Haymitch sits, slumped in his chair, a half-drunk bottle of liquor in his hand. The bottle never leaves his hand, but he drinks from it less often now. He is still drunk, his face flushed puffy from years of overindulgence and his sense dimmed from ignoring the many things he didn't want to see, but now he is at least sober enough to help the two kids in the arena.
He half watches the two sixteen-year-olds on the monitor as he chokes down some more of his liver killing drink. In the Capitol, everything we do is for amusement, to indulge our senses, to make our empty existence full with temporary thrills. I have seen many drunks in the Capitol, but none like Haymitch Abernathy. Here in the Capitol we drink to feel alive. Haymitch drinks to draw himself one step closer to death.
They are killing him, these particular tributes. This pair is just the latest in a long line of glorified human sacrifices to slake the Capitol's insatiable appetite for carnage. In all, he has mentored forty-eight tributes over the past twenty-four years, but these two are different.
Katniss and Peeta are my first tributes. There were forty-six other tributes before I became the District 12 escort for this game. Haymitch has drowned out their faces in a drunken stupor. He knew he couldn't get them home, not a single one of them, so he didn't even try. I don't think he has tried at anything since the last cannon blew at the fiftieth Hunger Games. It was there, at the Second Quarter Quell, that the man who Haymitch Abernathy was supposed to become died at the hand of the Capitol. In the arena, his world was ripped apart and he never managed to piece it back together.
I don't care what propaganda the Capitol sells, no one survives the Hunger Games. Victor's may leave the arena, but no one who has met a victor can say they came out alive.
It has been almost exactly twenty-four years since Haymitch left that arena and he still hasn't found himself. I don't know if he ever will, but at least he is trying again. He is trying to help these tributes. I'm not sure if he even knows why he is doing this, why these two are different to him, but I do. He sees in them his only tragic fate, and whether he knows it or not, he's trying to stop history from repeating itself.
With the new revision to rules of the game, there exist the slightest possibility that both Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark could make it home. That is, if the Capitol played fair, which they do not. They never have played fair. They are just working towards the most epic ending in Hunger Game history: Two lovers pitted against each other in a fight to the death.
I'm not so much of a fool as to think that President Snow plans for this game to end any other way.
"I don't want it to come down to the two of them." I whisper, the nerves that have been twisting my insides since I drew their names from the bowl, worsen. I have seen the games played for years, I have stood idly by knowing that there was nothing that I could do yet, knowing that I had to bide my time, but this time it's different. I drew their names. Katniss and Peeta… Their blood will be on my hands.
I can't stop watching the screen. I stand beside Haymitch's chair, but I do not sit. I cannot sit. I am too anxious.
Katniss tends to Peeta's wounds, but the boy is in bad shape. They'll be lucky if they can move from the riverbank, let alone find decent shelter. But they are survivors. If anyone can beat the odds, it will be the two of them. I can't bring myself to call it winning, the victor's win nothing but a lifetime of nightmares and guilt. Those who die quickly in the arena are the lucky ones.
But Katniss is so much like Haymitch, far too stubborn to die. And Peeta, well he has something to live for, something he loves. If I understand him as well as I think I do, he will not go quietly in the night. He will survive, because Katniss needs him to survive. But in the end it won't matter. The Capitol will only allow one of them to come home. The revision is a trick, they just don't see it yet, which only makes the deception that much more cruel.
I feel Haymitch's eyes on me. I glance over at him. His eyes are much clearer than they have been since I collected him from his mansion in a drunken stupor. They are still glassy from too much drink, but they are no longer lost in an unreachable stupor.
"Whatever do you mean Effie?" He asks condescendingly. "The Capitol says two can come home, surely you don't think they'll break their word."
I roll my eyes and glare at him, holding back a biting retort. He smirks for a second, but then his expression shifts. His eyes flash dangerously. There is a crazed look in his eyes. He sees something that he has never noticed before. I know what he has recognized, even before he does. Seam eyes.
Nervously, I adjust my wig. It was a gesture originally assumed as part of this adopted persona, but over the years it's become natural, as natural as the Capitol accent I've perfected and the unfamiliar face that greets me every time I look in the mirror.
But he can see it now, the merchant blue eyes. Maybe it's the lack of alcohol in his system. Maybe it's just the first time he has actually looked at me. Maybe it's because he's finally ready to see the truth. He stares intently into my shockingly blue eyes.
"Who are you?" He whispers.
I plaster on my best Capitol smile and prepare to speak the familiar lie. I am Effie Trinket. Forty years old, though I tell everyone that I'm thirty-five, and after years as a socialite, I have finally procured a coveted position as a District escort. But before the words make it past my lips, he grabs my wrist and pulls me toward him.
His grip is so tight that it hurts. He pulls me so close that I can feel his hot, sour, liquor-laced breath on my face. The smell makes my eyes water. I look away from him, but his other hand grabs my chin and forces me to face him. Our eyes meet again. I stare into his steel gray eyes. They seem so focused and years of drinking have been erased in a split second. For a moment he is the young man who beat the odds and won the fiftieth Hunger Games, much to the displeasure of the powers that be.
For the first time in twenty-four years, I think he might be ready for the truth. I glance past him to be sure we are still alone, though I know that we are never completely alone. Not in the Capitol, where even the walls have ears. I lean in closer to him until my lips brush against his ear and I whisper softly, so as not to be overheard.
"We'd live longer the two of us."
Haymitch jerks back as though I have physically struck him. He stares at me wordlessly. For the first time ever, Haymitch Abernathy is completely thrown for a loop. Recognition dawns slowly in his gray eyes as he looks past the changes the years and surgical alterations have made to my face. His gaze peels back the secrets and lies to see the truth underneath.
"I guess you just proved that." He replies with a smirk, trying to regain his trademark detachment, but he doesn't quite succeed. I can see a the traces of grief and longing through the cracks in his expression.
With those six words I know he knows everything. Not the details, but he knows the truth. Effie Trinket has never existed. It is the identity of a girl who had to disappear in plain sight. Before him is none other than Maysilee Donner. The girl who he thought had died in his arms. The girl who beat the Capitol at their own game.
I look away from Haymitch and notice Katniss on the screen. The pin on her shirt. The Mockingjay, her token, but it was my token first. The bird that is a slap in the face to the Capitol. The little bird that was never meant to exist. The unintended muttation. Everything that Katniss is, I have orchestrated. She is my greatest creation.
I may have worn it during my game, but in truth I was never the Mockingjay. The Capitol choose me, made me what I am. I am their creation. Their muttation. Katniss is their mistake and my great triumph, she truly is the Mockingjay. The Capitol didn't plan for her to be in the Games. And now she mocks them, forcing them to change their rules. Capturing the heart of the districts with her song.
I am not the Mockingjay. I made the Mockingjay. Katniss may be an explosion, but I've been playing the long con. I've been moving pieces into place for twenty-four years. I will play the Capitol for the fools they are, and they will not see me coming until it is too late.
I am alive even though the Capitol decreed that I should die for a crime that was not my own. My face may not be my own, but I am still the girl from the Seam. I undermine the Capitol and everything they stand for with every breath I take. I am what they made me, and it will be the monster of their own creation that destroys them in the end.
They underestimated the power of a single life and that will be their downfall. I have become more than they ever imagined a child from the weakest District could be. I am more than a victim, more than a survivor, more than a person.
I am the Jabberjay.
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