A/N: Happy New Year's to everyone. (I completely recommend the book Unwind, by the way, which is pretty amazing.)
sweetheart.
"I don't want to be social," Connor says. "I don't like the kids here." "Why?" asks Risa, "They're too much like you?" "They're losers." "Yeah, that's what I mean."
He gives her a halfhearted dirty look. ~Neal Shusterman, Unwind
Two years later, a man (winner of the forty-eighth, he's vaguely sure) comes up to him. "Chaff," he introduces himself.
Haymitch grunts. He hates victors, which is more than a little hypocritical. Chaff orders him another drink, plus one for himself, so he changes his mind. "You got a girl in Eleven?"
He nods. "Her, one sister, three brothers. You?"
"Not anymore." He doesn't offer anything other than that.
"Lucky bastard," Chaff says, only half-jokingly. Haymitch downs his drink and laughs, bitter, because he's doesn't feel lucky at all.
On the wall behind them, a gong rings. The cameras switch around dizzyingly, boygirlboygirl. A girl hurls a knife into the back of a fleeing tribute, and the younger falls easily. And then the next death. And the next. And the next.
He looks away, but Chaff's looking at him steadily. "What?" he snaps.
"That was your kid."
"They're not my kids," he says, even though they are. (Niels Allerman, fifteen. The girl won't last much longer.) He sits by and laughs at them most of time, because they don't stand a chance at living and he can't do anything but hate the fact.
"Don't tell me I'm a coward."
"You're a coward," Chaff says promptly.
"Takes one to know one," he answers, and they can't argue with that.