He arrives only in time to watch the last of a flock of candy pink birds, equipped with long, thin beaks, skewer her through the neck. He holds her hand while she dies, and all I can think of is Rue and how I was too late to save her, too. – Catching Fire
In the worst of his drunken stupor he stumbles to a house in the middle of town.
At seventeen he's the youngest drunk in the district as well as the most abhorred one. He has failed his first litter of tributes. Both fourteen-year-olds, weak and underfed: a boy from the Seam and a girl from a ruined town family. She'd look much alike it took a bottle of swill to even look at her in the morning.
"Maysilee!" he yells at the top of his lungs. "Get your ass down here, Sugarface!"
The girl died in the bloodbath the moment the gong went off. The boy spent three days of the Games huddled in a crevice, bleeding out.
She was nothing like her, though they shared the same silky hair and wide blue eyes. Had nothing of her resource. Never stood a chance of making it out.
Frankly, he wouldn't know they had died were it not for early morning recaps. And even then he was too hung-over to care.
"Maysilee!" he yells again. "Don't leave me waiting. It's cold out here, damn you!"
The haze of Ripper's herbal homebrew does little to ward off the winter stretching out around him, but he does not see the uneven patches of snow stained with District 12's ever-present soot. He sees grass, long and golden, swirling in the wind, sweet smells of poison permeating the air, feels the cold night soil beneath his bare feet. And, above all, he sees the ghostly forms of dead Careers approaching him, stretching their clawed hands forth to latch onto his clothing and rip his skin. They come traipsing after him night after night and disturb his sleep with bouts of shivers and screams. He's back in the arena and he's about to be saved or die.
Instinctively, he searches the square for a glimpse of her in the shade of trees, anticipating the rescue. When no one comes, he yells again:
"Maysilee!"
A flash of electricity flickers through one of the rooms.
"Maysi—"
"Shut it!"
She stands in the doorway huddled in a woollen coat. With a scowl that twists her pretty face into something grotesque and highlighted by shadows. But alive, in the flesh.
He feels a surge of gratefulness—only she can keep them in the dark from consuming him.
Bloodshot eyes and muddled mind have a way of twisting one's reality.
"Maysilee! Come warm me, I'm shivering."
"That's not the only thing you are, you drunken fool."
Her voice has the quality of thousand sent ringing and toiling through his ears at once and he presses hands to his temples forcefully, as if to strangle the migraine just gasping for a breath to let go its first scream.
"Not so loud, Sugarface," he rambles. "I'm aching here."
"Go home, Haymitch."
"May—"
"I'm not her!" she cries. "She's dead. Dead. You know what that means, don't you? You were there." Soft whimpers accompany her syllables as she says it, verging on tears. "She's not coming back."
Suddenly it dawns on him. The reminder sobers him in seconds.
"Marigold."
She nods.
He swallows, "I'm sorry, I thought..." he moves to comfort her, but is brushed off.
"I know what you thought. Go home, Haymitch. Take a bath, sober up. Don't come back here."
The days after he spends drunk to near unconsciousness, hiding from the demons stalking his nights; the pale face of the girl he failed to save and who saved him, shrouded by a puff of pink feathers.
If awake, he keeps to the house at all times, except for when he runs out of the sedative he soaks himself in. He cannot bear the sooty air of the town and the coal-smeared faces of the mines. He cannot bear the sight of the fair-haired town girls with frilly ribbons holding back their curls. But most of all, he can't bear the sight of the children he's going to send to their deaths years on end—the shambling anorexics yet to join the legion of ghosts haunting him.
But is that fate so terrible? The dead feel no pain, have no waking hours or urge to scream their lungs out, feel no guilt or loss...
There are fates worse than death, and the Capitol specialises in each of those.
The only victory in the Hunger Games, he realises, is death.
After all, he knows it better than anyone.
N/A: I chose to use Marigold as future Mrs Undersee's (Maysilee's twin sister) name, having seen it several times in a variety of other fanfictions featuring her.