Dr. Effie Trinket was not the first person in the comparative literature department to attempt to dissuade Katniss from asking Dr. Abernathy to be her advisor, but she was the most explicit.

"I know you expressed a desire to work with Dr. Abernathy when you applied, but… Well, that is to say, I know that you haven't taken classes with all of our faculty yet, but isn't there… anyone else you might like to study with?"

Katniss had friends in other programs – in the sciences – who had been asked to select a different advisor, but that was primarily because their choice would be preoccupied with research or administrative work for much of their time in their department.

This was not the case with Dr. Abernathy.

Rather, everyone in their department knew that he'd been doing only the minimum of what was required of him since achieving tenure five years before Katniss entered the program.

He didn't bother to go to conferences anymore. He didn't bother to submit articles to journals.

But no one knew Soviet literature like him.

And honestly, Katniss sort of liked the idea of being a thorn in his side.

"Nope. There's no one else."

"What do you want to do your dissertation on?"

"Russian emigrants in the Soviet era. I think I want to focus on Georgy Adamovich, but I have a bit of time to figure that out for sure."

Dr. Abernathy squinted at her. "You applied here because of me, didn't you." It was a statement, not a question.

"I did."

He hummed.

"What's your background in Russian so far?"

"My dad was a native speaker, so I was raised bilingual."

If this came as a surprise, Dr. Abernathy did not show it—his expression remained neutral as he asked, "Do you like Adamovich's poetry or his essays more?"

"Research isn't about what I like. It's about what prompts good questions."

And suddenly, surprisingly, he was smirking. Or at least, Katniss thought he was smirking. There was certainly a strange new twinkle in his eye.

"Alright, Ms. Everdeen. I think we just might be able to do something good together."

"What did you say?" her roommate, Johanna, asked her later, as they sat over dinner. "How'd you talk him into it?"

"I hardly said anything."

Johanna scoffed. "But really, what did you say."

Katniss could only shrug. "I hardly said anything."

Their meetings were few and far between. Katniss heard from him every two weeks or so, if he came across an article that he thought she'd find interesting.

This surprised her—she'd heard more than one student in the department joke that Dr. Abernathy had checked out so entirely that he didn't bother to keep up on scholarship. Apparently, she'd heard it enough that she'd begun to believe it.

She always found herself marveling at the things he sent her. Sometimes they weren't anywhere near her research interests, but they were all fascinating.

When they did meet, they sat together for ages. Katniss would not have been able to guess his schedule if she tried; he always seemed to have endless amounts of time when she reached out to him.

It was not until the beginning of Katniss's second year when she finally felt as though she could breach more dangerous subjects.

"Can I ask you something?"

"I suppose."

"You have this reputation of being…" She hesitated, and Dr. Abernathy raised his eyebrows at her—a bad sign, and, she knew, an indicator that she should just go for it. "Cavalier with your job. But you're… you try with me."

"Just because I'm disenchanted by the politics of academia doesn't mean you have to be." Dr. Abernathy gave her a small smile. Still a rare enough occurrence that her mood was raised immediately. "If you hate scholarship by the time you graduate, it's not going to be because of me."

"I'm not going to hate scholarship."

Dr. Abernathy didn't respond to that assertion; he changed the subject instead.

Katniss got an article accepted to a panel at a conference that year, and when she found out, she showed up as his door just to ask him to help her request funding for the trip.

What she did not expect was for him to sigh and say, "Damn it, Katniss, this means I need to go."

She thought he was joking at first. Even after learning that he was serious, spotting him in the audience when she stepped onto the stage was… a surprise.

When he strode up to her afterward, he patted her shoulder and said, "Good job," before he was off in all the directions that he still wanted her to develop her analysis of the topic, and it could have felt dismissive, but all she felt was reassurance.

Then he said, "If you're up for it, there's a panel on nationalist movements in five minutes. I have some friends who'll probably be there who I think would get a kick out of you."

Katniss had been thinking about going back to her room to wind down for an hour or two, but that daydream was gone immediately.

He hated the networking game, but here he was, playing it for her.

"Alright, Dr. Abernathy."

She finished her coursework at the end of that second year, and Dr. Abernathy asked her to call him Haymitch.

"It's been weird enough hearing you say 'Dr. Abernathy' anyway—I was already teaching here when I was your age."

Katniss tried the word out for the first time when she went home and told Johanna about her day, and Johanna just laughed. "If he's not careful, he's going to end up with more advisees next year."

"Good. He knows what he's doing, just as long as he can be coerced into advising you."

While Katniss was in the process of studying for her first round of comprehensive exams, she voiced a thought that had been plaguing her for longer than she really wanted to acknowledge to Haymitch.

"What if academia isn't the right place for me?"

Haymitch even refrained from allowing his expression to betray a sense of I told you so. "Is this because it's hard right now? Or because you really don't know if it's the right fit?"

Katniss considered this quite genuinely. "I'm not sure."

"Then we'll plan for both scenarios right now."

By Katniss's fourth year, Haymitch had accumulated three more advisees.

Everyone said that she was his favorite, which unnerved her.

Mostly because she knew it, too.

She finished her last round of comprehensive exams on a Tuesday, and he took her out for drinks that night. She had plans with her friends for the weekend to celebrate, but she preferred her outing with Haymitch.

Their third drink in, they fought about the balance between translating for literal and figurative meaning, a debate which lasted for at least twenty minutes. Otherwise, though…

It was quiet. It was nice. It was amiable.

Haymitch and Katniss stood in the airport security line, waiting to fly home after an exhausting, but exhilarating, conference.

"You know, I first met you at a conference."

He chuckled. "Is this some sort of commentary about me being closed-off until your presentation?"

"No, I mean we literally first met at a conference."

Haymitch spun around in a blink, staring down at her in bewilderment. "When? You were only barely out of undergrad when I stopped going."

"First year of my Master's, actually. I think it was the last one before you got tenure." Katniss paused, trying to decide exactly how much he wanted to unnerve him. "Our conversation back then is the reason that I wanted to work with you."

Recognition lit up his features. "I can't believe I never made the connection."

Katniss smiled graciously. "You don't have to act like you remember me, it's fine. It was 10 years ago, after all."

"No, but I do remember you. Or, at least, I remember a girl who couldn't stop talking about Nabokov's poetry. Considering that that was your Master's thesis topic, the comparison probably should have occurred to me."

Katniss, though, was all surprise, so that all she could do was murmur, "Probably."

Much to her delight, Katniss got a fellowship to do research abroad for her dissertation in the fall semester of her final year.

Much to her surprise, Haymitch had emailed her, before she was even confirmed for the fellowship, and asked about her plans.

My sabbatical is next fall, too, and we're going to be going to quite similar places. If you're amenable… I've been told I'm a great travel buddy.

She was amenable.

A week into their trip, they were eating lunch in a small French town when Katniss realized that she'd been sitting across from Haymitch and had forgotten that he was a professor for… she wasn't even sure how long.

He'd just seemed like a friend. One of her most honest, most sincere friends.

This was why she was his favorite.

A month in and she found that off-campus research had given her enough perspective to say something definitively. Not that she hadn't said it before—she'd lain awake, mumbling the words to herself when she knew no one could hear.

But she told Haymitch over dinner and, quite suddenly, it was real.

"I want to get a real person job."

He didn't even look up from his plate. "I know, sweetheart."

"Of course you do."

He always knew.

In the wake of this revelation, it was sometimes all Katniss could do to force herself to work on her dissertation each day.

Haymitch helped.

"Once you've finished dissertating, you could redo Europe without all the work."

"Yeah?"

He nodded. "Where do you want to go first when you're back?"

"We could go back to Oxford and try that pub that you didn't get a chance to see."

It was only after she said this that she realized he might find something strange in her choice to include him in this motivational daydream.

"Could we go to that winery in France, too?"

Katniss barely refrained from letting out a sigh of relief.

These theoretical trip plans became a significant motivator for them both in their travels. Somewhere along the line, Katniss shifted the tone of the game. They were driving down a rural road somewhere in Germany when she pointed out a quaint country home as they passed it.

"I'm going to live somewhere like that some day."

"You're not that disenchanted with comparative literature, are you?"

Katniss shrugged. "If I've got you to debate with, comparative literature will still be on my mind."

He didn't look away from the road, but his knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

Katniss didn't even quite realize that she wasn't joking about this fantasy until she held her diploma in her hand.

She said nothing about it to Haymitch, because she suspected that he had long known that she wasn't joking.

He always knew.

Katniss moved to France after getting her PhD. She mostly lived off of freelance translation work, sometimes taking manual labor jobs during harvest season to ensure that she had enough money to always live comfortably.

She visited one or two of the places that she and Haymitch had joked about returning to together, but it felt wrong to go alone.

It felt wrong to call him and drag him out to her, too, just because he was…

Just because she'd grown accustomed to him.

Johanna had gotten an actual academic job, working at a liberal arts school that Katniss had never heard of. A few years after they graduated, Johanna was able to visit Katniss for the first time over the summer.

"Are you happy here?"

Katniss hesitated. "Mostly, yes. I just miss… I miss my friends, Johanna."

She meant it, too, but Johanna wasn't wrong when she translated the assertion, either. "He's quit going to conferences again."

Katniss didn't answer. He'd quit talking to her, too—it had been a month since his last email.

And then, two weeks later, he was on her doorstep.

"Don't ask me the sorts of bribes I had to find you," he said, by way of greeting.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

Haymitch stared at her, expressionless. "I'm not… I'm honestly not quite sure."

After a brief beat, during which Katniss was trying to think of a way to make the conversation less awkward, he'd added, meekly, "But I don't… I don't have anywhere else to be."

She swallowed. "Anywhere?"

"Anywhere."

For weeks, they danced around what his arrival had meant. Mostly because the reality of it scared Katniss too much to say aloud.

Of course, here, too, she laid awake, mumbling the words to herself when he knew he could not hear.

He made it easy.

She was in the middle of peeling potatoes one day, musing aloud about the Dostoevsky that she'd been reading that afternoon. Haymitch settled his hand on her shoulder and turned her to face him.

"You've always been my favorite," he told her.

Katniss would have laughed if his expression were not so serious. "I know."

"Good."

He was so far away, so very far away, as though that was what he believed Katniss wanted of him. But if he'd inched them this close already…

She grabbed at his waist and pulled him closer, and he stood in her presence for what felt like an eternity before he grazed his lips across hers.