Disclaimer: I did not create, do not own, and realize no financial gain from the universe of The Hunger Games.
Note: Here I've simply tried to capture the spirit of a song that always alters my mood when I listen to it. Also borrowed inspiration from a horror movie from several years ago that I think was entitled 'Shutter'.
Will Ye Go Lassie, Go
In the wilderness outside District 12, Haymitch walks along the edge of a crystal-clear brook. An observer would say that he walks alone.
He is never really alone these days. The ghosts crowd around, restless as him. They moan with the wind and brush against his face and hands and ruffle his hair, which is growing long again. Sometimes, mostly at night, they speak much more distinctly. They harry him, reminding him how scared they are, and how young, and how hurt. They beg him for help or at least comfort. He wishes they'd go away, but he understands why they never will. They don't want to be forgotten, that's all.
The kids had wanted to come with him today. They don't like him to go off on his own like this, though the girl's at least smart enough not to say so. Haymitch knows that the boy expects him to just disappear one day, really any day now. Just keep walking, maybe, further and further away from the place where he'd endured so much of life, until exhaustion and hunger draw him down to the earth's cold bed. That, or make use of the knife he still always carries in one of the pockets of his old jacket. And sometimes he thinks about those options for hours on end as he walks. It's good to have options. So good to have some degree of control.
For now he's only gathering wildflowers: chicory and Queen Anne's Lace and wild mountain thyme and heather. He doesn't know what her favorite flower was and assumes it was some fragile hot house thing that would never grow here. But he thinks she would have liked Queen Anne's Lace if she had known it. He'd woken up to her this morning. She'd been beside him in bed and sitting across from him at the old scarred dining table and heavy on his shoulders wherever he walked. So he's building her a bower.
He returns to the structure, supple branches cut and weaved into a frame about three feet high and three feet wide, by now almost completely hidden by the layers of blue and white and purple. Circling it, he finds a thin place and weaves in the stems of the flowers one by one.
"Fine girl you are," he tells her, without raising his eyes from the fleeting monument. His voice is a little rough and a little muffled, but it doesn't break. She doesn't answer in words, but the weight on his shoulders shifts and then a warm breeze stirs the hair over one of his ears and touches him nowhere else.
"Haymitch?" a soft voice asks; not her, though.
"Go back home, Penryn," he says without turning around. The weight gets heavier, pushing him into the ground so that he has to lock his knees. It hurts now, a deep ache that slowly pervades his chest. And the worst part of that is how death has changed and twisted her.
"Come with me," Penryn implores. She doesn't touch him, not while his back is turned, but he can feel her stepping close. The solid living energy of her radiates out at him. And where it touches his neck it burns like fire.
"You're mine. Mine," whispers a voice in his ear, hurt and scared and too young to die.
"Yeah," he agrees. He turns to Penryn, who smiles up at him with relief and something else that might in a better world be love. All together the three of them walk back towards the Village. An observer would say there were only two.