I'm dozing on my front porch when the shriek of my name jolts me upright in the chair. It's dusk now, and she's running toward my house in a panic, my poor geese flailing away from her feet in all directions. It takes her a moment after she stumbles on the steps to tell me what happened, but the fear catching in her throat tells me enough.
The boy had another episode. And if the unraveled braid and fresh bruise under her eye were any indication, Katniss wasn't handling things so well.
I tell her to go home before I take off for the house down the street, disrupting those damn birds again as I cut through my front lawn. But I know her, and I know she'll still be lingering on my porch long after I arrive.
His front door still hangs ajar, and after I stagger inside, I don't bother calling for him. It's easier to just follow the commotion. I'm unsure of exactly what happens during those first few moments after I start up the staircase. I do remember dodging a lamp when I followed his shouts to one of the bedrooms, and I vaguely recall a torn curtain hanging in the window and a few shards of mirror on the floor.
At least he kept it confined to one room this time.
He screams at me to leave, and when I don't, he lunges for me like an animal, shoving me back to the doorway. I'm not as sharp as I need to be, so it takes a few hits to knock me to my senses before I can fight back. After that point, everything just falls into a blur of shouts and sloppy punches, obscenities and split knuckles. Finally, my foot connects with a metal shin, giving me the upper hand long enough to immobilize the boy in a headlock. It's not enough to calm him, and he still tries to fight me, crying out pathetically like a strangled cat, arms flailing at the elbows like the legs of a crushed spider. I jerk my arms tighter under his shoulders, around his neck, and I mutter something in his ear.
"Are you, are you coming to the tree?"
My singing voice is by no means a treat to listen to, but the words, ragged and strained as they are, still succeed in calming him slightly. He stops screaming, at least, and struggles to catch his breath. I repeat the phrase, making sure he heard me.
"Are you, are you coming to the tree . . ."
I wait for my unpleasant, gravelly words to sink in. How long has it been? Couldn't have been much more than a year ago when we had this boy strapped to a table with a morphling drip. We showed him the video of her singing. He recognized the song. It wasn't much of a turning point, but it briefly replaced the rage in his face with confusion, and, at the time, that was enough for me.
In the splintered mirror, I catch the same expression. No longer angry, but far from content. He knows he has a hold of something, but he can't figure out what.
"Sing the rest," I tell him, still holding my grip.
He stares into nothing, trembling, terrified, unsure of everything.
"Sing the rest, boy!" I demand, louder this time.
His breath shudders and his head drops to his chest. The sounds he chokes out are barely audible.
". . . Where the dead man called out for his love to flee . . ."
Slowly, he looks up from the floor and takes in his broken reflection through a tangle of yellow bangs. Missing chunks lay shattered on the floor while the rest stands fractured, incomplete. That's when his body goes limp. I release him and stand back as he slumps to the floor, fingers gripping into his scalp as he tries to swallow back the awful noises in his throat.
I can't stand it when he cries, but I try not to be too annoyed. It's possible I may have cried once or twice back when I was his age, too, before I learned how to properly drown the pain.
I leave the kid to sob it out for a minute while I rummage through his bathroom cabinet for bandages. Returning with a fistful of gauze, I find him with his head between his knees, bloodied hands still buried in his hair. He's blubbering something to himself, and I can't make out what it is until after I pry his fingers from his head and start dressing his broken knuckles.
"I hit her," he says.
I shrug as I pull my flask from my pocket. "She's a big girl, Peeta. She'll be fine." I pour some liquor over his split skin. The boy doesn't even flinch.
"No, it's not fine," he insists, and I can hear the tears building in his chest as he tries to speak. "I hurt her, Haymitch. I didn't mean to. I told her to leave, but she wouldn't listen to me -"
"And she's always been so good with listening to directions, I know," I add, cutting him off. He doesn't appreciate my joke, and I really couldn't care less. I just need to get him to shut up before he starts crying again. Shards of glass in his fist and not a single tear. A little bruise on a girl's face, and he's a sobbing mess. If I were a little more sober, I might understand it, but I'm not.
"I hate being like this," he mutters.
"We hate it, too, kid." I'm not going to pretend that encouragement was ever a strong skill of mine. But there's no use lying to the boy. I hate having to wrestle a child to the ground to keep him from hurting himself, and I'm not going to act otherwise.
I look up from the tangled gauze and catch his eyes, shattered, bloodshot windows a lost child peers through, pleadingly. A child I can't face right now. I look back down at my hands.
"There," I mutter, tying off the bandage. "Try not to break anymore shit for a while."
He yanks his hand away, curls his arms up into his chest. And we sit in silence as the windows grow darker.
At some point, I stand, with more difficulty than I'd like. I tell him to get some sleep, that we'll call Dr. Aurelius and put things back together tomorrow. I still have to help him to his feet, and he stumbles alongside me in a daze, too exhausted to put up another fight, as I lead him downstairs to the couch.
Peering out the window, I check my porch. It's vacant, and there's a light on at her house now. She'll likely be back here in the morning. If not, I'll have to look in on her, myself.
For tonight, though, my place is here, sitting at this boy's kitchen table while he lays in pieces, riding out another wave of nightmares, waiting for the cruel mercy of tomorrow.
"Is she okay, Haymitch?" he asks groggily from the living room.
I lift my flask to my lips. "You know she's just fine, boy," I answer, and we don't speak for the rest of the night.
When the liquor is gone, I close my eyes and drink in the silence. And I wait for morning to arrive.
A/N: Not my best, and I realize I have the most cliché title for an angst fic, but I just really wanted to write Haymitch.