Title: growing up seam
Fandom: The Hunger Games
Words: 867 words
Characters: Haymitch, Mr. Everdeen, and Mr. Hawthorne
Prompt: haymitch + mr. everdeen + mr. hawthorne, growing up seam for electrumqueen.
Summary: Here's the thing if you grow up Seam: when you're born close enough together, you're stuck. Spoilers for Catching Fire. Originally posted here at the girl on fire ficathon.
Disclaimer: I do not own The Hunger Games.
Here's the thing if you grow up Seam: when you're born close enough together, you're stuck. Your mothers trade worn and patched up clothes, your fathers share Merchant jokes on their way home from the mines, and your children are the walking dead, racking up tesserae or bound for the Reaping (though most often times both).
As a result, Haymitch Abernathy, Nat Hawthorne, and Oscen Everdeen are friends by virtue of their proximity.
It doesn't make for an easy start.
Haymitch has it relatively easy. He still has both parents, a rascal of a brother, and a house that isn't crumbling from foundation to roof. He learns rather quickly how to get by school on the power of his smile and charm alone and the teachers like him. They let him get away with not doing work, with skirting dangerously close to defiance with his words because when he walks out, he'll be walking down into the ground after all.
Naturally, Nat hates him. He deems himself a scholar, spends his days reading the discarded newspapers his sister brings home from the mayor after she's finished cleaning his house. He wonders what sort of libraries they have all the way over in District 7, where they're wasting paper making books that the citizens in the Capitol use to decorate their finely polished tables and weigh down their elegant shelves. He knows what it means to be in the mines, to have all that dust fill up and blacken your lungs, to cut your life so dreadfully short.
Oscen is the one that everyone likes, from the butcher to the baker to the respectful proprietor of the Hob. He's shorter than Nat and not nearly as handsome, but he has a pleasant face and a gentle way with words. He also has his freedom and it's an open secret that the others envy him for the way he can hide away in the lake or in the woods. He doesn't take them there, doesn't show them those places, not at first, but he has a generous heart and is never afraid to share the game he catches on his hunts.
They don't get along spectacularly, but they get along well enough, sitting at the same tables in the Seam section at lunch, lamenting over the reality that the sons of those in town will breathe fresh air for most of their lives, and whistling at the golden-haired girls that know smiling back at them means trouble will start.
In their thirteenth year, they become infamous for their part in a particularly nasty brawl outside the Donners' sweetshop, when Oscen whistles a pretty tune to an even prettier girl and the eldest Mellark boy takes offense. He doesn't throw the first punch, but his Merchant friends do, following their sharp slurs with their fists. There is hitting and kicking and yelling until the Peacekeepers arrive, pulling them all apart. "Animals," they say.
On the way back home, sagging with weary bones and wounded pride - they'd won fair and square, no matter what the others said about them fighting dirty in the Seam - Haymitch spits out the blood from the cut on his lip, tells Oscen that the girl had better be worth it. (She is; he marries her later to the astonishment of all.) Nat just winces, groans when he sees that his mother is waiting, hand on her hip. The scolding they receive from Mama Hawthorne that afternoon is worse than the bruises that rise in the morning, and it seals their fate.
They're more than reluctant friends; from now on they're bound as brothers, whether they like it or not.
They stay that way, three of a kind, until a week before the Reaping, the conditions of the Quarter Quell hanging low about their ears.
"So," Oscen says, "they're stealing away four of us." He looks at Nat when he says this, who in turn grabs the bottle of Sae's moonshine they've bartered a meaty squirrel for.
Nat takes a sip, sputters it out. "How can you two drink this stuff?" He shakes his head, as though it will also clear his throat. "If the Capitol had their way, they'd send all of us. Though Abernathy here would make it out. He can talk through anything."
Haymitch laughs, finishes off the drink that burns all the way down. "Your looks would be more valuable to the sponsors, I'd say. They give the Careers feathers just so they wouldn't mar your face. What was that Hazelle called you the other day? Her 'angel?''"
They go on like that for a while, letting gallows humor and the alcohol dull their tongues, avoiding the things they want to say but cannot. It's Oscen that finally suggests it, their little pact. They make promises not to volunteer as the other tribute if only one of them is called, to not be noble when their mothers will weep over the loss of their sons before they even leave, when they'll need to close ranks and help take care of their own.
Even in the Seam, one sure death is already - and always - one too many.