The first thing that really struck Haymitch in the Capitol, the only element that would stick out in the haze of memories that he kept with him for the rest of his life, was the carpet in the lobby of the Training Centre. It was so thick that it was like walking on settled snow that kept shifting and changing its patterns underfoot. It was a dark red, the colour of venous blood, and Haymitch's boots were dropping mud and soot all over it. You can take the kid out of the Seam, he thought vaguely, as Polyxena Pots ushered them into a huge glass elevator. But you can't get the Seam out of the kid. No matter how much you wash them. Ha.
The floor Twelve penthouse was big and airy and garish, with floor-to-ceilling windows around the entire thing that looked out on the glittering nightlights of Panem's central city. It was a little dizzying for the new tributes, none of whom had ever been so high up in their lives.
Polyxena Pots was talking again, although maybe she had never stopped in the first place. The Bluejoy kid's bottom lip was wobbling and he was clutching at the fringed silk hem of her skirt with her fist, which the escort was choosing to ignore. Maysilee Donner had walked away to one of the windows, taken a seat on the floor beside it and was looking out at the night sky, which was pitch black now from all the night pollution. Mollie was nodding every now and again at Pots' nattering, but her eyes kept drifting towards the dining table laid with a variety of finger food. Haymitch found himself alone, still stood by the elevator, hands deep in the pockets of his leather jacket that still carried traces of home.
How come Ana didn't come and say goodbye?
"Do we have to stay in here all the time?" he asked suddenly, stopping Polyxena mid-sentence in a speech about all the wonderful things they should expect to happen to them in the next few days.
"Sorry?" she asked, blinking with lashes that looked like butterfly wings. Maybe they were.
"In this room, I mean. Are we locked in?"
"No. The whole Training Centre is available to you for the duration of -"
"Right," said Haymitch, turning around and stepping back into the elevator. "Thanks."
"Wait there, young man -!"
The crystal doors slid shut as Haymitch hit a random button for any floor other than this one, closing his eyes and tilting his head back with a sigh. He didn't want to be around them, he realised. Not Pots or the other tributes or anyone. Mollie he couldn't bear to look at now he knew her past and her plan, and the others might try to forge some kind of alliance with him. He didn't want that. He didn't need allies if he was going to win this. No; he could do it all by himself.
The elevator took him down and opened up onto a dimly lit room that seemed to be below street level. It was a bar, he realized, with a sinking feeling. Ghosts of his father lingered around places like this. But the speed of the elevator was making him feel a little sick, and he could not face riding it a third time in five minutes.
The bar was almost empty. A couple of men in purple Gamemakers robes were talking a booth in one corner, and only a handful of stools that faced the mahogany serving counter were taken. It seemed far too grand a place to be secreted away in the basement of the Training Centre. Then again, the Capitol had plenty of grandeur to burn.
"You look lost, kid."
A big, dark-skinned man (District Eleven kind of dark, if Haymitch had to guess) had walked in behind him, already holding a near-empty liquor bottle. "I'm right where I want to be," Haymitch lied, stepping back to allow the man to pass. "Don't let me hold you up."
The man laughed – a loud, chesty laugh that echoed around the bar and caused its few other patrons to look up with disgruntled expressions on their faces. It also made Haymitch smile, if only just a little. "Chaff," said the man, holding out the arm not grasping the bottle for Haymitch to shake.
Haymitch lifted his own hand only to realize that he was faced, not with another palm and fingers, but a stump that had been neatly sewn shut. His surprise must have registered on his face, because Chaff let out another laugh.
"Every time," he chuckled.
"That your only joke?" Haymitch asked, shoving his own hand back into his pocket.
"Why, you wanna steal it?" Chaff asked, setting off for the bar itself beckoning for Haymitch to follow him. "C'mon, I'll buy you a drink. What's the name again, kid?"
"Abernathy. District Twelve."
"What d'you drink, Abernathy-District-Twelve? What's your vice?"
"Water," Haymitch said automatically, taking a seat at the bar next to Chaff. The tender was an Avox, who pulled a tumbler of brown bourbon up for Chaff and decanted water from a bottle for Haymitch.
"Cheers to that." The glasses clinked together. "Why you down here instead of hanging with your district, Abernathy?"
Haymitch shrugged. "Don't see why I need to."
"Ah," said Chaff. "So you really wanna win, huh?"
The water was the cleanest Haymitch had ever seen, and it had a faint sweetness to it. "Maybe. What about your tributes? I'm guessing you're here to mentor as well as drink."
"Oh," said Chaff, "mine are all dead already. The fact they're walking around and crying doesn't mean jack shit."
"So you're hiding from them," Haymitch guessed, and Chaff nodded.
"Nothing wrong with a little cowardice and a lot of alcohol if it gets you through the night," he told the younger tribute.
"You sound like my father."
"Your father sounds like a wise man."
"He was a bastard. He beat my mother and crawled off to die because he couldn't face what he'd done to his family."
"Like I said," Chaff replied. "Wise man."
Haymitch laughed. He couldn't help it. People at home stepped carefully, softly around the shadow of Rath Abernathy, and it made a nice change to hear someone talk about him as brazenly as Chaff just did. Haymitch watched the Victor – who didn't seem to be more than five or six years older than him – knock back the glass of bourbon and gesture to the Avox for another.
"Sure I can't tempt you?" Chaff asked, finishing the second glass as quickly as he did the first.
"Yep. Got any advice for me, then?"
"I come down here to get away from mentoring, kid."
"Twelve's last Victor died before I was born," he said. "Screwed too many of the wrong kind of whore and rotted away too quick to be of any use to me. Our escort cares more about her wig than the kids she's meant to look after, which is… pretty standard for escorts, actually. The trainers aren't gonna favor me over the other forty-seven kids even if I paid them to. No pressure, but you're my only hope. If you don't help me, then my death is on your hands."
Chaff narrowed his eyes. "That's a cold move."
"I know."
The man considered it for a moment, looking not at Haymitch but at the booth of Gamemakers in the corner with a strange expression on his face. "Fine," he said, in a more serious tone than what he had been using before. "Carry me back to the eleventh floor when I'm too drunk to stand, and until then I'll tell you everything I can remember about how to win. It's not a lot, but it's something. Deal?"
"Deal," said Haymitch. "Just don't ask me to shake on it. I'm not falling for that again."
"So you're smart," Chaff grinned. "Good. You'll need that. So the tribute's parade is tomorrow night. We'll write that off, since you don't have a hope in hell of standing out, and even if you can fight -"
"I can."
"- It won't be anywhere near enough the show that the Careers put on to impress any Gamemakers. Keep your head down and mind your own until the interviews. With a mouth like yours, that's your best chance to make them remember you…"
%
Chaff was not wrong. The Tribute's Parade was a poorly organised mess of colour and shouting, during most of which Haymitch had been sulking in his itchy coal-miner's outfit and trying to stay out of the way of the other tributes. In training he and Mollie hung around the survival skills areas together, failing to identify which berries were poisonous and building fires that seemed impossible to light.
"All this is great news for me," Mollie had said, "but you're gonna need to learn some of this if you wanna win."
"Why?" Haymitch asked. "What if it's all poisonous? What if there's nothing to build a fire with anyway? We don't know what's coming."
"Valid point," Mollie said, taking one of the definitely edible berries and popping it in her mouth.
"What's your suicide plan, anyway?"
"Step off the podium too soon," she said. "Not straight away, obviously. I wanna get everyone's attention."
"Oh," said Haymitch. "I get it. You wanna make a statement."
"Doesn't everyone?" Mollie asked, helping herself to another berry. "I'll wait right until the last second, I think."
"What if you miss the last second? You could get distracted."
"Then I'll piss off that thug-looking District One girl," Mollie said, nodding in the direction of her subject. Unusually for the typically slender and more beautiful of the Career districts, this particular blonde tribute was huge and burly, throwing axes around like they were nothing. "She looks like she has trouble processing her anger."
"She really does, doesn't she?" Haymitch agreed. "Wanna try building a snare next?"
"Not really," said Mollie. "But I haven't got anything better to do with my time."
He passed through the training with a score of seven, which was impressive considering that all he did during the solo observation was sit and sharpen a stick into a knife. Haymitch spent most of his free time either in his room, the peaceful rooftop garden it seemed nobody else had discovered, and carrying a blacked-out Chaff from the basement bar to the eleventh floor. It was in doing so that he met Seeder, a nice woman who seemed used to her co-mentor's nonsense, who offered to let Haymitch stay for dinner with them and the four Eleven tributes. He appreciated the offer, but declined. He had no desire to get to know any more people that were only going to die in a few days anyway.
And then, it was the interviews. Haymitch's stylist had shaved his jawline clean and trimmed his hair, pushing it back from his face in a manner that he was not enjoying in the slightest. The suit he was wearing was gray, with black accents to look like coal dust, and Haymitch had vetoed the shoes in favor of wearing his own boots. The mud had still been scrubbed off of them, however. It was the cleanest Haymitch had ever been.
He was the last person to be interviewed by Caesar Flickerman. The rest of them seemed to drag on forever, girl then boy then girl then boy, and for the thousandth time Haymitch was struck by the sheer size of these Games. Polyxena was fussing over the Bluejoy kid, whom she had chosen as her favorite for some reason beyond Haymitch's comprehension. Maysilee Donner was hiding somewhere. Mollie was sulking in a frilly orange dress that suited her about as much as it would a gorilla. Haymitch kept to himself, avoiding even Chaff as he watched the tributes slowly filter out of the room to be interviewed by the face of the Capitol himself.
He wondered if Ana would be watching. His mother would've tried and failed to talk Denton out of seeing any of it, and they would both be in the Hob now, at Greasy Sae's table, clutching uneaten bowls of food other people had bought them out of pity, with the damn dog probably curled up at Denton's feet. Roan would be in the woods, hunting, unable to bring himself to watch live; he would catch up on the news later, by word of mouth. But Ana… was she at home, sat with her family and their own private television, biting her tongue lest she give away her secret feelings for him when he appeared on screen? Maybe she had joined the Donners, where she could be vocal in her distress, or even braved the dangers of the Hob. Maybe she was hiding in her room, unable to face it at all. Haymitch couldn't have put money on any one of them being the truth. All he knew was that he missed her.
"Haymitch!"
Polyxena Pots' voice was hot and sharp in his ear. He could feel her pushing at the small of his back, nails digging in like claws through his clothes as she shepherded him to the edge of the stage. His ears were ringing with the noise of the sound system and the cheering crowd, and his mouth felt drier than ash. "Five," someone was saying. "Four, three, two…"
"Ladies and gentlemen," Caesar Flickerman cried out as Haymitch walked out into the blinding light of the interview stage. "I give you our final tribute of the night – Haymitch Abernathy!"