Prompt : Hello. I have a prompt- it's post mj, Haymitch tells Effie about his girl and the haunting reaping of the 50th games and how his girl spent it with him because for present day Haymitch, the alcohol seems to be no use anymore. In addition, can 'his girl' be named 'Sabille'? It would mean SO SO SO much to me as you're my favorite writer. XD
I'm not making this post MJ because I don't think Haymitch's girl would be mentioned much and I have another idea ;)
Now and Then
Haymitch couldn't sleep.
The lack of alcohol, the unending craving for liquor, the knowledge that the next day he would relive his greatest nightmare… There were so many reasons not to sleep that he didn't even try to fight it, he simply laid on his bed and stared at the ceiling, trying not to think. Not thinking wasn't working well for him either. He couldn't stop thinking. His first Reaping, the Arena, the years that followed… And now the new Quell.
He hoped Heavensbee was legit. He hoped those rebels would do something – and they certainly would, they needed Katniss after all, they wouldn't let her die in an arena when they needed her to lead their rebellion. He was still unsure about that, the mere thought enough to make him laugh. Cinna believed in the girl but Cinna didn't know her like Haymitch did. He only saw what she could be when Haymitch saw the flaws, the broken parts… And it was all irrelevant, wasn't it? Even if the rebels were willing to help them… The Reaping would still take place and two of them would still be sent to the arena. The nightmare would start again.
He heard the front door open and close but he didn't feel particularly alarmed. He glanced at the clock, four am. Not Katniss, he mused, as he listened to the light noise of someone climbing up the stairs, not a Peacekeeper either : they would all stomp. Peeta, perhaps, needing to be sure they still had an agreement.
He didn't bothered reaching for his knife. He could take it out quickly enough if he needed it.
It was probably the boy, he decided.
Yet he wasn't surprised when a feminine figure appeared in the doorframe.
He didn't need to switch the light on to recognize her. There was no woman in Twelve with such voluminous hair.
"A bit early, aren't you?" he attacked.
"The train just came in. I sneaked out, I needed to see you." Effie's voice sounded odd, pitched. As if she had been crying for hours.
"I'm not doing the comforting, sweetheart." he grumbled, turning his head away to stare back at the ceiling. "If that's why you came…"
"I needed to see you." she repeated, walking closer to the bed.
The moonlight spilling from the window was enough for him to glimpse her disheveled state. The dress was too simple for her standard, the wig was askew… It looked as if she had gotten dressed in a hurry. Perhaps she had sneaked out on a whim.
"Have fun with that." he spat, watching her kick her shoes off with too much disregard and climb on the bed next to him.
She sat back on her heels and studied him in the dark. "You're sober." There was a small measure of amazement in her voice trampled by outright incredulity.
"The boy watered down my stock and threatened to report anyone in the District who would sell me alcohol." he explained. He was still holding a grudge over that.
She stayed silent for a few seconds and then licked her lips to hide her amusement. "That explains the house. It's so clean I almost thought I had it wrong."
"That was the girl." He rolled his eyes. "She made me hire a housekeeper."
Her giggles broke the tension and made him chuckle in turn.
It was ridiculous. Haymitch Abernathy, forced to sobriety and cleanliness by two insufferable kids he couldn't say no to.
"Did she figure out she loves him yet?" she asked.
"No." he shrugged. "She won't until it's too late, I think."
"You are very alike, you and her." she pointed out with a sad smile.
"Maybe." he shrugged, studying her form in the obscurity. Or maybe he had figured it out already but he was trying to pretend he hadn't. What was the point?
There was no talk or discussion as she lied down next to him, her head on his shoulder, a leg hooked over his. He simply held her, tugging on the wig to get rid of it. It gave easily which was unusual, there were no pins to keep it in place. He ran his fingers over the carefully braided blond hair underneath. It was a familiar style.
"You shouldn't do that." he rebuked her, tracing the perfect Katniss' braid with his fingers. "That's dangerous."
"It's the latest fashion." she argued. "All the women I meet have braids."
"Not under a wig." he snapped, certain of the fact without needing to be a fashion expert. "That's not fashion, that's a statement."
"What if it is?" She burrowed further against his side. "What if it is?"
The last one was a whisper and he closed his eyes, adding Effie to the list of things he had to worry about. He had been very careful about not thinking about her lately, about what she would go through if he was thrown back in the arena, about what she would do or say, about how much danger she was in…
"If I draw out your name tomorrow…" she continued.
"Peeta will volunteer." he cut her off, no point in keeping that from her.
Her intake of breath was sharp and pained. She wanted to keep the kids safe just as much as he did, she had fought for them too. She loved them too.
"And if I draw Peeta's name?" she asked after a few seconds of silence.
"I don't know." he answered honestly. He had been turning the thought over and over in his head. He wanted to volunteer. He wanted to save the boy and help save the girl and it all felt like fate : he would go back to an arena and he would die there like he should have done so many years ago. But fate was a fickle bitch and he simply wasn't sure he would be brave enough to step up and do it. Volunteer to such a painfully familiar hell, volunteer to go and kill his friends… "Whatever happens… The kids come first. You have to promise me."
Because he knew her.
She loved the kids but she loved him too – because she was a very stupid woman who couldn't keep her feelings in check and respect their agreement that sex was just that – and at some point she would get conflicted.
"Do you know what you're asking of me?" she murmured but then she buried her face in his shoulder, breathed out slowly and closed her eyes – he felt the fake eyelashes brushing the skin of his neck. "The children come first."
She wouldn't break her promise, he knew that too.
He dropped a kiss on her forehead and they remained silent for a while. Holding her felt good, it was the second best thing to alcohol, but it didn't help that much. Truthfully, he was certain he could have drunk until he passed out and it wouldn't have helped either. The flashbacks kept coming. His name echoing in the silent square, the last one to be called, the fourth one. The glance he had exchanged with his best friend right before starting the long lonely walk to the stage. Maysilee's dejected face as he came to stand next to her. And then, his mother in the crowd, fighting tears. The awful goodbyes. His brother's little arms squeezing his neck almost to the point of choking him. His girl's last kiss. The promise she wrestled out of him : come back. Whatever it takes, come back. He could still hear her voice. He could still…
He buried his nose in her hair but the smell was wrong. It didn't smell like wood fire and the wild flowers Sabille used to always wear in her hair, it was the heavy fragrance of Effie's perfume.
"I can't tell if we're then or now." he confessed before he could think twice about it.
He half-expected long dead ghosts to start dancing in the room. He had seen them during the first days of his forced withdrawal – although he had seen them long before that, even alcohol wasn't enough to keep them away sometimes – he had begged Katniss to find him some liquor because he knew she would give in more easily than Peeta but the boy had done things right. No one in the bloody District consented to sell either of them anything alcoholic.
"We're now. I am here and I don't intend to leave you. We are a team, aren't we?" she asked, tightening his hold on him. Her thumb was drawing calming circles on his chest but it didn't soothe him.
"Odds aren't in my fucking favor." he snorted, finding it funny all of a sudden. A fifty percent chance wasn't good, it was worse than before. "I had twenty tesserae entries last time. It was twice as much as everyone else. With four people being reaped that year, I knew my odds."
She was silent which meant she was at a loss for what to say.
"The night before the Reaping, I had a bad feeling." he said. "I have the same bad feeling now, sweetheart."
He couldn't tell if it was his guts speaking or just his fear.
She propped herself on her elbow to look at him. His eyes retraced her features in the dark, wondering if it was her face he would recall when someone would kill him in the arena. It was familiar, comforting even though he had spent so long hating her…
"What did you do last time?" she asked tentatively.
He had never told her anything about his past before and she wasn't sure how to handle it, he figured. She knew everything of course, everyone knew his story - it was the point - but he had never talked about it with her or if he had, he had been too drunk to remember.
"I sneaked out to the meadow with my girl." he answered. His chest tightened with pain as it always did when he thought about her. Her long dark hair flying behind her in the wind, her sparkling grey eyes, the teasing smile glued to her so perfect lips… He wondered if her face would appear too when he would die. He certainly hoped so. "She had ten tesserae. Her odds weren't good either."
And yet she had escaped the Reaping.
He had breathed out in relief when Maysilee's name had been called, the second girl from Twelve, the last. Sabille had been safe. Of course then he had been called and everything had gone to hell…
Still, he couldn't imagine going into the Games with her. It would have been a thousand times worse. He truly felt for Peeta, sometimes more than he felt for Katniss who was so blind to everything but her own pain until it was too late.
"It was our first time." he recalled, wondering why he was speaking so much about something he had kept silent for so long. He didn't want to talk about Sabille because he had failed to protect her when she was alive and he wanted to protect her memory. But if he died in the next few weeks, who would be left to remember her? No one. She had no family left and he had lost all the friends they used to have. Someone should remember her even if it was only by proxy. "Our last one too."
"You had sex." Effie clarified. It was such a Capitol thing to do, take the beauty out of everything to make it commonplace, almost worthless, that he couldn't suppress a flicker of annoyance.
"We made love." he snapped, intending to hurt her. He did. She flinched slightly and dropped her eyes. He and Effie never made love. They had sex, they fucked, they screwed each other brainless, but they never made love. It was never about just… expressing something. On comparison, his experience with Sabille wasn't as good but it was almost sacred.
"Did it help you forget for a little while?" she asked anyway, avoiding his eyes. Her hand slid down his chest to his stomach. "I can…"
"No." He crushed that idea in the bud. He didn't want that, not now. Not when he wasn't making the difference between past and present clearly.
"I know I am not her but…" she tried to argue.
"No, you're not." he sneered, angry at the comparison. Then he realized how ridiculous he was acting and sighed. "Then again, I haven't been the guy she used to love in a while. If she were here she wouldn't want anything to do with me."
"Then she would be blind." Effie replied firmly. "Because you are a good man. You certainly have a lot of flaws – enough for me to write a book probably – but you are a good man."
"You're a lunatic, sweetheart." he snorted but he couldn't hide his fondness.
"Says the alcoholic to the most popular woman of the year." she mocked.
"Who says you're the most popular woman of the year?" He lifted his eyebrows in surprise.
"A poll." she grinned. "I will have you know that seventy-six percent of the Capitol citizens now hold me as their favorite escort, eighty-nine percent think I dictate the fashion and sixty-two percent want to marry me. It's a very scientific poll."
"It's a lot of bullshit." he smirked.
"I just knew you would say that." she replied. "Please, repeat it in front of Portia at the earliest opportunity, she now owes me a new pair of shoes."
"Don't you have enough?" he taunted.
"Haymitch…" she sighed very seriously. "A woman has never enough shoes."
He studied the amused smile tugging at her mouth, riveted by the sight. "Are you going to kiss me anytime soon, Princess, or did you sneak off the train just to talk about shoes?"
Her amusement was washed away by a frown. "You just said you didn't want to. Are you suffering from memory loss? Because I've read in an article that it's a possible consequence of an addiction to alcohol, you know."
"You're annoying." he told her.
"And you're rude." she replied without missing a beat.
His smirk only grew when he tossed the end of her braid over her shoulder and cupped her cheek with his hand.
"You're not her and I don't want you to be, sweetheart." he said, keeping his eyes on her mouth because it was easier. "My last night on Earth is yours. I hope you're flattered."
His attempt at levity fell flat.
"It's not your last night, don't say that." she hissed. "Even if you are… It's not your last night."
"Whatever." he shrugged. If he was Reaped, they would be counted anyway. "It's yours. Do what you want with it."
"You are infuriating." she breathed out. "Endearing but infuriating."
"Work with the endearing part." he advised, propping himself on his own elbow to bring his face closer to hers. He brushed his lips against hers once, twice before she gave up and started responding to the kiss. "Or maybe it's the infuriating part that you like." he teased, pulling her closer until she was half lying on his chest. "Who even knows with you. I still think your brain melted because of the… humph." Her next kiss was violent and it silenced him for good.
The ghost of the Quell was still looming over him but her warmth kept it at bay. She brought him back every time his mind started wandering: she kissed, caressed and coaxed until his thoughts were clouded with lust and pleasure and the only thing he could focus on was her.
He was glad she had come to him.
She wasn't Sabille, and he meant it when he told her he didn't want her to be, but Effie was his girl too now in a way – even if it was only in the privacy of his own head.