So I saw Mockingjay part 2 on Friday night. It was amazing, especially... the Hayffie kiss! I've been a proud Hayffie shipper since 2012, and now, almost four years later, it's canon. I'm incredibly happy. Also, I was inspired to write yet another piece about my favourite THG character. Enjoy.
When Haymitch Abernathy was sixteen years old, he got into a fight with another boy from the Seam. He ended up punching the boy in the face, and got blood all over his knuckles. For days to come, he bragged about the incident to anyone that would listen.
"I beat the shit out of him," said Haymitch confidently, for the hundredth time that day. "I won. I bet I could win the whole goddamn Hunger Games if I wanted to."
He was smug. He was angry. And he didn't think about the twenty-nine slips of paper that would say his name that year at the reaping. All that mattered to him was the infamy among the rougher Seam kids, a momentary fame that didn't last more than a week.
Almost forty years later, he can't remember the boy's name.
He sees blood on his hands even when it isn't there, and it makes every inch of his quivering body cry out in pain and fear. It's the blood of all the tributes- no, the children, they were fucking children- that he killed during his Games. It's the blood of Maysilee Donner. It's the blood of his family, and of the dozens of tributes from Twelve that he's lost over the years. And it's his own blood, when his mind flickers back to being sixteen, a child, holding in his own intestines and trying not to cry as the cannons go off all around him.
His whisky-soused brain conjures up dusty monsters in shadowy corners, when he knows that the only monster there is him. He throws empty bottles across the room, trying to take them out like it's target practice. He digs his fingernails into his palms until his knuckles turn white. He sobs until his stomach aches with it, until his entire body is at the verge of breaking into pieces.
And he wonders how the hell he was ever proud of harming another human being.