Disclaimer is attached to first chapter

Inspired by Poe's 'The Raven'.

Capitol Nights, chapter 53

The storm actually wakes him up. Haymitch rolls out of bed, assessing the room with quicksilver eyes. He's still pleasantly drunk, more fascinated by what's happening outside than wary and paranoid about what might have gotten in here with him while he was asleep. Liquor is the elixir of the gods, it really is. If he can just stay like this all the time, he'll be alright.

Sifting through these thoughts and finding nothing new, Haymitch moves to the window and pushes the heavy green curtains aside. The rain continues to hammer down on the roof, a constant and ineluctable roar. Ineluctable, so he lets it carry him along for a few minutes, his mind blissfully empty as it fills the world.

And- there's lightening. That could mean he's about to lose the lights. And just like that the wariness and distant fear come bubbling up like the taste of bile in his throat and it's almost as bad as being sober. "I hate blackouts," he says lowly to his reflection in the glass. They're like waking nightmares. Time to drown himself back to sleep.

He makes his slow way down the stairs, one hand wrapped around the banister and his face fixed in a grimace of pain and determination. He's gone down these stairs on his ass once or twice, but tonight he walks down them like a grown-up because he just isn't drunk enough. "So proud," he taunts himself as he steps flat-footed down another riser. "Look at you. Walking all by yourself. Bet Rue can't do stairs yet." He stops, bowing his head and tightening his grip on the banister and biting hard into his lower lip. When the hatred and shame ebbs enough he takes another step and doesn't say anything, not a damn word. Just got to get to the kitchen, that's all. Liquor will make it alright again.

He casts an involuntary glance over his shoulder, willing back the fear that laps at the edges of his mind. Were stairs always this unsettling? He doesn't like being followed, hasn't for decades. Following is only a half-step away from chasing. Something behind him on the stairs. Fuck. He stops and looks back again, sharply afraid. Nothing. Nothing yet. But he's less than halfway down. Shuddering, Haymitch turns again and takes another step. Something coming downstairs after him would catch him in a couple of seconds, if it wanted to. Or, it could take longer. Stairs hurt. One misstep and he'll fall hard. Then the thing behind him could take all the time it wanted.

"Nothing there, you goddamned baby," he snarls. There are two of him sometimes, the man and the pathetic whoring half-man, and the former is again at the end of his ever-loving rope. From the depths of the well, Haymitch thinks that the former isn't really him at all. The shade of Fash, maybe. If he still had a family he guesses he'd live in the Capitol full-time like some of the other Victors do. But they're all dead, and he can't escape them so easily.

But, more to the point, there's nothing on the goddamn stairs, no one in this house but himself.

"No one here," he says aloud, and immediately wishes he hadn't spoken. The defiance in that statement sounds just pathetic.

Walking into the kitchen at long last and dwelling darkly on the preposterous size of this house, he freezes a few steps from the cabinet with his head cocked. His eyes scan the room as he replays the sound. Hallucination? Possible. This soon after waking up, probable. Still…

"Peeta? Katniss?" he calls. But they'd announce their presence. Either of them would have pounded on the door and then come in yelling. Even in the middle of a storm they wouldn't just come in. They couldn't possibly be that stupid.

Turning sharply and falling into a more normal, faster, much more painful gait, Haymitch heads for the door. "Honey, you're going to get yourself killed one of these days sneaking around where you don't belong," he calls out, just so the thrice-damned girl will know he's pissed and not at all scared. He's not even tense. Not one damn bit. Except maybe with anger.

The hall is a dimly lit, claustrophobic tunnel interspersed with wall sconces of amber-colored glass. There's no one inside, not yet. Shadows and stillness. That, and a rapping at the door.

He limps slowly down until he stands in front of the portal, canting his head to the side. Not the kids. Peacekeepers don't knock. Who else-

The tapping again, soft and insistent, like someone wants to come in here without being seen or noticed by the outside world. He swallows drily and goes back to his list of people who know him well enough to come looking for him (just the kids) and those who might have business with him. Balthamos wouldn't knock, would he?

He might, a grim voice speaks up in his mind. Hell's bells. Guess you better open the damn door, then, hadn't you?

The goddamn house is more Balthamos's than Haymitch's, anyway. It never really belonged to Haymitch, of course. But for a while that he'd thought would last forever, it had been home. No one used to come in here. Here he'd been able to drink and sleep and scream in utter privacy, unnoticed and undisturbed. He used to spend hours just sitting in this hallway near the door, counting flowers on the wall and thinking and drinking… counting and drinking… drinking. Here, in sight of this door.

Suddenly he just wants to lie down somewhere not-here (he thinks vaguely that the upstairs hall would be alright). Just stop. He'll just lie there. He'll lie there through the ice-pick headaches and the gut-cramping nausea and the shakes that deepen into convulsions so bad he almost looks like an epileptic instead of a pathetic rumdum. Yes, he won't get up. He'll fucking detox himself on the hallway floor, screaming himself hoarse at the monsters that will emerge from every one of those doorways up there, in the dark. And all that, all that without food or water or any damn thing, will probably kill him. But if it doesn't he'll just stay right there in his new home, the part of this poisoned house that he'll gather around himself. And maybe, maybe then he'll starve. He supposes it's possible, although it doesn't seem very fucking likely. Most likely he'll lie there until the train comes again. Back to the Capitol. Won't matter, though. That's the beauty part. Just different places to lie. He can make it so he won't have to care about any of this, ever again. He can just turn away from it. Why not? Intelligence sure as hell isn't required for what he is now.

The rapping again. This damn house. He'd like to watch it burn.

He throws the door wide, stepping forward, stepping into the doorway and then through it so whoever it is will have to jump back on the narrow stoop. He's leaning forward a little, grinning, his steps fast and lumbering. If they don't step back he'll plow them right the fuck over the edge.

"So sorry to keep you waiting!" he declares through his ferocious grin. "I was asleep, passed out, face down in vomit and spilled liquor, having a damn near sexual dream about knives…"

He stops, looking around, scanning the dark ground at the sides of the three stone steps. There's no one. There's nothing. Just darkness, and unbroken stillness.

"Huh," he grunts, shrugging. He retreats back into the house, chest hurting from that shot of adrenalin, both his heart and his brain racing along at a thousand miles a minute. He's got something for that, though. In the kitchen.

He gets four steps down the hall before that tapping starts up again, louder than before.

"Fuck's sake!" Haymitch barks out in startled anger. He whirls clumsily, crashing into the wall and knocking himself a hell of a good one on the sconce protruding there. Still shaking his head and glaring through pain-slitted eyes, he yanks the door open again. And, big as life and twice as ugly, in struts the only yellow rat Haymitch recalls seeing in his entire life. Not running or anything, it treads off down the hall without a glance at him.

Haymitch stares after it and wonders if he's hallucinating. He pretty much has to be, right? He turns confounded gray eyes out on the night. It's still raining a pretty bitch out there, but he can see the grass and the cobblestones of the street well enough. They're not underwater or anything. Murkily he looks around for other fauna that might be planning to move in. Seeing none, he lets the door swing closed.

And just by the way, where is the yellow rat?

It's in the den, sitting up on the mantel over the fireplace, looking at him inscrutably. Taking that in, Haymitch finally realizes that it's not even a rat. It's a half-drowned cat, its fur plastered to its body so that it looks smaller than it usually would. He snorts in amusement. Well, at least that makes more sense.

"Hello, cat," he offers, walking towards it slowly, trying not to scare it. "Stay there, cat. Stay there so I can grab you. That's right…"

The cat lays its ears half-back and just barely hisses.

"Oh, screw you," Haymitch mutters. Rolling his eyes, he switches back to a voice that tries and fails miserably to be wheedling. "Gonna grab you, you ugly, disease-raddled, flea-infested kitty. Just gonna grab you and put you back out, that's all."

The cat watches his approach unblinkingly. It lifts one paw from the stone.

Haymitch darts his left hand out, seizing the animal by the back of its neck. The cat utters a howling screech, twists in a full circle, lays his hand open with talon-like claws, and lands lightly on the floor. All of this seems to be part of the same movement. Haymitch hisses and instinctively clasps his injured hand in his right one, but the cat is already perched on the back of his armchair and giving him a forbidding look before the stinging pain even registers in his conscious mind.

"Oh, this is not happening," he says lowly. The cat continues to stare, unblinking and unmoving. It doesn't even have the decency to put its ears back this time. Shows you, I guess, you clumsy old drunk, it seems to say.

Huffing out a disgusted sigh, Haymitch slumps down into the other chair and looks moodily into the fire. "You got a name?" he asks, for no reason at all. His mind idly ticks over appropriate names for this thing, each one making him a little angrier: Flea-Bite, Old Scratch, Drunk's Bane. Not that he's going to name the beast. He'll take another grab at it in just a few minutes. Just as soon as there seems to be a point to the gesture.

"Kelsee," the Cat says, quite clearly and unmistakably.

Bolting upright, Haymitch snaps a wide-eyed and half-scared look at his visitor. Still sitting there, still sitting unmoving on the back of the chair. But its eyes are different: they've taken on an aspect both knowing and malicious. From ten feet away they glow with a sickly yellow light.

"Cracking up," he tells himself softly. "Oh, don't you just know it." Slowly and deliberately he leans back in the chair and laces his fingers together over a belly that has recently gone from flat to just slightly concave. He never looks at himself without a shirt on (or with a shirt on, if he can help it). The only intact mirror in the house is the little one set into the front of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. If he did look, he would be able to easily count his ribs by this point. And it might occur to him that those who now have a vested interest in how he looks without a shirt on aren't likely to let this state of affairs stand much longer.

Fortunately or not, he has no inkling of these things just yet. The near constant discomfort in his stomach, the headaches, the increasing clumsiness- these are all just signals that he's probably starting to sober up a little. He needs more liquor, that's all.

He can see how ludicrous this whole situation is, and he grins crookedly at the demon as he stretches his legs out in front of him and casually crosses one ankle over the other. "Five impossible things," he invites the demon, the opening gambit to one of the many games before the Games. Only after he's spoken the incantation does he remember that this was one of Kelsee's favorites. Stubbornly, he plows on. "One: Cats can talk." Easy, that. "Two: Dead girlfriends sometimes come back."

The Cat utters a choppy hissing-coughing sound, fanged jaws gaping open. Horribly, inexorably, it's laughing.

"Three… I'm dead. I fell down the goddamn stairs and I'm dead."

The Cat stops laughing and just looks at him. He's losing, because that last one wasn't an Impossible Thing at all.

"Three: Ghosts are real." No, fuck, that's the same as the second one. Was there really a time when he'd played this round after round, for fun? And what the hell has he done to his brain since then? "Four," he declaims, rising from his place and taking a step towards the Cat. "The Districts can defeat the goddamn fucking Capitol!" His voice rises defiantly, almost to a full-throated shout in the nighttime stillness of the Village, and it's just him and the kids who live here, sure, but the place is patrolled, kept under surveillance, at least one Peacekeeper is out there somewhere, circling, and in that one uncalculated moment he shouts this Impossible Thing for the whitecoats to hear and come if they will.

In the same instant a deafening crash of thunder shakes the world, rattling the bottles on the end table. And in its aftermath, all of the caution and wariness and animal-cunning that's gotten him this far down the path reasserts itself. He remembers his place in this, and the role he must play. If they tortured him, how much would he say? Would he give up Plutarch? Finnick? Could they make him speak the names of the kids, or of Effie? I'd bite my goddamn tongue in half first, he thinks, but there's a horrible uncertainty in the assertion. He's very much aware in this moment, as aware as he's ever been, that he's weak, and he's addled, and he's a coward.

"Just shut up a minute," he snaps at the silent Cat perched on the chair back. He listens, rabbit-still, his hand curling around the haft of his knife as he draws it out of his pocket.

The thunder saved him, it seems, or maybe it wasn't even that. They're not there all the time. On a night like this they almost certainly aren't. The ones on duty tonight are probably clustered around a fireplace at their headquarters in the Justice Building, throwing darts and taking turns with some hungry woman in the back room. And even when there is someone here they mainly circle the outskirts and watch the gate, hoping to nab trespassers for a couple of days in the stocks. Still…

"Still, pretty fucking stupid," he tells himself. Even if it is an Impossible Thing.

"Five." And five is always something you can never do. Five: I could move to Town and become a merchant. Five: I could move to Town and marry a merchant. Both of them laughing, knowing damn well that their futures are in the pitch-black shafts, knowing and laughing in the teeth of that dark foreknowledge. That had been back when they'd been immortals.

"I can save the kids," he says, smiling ironically. Didn't he escape the mines, after all? Hell, didn't she? Not exactly to Town, though…

The Cat stares down at him, seeming to smile. It has said all it will say already, all that is in its soul, wrapped up in that chuffing laugh that sounds a little like red agony and a struggle to breathe. There has to be more, there were words, but whoever was speaking has left him, now.

"Leave," he mutters, looking up at the Cat. "Go on, get the fuck out, if you've got nothing else to say." Everyone slips away like grains of golden sand, receding faster and faster the tighter he tries to clasp them, until there's no solid ground left at all, nowhere for him to stand and nowhere even to hide. The Cat can take any one of almost a dozen faces, ephemeral as it is. It's all the same. He can barely call up what they looked like, anymore. And that's killing them twice, because there's no one but him left to remember any of them.

"Kelsee," the Cat says again in its hissing voice.

"Yeah, her," Haymitch says, envisioning a dead teenaged girl that he knows is the wrong one.

The Cat will leave, he figures, as soon as the rain stops. He guesses he'll just let it stay until then. He's too slow, too clumsy, too damn addled to catch it. He looks at it again, giving up on the dead girl for the moment, and favors it with a shaky smile that is strikingly different from any expression he'd let another person glimpse. There's nothing hard-edged or cynical in it, nor does sardonic laughter seem to lurk at the edges of his mercurial gray eyes in this unguarded moment. It's only a cat, only a cat and his own sick mind and the liquor combing to give it its one-word refrain. And it's still kind of funny, isn't it? Sure it is. Just a scraggedly half-drowned cat with an attitude, waiting to see if he wants to go another round or if it can start grooming the running water off its coat.

It's only a stray cat that will disappear in the morning, and he's still drunk, and he can talk to it if he wants to. Just to pass the time. And just suppose… well, just suppose ghosts are real?

Careful there, lad…

Her eyes had been almost fiery, he suddenly remembers, when she was mad. Palest brown, they had been, a lot of gray in them like almost all the Seam kids, but in her it gave the rather magical effect of frost over dead leaves. Intimidating eyes, at least they had been at first, cold even when she was happy. Really the last place you'd expect to see embers. How could he have ever forgotten eyes like those?

The Cat's eyes are sickly yellow, and they burn into him. He leans back into the leather of the chair, turning his head and listening to the minute scratches of diamonds against the soft surface. This is who he is now, (hated) diamonds and (sullied) gold, and all of the Others are dead. Scattered ashes dumped who-knows-where, and nothing remains. So go on and forget them, because it's just too fucking late for this nonsense. And forgetting them would be a mercy.

"Have you come to tell me to forget her, Cat?" he asks, wondering if he actually could.

"Kelsee," the Cat replies; the Cat demurs.

"Well, who asked you," Haymitch returns furiously and nonsensically. It's the truth, anyway. "Damned fool, sitting here talking to a cat. The fuck did you expect?" he continues to himself. He gets to his feet, finally done with this folly, ready to give it up for the night. He means to tell the cat that he's going to throw it out on its ass just as soon as he wakes up again, but instead he asks: "Will I save the kids?"

"Kelsee," the Cat replies; the Cat reminds.

"Fuck," Haymitch says, his voice breaking. That about says it all, doesn't it?

The confirmation almost crushes him, even though he's always known that answer. "Enough," he says, pleading now. "Enough." There's silence between them for a moment, and perhaps now he can leave this haunted room. Instead, he asks: "Will they die, though, Cat? Will it be just… just… Or will he kill them?"

"Kelsee," the Cat replies; the Cat condemns.

Finally silent, numbed and distantly hurt, Haymitch reaches the kitchen. He opens the cabinet and takes out a stout mongrelized bottle that Katniss put there at some point in the last week or so. He sits at the table and tips it up and swallows quick, two, three, four times before relenting and setting it down long enough to get his breath back.

The Cat has followed him. It jumps nimbly to the top of the fridge, sits with its tail curled over its paws, ignores the water still dripping from its fur. It sits unmoving and looks down over him with effulgent eyes.