Chapter 2: Sins of the Father

That very same night, Lillian Everdeen hurried up to the imposing black, gothic gates of the Victors' Village. Storm clouds were gathering overhead; if she hurried, maybe she could drop off this important delivery and beat the rain home.

She had never been to Victors' Village before. Unlike the other Districts, Twelve's was extremely unimpressive. Besides being overgrown with weeds, there were 12 homes. For the last, oh, half a decade, one had lain abandoned. Ten more stood empty. And in the other sat someone who - for that last eight years - had shut himself up here like a hermit, a damned soul in exile. By now, parents would tell their older, braver children stories around Halloween of the ghost who haunted this hillside. It would make for a good ghost story - if only the ghost weren't still living.

Lillian rapped on the door with a shaking hand. After a moment, a young man of 23 - her same age - answered the door. As always, Haymitch Abernathy was unkempt. Scraggly scruff at least four days old clung to his chin like brown barnacles. It would be more off-putting, if his hair of the same color wasn't already receding prematurely - could someone so young really go bald? Lillian didn't know. But if she had to guess, the hair loss was not due to some rare genetic condition, and more due to the horrors of an arena her former classmate had witnessed and lived to tell about - one of only two people in District 12 history to accomplish this feat. Winning that sick death match known as the Hunger Games. And in his case, against double the odds. So many deaths in that Quarter Quell, including her friend Maysilee Donner... so many...

"Hi, Lillian," Haymitch gave his best crack at a smile, yet there was still sadness in it; in his eyes, too. "Come on in."

Brushing her long blond hair out of her face, the young former Merchant followed the Seam folk hero inside. His mansion was huge - wider than several miners' homes lined up end-to-end. Such a pity that it lay in this kind of disarray. Bottles and crumpled bits of old newspapers with Capitol labels and headlines littered the floor. She wondered if Haymitch was some kind of hoarder, or just plain lazy. Either way, she could find no way to blame him - not as she watched him half-fall into a chair and clutch at a near-empty bottle of liquor the way someone might cling to a -

All at once, Lillian could feel the tears coming, and she squeezed her eyes shut to fight against them. Don't think the word, don't think the word... But too late.

Baby. Haymitch clung to that bottle the way he might cling to a baby. The way she wanted to cling to a baby - her baby...

No, she refused to cry in front of Haymitch Abernathy, Victor of the 50th Annual Hunger Games. But apparently, even in his drunken stupor, he'd already noticed.

"Awww, don't cry, sweetheart..." Then: "Is this because your flop of a husband can't get you knocked up?"

She needed to leave. If her frayed emotions didn't necessarily demand it, Haymitch's brazen lack of tact and all-out rudeness damn sure did. Trying to conjure righteous anger where only sadness now reigned supreme, Lillian turned on her heel to depart.

"Wait, don't go - I'm... I'm sorry."

Lillian froze. She had never expected Haymitch to apologize to someone like her. Sure, the old Haymitch, the classmate she had sat besides, might have, in another lifetime. He had mostly been a loner even then; she sometimes wondered if she had been his only friend. At least he would talk to her, albeit stiltedly, whenever she had tried to initiate conversation. But the new Haymitch - the one that had emerged from a hell in which 47 other condemned souls had perished... skills like self-awareness and humility had also died in that arena. Died with a part of him, along with his slain competition. Perhaps not out of arrogance at achieving the status of legend among his people, no, just... brokenness. Resignation. The desire to no longer care.

"How do you know?" The words came out before she could stop them.

"Tonight at the bar. Old Estes sure doesn't know how to hold his liquor - or keep his voice down. He was crying in his beer all night over it with Cotton Hawthorne." And then, even more stunning than his uncharacteristic apology:

"Poor guy. Always did like him. He must love you very much, to try and recruit his best friend to sleep with you just to give you a child." His voice was quiet.

She nearly gasped. Drunk as he was, she instinctively knew Haymitch spoke the truth. Even when not all there, he could still be very observant - she had noticed that when he was in the arena. It was part of the reason he won. Were those really the lengths her husband was going to go to so she could become a mother? Have Cotton sleep with her? Yes, Estes had once tried to bring up the possibility of donors to her, but she had dismissed it out of hand, refusing to believe that there was anything wrong between them and how they made love.

Wiping at her eyes, she turned around and approached the table, taking a seat next to the Victor. She gestured at the nearly empty bottle. "Mind if I have that?"

He pushed it towards her. "Help yourself."

She finished that bottle quickly, and did not refuse the next one that Haymitch seemed to pull out of thin air and uncork. As it is wont to do, the alcohol loosened her speech:

"... Thank God, I have Estes, but..."

Haymitch just sighed. "At least you have somebody." Getting up, he staggered into the next room - the living area, where a pull-out couch bed now lay, as unmade as anything else in this extravagant... mansion? Prison? Haunted house? A combination of all three? It certainly seemed like all of those to Lillian; how could Haymitch stand living here?

Watching him curled up in the bed, Lillian sensed how lonely Haymitch was, and that he could use a soulmate. She wondered why he had never married. Then, she remembered - shudderingly - how Peacekeepers had shot his whole family and girlfriend dead in the street out front of her family's apothecary shop. No wonder he had found no new companion; he couldn't, after what he'd lost.

"Would you do something for me; would you mind just... lying here next to me?" She stared at Haymitch lying in the fetal position, his eyes pleading like a small child's. "No... no need to go any further. I know you're..."

Her eyes filled with pity, Lillian climbed into bed next to him. They held each other in the silence of the night. And then they clung to each other, weeping with wracking sobs over imaginings unfulfilled; he over what he had lost, she over what she could not achieve.

For years afterwards, Lillian was not sure just what made her do it. Desperate for comfort, for some human connection, and sorry for Haymitch's lot, she kissed him. She was a married woman, and they were kissing.

And then they were caressing. And then they were tearing at each other's clothes. Lillian assertively pushed Haymitch flat onto his back and straddled him. The booze had clouded her judgement; the thought that she was being unfaithful to her husband never even crossed her mind...

Hours passed like this. Lillian bouncing up and down on Haymitch while giving breathy moans, before he would flip them over and pound into her. How many times each of them came against the other, she lost count...

Later, just before the sky began to gray, Lillian dressed and left the naked, drunken Victor sleeping in his bed. Nearly debilitated from the pounding of her head and the ache between her legs, she barely made it home and into her own bed, the one that she was beginning to realize she had not shared with her still-sleeping husband the night before.

It was amazing that her thrown together fib, about how she had gotten caught in the rain and spent the night at the Hawthornes, was accepted without question the next morning. Indeed, there was some kind of mysterious hope in Estes's eyes.

It was only a few weeks later that Lillian discovered she was pregnant.

For nine months, she worked harder than she ever had in her life, to make sure the miracle she had been blessed with was born healthy. Didn't matter who had bestowed it...

She did not see him around town in all those months. Even before she was ordered to bedrest, an over-the-moon Estes had pampered her as though she was a fragile doll, his eyes filled with wonder as he would run his hands over her baby bump while she glowingly smiled. Her husband now took over all the errands in town, as well as working himself ragged in the mines. Sometimes, she would catch him talking to himself:

"How did Cotton do it?" he would say. "I'll pay him back a thousand times if it takes the rest of my life!" Incredibly, when they had the Hawthornes over for dinner one night to tell them the news, Cotton did not refute the assumption. And surprisingly, neither did Hazelle. Had Cotton told her about Estes's despondent night at the bar? He must have. And anyway, it didn't matter. His hands were clean of the whole situation. Someone else had gotten to Lillian first. Nobody had to know the truth...

She thought of him, though - her baby's famous father whom she had not seen since the night that they had created her. But had he heard about her pregnancy? Had he connected the dots, and likely descended into a total panic? If he did, he mercifully kept it to himself.

When the day at last came - that morning in early May - she pushed and screamed and screamed and pushed. The agony was all worth it, when she finally got to hold that baby girl sporting the tell-tale grey eyes of the Seam - and, perhaps most strikingly, a crop of choclatey brown hair...

But Cotton had brown hair, too. As she had told herself countless times before, nobody had to know who was really responsible for giving her -

"Katniss. Katniss Sierra Everdeen."