For Hayffie Challenge prompt #39 She missed his warmth.
Effie hates the time spent between Games. She hates it because she is supposed to hate it. The time between Games is down time.
Outwardly, she hates the downtime for all the right reasons. It's too much paperwork. She has no time for herself. Then once the paperwork is done, she has to begin planning for the next year's Games. She rarely gets to see her friends, and when she does, they sympathize with her busyness and remind her that she has the dream job and that she should be thankful, though they wish they could see her more.
She doesn't wish she could see them more.
Inwardly, she hates the downtime because it allows her to think. She hates the downtime because it allows the nightmares to creep back in. Memories of haunted faces. Violent endings to innocent lives. When the Games are going on, she is usually too exhausted for nightmares. She sleeps dreamlessly, though the occasional nightmare still creeps in. She doesn't think she will ever be fully free of them. But being busy and exhausted certainly helps.
She hates the downtime because she has to pretend to be like everyone else. She has to interact with the Capitol citizens, gush over new fashions, spend extravagant amounts of money on clothes she thinks are hideous. Deep down, she would love to do something else with the huge paycheck she gets from the Capitol every year as compensation for going to a District as "barbaric" as Twelve. Honestly, she believes that Twelve could benefit from her check so much more than these Capitol stores. They are not hurting. But the hungry, emaciated faces she sees in District Twelve every year...they visit her in her nightmares.
What she hates the most about the downtime, however, is something she could never speak aloud. She hates the lack of companionship. She knows no one would understand this. Why would they, when she has plenty of Capitol friends to rub shoulders with?
But she doesn't consider them companions. What they do when they are together is frivolous. During the downtime, she spends time with them mainly to fill the void. But it never works.
What she misses is like-mindedness. What she misses is knowing that no matter how fake she feels, and how much the faces of dead children plague her, the man sitting next to her feels the same way. She misses having someone there when she watches the final bits of the Games, someone to hold her hand as the children she picked are murdered and tossed aside like ragdolls.
And most of all, she misses his warmth. On hard nights, when their tributes have made it far enough into the Games that sleeplessness on her part is required, he is there. A shoulder to lean on. While her tributes shiver so hard in the Arena that she feels the chill down to her own bones, he puts an arm around her and rubs her own trembling away.
He is the drunken Victor of District Twelve, and she misses him every moment they are not together. Imagine telling her frivolous Capitol friends that.