Disclaimer: I'm just playing with Suzanne Collins' characters and her world. They're hers. Not mine.
Light Yet To Be Found
AN: Many thanks to FortuneFaded2012 for beta'ing.
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Haymitch stares at the pair of cold stones in front of him. He can still remember the freshly piled dirt, now flat and covered with thin, patchy grass and more than a few weeds. He takes a long swig from his bottle and drops it.
His mother hated drinking.
She'd told him once his father was a drinker. That he'd blamed his need for a crutch on never knowing his own father.
"That wasn't much of an excuse," she'd sighed rubbed her hands over her eyes. "Now he's dead and you boys won't know your father, but that's not an excuse to crawl in a bottle either."
He wonders if she'd think getting her and Graeme killed is enough of an excuse to get falling down drunk more nights than not. She hadn't thought getting Laurel killed was reason enough, but maybe three deaths of people he loved would make his mother realize that sometimes oblivion is the only way to cope.
A few more raindrops break free of the gray clouds overhead, splatter on the stones with his mother and brother's names on them, roll down the rough sides and smooth fronts, trailing lazily over the etching of their names.
If he could cry he would, but he's never been much for tears and the few he had are used up already. Not at the funerals. Not out in public where the Capitol could enjoy his misery, though he's positive they still have a front row seat to his suffering, but in his room, in his empty house. The house that he'd planned on letting the two people whose stone's he's standing over now share with him.
That's never going to happen though, and it's all because of him.
It's been five years since the funerals, since he buried his mother and brother, and only a little longer since he'd stood next to Laurel's parents and put her in the earth, but it feels like decades. He doesn't feel like a young Victor anymore, but a very old man.
This is certainly not the life of comfort and ease he'd been promised for winning the Hunger Games.
If he'd just listened to that damned woman when she came to him.
It had been just hours before his interview, before he was forced to watch the recap of his Games, watch the bloodbath, watch Maysilee die, watch himself be disemboweled, when she'd come into his room.
She was dark haired, ashen skinned, a little hazy to Haymitch's eyes as she walked in his room.
"Can I help you?" He'd asked. She wasn't garishly dressed or overly made up, so he quickly assumed she wasn't from the Capitol.
"No," she finally answered as she picked up his District token, a little thin silver chain his mother had pressed on him seconds before he was taken away. "But I think I might be able to help you."
"How's that?"
She smiled, handed him the chain. "Do you know who I am?"
Haymitch scowled at her. "A Victor."
It's the only thing she could be.
"But who am I?"
She keeps smiling, even though it was perfectly apparent he had absolutely no idea who she was aside from a former Victor.
He didn't have time for more games. He had an appearance to make, and soon, so he smirked at her. "Nobody I need to know, sweetheart."
She didn't take his cool reception as a sign to leave. "You should want to know me. You're going to have to make a choice, and the sooner the better. If you listen to me, my option may just save you."
It had been a long time since he'd had a good laugh. This woman looked about as likely to save him as she was to get him killed with her cryptic words and vague demeanor.
"I'm serious, Haymitch," she tells him, her mouth downturned in annoyance at his dismissal of her statement. "You've made a lot of people upset with your little stunt with the force field. There'll be blood to pay, and that blood will be on your hands."
He snorted at her. "What're they going to do to me? Send me back in the arena?"
Years later that statement would haunt him, just like his waving off her offer of help would plague him, one just much sooner than the other.
"Just because you made it out alive doesn't mean the Game is over," she cautioned him. "We're all playing still, the question now is: what piece in the Game do you want to be?"
A few weeks later, Laurel was killed. A poisonous snake somehow found its way into her bedroom, and he regretted turning his back on the woman. He didn't try to make amends with her though, when he saw her in Three during his Victory Tour.
Her name, it turned out, was Wiress. She shot him a few questioning looks as he gave his canned speech to the drab mass of humanity that was District Three, but she didn't speak to him again, didn't ask if he'd decided what piece of the Game he wanted to play.
Then, at the end of his Tour, he met Shelly.
She was clearly a Victor from Four, and if her name hadn't given it away her looks certain would've. Tanned and slim and effortlessly graceful, she'd smiled with perfectly straight teeth, artificially white, and told him that his services were needed in suite thirteen.
"You'll find everything you need in the room," she told him, her smile never faltering.
"Everything I need?" He'd asked. Haymitch knew better than to take directions from a stranger, even a very attractive stranger.
Shelly simply chuckled. "To repay your debts, of course. Everything has a price."
Especially victory.
It hadn't surprise him, what was being asked of him. After Laurel's death he'd gone over Wiress' words, and Shelly finally confirmed what he had guessed about the other choice he was going to be offered.
It was the choice Delmond Seward, the useless lump that had, until Haymitch's victory, been Twelve's only occupant in the Victors' Village, had made. He hadn't said as much, but when Haymitch had foolishly mentioned Wiress' visit, the old man had paled, told Haymitch he should've listened to her.
"No one'll want you when they finish with you."
Haymitch had crossed his arms, rolled his eyes at Shelly in her fancy dress and painful looking shoes. "I paid my debts, princess. I gave them a show. If they want a private audience with me they'll have to send someone a little more persuasive than you."
She'd grinned, made a disapproving noise as she stood. "For your sake, I hope you change your mind before I get down this hall."
He hadn't, of course, and the moment he stepped off the train in his home district one of his friends, a boy he doesn't even see anymore, had come running to him, cold fear in his eyes.
There had been a fire, and Haymitch arrived just in time to see his childhood home, the one he'd been trying to convince his mother to move out of and come live with him, collapse in on itself in a burning mess. When they finally got the fire out, pulled his mother and Graeme's bodies out, Haymitch had lost the ability to speak. He almost put himself out of his misery. The only thing that stopped him were Wiress' words.
"What piece in the Game do you want to be?"
He told her the next year exactly what piece he wanted to be, as they sat in the wake of their Tributes' deaths in a grimy bar at the center of Capitol.
"I want to help bring them down," he told her. "And the sooner the better."
Wiress and her friend, another Victor from Three, a twitchy man named Beetee, exchanged a look. Haymitch thought they might've changed their minds about helping him, or more likely, letting him help them. He hadn't exactly been his normally charming self the year before.
After several silent seconds, though, Wiress turned back to him.
"You'll have to use that patience of yours, young man." She took a deep breath. "This is a long game we're playing. Don't expect a quick Capitol-style ending. We don't have all our pieces yet."
His part wasn't much, or at least didn't feel like much. He was clever, or so Wiress thought, and all he had to do was watch.
"It's like a game of chess," Beetee had explained, more than once. "We have to find the right moves and we have to make them with the right pieces at the right time or we'll lose more than we can afford."
"We need to cultivate a Tribute, a Volunteer. One that will inspire the Districts and pull at the empty hearts of the Capitol," Wiress told him. "But before we do that we have to practice our moves. Make sure we can sway the masses to our liking. Do you understand?"
It would've saved them a lot of time to be straightforward. They had devices to keep the Capitol from listening in on them, why they didn't just use the damned things and tell him and everyone else what the end of their long game was, Haymitch didn't know. Maybe they weren't as confident in their toys as they so often seemed.
Still, Haymitch understood, and he had nothing better to do than wait and watch. All he had was time it seemed.
So for five long years he's played his part, waited and watched, passed along notes, helped Wiress and Beetee and the other head cases in the 'Scouts', the Victors that lacked the physical draw to make the government money, but paid their debt with their minds, try to figure out what moves they wanted to make next, what strategy they wanted to test.
He's happy not to be a part of either of the groups. They're miserable, more than he is, even if their misery is shared among them. Haymitch has the rather dubious gift of being both among and apart from the 'scouts' and the 'bought and sold' of the Victors.
Being alone has given him time to drink, time to let his anger simmer, time to plot.
Mostly, though, it's been drinking.
Not being in the haze of a drink meant having to think about how he could've saved his mother and brother. Laurel had been a hopeless case, she was the Capitol's jab at him for using the force field in a way they hadn't meant it to be used, but his mother and brother had been retaliation for what he'd refused to become.
Maybe if he'd listened to Wiress, let her help him as she'd claimed she could, he could've saved them. It burns him a little, that she might've been the one that determined that his best punishment was to take his family and Laurel from him, but he can't find it in himself to hate her. Wiress was playing her part, making the moves she needed to in order to keep her loved ones safe, and he couldn't hate her for that, not really.
He doesn't like her though. He accepts that she is what she is, a creature that's surviving to the best of its ability, like a wild animal that lashes out when provoked. She's neither his friend nor his enemy, just another part of the never-ending game he's trapped in.
Rubbing his hand down his face, he wipes away some of the flecks of rain that have come down on him. He'd known it had looked like rain when he stumbled out of his house, but he hadn't cared enough to grab the umbrella he'd stolen from the ditzy escort Thisba at the end of the last Games.
For the hundredth time he feels eyes on him and he groans.
It isn't bad enough getting gawked at during the Reaping, it's worse since Delmond went and froze to death looking for his damned dog last winter. Now Haymitch is the only Victor for the crowdto stare at while Thisba makes an ass out of herself on stage.
He tries to ignore whoever it is, shoves his hands in his pockets and locks his eyes on the stones, but he can still feel them.
Just when he's decided to leave, go home and try for the millionth time to find the good whisky he'd brought back from Capitol a few years prior, he feels a hand on his back.
He jumps, pulls his knife out. It wouldn't be the first time someone has tried to rob him since his Games.
Instead of finding some dumb as dirt miner or a kid, he finds a ghost.
She's older than she had been, there's no blood spurting from her neck, and her eyes aren't as clear, but there's no doubt who it is.
Maysilee Donner.
The apparition takes a step forward, smiles and offers him the shelter of its umbrella.
That's when he comes to his senses.
There's no such thing as ghosts, only dead girls with very much alive sisters.
Haymitch has never talked to Matilda, not before the Games and certainly not since. He has enough problems without looking at the face of his ill-fated ally.
Graeme had told him that during the Games Matilda and her father had stood with them, given him and their mother treats from their shop. Even after Maysilee's bloody death, they'd apparently continued to keep Graeme and Harriet Abernathy company and bring them gifts of chocolate.
Looking back, Haymitch thinks maybe Graeme had developed a bit of a crush on the sweet shop owner's daughter. He'd told his big brother every detail about the candies, told him about helping Matilda make glass candy and chocolate drops, and had begged Haymitch to go with him to the shop every day, right up until the fire ended his life.
She and her father had come to the funeral, given Haymitch a tin of beautiful fudge. He'd thrown it in the pile of garbage in his kitchen the moment he got home. If there was one thing he didn't deserve, it was a treat from a pretty girl.
He hadn't exactly avoided her since that day, they didn't run in the same circles, to say the least, but he hadn't sought her out. Maybe he should've thanked her for making his brother's last few months a little brighter, or sent out 'thank you' cards for the funeral and said it, but he honestly felt that maybe if his brother hadn't been so happy, right up until the end, losing him wouldn't have felt so bad.
When he doesn't make a move to get under her umbrella her smile fades into an uncertain expression. Her lip puckers and her pale eyebrows knit together.
"Hello," she says.
Haymitch grunts an acknowledgement. He doesn't want to talk to 'Mad Mati' Donner, not even to say a half-hearted thank you for keeping his brother happy.
Matilda tilts her head then turns and points behind her, to where she'd come from.
"I came to see May and my mother," she explains as her hand drifts down. Her pale hair floats around her head as she turns back to Haymitch. "Did you come to see your brother and mother?"
She's apparently forgotten about Laurel, most people do.
Matilda has always been a little strange, and from what he's heard her oddness has only increased since her sister's death. He's heard rumors that she's stayed in her room for days on end, complaining of terrible headaches. There's little sympathy for her. People suffer worse lives than she could ever imagine and they don't lock themselves away. It's actually a surprise to see her venturing away from her family's sweet shop.
He starts to tell her he came out to meet a lady friend and for her to leave before she becomes part of a party she won't like, but stops himself. He doubts she'd even get his joke.
"Yeah," he finally says, turning back from her and to the stones. He can't stop himself. "I really enjoy their company."
He hears a snort and glances back. Matilda has her hand over her mouth and her eyes are crinkled up.
Her hand drops and she smiles at him. "Me too."
Even though he hadn't expected her to catch his joke, he's pleased. He doesn't get much interaction outside of his transactions for liquor and the yearly Reaping.
Matilda offers him her umbrella again. "You should be wearing a hat."
His eyes flicker down to her feet to see whether she is wearing shoes. She was notorious during school for taking them off during recess and forgetting to put them back on. Sure enough, her pale bare feet are settled in the straggly grass.
"You should wear shoes."
She shrugs, takes her umbrella back.
For a minute they seem to be at an impasse. Haymitch wonders if he can walk off and Matilda will assume she'd imagined the whole meeting or if he has to excuse himself. Then she reaches in her bag and pulls out a tin.
"I made orange slice candies. Graeme liked them best." She opens the tin and tilts it to show Haymitch. "I remembered it was his birthday today and I made them for him."
Annoyance bubbles up in Haymitch's chest.
She's wasting perfectly good, if not entirely nutritious, food on someone that can't appreciate it.
Graeme had lived for thirteen years and she hadn't bothered to give him candy before her sister and Haymitch had been Reaped. If Maysilee hadn't been his ally, if they hadn't met up and made it to the final eight together, would Matilda have even spared him a second thought? Where were she and her father and their sickly sweet candies when Graeme was starving? When Haymitch had been forced to start pawning off his family's prized possessions just to survive after his father died?
Her sympathy and care are conditional, and that burns Haymitch through.
If her family had cared a little more then maybe Haymitch wouldn't have taken out so many Tesserae, wouldn't have been Reaped, wouldn't have become a Victor.
If her family had cared a little more when it counted then maybe her candy wouldn't be going to waste on a dead boy.
He's being unreasonable. He knows none of his misery is Matilda Donner or her family's fault, but it's his baby brother's birthday and instead of scraping together enough to buy him a cookie to celebrate Haymitch is going to get falling down drunk in his cold, empty house and try to forget that he ever had a brother.
As she brushes past him he catches her elbow, snatches the tin from her and hurls it into the ground, getting a little too much satisfaction from the metallic bang it makes as the lid jars off and the candies spill out.
"He's dead," he snaps at her. "He's dead and it's stupid of you to leave candy for a dead boy."
Her little smile slips off. "Oh, I'm sorry."
She tosses her umbrella, drops down and starts gathering up the candies, but Haymitch kicks the tin and several of the candies out of her reach.
"They're ruined. There's no reason to pick up something that's ruined," he tells her as he glares down at her.
Matilda seems to shrink, falls back on her heels and crosses her arms over her stomach protectively. She nods to the ground.
There's no reason to keep picking at her, but he's furious at the world and she's just lucky enough to catch the explosion. "Don't even know how stupid you look, walking around without your shoes and taking candy out to the cemetery. You're still just 'Mad Mati', aren't you?"
Her face is still down, but she's swatting at it, brushing away tears. "Please don't call me that."
Haymitch remembers when they were younger a game the other kids had always played. 'Make Mati Cry'. The winner had always gotten a cookie from Kolach Mellark's parents' bakery, though he never looked particularly happy about being included, even if only tangentially. Haymitch had never played, his mother would've killed him for tormenting a girl like that, but he'd watched and now he was finally taking his turn.
"Just as bad as when you were little. Crying your eyes out when someone points out what a waste of space you are." He takes a breath, prepares for the final blow. "Only difference is, now you don't have your sister to protect you, tell you what a big bully I am. 'Cause she's dead too, 'Mad Mati'."
She pushes herself up and he can see her shaking. "Please don't call me t-that."
"But you are," he tells her coolly. "You're 'Mad Mati' and that's all you'll ever be. Do you think Graeme would've been your friend if it hadn't been for the Games? Not even a kid like him would've wanted to hang out with a nutcase like you. I bet that's why Valencia Burdock ran off to the Seam, she was sick of babysitting a lunatic."
The tears are pouring now, falling down her cheeks and dripping onto her blue blouse.
She doesn't say anything, just nods, turns, and runs.
For a few seconds Haymitch feels a dark kind of satisfaction. If she doesn't feel every bit as awful as he does now she doesn't know how to feel. That feeling evaporates, like the rain will once the sun shows its face, when he glances back at the stones.
A voice, that sounds suspiciously like his mother, calls him a genuine bastard. If he had a conscience, which he's positive he doesn't, he'd swear it was slapping him. It tells him he had better go and apologize to that poor girl or there'll be hell to pay in the morning.
Instead of going after her, Haymitch picks up his bottle, takes the last swig and tosses it into the distance. His feet carry him home and the reasonable part of his mind, the part that isn't telling him to chase after 'Mad Mati' Donner, helps him locate that whiskey.
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When he wakes, blinking painfully into the blazing sun, he has a pounding headache.
He's on the floor of the living room, still in his clothes, reeking of alcohol. If his mother had been alive and not disappointed with him yesterday, she would've been today.
Stumbling up the stairs, losing his left shoe in the process, he makes it to the bathroom.
When he finally gets the shower on, falls into the oversized tub with most of his clothes still on, he wakes a little more.
All the things he'd been drinking to forget, his mother, his brother, Laurel, come back to him. His head pounds and he wonders if he can get himself in a well enough state to get to Ripper and rid himself of his pesky memories.
After an hour and a magnificent struggle with his right shoe and his belt buckle, he finally gets as clean as he's likely to get. He crawls out of the tub, leaves the mess of filthy clothes in the pile he's been creating over the past few years, and digs something wearable out of his closet.
When he finally finds his mirror, hidden under several coats, he sees he's mostly presentable.
He makes it downstairs; his feet have started cooperating finally, and he walks with surprising steadiness into the kitchen.
Digging through the cabinet, he doesn't find anything edible. He moves on to the icebox, finds a handful of strawberries he'd picked up during his last liquor run, and snatches them up.
As he chews the last berry the sun catches on something in the corner. He almost groans when he realizes what it is.
His head, which had started to feel marginally better, begins to pound again when he marches over and picks up the tin. The fudge is rock hard, bangs roughly against the tin container when he shakes it.
That voice that had harassed him the day before begins nagging at him again.
A sharp pain hits his chest. There had been no reason to taunt Matilda. She was odd, that was true, but that was just one more reason why he shouldn't have tormented her. She had only been trying to be nice, in her own weird way.
He knows what he needs to do, and he absolutely hates it.
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Before heading to the sweet shop Haymitch goes to the cemetery and picks up Matilda's other tin.
It's bent, some mud had washed into it during the course of the little shower, and he can't fit the lid back on, but at least it's something for him to hand back. Even if she slaps him, she can't say he didn't come by. She'll have the tin as proof.
The bell over the door to the sweet shop jingles happily when Haymitch pushes it open and lets it drop closed behind him.
Matilda's father, his name escapes Haymitch at the moment, pokes his head out from the back, squints through his crooked glasses to see who has come in. He blinks, reaches up with a white powder covered finger and pushes his glasses up his nose, leaving a faint trail of powdered sugar up the bridge.
"Hello," he finally says. It's even but not angry. A smile cracks his face. "I always wondered if you would come and see us."
He comes around the corner of his candy display and holds out his hand.
Confused but happy he isn't going to throw him out before he can make amends with Matilda, Haymitch takes his hand. When he pulls back he's sticky.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Herschel, that'shis name, Haymitch remembers when he glances at the little name badge on his chest, says.
He pulls a rag from his back pocket and rubs the half wet powder from Haymitch's hand.
"I've wanted to talk to you for years, but I wasn't sure if you would want to," Herschel tells him as he finishes wiping the powder off. Haymitch instantly feels his stomach drop. "I wanted to thank you for being so kind to Maysilee."
It's unnecessary praise. He hadn't teamed up with her for her benefit, and given the choice he wouldn't have allied with anyone. It's messy and mentally exhausting. Pragmatism had won out though, and now he's receiving gratitude he doesn't deserve.
He swallows down a bit of bile that's risen in his throat. After how he treated Matilda yesterday he definitely doesn't deserve any appreciation.
"I-It was the least I could do." The very least.
Herschel's smile brightens. "No, it wasn't. It was more than most would do."
He looks like he might cry, which makes Haymitch more than a little uncomfortable, so he clears his throat. "Uh, I just came by to see Matilda."
The old man nods and gestures to the back, behind the counter and through an open doorway.
"She's making stained glass candies." He takes Haymitch by the hand again, gives it a paternal kind of pat. "She'll be so happy to meet you, officially I mean. I know you went to school together. She's wanted to thank you and tell you how wonderful your mother and brother were to us during the Games for ages and tell you how terribly we felt when we heard they'd been killed."
A knot forms in Haymitch's stomach with each word out of Herschel's mouth.
"Your brother was such a sweet boy. Kept telling us how much you would like fudge if you ever got a chance to eat any. And your mother was a lovely woman. Told us every day that you were a gentleman. That you would take care of May until the end." He takes off his glasses and rubs a smudge off with his shirt. "And she was right. You held her hand right to the end."
It's painfully apparent Matilda hasn't told her father what a complete bastard he is. If she had he wouldn't be heaping praise on him. Even if he had held his dying daughters hand.
Herschel leads Haymitch around the counter, gestures for him to keep following him until they turn past a large contraption that looks to be pulling taffy.
Matilda is at a little rough table, breaking apart a sheet of red candy into large chunks. Her hair is pulled back, a few strands are floating around under the net she has over her head and her face is smeared with something blue. She stops when she hears her father come in, looks up and knits her eyebrows together.
"Look who has finally come to visit us, Mati." He gestures to Haymitch.
When she doesn't respond Haymitch expects her father to get suspicious, maybe ask her what's wrong, but instead he just sighs.
"Mati-dear, this is Haymitch. You remember, don't you?"
She nods, drops her eyes, takes her hands off the candy and begins wiping them on her little apron. "I remember."
Herschel seems to be used to prompting her, patiently prodding words out of her, because he gives her an encouraging smile. "He came by to see you."
Her eyes stay down and her mouth settles into a firm frown. "Why?"
Her father chuckles. "I have no idea."
The bell over the door rings, just as it had when Haymitch had entered and Herschel smiles at the prospect of a customer.
"I'll let him tell you, dear," he tells his increasingly anxious looking daughter as he shuffles around the source of her worry to get to the front of the store.
Once he's vanished back around the taffy machine, the two are left in suffocating silence.
Matilda picks up a wooden spoon, holds it with both her delicate looking hands like some kind of pathetic sword. "Did you come to play another round of 'Make Mati Cry'?"
It would've hurt less if she'd slapped him. That irritable voice in the back of his head, that sounds a little like his brother now, calls him an asshole and he's inclined to agree.
"No." Haymitch swallows his pride. Unsurprisingly, it tastes like orange slice candy. "I came to apologize."
Her expression is still guarded, but she lets the wooden spoon drop a few inches. She'd stab him in the stomach instead of the chest now, which in his case might not work. There's no telling what those Capitol doctors used on him when they stuffed his guts back in.
"I was feeling shitty and I just took it out on you." She's like a human equivalent of a puppy. Perfectly sweet and easy to kick, but even if they deserved it you still feel like a bastard for doing it the moment they turn their eyes up at you.
"Look, it was real nice of you to remember Graeme's birthday. I'm sure he would've liked the candy, and I appreciate the gesture." Even if he still thinks it's a little stupid. "I shouldn't've thrown your tin and I shouldn't've made you cry. I'm sorry."
He reaches into his coat and pulls out the tin. It's still scuffed up, despite his best efforts to rub the dirt off with his sleeve, and there's nothing he can do about the bending, but it's something.
Matilda lets the spoon drop down, but keeps it in her left hand as she chews her lip and considers Haymitch for a moment. She slowly walks around the table and reaches out, takes the tin from his hand and examines it.
He expects her to throw it at his head, that's what Laurel would've done, and honestly it's what he deserves.
He doesn't expect her to lean, practically fall in, and hug him.
It's been a long time since he's hugged anyone. He's had a few strange hook-ups in the Capitol, after he's failed another pair of idiot kids again, but he doesn't remember much of those and he's fairly certain they didn't involve hugging. At least not hugging like this.
The women in the Capitol are artificial, plastic and harsh, stink with perfume and smoke. Matilda is soft, she smells like the shop around him, sweet and powdery.
For a minute he just lets her hold him, stands stiffly with her cheek pressed into his chest. Then he relaxes, gives her an awkward pat on the shoulder.
It goes on a shade too long, and Haymitch starts fidgeting. He isn't sure what he's supposed to say if Herschel comes in and finds a guy he really just met today being hugged by his only remaining daughter.
"You can let go anytime now, sweetheart."
She slowly unwraps her arms, and Haymitch feels a ping of disappointment at the loss of contact.
"I'm sorry I upset you too," she says. It's so soft he almost misses it.
He makes a gruff noise and she looks up.
"You didn't upset me. I was already in a bad mood."
Her head tilts, a few wisps of her hair float around her head under the netting protecting it. "I was just an easy mark."
She doesn't sound surprised or even upset. It's a fact to her. There's no telling how many times she's been 'an easy mark' for people's frustration. Haymitch is furious at himself for adding his name to that list.
"It's okay." She shrugs, gives him a smile. "I'm used to it."
Haymitch grinds his teeth. He's been on the receiving end of people's irritation for the past few years for his failure to bring home any of the Tributes in anything but a pine box, and he still isn't used to it. Not entirely. The fact that dainty little Matilda is so easy to forgive him is a little disconcerting. He certainly wouldn't, and it makes him wonders if anyone who'd used her as their emotional punching bag had ever apologized.
Uncertain what to say to that, Haymitch nods, gives her another pat on the back and turns to leave.
"Haymitch?"
Against his better judgment, he turns back, forces himself not to make an agonizing face. She's made him feel too much, or at least feel something that isn't self-pity and self-loathing, and he's eager to get a drink and rid himself of those unwelcome emotions.
"Can-Would you mind if I came to visit you?" She's finally put her wooden spoon down, has both her hands clasped in front of her.
He doesn't know why she would want to go out to his filthy, misery laced house, but he also doubts she'll actually come, so he shrugs. "Whatever makes you happy, 'Tilda."
Her smile could light an entire district and Haymitch can't help but grin back at her.