A/N: Not much to say. This is years old; I wrote it a while back, then found it this morning, revised it and now here it is. It's shorter than I remembered, and I don't really like it—it kind of sucks, and it was hard to blend the two styles (you know, old stuff, new stuff), seeing as I write so very differently now—but whatever. Hope you like it. If you did let me know; comments are love.
She sticks her hand out, and at that moment he thinks it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. He doesn't know that she will die a few days later, doesn't know that only a few minutes after they part for the last time she will be killed. They clasp hands, agreeing to an alliance—and then the scene shifts, changes, mutates into the look in his opponent's eyes as the ax comes bouncing back and buries itself into her skull. She is only sixteen, his age… and now she is dead. This is what the Capitol has forced us to become, he thinks, and it's the only thing that manages to make it through the buzzing in his skull, the roaring in his ears—and then the world twists into a nightmarish version of the arena and blood is everywhere, raining from the skies, flooding from the lakes and the berries and he is drowning in it. He claws upward, desperate for an escape from the ocean of blood, the sea of blood, but it doesn't work and he is growing dizzy from lack of oxygen and his lungs are burning—
Haymitch wakes with a start, liquid sloshing over him from the half-empty liquor bottle he clutches like a lifeline in his fist.
Awareness returns in a flood, brings with it that aching pain that never goes away, only fades to a dull throb, no matter how much alcohol he downs. Maysilee Donnor's face flashes before his eyes. Then the girl he killed with her own ax. And then dozens of faces are flashing before his eyes: the faces of the 48 tributes he faced in the Quarter Quell, the faces of the children he's mentored (what a joke) and seen die in the arena, the faces of the families whose loved ones have been snatched away by the cruelty of the Capitol.
He takes another swig from the bottle to deaden the pain, and then another, until slowly he is numbed, and then stares at the fire because he has nothing else to do. The flames shift and shimmer, throwing glistening bars of light across the floor of this empty house in this empty village.
And in the shifting of the shadows, the flickering of the flames, he remembers.
He remembers the looks on the faces of Maysilee Donnor's family at his victory party in District 12. They can barely look at him, can barely mask the hatred on their faces—and that is the first time he reaches for the liquor, at his twisted victory celebration, to blunt the horror of all the things he'd seen and burn out the guilt that he survived.
That is also the first time he has the nightmares.
He remembers what the Capitol has done to them, a spark in his chest that he uses to rekindle himself when he starts to forget the goddamn point of all this torture. He remembers his little brother, unable to meet his eyes (big brother, the murderer) after he returned home. He remembers the sticky, slippery feeling of blood soaking his skin. It never goes away, that feeling, not once in the long and tiresome years since he came out of the Games. On his deathbed, he thinks, the blood will still be there, a gruesome reminder of the suffering he has caused.
He drinks to forget, but also to remember: the look on Maysilee's face as she held out her hand, the cold dread in his opponent's eyes as the ax came hurtling up, the precise feel of the gaping wound in his side that still bears a faint scar. These things—the little things—these he holds at a distance from himself, locks them away in a careful box in a tiny corner of his messed-up psyche, because if he remembered them all constantly he would go insane and it is only when he's drunk that he is numb enough to stand the pain.
He stares at the glowing amber dregs swirling in the bottom of the bottle.
Today, when his eyes finally close, he will not dream of Maysilee. Instead he will dream of her: Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire. The only one to come out of the Hunger Games alive—because Haymitch isn't alive, not really, not anymore. He is dead and cold and drunk and so, so broken, and the spark that used to burn so very brightly within him is fading.
He's so damn tired. All he wants is for this to be over.
He drinks and he sleeps and he dreams of Katniss Everdeen , the Mockingjay, the leader of the rebellion, salvation. Most of all, Haymitch remembers. He wishes he didn't, he tries so desperately not to, but he remembers.
He can never forget.