Hello everyone and welcome back for a brand new hayffie story!

What is "The Dragon & The Mockingjay" you'll ask and how does it have any link at all with hayffie. And I will answer, this story is a toddler au based on Archervale (who you can find either on deviantart or tumblr and whose drawings I really encourage you to go look at) 's drawings of hayffie taking care of toddler Katniss and Peeta.

This story is 12 chapters in all, chapters are rather long so I hope you don't get bored and I hope you enjoy the ride!

The Dragon & The Mockingjay

1.

The four year old girl stared back at Haymitch steadily.

It wasn't silent, not really. The echo of the geese's honking in the yard provided a background noise, he could hear the familiar hum of the fridge in the kitchen and the logs regularly popping in the living-room's fireplace. Yet the silence between them felt heavy.

The kid had some balls, he would give her that. He had half-expected her to wail as soon as she had put a foot in the house but so far no tears had appeared even when the social worker had left, obviously in a hurry to go on to better things. He knew the Seam was a small town, lost in the middle of nowhere in the Appalachia region, but, still, one would expect more diligence from someone responsible for little kids. They had hardly looked into him at all, happy to discharge the responsibility of one more orphan to her closest living relative.

A relative she had never seen before in her short life.

Hence why he had been expecting tears and a tantrum that would have been more than understandable given the circumstances.

"We've got the same eyes." he said – which, admittedly, was the dumbest thing to open a conversation with anyone and especially a four years old.

The thing was, Haymitch didn't know how to speak to four years old and being left in charge of one hadn't exactly been in his short term plans.

Taking in a niece he had never knew existed sort of took the cake of his relatively shitty life at the moment – even if they did have the same grey eyes. What else was there to do though? He had never known his half-sister – his father had been an asshole who had abandoned him, his mother and his brother to a life of poverty to play family elsewhere, in the richest part of town, and as far as Haymitch had been concerned that had been the end of that. He had always known he had a half-sister somewhere, he had even known her name was Aster and he had also known what she looked like for having glimpsed her once or twice – the Seam wasn't that big – but he had never talked to her and he had been only too happy to forget everything about the whole thing when he had left for the Army.

Of course, that had proved to be another load of shit but it was written somewhere that whatever decision he took would always come back to bite him in the ass.

The point was, though, that he had never known Aster and yet it had still felt like being punched in the guts when the social worker had told him on the phone that she, her husband and her youngest daughter who, if he had understood correctly, had barely been one year old, had died in a car crash – and not only because his own mother and brother had died in similar circumstances. Katniss was left all alone in the world with him for only living relative and it didn't matter that he was already a shitty uncle who hadn't known her name a few days earlier, her parents hadn't left a will and thus it was either him or the system. He had hesitated, he really had, because he wasn't uncle material – never mind parent material – and he had thought maybe she would be better off out there.

He couldn't bring himself to abandon her though. She was a survivor, like him. And he might do a shitty job of it but he could at least try. He owed it to that stranger he had never really called a sister but who had still been in his thoughts some times during his life.

Katniss was staring, unwavering, standing in the exact same spot the social worker had left her in while she had made him sign some papers. There was a big messenger bag tossed over her shoulder that looked far too heavy for a kid, a navy suitcase almost as high as she was behind her and another duffel bag at her feet. It was all she had with her. It wasn't much. Then again, from what he had gathered, his half-sister hadn't exactly been rich. The tables had turned somewhere down the line.

Funny how life worked.

"Okay." he said when she remained silent, only jutting her little chin higher in the air. Her long dark hair was tied up in a ponytail and he hoped she was old enough to take care of it by herself because he was already dreading having to play hairdresser. "Do you want to see the house? Your room?"

He had cleaned up. Or he had tried to, at least. Chaff often joked that his house looked exactly like the geese pen in the yard and smelled almost as bad. He lived alone and he was no angel in the house. He had made an effort though. He had picked up the empty bottles of liquor that usually littered his floor as well as the dirty dishes he had a habit of leaving everywhere, he had vacuumed and mopped the floor, he had tidied up the kitchen and stocked the fridge with different sodas in hope she would like one of them, he had tried to make the bathroom on the first floor landing useable – which had actually been the easy part since he mostly used the one en-suited to the master bedroom – and he had made sure the guest room was livable.

Katniss was very good at the silent staring. It was almost creepy.

Kids were supposed to be loud and boisterous, weren't they?

Well… Maybe not kids who had lost their entire family a few days earlier. He already felt like an asshole.

The messenger bag moved.

Haymitch blinked, wondering if it was the lack of liquor – he had been flirting for years on the line between possible alcoholic and complete drunk – but there was a ruffling sound and then it moved again.

"Sweetheart, what do you have in there?" he frowned.

She held the bag closer to her chest, defensive, but didn't take a single step back, almost challenging him to try and pry it away. His question was answered when a ginger tomcat's head peered out of the bag, pushing the lapel away enough to sniff the air. The cat looked positively monstrous. And it hissed when Katniss tried to push it back inside.

He should probably have been concerned about a possible danger for the kid but he couldn't help a smirk. "You sneaked that past the social worker?"

"His name is Buttercup!" she snapped petulantly, finally succeeding in pushing the cat back down in the bag. "He's Prim's cat and they were going to leave him all alone! He's mine now."

There was a clear challenge there, she was almost daring him to object. It would probably have been a good time to start putting boundaries and rules in place but he was impressed by the sneaking around of a cat under that woman's nose. The social worker had taken her back to the house only long enough to pick up some essential things. How attentive to his niece had she been if she hadn't even noticed her shoving an angry cat inside her bag?

Plus, Prim was the other kid's name – the baby niece he would never get to know – and he wasn't cruel enough to make a four years old abandon her dead sister's cat.

"Okay." he shrugged. "I think you can let him out now. Let him explore."

She looked uncertain, as if she had expected an outright refusal and wasn't sure this wasn't a trick to get rid of Buttercup. She scowled for several minutes, obviously thinking hard, and then she slowly put the bag down. The cat didn't lose a second before dashing away and disappearing down the corridor. Haymitch simply hoped he wouldn't try to tackle the geese.

"Want to explore too?" he offered, awkwardly outstretching his hand.

She eyed it with open mistrust and stepped right past him, poking her head in the first door on the right which happened to be the living-room. She wandered around the room for a while, looking at some of the things he rarely used like the dvd player and touching some of the things he did use like his bookshelves.

"Do you have fairy tales?" she asked, letting her little hand run over the cracked spins of books she wouldn't be able to read before at least a decade – and the thought that she would still be there in a decade made him falter for a bit.

"No, sweetheart." he winced. Her arrival had been short-notice. It had taken a few days for the social worker to track him down and it had taken two more for him to make up his mind. "We can get some if you want."

"Prim likes the princess ones. It makes her laugh." she declared. "But I like the ones with dragons and adventures."

"Okay." he agreed easily and he knew he was saying okay an awful lot but he was so out of his depths… Whatever. Princesses, dragons, adventures… He was up for anything as long as she didn't start wailing. He truly wouldn't know what to do with a wailing kid. He was a little disturbed by the way she kept talking about her sister in present tense but he figured she was still young and maybe it would take a little while to sink in.

"It's a big room." she commented.

"It's a big house." he offered. Too big for him alone. He had bought it after his first big mission in the army, intending for his mother and brother to move in. Life had prevented that.

"My house is smaller." she conceded. "But I like it better."

"Fair enough." he sighed.

Granted Haymitch wasn't an expert in kids but she must have been the oddest little girl he had ever seen. When she was done touring the ground floor, he grabbed her stuff and hauled it up the stairs. The cat had already made himself at home on the windowsill of the guest room and hissed when he showed her in.

"Nice pet you have, sweetheart." he snorted.

She wrinkled her little nose in obvious distaste. "I hate him, he never wants me to pet him."

He almost asked her why they were burdening themselves with it, then, but thought better of it. Her sister's cat, she had said. She wouldn't want to be parted from it.

She looked around with a frown. "I sleep here?"

"Yeah." he said, placing the suitcase and the duffle bag near the wardrobe. It wasn't exactly children friendly. There was a double bed, a wardrobe, a dresser and a threadbare rug, all intended for adults. He had bought the house furnished and had never seen a need to change it. "We'll get you some funnier things, okay? Pink even."

"I don't like pink." she retorted.

"Of course you don't." he sighed. It would have been too easy if she had been a stereotypical kid. She didn't want princesses, she wanted dragons. She didn't want pink, she wanted… "I will let you settle in."

He didn't leave her a chance to agree or disagree with that, he went back downstairs, eager for some space to process everything. His steps automatically took him to the kitchen and to the cupboard he had hidden the liquor in. He poured himself a drink, took a sip and then tossed everything down the drain. He couldn't drink with a kid in his house, could he? Not the first day at the very least. Not ever, really. He couldn't let her see him drunk. It would frighten her and he might hurt her by accident…

He went to feed the geese, needing a distraction. He would leave her a couple of hours to herself, he decided, it would give her time to unpack and then… They would figure it out. One step at a time, it was all he was capable of at the moment. One step at a time.

A couple of hours later – a couple of hours he spent roaming the house aimlessly – she had yet to come back down and the house was entirely too silent for his comfort.

He cautiously went up the stairs to check on her and found her sitting on the rug in front of the bed, hugging her tiny legs close to her chest. She wasn't crying but her lips were wobbling and she was rocking back and forth. The luggage remained untouched.

"What's wrong?" he asked, immediately worried. With his luck, she was sick. He crouched next to her, reaching for her forehead. She was warm but not in a feverish way. At least he didn't think so. "You're okay, sweetheart?"

"I need to go pee pee." she sniffed.

"Then go…" he said, not understanding where the problem was. "You can go by yourself, yeah? You don't need help?"

"I'm a big girl!" she said defensively, as if he had just insulted her.

"I know." he offered. "You've been a very big girl since you've arrived. Very brave." She was mildly placated by that so he took his chance. "What's the problem, sweetheart?"

"I don't remember where the bathroom is." she finally confessed with another sniff that he was very afraid would lead to crying.

"You should have looked around." he said, standing up to lead the way. "It's your house too now."

"You left." she accused him, following him so closely she bumped into his legs when he stopped in front of the bathroom.

"I was downstairs." he countered.

"That's still not here." she pointed out before slamming the bathroom door shut. He had thought only teenagers slammed doors. Clearly he needed some help with the kids business. He waited in the corridor, not keen on being accused of leaving again. The door opened after only a minute and she glowered at him. "I need help to wash my hands. Mommy says it's important."

Again with the present tense, he thought.

He found a box that, once upturned, could be used as footboard for her to reach the sink. She declared herself satisfied with that solution but the glaring informed him he wasn't entirely forgiven for not thinking about everything by himself.

She wandered back to her bedroom so he followed, feeling a little as if the roles had been reversed and he was the four years old and Katniss the grown up.

"You didn't unpack." he noticed, poking at the suitcase. "You got any other cats in there?"

She sat back down on the rug and looked at him as if he was crazy. "Mommy cleans. I just help. I don't know where things go."

Yeah, on second thought, expecting a kid so young to put her clothes away was maybe a bit much.

"I'm going to suck balls at this." he sighed while dragging the suitcase on the bed so he could see what was inside.

"Why do you want to suck balls?" she asked, puzzled. "That's yucky! Balls go in the mud when you play."

He opened his mouth and wisely closed it again. The first item he found was a toilet bag with a toothbrush, some strawberry toothpaste, a hairbrush, hair ties and some pins…

"You want to go put that in the bathroom?" he suggested, handing it to her. "You can decide where everything goes. It's your bathroom."

"Bathroom for me only?" she asked with wide eyes.

"Yeah." he nodded.

He didn't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. She didn't seem to know either but she ran away with the toilet bag. He thought about forbidding her to run in the house and then shrugged, deciding if she fell it would be more of a deterrent than whatever he would ever say. As long as she didn't fall down the stairs that was – he was doing great already, he thought not without irony. She came back and grabbed a handful of tee-shirts before dumping them in a heap in the drawer he had been filling with her clothes. She looked so proud of herself for helping that he patted her head awkwardly and continued with his own task until he uncovered an old stuffed animal frayed in some places.

"My Mockingjay!" Katniss exclaimed and jumped to snatch the thing from his hand. She held it close to her heart with both arms.

"Your what?" he asked, eyebrows creased in confusion. It was some kind of black and white bird... A magpie, maybe.

"That's my Mockingjay." she repeated, narrowing her eyes in that way he was quickly learning meant he was an idiot.

"Okay, I'll bite, what's a Mockingjay?" he sighed.

She didn't look impressed by his lack of knowledge. "It's a special bird who can sing like humans. It's like a mockingbird but with a jay. My Daddy says so."

"It's a very pretty... Mockingjay." he offered.

She nodded gravely. "It's rare."

"I bet it is." he humored her.

It didn't take much longer to put everything away for the good reason that there wasn't much to begin with. The messenger bag in which she had been carrying the cat was more interesting: a framed picture of her family that was dutifully placed on the nightstand next to her bed, a worn out leather jacket that she put on but was so big on her she looked like she could drown in it – it was her father's, or so she told him with wobbly lips before breathing in the smell that must have still been clinging to it – and a golden pin with a bird that her friend had gifted her with. Everything had clearly been snatched from the house while the social worker hadn't been looking. She had been thorough in her theft. No toys.

The toys were in the duffel bag. Some pencils and coloring books, a plastic bow complete with plastic arrows, a book on birds and a few tin figurines. No dolls or anything like that but he hadn't really expected to find any anyway. She didn't look the kind to spend hours having tea parties and playing dress-up with dolls. They put the toys in a drawer until they could find a chest or something to use as a toy box. And until he could buy her more toys. He and his brother had had next to nothing growing up but he had money now and he would buy her whatever she wanted.

"Pasta for dinner, sounds good?" he asked. It better sounded good because it was probably the only thing he knew how to cook properly apart from stew, soup and take-outs. "Or do you want pizza?"

"Pasta." she decided.

He expected her to remain in her room and play but she followed him downstairs and sat at the kitchen table while he got everything ready, clutching her Mockingjay to her chest.

She wasn't talkative and that suited Haymitch just fine. He tried to make her laugh once or twice but his best jokes were not suitable for small children and, in the end, they ate mostly in silence. Convincing her to take off the leather jacket to get into pajamas was difficult but he managed well enough, mentally patting himself on the back for the notorious absence of tears. She was clearly independent and didn't really required his help further than to draw her a bath, help her in the bathtub and out of it – which was embarrassing in itself because he didn't know the kid and he was ill-at-ease. She had everything else covered.

He didn't know when bedtime was supposed to be, he wished they had left a manual or something, but she was rubbing her eyes and she was clearly tired so once she was in her pajamas, he helped her on the bed that was too high for her to reach on her own without a lot of climbing, tucked her in – or tried to, at least – mumbled a goodnight and shuffled out of the room. He passed by Buttercup on his way downstairs, the cat was obviously plotting his murder.

He collapsed on a kitchen chair and let out a deep breath.

He wasn't exactly surprised when Chaff opened the backdoor and came in without a knock or an invitation. He had suspected his best friend would show up at some point.

Chaff took one look at him and wordlessly fetched two glasses in the cupboard.

"Milk for me." Haymitch mumbled.

"That bad?" his friend laughed. It turned out the milk was sour. Go figure.

They had barely settled down around a glass of some disgusting pink soda – he didn't know what it tasted like and he didn't particularly want to find out, he had bought it because he had figured kids liked it and Katniss would like pink – when there was a noise upstairs and then the sound of sock clad feet running down the stairs.

"Katniss?" he called out.

She was quick in rushing through the door and colliding with his chair, almost slicing her head open in two in the process.

"Where's the fire, kiddo?" Chaff teased.

She froze when she realized Haymitch wasn't alone but quickly recovered and put on her best scowl. That girl could have won scowling competitions.

"I don't want to be upstairs by myself." she promptly declared.

"You're scared?" he frowned. "'Cause there's nothing to be scared of, sweetheart. I can..."

"I'm not scared!" she cut him off petulantly. If possible, the scowl deepened.

"Well, she has a temper. Must run in the family." Chaff commented, taking a sip of his soda. He made a face and placed it down. "This is disgusting."

He used his stump to push the glass away and that caught Katniss' attention. She edged closer, watching him warily from under her fringe, ready to bolt at the first movement – or maybe to use the magpie/Mockingjay stuffed toy as a weapon, that was anyone's guess.

"You don't have a hand." she said flatly.

Talk about bluntness...

Chaff's laughter boomed out in the kitchen. "She's your niece alright, Haymitch!"

Katniss frowned and turned to him, waiting for him to explain.

"You can't really say that sort of things to people like that." he winced.

"Why?" she demanded. "He doesn't have a hand."

He shrugged. "You know... I never got the hang of it so... Never mind."

She looked as if the whole sidetrack conversation had been a great inconvenience and turned back to Chaff.

"You don't have a hand." she stated again. In case he had missed it the two first times, Haymitch figured.

"I had one." Chaff explained, showing her his stump. "I lost it."

"Like a boo boo?" she caught up, reaching out to touch the scarred tissues. Most kids would have run away but Katniss studied it with some interest. She poked it, wrinkling her nose as if she expected it to start bleeding.

"Sort of." Chaff nodded. "I was a soldier like your uncle."

"My Mommy fixes people's boo boos." she said, completely ignoring the rest. "But my Mommy isn't here."

Chaff glanced at him uneasily and Haymitch rubbed his face, at a loss for what to say.

"Yeah, I heard. Sorry about that, kiddo." his friend eventually mumbled. "It's already fixed though. Look, all good." He hit his stump against the palm of his other hand a few times.

Katniss had completely lost interest in that though. "The lady said Mommy and Daddy and Prim aren't coming back."

She was blinking fast but he could see the tears shining in her eyes and he had no idea what to do about it.

"I'm going to go." Chaff said, standing up and clapping him on the shoulder once before making his escape. Lucky him.

With a sigh – because he had never wanted to break a four years old's little heart, thank you very much – he lifted her up and sat her down on the kitchen table so he could sit in front of her and they would be at eye level. She wriggled her legs and her feet kept hitting him in the thighs but he didn't complain.

"They explained what happened to your family, yeah?" he asked, as gently as he could.

She wouldn't meet his eyes. She looked down, her face veiled by her long ponytail. "They're not coming back and now I live with you forever."

"Yeah, pretty much." he nodded. "But you know they didn't want to leave you, right? You know it wasn't their choice?"

She glanced up at that but it was brief. "But they won't come back."

"They can't, sweetheart." he whispered. "I'm so sorry but they can't." Her legs wriggled harder, hitting him in the chest. He wrapped his hands around her calves to put an end to that. "It's going to be okay, Katniss. I know you don't believe me but I'll make it okay. I'll try."

That wasn't a promise he had intended to make. He never made promises he wasn't sure he could fulfill. But what else could he say to the kid? That she would suffer forever and that even if he only had the best intentions he would inevitably fuck up?

"But what happens if I get a boo boo and Mommy isn't here to fix it?" she muttered.

"I will fix it." he shrugged.

"And what happens if you leave too and never come back?" she insisted.

"I won't leave." he replied. And he guessed that was it for his slow descent into alcoholism. No more booze. He would have to find other ways to cope.

He kept expecting her to burst into tears but she was made of stronger stuff than that. She nodded, not quite believing him he suspected, and hopped down from the table before declaring she would wait with him on the couch and fall asleep there while he watched TV and he could carry her to bed afterwards like her Daddy did. Haymitch wasn't really a great TV watcher but the compromise seemed a good one so he followed her plan, still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The other shoe dropped the next morning.

It didn't start in the best way. She stumbled in the kitchen, rubbing her eyes, clutching her Mockingjay in one hand and her hairbrush in the other, while he was trying to cook eggs for breakfast. There was a fine line between crisped and burnt and he was on the charred side of it. She made a face when he dropped the eggs on her plate and demanded her cereals. He didn't have any cereals in the house. He added grocery shopping to the list of things to do.

She was grumpy after that and waved the hairbrush at him, clearly expecting him to do something about her tangled hair. Maybe they should have untied the ponytail before she went to bed because it had come half undone and it was a mess of strands coiled around the hair tie. He did his best but her repeated affirmations that "Mommy never does it like that" weren't helping. By the time he managed to get the hair tie out of her hair, she wasn't just grumpy, she was sulking. It only grew worse when he tried to actually brush her hair. She didn't say anything but he knew he must have been hurting her.

"Braid." she requested.

"Do I look like I know how to braid hair?" he scowled.

She gave him a glance over her shoulder that told him she thought he didn't look like he could do anything – and certainly not braids or eggs.

And the fucking cat kept mewling despite the fact that Haymitch had already given him some scraps of bacon and a bowl of water.

"Are you ever going to shut up?" he snapped at the animal who hissed back at him. "What kind of food did you give him before?"

Adopting a cat had been even lower on his list of things to do than adopting a niece. It wasn't that he didn't like cats but that one? That one was the devil in disguise. He had tried to claw him twice already.

"He doesn't want food he wants Prim!" Katniss shouted back. The cat had jumped on the table, trying to investigate what was in the plates and she pushed him away with all her strength only managing to get her hand scratched in the process. "She's dead, you stupid cat!"

For a second, time seemed to freeze.

But that word, out of her own mouth, so big for someone so small, seemed to be her undoing. The tears he had dreaded all afternoon the previous day were there now. She was sobbing and screaming and she struggled when he picked her up – what else could he do but pick her up? – but then she wrapped her arms around his neck and she cried and cried...

He tried to rock her, to walk around and make soothing sounds but he knew, deep down, there was nothing he could do to assuage her grief. He was painfully acquainted with that particular sorrow.

She made herself sick and it only made her cry harder.

Haymitch was completely at a loss but he did what he could until she eventually fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

She didn't mention anything when she woke up but she became clingy, following him everywhere around the house. The geese seemed to take her mind away from everything for a while. She said they were ugly but she liked birds, she was delighted to learn those ones had teeth and she even played at hunting them for a while, hiding behind rocks and piles of wood to jump on an unsuspecting bird. He hovered a little at first, worried she would get herself bitten, but she was swift on her feet and very good at running away from the geese before they became aggressive. The gaggle accepted that new game with the stoicism of a flock of birds used to being hunted by foxes and the occasional wild cat. In comparison, the little human was certainly not as bad.

Watching her play in the yard gave Haymitch hope.

It was bad for now but maybe... Katniss was strong. She would make it through this and, hopefully, things would get better.

The both of them had a whole life ahead to learn how to get better.

Did you like it? Next week familiar faces will pop up ;) Let me know what you think!