Haymitch untangled his legs before kicking the sheets over the end of the bed onto the floor. The cool air settled onto his damp skin, soothing away the feverish dream that clung to him in the darkness.
He lay still on his back for several minutes before shifting his gaze to the window gaping, undraped, over the back gardens of the Victors' Village. Moonlight reflected off newly fallen snow and threw shadows across the walls of his bedroom.
Tonight, as on countless other wakeful nights, he had familiar ghosts to keep him company. These weren't the demons that shrieked between his ears as he slept. These were melancholy spirits that wafted around him like week-old party balloons still attached by flaccid strings, reminding him that joy had come and gone.
Foggy images of his mother and brother came to him. On silent evenings like this, they would sit together in the kitchen, the two boys dangling their wet boots over the edge of a bench, the young mother telling the past while spooning molasses onto toast. Her own mother, she used to say, woke up on special winter mornings to find candy or little presents in a sock she hung up by the fire. Those weren't presents you earned by having a birthday or finishing school, or anything like that. The presents you found on that day were only meant to show that you were loved, whether you deserved it or not. Haymitch's mother had continued the tradition with her boys every winter.
The serenity outside the bedroom window continued to evoke memories, scene after expectant, childhood scene. In his mind, Haymitch found little gifts in his mother's kitchen on those special mornings, wooden spools, a sack of candy, a downy squawking gosling his brother got in a trade for a rubber ball. He ached with grief. He was sure that he could live easily without the comfort of a human family, if only he could forget that he'd ever had one. But in this nightly alternate reality, his mother and brother lived on and on. He couldn't escape them. He felt guilty for thinking that he might want to.
Inevitably, the emptiness and silence of the bedroom became unbearable. It drove him out of bed. He quickly gave up the search for something to put on his bare feet, and shuffled into the hallway to the stairs.
"Yeah," he thought as he descended, "this would have been that night… about a week before the new year."
A little hooch would chase away these ghosts. Peeta had left a plate of sugar cookies on the table that evening, too. A drink, a snack, and a couple of chapters in the book he'd pulled off the shelf, another drink… he just might be distracted into another hour of sleep.
Still, there would be no presents. "S'all right." Haymitch thought, "Probably don't deserve one anyway."
He snapped on the light switch at the kitchen door. There, curled up asleep in his chair by the kitchen fire, next to an expensive leather bag, he found Effie Trinket.