A/N: I would just like to thank you all again for your positive responses to this story (despite its darkness). This chapter is quite short, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.
Those walls could do with a coat of paint, she thought. Perhaps a nice yellow like my living room. Mundane thoughts like these were her defence mechanisms; they kept her from the darker corners of her mind, which seemed to be occupying a great deal of space more than they used to. Oh, look! A dried bloodstain on the shackles. She hadn't noticed that before. Her eyes fixated on the little brown fleck and she wondered how many more there would be before the end came and whether it was even hers. It's funny – isn't it? – how you can look at somebody's blood, a vital part of them, and still not know a thing about them. How old were they? Did they have a happy childhood? A family? Which District did they come from? Or were they Capitolian?
Were they dead or alive?
Effie knew what awaited her and she welcomed it. Death would save her from this place. He would be merciful and she would thank him.
The tray of food – a paltry bowl of grey mush (without a spoon) that smelled strongly of rotting fish – had remained untouched after the last Interrogator had left, but they seemed to have given up on forcing her to accept it. The notion both relieved and worried her. No Interrogators, not even a single Peacekeeper, had been into her cell for quite some time. So where were they? Or, more importantly, what were they planning?
As if the room had been reading her thoughts, the bolt clicked and Effie instinctively pushed herself against the back wall, casting her grey eyes downward.
"Effie?"
Hallucinations must be setting in from the depravation. How else could Haymitch Abernathy be standing before her? He hadn't even greeted her sarcastically or with that ubiquitous tinge of disgust. No, he had said her name – for the first time in a long while – with something akin to concern. If this was a hallucination, it was a cruel one.
"Effie," Haymitch repeated more loudly, as though she had not heard him the first time.
Effie could not find the voice to reply. She was even hoping now for this to be a distortion of reality cooked up by his disorientated mind. She did not want to be seen this way. Weak. Broken. Dependent on a man who hated her guts.
But there he was, followed by a trail of artificial light from the doorway behind. He didn't approach right away and it made her feel like a caged animal that scared off its trainer.
"I'm sorry." The words struggled from between her parched lips before her brain could assign any kind of meaning to them.
"Don't be stupid," Haymitch replied flatly and finally, but warily, walked towards her. He pulled out a small metal key from his pocket and knelt at her feet. As he reached for the shackle, Effie flinched away. He stared at her hard for a second and a shadow crossed his rugged features. What was it? Pity? Anger? Both? Effie could not tell, but it frightened her.
She struggled against the urge to move away when his hand brushed her ankle but was overcome by the sense of relief that followed her liberation from the chain. It was replaced immediately by the sense that something was wrong. How did Haymitch get in here unharmed? How did he get the key to her freedom? She would not think of it now.
She was being rescued.
Nausea rose up through Effie's body when the pain set in. She had managed to hobble halfway across the cell – a few mere metres – with the support of Haymitch's shoulder under her arm, but even that had been near unbearable. Her leg seared from the injury that still had not healed. Her arm still ached from the bruises. Her mind ached from the exhaustion. She was not going to make it out alive.
The world fell from beneath her feet as Effie's knees buckled inward and her body hit the cold tile floor with an unsettling crack.
That was it. She was gone.
Then came the ascension. But it felt as though she was being carried. This was not supposed to happen, was it? There was no guardian angel assigned to Effie Trinket, God knows she had found that out the hard way. Then she couldn't be dead and somebody must really be carrying her. Haymitch. For the moment, she did not care where he was taking her. He was here. Like a child in the arms of their mother, she shifted towards the warmth of his chest.
"It's alright now." For once, she really tried to believe his words.
The night swelled around her, a mass of cold darkness. It had been so long since she had last seen the sky, even longer since she had cared to, but to Effie it was suddenly forbidding. A light humming told her that a hovercraft was stationed nearby and she wondered whether this escape would be short-lived, whether a peacekeeper was nearby, whether they would kill Haymitch right there and take her back to the cell. Or would they be merciful and kill her too? She highly doubted it.
A moment later, there was an odd shift in the ground below her and her she was being tipped back onto her feet. Haymitch's voice crept into her ear.
"I know it hurts, but I need you to stand just for a bit so you can get a decent hold on the ladder."
"Haymitch, we can't afford to stay any longer." Funny, that sounded like Plutarch Heavensbee. What on earth was he doing here? Wasn't one person seeing this bad enough? Effie winced as she put the weight on her damaged leg and felt a jet of fire run through as payment. Her fingers closed around the cool metal.
Even though she knew she could not fall, her fingers gripped the ladder ever tighter.
