Prompt : Hi! I have a prompt request . . . I just read your latest story about Effie talking with Haymitch about his girl. I thought it was amazing but I felt badly for Effie because of the whole they don't make love thing. Could you write something along the line of Haymitch assuring Effie his feeling for her are just as deep. Maybe while they're in district 13?

I'm making this book!canon and timeline is around the end of MJ.

The ask refered to chapter 195 but it can absolutely stand alone.

Progress

She wakes up screaming and, if anything, it only makes her scream harder because there is something disconcerting in waking up mid-scream. When did it start? Why did it start? For a second, she can't remember and in her most recent experience, waking up screaming means there is pain involved and it's good to scream when you're in pain. It helps you focus on something else and it makes the people who like to hurt you happy. They do love to hear her screams, it has become a game somewhere along the line : who can make her scream the hardest?

Something shifts behind her, wraps its arms around her sitting form – tight enough to be felt but not tight enough that she feels trapped. She doesn't try to escape, knowing there is no point to it, there never is. A feather-like kiss is pressed against her nape. She recognizes the familiar hitch on her skin where his stubble rubs against the skin at the same time she smells him. He smells different ever since her rescue, less liquor and no cheap soap but the faint trace of sweat is still there and there is something else, something inherently Haymitch that no months of withdrawals or a military district could ever hope to erase.

"Shh…" he whispers in her ear. "It's okay, sweetheart. You're safe. You're with me. You're safe."

She believes him and she finally dares opening her eyes.

Her surroundings are recognizable for want of being familiar: Haymitch's room in the President's Mansion. She has been living there ever since her release from the hospital a week earlier – where else would she go? Her apartment is still standing but ransacked and destroyed, unfit for living, and her parents' house... She carefully cuts that train of thoughts, she doesn't want to think about her parents. Still, it's always Haymitch's room in her mind, not their. He often uses our when he talks about the room but she can't. If she has to refer to it directly, she uses the.

She relaxes into his arms, swallowing back the sob that wants to break free. Screams are often followed by a long heartfelt session of wailing but Effie feels as if she had exhausted her quota of tears for the next ten years. In the last few months, she thinks she must have cried every day : from fear, from pain, from despair… And then it started all over again when she was rescued : the fear of being thrown in prison again because of her status as an escort, the pain her body was in after they repaired the rag doll she had been – and one would think it's easier to be made whole than to be taken apart, but they would be dead wrong – and the crushing despair she never seems to be able to shake off no matter how hard she tries. Most days she makes an effort to be like her old self : bubbly, cheerful, optimistic – oblivious. A lot of people are fooled by her act but not Haymitch, of course, never Haymitch.

She lets him pull her back in a lying position, lets him arrange the blankets around her with a care he never showed before but that is quickly becoming the norm, lets him wrap his arms around her again, tentative and unsure. She rejects his embrace more often than not lately, preferring to sleep on the very edge of the bed than to touch him. It's not his fault. She can't bear the thought of anyone touching her. It's not just about what happened to her in prison, it's about this new body of hers. They erased most of the scars but she can still feel them under her fingertips, the skin is tight and swollen in some places, she's downright bony and she feels ugly. Haymitch could probably make her feel beautiful again, even for a short while, but she isn't ready for that. She can barely tolerate his arms around her as it is.

Not tonight, though.

Tonight is a night she needs the familiar feel of his body around her. So she turns on her good side – the one not burned, it doesn't hurt anymore but it hurt for so long it's almost a phantom pain, she's always aware of it, always careful – and tugs his arms around her until his chest is pressed against her back and his thighs are against the back of hers. She melts into his body. She always feels safest when he is spooning her like this because she knows he would kill anything that tries to hurt her without a second thought. It's not as obvious during the day but in the middle of the night, in the dark, after a nightmare, she knows. She has seen the tell-tale dangerous glint in his eyes when he's frustrated with President Coin's recurrent insistence that Effie is to be put on trial like any other escort and probably executed for good measure. He wants to kill the rebel president and it's not completely because of Effie, something else happened – he has nightmares too and he talks in his sleep sometimes – but she doesn't know what it is and she doesn't care enough to ask. She just knows if Coin keeps on trying to pull Effie from him, he will probably snap and do something drastic. Haymitch never reacts well when people try to take what he feels belongs to him.

Does she belong to him?

Effie is confused by his attitude most of the time. She doesn't know why he puts up with her and her incessant screaming during the night. She doesn't know why he showed up in her hospital room every day. She doesn't know why he holds her so carefully she wants to cry sometimes. She does know why he wants to keep her alive : she's part of the team. However being part of the team doesn't explain why he treats her like she means more to him than just a convenience. That's all she ever was to him before now : a convenient way to get easy sex. It has always been clear between them that it was all he wanted from her but he can't get that now, he hasn't even tried to get that and she isn't sure she will ever be able to give it to him anyway. Now the rules have changed and no one made her aware of the new ones.

"It's different." she whispers in the safety of the surrounding darkness. "Why is it different?"

Before the war, before everything, he would have pretended not to understand her question or he would have laughed it off. Now, the arm passed around her waist barely twitches with tension.

"Remember what you said the night before the Reaping? About Katniss?" he asks.

She remembers everything about the night before the Reaping. She remembers the train pulling in the station at around two in the morning, she remembers having spent the whole trip in tears, she remembers the throbbing headache, she remembers sneaking off the train and into his house, she remembers him telling her about the only girl he ever loved, she remembers a particularly hurting discussing in which he had made it clear he was only having sex with her whereas he had made love to his girl… She remembers being almost ashamed at that moment because she wasn't sure what the difference was.

"She will figure out she loves Peeta when it's too late." she answers.

"Yeah, well… We're a little past too late." he snorts bitterly. "She figured it out. She's not the only one who figured it out."

She's tired and he's not making any sense. "Everyone with eyes could see she loved him months ago, Haymitch."

There is a long bout of silence and, finally, the raspy sound of his voice, rough with suppressed emotions. "I'm not talking about the kids, sweetheart."

Her heart starts racing but it takes her brain a few seconds to catch up with it. She turns in his arms to look at him. It's difficult to read his face in the dark but she knows he's guarded, insecure. It occurs to her she should be surprised or delighted, instead she's simply… content.

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder?" It's halfway between a tease and a taunt, halfway between a satisfied statement and a resentful reproach. She wonders if they're ever going to stay on the edge now, if she will ever stop blaming him in a quiet corner of her mind for not saving her earlier while being grateful at the same time that he cares enough to give her his protection.

"Something like that." he replies and his voice is strained. She expects him to stop talking and tell her to go to sleep but he surprises her. "When they executed Portia… I kept waiting for them to bring you up next."

He drops a kiss on the top of her head. He looks detached, almost careless, but his arms tighten around her and she feels the need to snuggle closer for his benefit rather than her own.

"They wouldn't have killed me. They thought I had information." she says.

"Portia had more information than you." he tells her. Something in her heart keeps pinching at the mention of her friend but she has known too much grief lately to be properly sad. There is no room for more sadness in her mind. He leans in, resting his forehead against hers and she knows whatever he is going to say next will be bad. "They kept you alive because as soon as we learnt you were captured, I had Plutarch's agents in the Capitol spreading everywhere that you were important to me. That was the only way to keep you alive until we could get to you. Give you value."

She waits for the anger to bubble in her stomach but nothing comes but an exhaustion that takes root in her very bones.

"So they tortured me because they thought you love me." she sums up. It sounds hysterical somehow and she starts chuckling like a mad woman, aware he's watching her with growing unease. Maybe she's finally having the nervous breakdown she's entitled to because she can't stop laughing. She laughs until tears run down her face and she wheezes, her sides hurting. "That's irony at its finest." she pants at last, when she's a little more calm.

"How?" he frowns.

"Because I'm the only one in love in this relationship, Haymitch." she sighs, too tired to sugar-coat the truth or make it look insignificant. It is significant. "You just feel guilty."

"It would take a lot more than guilt to make me bother with you." he scoffs.

"Bother with me." she repeats. She rolls away from him again and drags her body away from his, right up to the very edge of the mattress. She doesn't know why she feels so bitter over his choice of words. Of course, she's a burden. He always thought her to be annoying but now she's insufferable – she's insufferable even to herself – she's trying to adjust to a world that looks so different from what she's used to, she forces him to sleep with the lights on more often than not, one second she needs to curl up against him, the next she wants her space… She's confusing and confused.

"You always need to make everything complicated." he groans.

Instead of respecting her wish for space like he has always done up until now, he spoons her again. She doesn't protest. He's warm and she's freezing – the cold comes from inside, of course, and there's nothing he can do against it but it helps somehow. His hand finds her and she lets him lace their fingers together.

"Losing you…" he says carefully. "It would have been like losing her all over again."

She doesn't ask who the "her" is. She knows.

He has built such a shrine to his dead girlfriend in his mind, she's almost a saint. Effie should probably be flattered to be compared to her.

"I'm not her, Haymitch." she whispers.

"I know." he snaps and it's annoyed and frustrated. "Can you stop being stupid and get what I'm trying to say?"

"I understand what you're trying to say, I simply don't believe it." she answers. "Either you're confusing me with her or the lack of alcohol makes you deluded."

He has always been delicate with her ever since her rescue, that's why she's surprised when he props himself on his elbow and forces her to roll on her back. He's gentle when he cups her cheek but she's tensed, her heart racing, ready to bolt.

"I'm not confusing anything and I'm not deluded." he growls. "It's been hell not knowing where you were, if you were alive, if they were hurting you, thinking about how they were hurting you…" His eyes look strangely shiny in the darkness, his thumb traces her jugging cheekbone. "I'm not saying you're like her, sweetheart, I'm not even saying I'm feeling the same way. I was a boy, it was… Grown men feel deeper." His hand travels down, coils loosely around her neck. "Nothing to do with guilt, Effie."

It's the use of her name rather than his speech that convinces her. He hardly ever uses her name, preferring ridiculous pet names or her surname to simply calling her Effie. Effie means he is serious like he rarely is.

"Kiss me." she requests.

He briefly frowns because she hasn't let him do that since her rescue but he doesn't ask if she's sure. His lips brush against hers twice, tentative at first, and then he's kissing her and she's kissing back and for a glorious second the world tilts and everything is right again. She loses herself in the flood of familiar sensations, marveling at how easy it feels, at how starved she has been for him. It's only when his hand slips under her shirt and his calloused palm meets the freshly repaired skin of her side that she breaks the kiss up, instinctively gripping his wrist. He doesn't ask for an explanation or try to insist, he takes his hand away and leans in for another kiss, a softer one.

"I'll rip apart anyone who tries to hurt you again." he promises. It's a whisper against her lips but she knows he means it. She knows he's at the end of his tether just like she's reaching the end of hers. They lost too much, too many people. She almost feels sorry for anyone who would try to touch a single hair on the children's head - or hers for that matter.

She snuggles closer, rests her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes, confident that she's as safe as can be. She will forget, of course, and she will wake up screaming again but maybe it won't be so bad if he's here to chase the memories away.

And one day, not now but soon, maybe he could show her what the difference was between having sex and making love. She would like that, she thinks.