well.
Sometimes.
"What's this for?" she asked, holding it close to her body. In the mirror, she was a stick compared to the frumpy thing. They didn't even measure her...
"Coin needs you to be bright and happy for Katniss, you know, get her in a real good mood."
"Plutarch, she hates me. I think I'd just annoy her."
"Nons- well, okay, but it's worth a try. Here, try it on, try it on."
Plutarch led her into a dressing room, one with a silhouetted divider so she can easily change in front of him. He stepped on the other side, continuing on with Fulvia's latest antics.
She slipped on the dress, the wig, and when she looked in the mirror, she looked nothing like herself. She eyed her scars, her stitches, some bruises hopeless to cover with makeup. It didn't look right.
Plutarch stopped talking.
"This is all wrong, Plutarch."
She was so skinny, too.
He went to her side of the divider and stepped right beside her. He slung an arm around her waist and pointed at her reflection. "You see yourself? That is a rebel. It isn't wrong in my eyes. You look beautiful."
He smiled. She smiled. It was nice to hear something nice come from his mouth sometimes.
"But, the scars we can clean up for Katniss's sake if that's what you'd like."
"That would be nice."
"Fulvia loves a good makeover. Come, now."
Xxx
"Effie."
"Dr. Aurelius."
"How's apartment life?"
"Good."
"Still cold?"
"Not really."
"Dark?"
"Sometimes."
"Well, you know, you could fix it."
"Enlighten me."
"I can't tell you that. You have to provide your own light to your darkness."
"Some therapist you are."
"Some patient you are."
"Go to sleep, Markus."
Xxx
After Coin was assassinated, Effie's life was a life of flurry movement. There were things to do, people to speak to, but still, the nights were rough.
She gained notoriety for her insomnia.
One night, she went and saw Haymitch again.
"Can't sleep, Princess?" he asked as he opened the door for her to come in. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and led her in his living room, shivering from the sudden surge of cold.
"It's nice to hear that godforsaken nickname again," she said, making her way to his makeshift kitchen. "Coffee?"
"Sure. It's nice to see you're back to your busy self again." He followed her into the room. "Reason why you're coming to my place?"
She shifted through his pile of clothes, trash, and papers. Scrunching her nose, she finally found the stash of unopened coffee canisters smuggled in by Plutarch a couple of days back. Thirteen was running low, so he called - bless his soul, only he would - a mandatory rationing of all coffee supplies and banned it in the cafeteria. Just so he could have some himself.
Of course, Haymitch managed to blackmail his way to get some supplies. But Effie knew his secret. He didn't like coffee, she did.
"You're the only place with coffee. Funny, you don't even like coffee."
"I've acquired the taste."
"Bull."
"I acquired the taste for your company."
She blushed. It was a foreign mannerism - blushing, flirting, joking - after months of crying, hurting. But it was a good feeling. A good thing in a mess of bad.
She pushed the can in his hands. "Here, go make your own coffee."
Xxx
Formally, she stayed in Apartment 10F-X3.
Informally, she stayed in Haymitch's apartment.
Xxx
It was Peeta.
Turn around.
She approached his bed cautiously.
Go back.
She smoothed back his hair, almost motherly, but if she can't be one and he lost his, well, there's a place for everyone in this brave new world. In response, his eyes flew open and his hand caught her wrist within a second.
"Who are you?" he asked accusingly.
"Effie," she said slowly. "Effie Trinket, don't you remember?"
"You're not Effie. Katniss told me about Effie. She's from the Capitol."
Effie sat down by his bed. He released her wrist. She took his hand in hers and exhaled, slowly, softly, all at once. "Peeta."
"Effie's not...was she a rebel?"
"Yes. She was." Her thumb ran over his in a slow, fire burn. He retracted, but then relaxed.
"Where's your accent, if you're Effie? Where are the colors?" He stared at her. His blue eyes were like mirrors. She saw her in him.
"Lost in the screams."
Peeta considered this. His eyes were soft, malleable, and were crushed by the weight of the situation just as she was. A spark of memory ignited another type of fire - one whose fuel was nostalgia. Then, he said, "You were in the same cell block as me, real or not real?"
Her cheeks were wet already. He didn't even need an answer to choke out a strangled sob, "Effie..."
Xxx
Effie woke up in a fit of sobs.
It was another nightmare, another where she lost him to the flames in a Capitol-created monster's eyes. He was burning. She was burning. She still felt the splatter of hot oil even as she sprung back to reality.
In her dream, it was cold, dark, and lonely.
"Ssh...sweetheart, wake up, wake up."
She clung to him, crying still, not willing to wake from her holocene. It was too real. Too close to home.
"I was alone."
"But you're not, okay, you're not alone, you have me."
"I...I know..."
"Go back to sleep, I'm here."
"I love you..."
"I love you too."
Xxx
Twenty years fast forward, almost a quarter century later. She had moved in with him and made her own home in his. Nightmares still existed - neither of them have yet to lose the word, it molded into them - but it was greeted with wistfulness.
She didn't want to lose herself, not after all she's been through.
He didn't want to lose her, not after she's proven that he deserved her as much as she deserved him.
It had seemed that she had nothing much to fear anymore. Not cold, not dark, not the lonely. She had found clear-cut antonyms nestled in every nook and cranny in him.
She built a home in District Twelve, where she's belonged all along, where it was warm, lit, and with good company.
Effie, Effie, Effie, after all these years, you've finally found your place.
Xxx
A/N: woah. okay. unsure about this piece... I need to reread it again. Please leave a review! Means a lot :)