Author's Note: I can't believe I actually finished a piece of writing. It's been awhile. I want to give credit to this fanvid ( watch?v=EoQ6eAcNKM0&list=PLGXtJ-tdeI4T-JzTt4Jt0MRPHDCRhtd_K&index=16) for inspiration, and direct you to my own Haymitch/Katniss playlist ( /shimmer_disco_lemonade/empire-of-dirt) if you want something to listen to while reading.
-o-o-o-o-
Back in Thirteen, there was a ruckus around her. They were congratulating her accidental bravery, her accidental stroke of genius. Plutarch was smacking her on the back, beaming his circus smile, and even Coin relinquished some grudging approval. Her heart was still pounding from the passion that had overtaken her whole being in District 8, when she shot down the Capital's plane and screamed into the camera, If we burn, then you burn with us!
But despite the rush, despite the noise, despite the many things to be caught up in, Haymitch's glare quietly tore through all of it. His eyes drew in hers like magnets, and as always, she could hear his thoughts louder than anything else.
You. Me. Alone. NOW.
With a slight eye roll and a heavy sigh, she excused herself from the crowd and went to him, following him wordlessly into a gray, empty corridor.
"That was quite a performance, hot shot," he growled at her, brows furled like a beast. "You don't ever, ever disobey a direct order again, you hear me? You want to be out there in the thick of it? Then you listen the old man in your headset. I didn't keep you alive through two Games for you eat it in a blaze of idiotic bravado."
Katniss swallowed her words, an angry lurch in her stomach as she gazed at the tense lines of his face.
"Maybe if I'd done a little less listening to you and a little more trusting my gut back in the arena, Peeta would be here now," she spat, stepping forward and putting mere centimeters between her Seam eyes and his.
Haymitch chuckled soundlessly, and then shocked her by grabbing hold of her face with both hands. He cupped her skull, the tips of his calloused fingers digging into her sweaty hairline. "You think you could stop listening to me even if you tried?" He was breathing right into her mouth, the first time she had ever smelled him not reeking of whiskey. She could barely see anything but the gray of his eyes. "You can't get me out of here, sweetheart. I've been in your head ever since we met on that hellbound train."
They stood, breathing hard, angry hearts beating, wondering who would show fear first. Katniss could not help but think back on her first glimpse of him, staggering drunk on the Capitol train. She remembered the despair in her heart; she was a lost little girl, riding to death, and the only piece of home she had to cling to was him.
"I can't save you," slurred the drunk man, squinting through sad, bleary eyes.
"Why are you here, then?" quaked the angry little girl. Her youthful will to live gave off a palpable heat.
It had seemed so hopeless, at first. But then they spoke. Something in her woke up something in him, and there was a sudden, albeit thorny, promise that they would fight this thing until the end.
Here they were, then, standing at what they hoped was the threshold of the end. He was no longer drunk, and she was no longer a little girl.
"Maybe," she conceded, speaking not angrily but honestly. Softly. "But I'm in your head, too. You think you can control me, but you know you don't really want to."
His stance weakened, just a little, but he held his grip on her face, gaze locked. He couldn't, despite trying, look away from her. "Damn it, Katniss," his voice dropped to a whisper. "It's not about control- that, out there, was not about control. I'm trying to protect you." He breathed. "I get you. I know you better than anyone. Sure Cinna knew how to dress you up, like a little doll, but I see what makes you strong. It's the same thing that makes us both fighters. It's that rage, that blind and stubborn anger at the Capitol and all their clowns."
She wanted to crumble in his arms. She wanted to cry against his sternum. She wanted to be weak, for just a moment, and share it with him, because she knew deep down that if anyone could understand what she was feeling it would be Haymitch.
But that wall was too big to climb. Making herself that vulnerable, that open to him, would give way to more truth and feelings than she could let herself have.
She hardened. "I'm sorry, okay?" She shook herself free of his grip, pulled out of his gaze. "I won't let you down again."
With a kind of emptiness, she walked away from him. He watched her go, tormented.
-o-o-o-o-
It was four months later, and she was a prisoner back in her Capitol quarters. She killed Coin, a suckerpunch, coldblooded, and she had tried for weeks to feel remorse or guilt or something, but that feeling never came. After everything, after war; after Prim. It hardly mattered where she laid her head, after all that. Being imprisoned wasn't so bad. Being alone was a welcome gift.
When the door opened on a familiar face, it was his. She could tell that he'd been drinking again. His face had the weary weight of dehydration, lack of sleep. She could not blame him.
He sat on the floor beside her and she pulled her body onto his without a word. She threw her whole face into the warmth of his chest and they both thought, for a sincere minute, that she wouldn't ever come up again. She had shed her soldier's skin the moment they put the shackles on her wrists. This war was done, whether she had won or lost. But at least now she didn't have to be strong any more. It had been too long, this waiting to rest.
"God damn girl," he whispered into her matted hair. The comfort of having her near again shouldn't have surprised him so much; he knew too damn long ago that she was the answer. She was the reason to keep breathing.
Maybe minutes, maybe hours marked their wordless reunion. Katniss broke the silence, speaking into him, an incomprehensible statement, muffled by his stomach and the cotton of his shirt.
He lifted her up, looking at the tired gray eyes that looked longingly back at him. "Come again, sweetheart?"
She spoke again, her voice raspy from the long absence of conversation. "What's the verdict?"
Haymitch sighed. "Insanity," he answered simply. "Which is the same as innocence, oddly enough."
She looked at him. "You knew what I was going to do, right?"
He reached out, in an uncharacteristically gentle gesture, and fingered an errant strand of her hair. He nodded. "I always do, sweetheart." He couldn't help but want to hold on to her; he wanted to clutch her face, hold the whole of her, feel her and finally stop being afraid that she wasn't coming back. But there were too many unmarked lines there, lines he didn't know how to cross.
"What now?" she asked, looking at him in desperation.
Haymitch shrugged. "We go home."
-o-o-o-o-
Rebuilding had not been easy on anyone. A lot of the people who returned to Twelve didn't stay long; too many ghosts. Too hard to start from scratch. District Twelve was little more than rubble and wilderness. The industrialized districts was where most people flocked, after the war. He didn't blame them, not even Peeta. No one was the same. "Home" was something they had to make all over again.
It was two years after Katniss' trial. The path between his house and hers was a worn dirt rut. It was one more day in their new version of ordinary, as Haymitch marched his boots along the familiar steps. The sky was overcast, rumbling, about to pour. It made him think of hot chocolate.
He let himself in and ambled into the kitchen, shuffling through Katniss' sparse possessions in the dim light. He put on the kettle.
"Shit day for hunting," Katniss lamented as she entered the room, speaking as though it was no surprise to see him there. It never was, any more. Terrors still claimed her nights and dreams, horrible fear and anxiety that would never fully leave her. But Haymitch was a soothing constant. Their rhythm was natural, and it made the dark days pass more quickly.
"Hmph," he grunted as the kettle whistled, which Katniss correctly interpreted as an invitation to sit in comfortable quiet on the porch all afternoon. His little things, his little ways, spoke volumes to her as they always had.
She obliged him with hot chocolate and rocking chairs. The drizzle of rain battered against the metal awning and the warped wooden boards creaked as they rocked. They stared into the fog, into the quiet that they could safely call theirs at last. Haymitch spoke into the rain, and Katniss gazed into the treeline as she listened and responded.
They often talked this way, looking in opposite directions. Eye contact was too intimate when it came to them; they saw too deeply inside one another. It would mean too much to know so much about what the other was thinking.
"Cup's empty," Katniss lamented after sometime, looking at the chocolate dregs at the bottom of her mug. "Should I put on another pot?"
Haymitch climbed out of his chair in response. "I got it."
When he didn't return in a reasonable amount of time, Katniss left her comfortable spot to go search for him. She found him on a ladder in her foyer, hammer and nails in hand.
"What are you doing?" she asked, exasperated. "Did you forget where the kitchen was?"
"You've got a leak… just look at all the water damage it's already done in here! You can't just ignore these things, sweetheart. I'll take care of it for you."
She watched him, half annoyed and half endeared. There was a time when he spat the word sweetheart, like it was derisive, a smack on the wrist. Lately it just came from him, naturally, like a habit he couldn't break. He was softer now, after the war.
"Christ's sake, Haymitch, get down from there." The ladder wobbled beneath him with the jolting vibrations of the hammer hitting rotting wood. He wavered each time he lost his balance, until he finally conceded to Katniss' nagging.
As he climbed off the ladder, Katniss was waiting there, standing uncomfortably close. "Maybe it's stupid to try to keep up this house by myself," she said to him, carefully watching his face. "Why can't you just move in with me? You're always here, and there's more than enough room."
Haymitch kept his face hard and straight to hide the nervousness he felt inside. "Are you crazy? We'd make terrible roommates. I happen to like my alone time, see?"
"God, you are stubborn," she grumbled. "I know I don't have to spell it out for you. You can read me without trying. You know what I… you know what I mean. Come stay with me for fuck's sake, Haymitch."
She turned away and he reached out. He stopped her from leaving by tugging on her waistband. She felt a wave of heat pass over her. She couldn't look at him.
His voice was a low growl. "I know what you want, I just don't think… I don't think we could handle it." He sighed and let go of her, running both hands through his scraggly hair. "God damn, girl, just let me fix your roof," he said, pressing his gaze on her. "Would it kill you to listen to me for once?"
A fat drop of rain felt right on her face, dripping across her brow and down her nose. She could taste the rain on her lips. She rolled her eyes and sighed, shaking, drifting toward him.
"I've been listening for so long," she whispered. She looked at the floor and just, leaned into him, her face on his chest where it had rested so many times before. He trembled at her closeness, at her honesty. He bent forward and smelled her rain-dusted hair. "But I just want to hear you say it."
She looked up at him. Her eyes were clouded with stubborn tears, the kind that stung but refused to fall. Tears that were just like everything else about her.
And then he was there, his eyes in her eyes, gray bound to gray, and it was all at once impossible for him to play dumb. He knew what she wanted, he knew how she felt, and he knew that he was transparent to her. It had once been a strategic advantage, her ability to just get exactly what he was trying to say. But the war was ended, and now all it created was an open door to him that Katniss could walk right through. For the first time since he was fifteen years old, he was genuinely terrified.
He started, "I'm not sure it's such a good idea if-"
"Fuck it, Haymitch. We have nothing to lose. All we have left is each other."
He cleared his throat. "Well, you know that I-"
"Say it."
He reached out in a rapid motion and held her face, rough hands and firm grip, just like that day back in District Thirteen when she'd ignored her headset and he'd been so angry he could have smacked her. He knew then he loved her. He knew then that the way he felt about her would never go away. But he never imagined she'd really be his to take; never thought, in the wake of all the madness and demons, that she could make room in her heart to feel the same way.
Softer, pleading, "Say it."
He kissed her like a man in the desert, and she was water. The toxic accumulation of so much hopeless wanting lifted him into a frenzy. He felt her relinquish the weight of her battle-shattered body as she pressed against him, falling desperately into his kiss. He felt the dead blood inside him run hot. "Stay alive" had been the merciless mantra he'd bestowed on Katniss years ago, but now, here, in this moment he finally felt truly alive again.
She pulled away, leaving him gasping for hair. She grabbed a handful of his linen shirt and clutched it like a leash. "Say it," she ordered.
"I love you," he breathed, letting go of her face and wrapping his arms around her. He kissed her hair, her eyelashes, her neck. "I love you, and you're mine."
She tapped his temple as she leaned in to kiss again, a reminder of their wordless bond. His embrace felt like home. "I know," she said. "And you're mine."