Nobody ever went into the hallway bedroom in Haymitch's house.
It was the only room he kept locked and though both Katniss and Peeta had tried to get into it during the time of his withdrawal to look for more alcohol for him, neither could get in no matter what they tried.
Nobody could get in without a special key that Haymitch kept on him at all times.
He, himself, rarely went into that room but when he did he would never go in intoxicated for fear of destroying the only part of the house he actually cared about, the only part of the house that wasn't a mess.
Even though it hurt him to visit it, Haymitch couldn't resist, once a year at least, slipping behind the door and leaning against it so he could get a full view of the room which was almost papered with photographs and drawings.
His mother.
His father.
His little brother.
His big sister, her husband and their daughter.
Family photographs.
His girlfriend.
His best friend.
All the people he had lost to the capitol.
When he returned from the Victory tour and he saw they weren't home Haymitch felt as if he couldn't breathe, they were dead, all gone…
All except for his nine year old niece.
He couldn't understand why they had let her live but murdered everybody else.
Maybe, he thought naively, they wanted him to keep one family member to remind him painfully of all that he had lost; maybe nobody wanted to get their hands dirty by murdering a little girl.
As the years went by Haymitch raised his niece, though he was barely an adult himself.
He began to grow more cynical the more time he spent with the other Victors.
He began to suspect why his niece survived the tragic 'accident' that had killed the rest of his family.
They wanted her for the Games.
They wanted to watch Haymitch suffer through watching her die in the very Games he had inadvertently defied by being cleverer then them.
It wasn't until she was fifteen that the Capitol claimed her.
She was taken into the Games and they made it very clear it was a punishment for him.
Little did they know Haymitch had been training her, she made it all the way until the top two, even with the Gamemakers targeting her the entire way.
Only Haymitch's niece and her ally remained.
Neither wanted to kill the other, all they could do was just stand and stare at one another, unable to quite believe what they had to do, this was different then taking out someone you hadn't gotten to know.
The ally lunged involuntarily forward with his knife as though he had been knocked from behind by some invisible force.
And then she was dead.
They didn't show her ally crying over her body, but relished in Haymitch's anguish.
Haymitch relived watching her die every time he visited the room and saw her happy face smiling out of the photographs, surrounded by the family she had barely gotten to know.
He couldn't stand being in the room for too long, remembering the dead, but he was almost grateful for the pain that came from love, it was a feeling the Capitol couldn't take away, though they used it against him, encouraged him to numb it with alcohol.
But he never lost it.
They thought killing his niece in the Games was a brilliant revenge, but all it did was make his resolve stronger.
One day he would overthrow them.
One way or another they were going down.
A/N: Ok ok I know photographs in District Twelve aren't really plausible but I liked the way this story turned out nonetheless. If there's anybody who got this far, thanks for reading