Prompt : I just read of this soulmates au where soulmates think with the respective soulmate's voice. I'm imagining Effie thinking with haymitch's voice and swearing a lot in her head secretly. And haymitch going crazy because of effie's cheerfulness.
This was actually difficult to pull out because does that mean the voice takes up the soulmate personality? Does that change the way you're thinking? Anyway I did my best! I hope you like it!
Raspy But Loving
Soulmates were a curse.
Most people lived their lives without finding theirs. They led perfectly normal lives, fell in love, got married, had kids, grew old... And through it all they retained their brain to themselves.
That little voice in your head, the voice to your most intimate thoughts, that voice you stopped paying attention to because it was always there, something you took for granted... That voice had a particular feel to it, a particular sound.
The second you met your soulmate, that voice changed. It became theirs. That was how you knew.
Haymitch knew on a cold morning of June, in the hall of the Justice Building, as he was sneering at the offered gloved hand of his brand new escort.
One second he was thinking how ridiculous she looked – in his normal inner voice – the next, every thought he had was delivered in a bubbly voice with entirely too much cheer and so high-pitched it felt as if his head would burst.
And given her horror struck expression, he wasn't the only one who had just noticed a change.
To her credit, she recovered first.
"Must you be so vulgar even in thoughts?" she asked in a matter-of-fact tone.
"It's my voice not my thoughts." he snorted. "If you're swearing in your head, that's all you, sweetheart."
And fuck did he want to swear, he thought in an unfamiliar cheerful voice.
"Clearly, there's been some dreadful mistake." she hissed, glancing around to make sure nobody was listening. That was a fool's wishing. Someone was always listening. "You can't be my..."
The words were too much for her to bear and she pursed her lips and turned her head away not to be affronted by the sight of his pants stained at the knees and his too unkempt facial hair.
He took out his flask from his pocket and swallowed a generous mouthful, happy to be slightly drunk already. He suspected he would have otherwise been furious against fate and life in general. As it was, he could almost see the hilarious irony of the situation. Chaff would certainly have a good laugh out of it.
The fact that this whole train of thought was delivered in her cheerful Capitol accent only made him take another swing of liquor.
"Want some?" he offered.
She glared at the flask as if it had personally offended her. Perhaps it had. After all, she had just discovered her soulmate was a disheveled drunkard.
"I suggest we keep this to ourselves." she declared. "Nobody needs to know."
"Ashamed of me, sweetheart?" he chuckled. "Better get used to it. You're my escort now."
And his escorts always ended up humiliated, that was part of the job description at that point. The other problem, the soulmate curse, he would think about later – or never.
She pursed her lips even tighter and pushed him toward the stage, ordering him to behave as if she was born to annoy him.
Although, if fate was to be believed, she actually was.
Later, once he was sober and the whole thing looked less ironical and more catastrophic, he was happy for her quick thinking – even if that thinking meant she had stolen his inner voice. He was happy with ignoring the whole thing and pretending everything was normal.
Learning how to live with her voice in his head was difficult. It often gave him a headache to hear himself think, and the contrast between his bubbly voice and his dark thought was sometimes more than he could bear. He tried to drown it in liquor and failed. After a few months though, he grew used to it.
He never asked her how she was faring.
Out of the two of them, he figured she had gotten the sweetest end of the deal. After all, his voice wasn't high-pitched, it wasn't annoying and he didn't have a fancy accent.
The soulmate part of the problem was never discussed either.
They were too busy hating and loathing each other to think about it.
He often wondered if there was something fundamentally wrong with him that he would end up with a soulmate he couldn't help but despise. Effie Trinket was selfish, she was blind, she was shallow and she was too ambitious for her own good. Her only saving grace in his eyes was that she could match him wits for wits. She was also hot but that wasn't something he ever let himself think about – thinking about how hot she was with her own voice was, anyway, too weird for him to handle.
It took four years for him to realize she wasn't as blind to the Games' true nature as he had wanted to believe. It took him five years to realize she actually cared about the tributes and that she was a better actress than he had given her credit for.
She still irritated him with her constant nagging, her obsession for manners and appearances and her boisterous personality but he stopped hating her. He resisted her attempts at changing him into the perfect victor she wanted him to be but he allowed her to work with him. They weren't friends but they weren't completely enemies anymore.
Sometimes, late at night, in Twelve, when it was dark and the loneliness was crushing, he almost welcomed the bubbly sound of her voice in his head.
He kissed her for the first time a week after their sixth years of working together. It was the only way he found of shutting her up. He couldn't bear her lecturing him about his drinking habits any longer. He hadn't planned it, he hadn't thought he would enjoy it, and he hadn't meant to get carried away.
They didn't make it past the living-room wall.
Thinking with your soulmate's voice sucked but having sex with your soulmate rocked.
It was like they were meant to fit together. And it sounded cliché to his own ears – even more so when her voice was the one saying it in his head – but it truly felt as if their bodies had been created for the express purpose of screwing each other brainless.
They still didn't like each other.
But they loved having sex together.
It wasn't something they discussed. It happened. Sometimes in the middle of a fight, sometimes late at night when one of them would sneak in the other's bed for a little while, seeking a comfort they couldn't find anywhere else...
Haymitch had his liquor, she had her partying.
With each passing year, alcohol was cutting it less and less.
With each passing year, her love for going out grew thinner and thinner.
Katniss and Peeta changed things.
Of course, they did.
It wasn't just Panem the girl set ablaze, it was their lives too.
Haymitch threw himself in the rebellion, barely noticing Effie was pushing too far. Maybe he didn't notice her public slips of the tongue or how rebellious it would look for her to talk about teams and matching tokens because all he could think about was the rebellion and he always thought in her voice. Maybe he didn't notice because somewhere down the line he had started taking her for granted.
He didn't know why he was surprised when the plan to break the victors out of the arena blew up in their faces.
It was a great plan – a plan he had devised almost single-handedly with Plutarch – but he should have expected Katniss to do something rash.
They had to leave in a hurry, earlier than planned. There was no time to find Effie – he tried – and he was placated by Plutarch's quiet reassurance that she would be better off in the Capitol anyway. She was a Capitol citizen, she didn't know anything and she was an escort. Thirteen wasn't the place for her.
They lost Peeta and Johanna and, for the first time, even her bubbly voice sounded desperate in his head.
It only grew worse when it appeared obvious being a Capitol citizen, not knowing anything and being an escort didn't guaranty safety. They couldn't find out anything about her, be it her whereabouts or if she was even still alive.
Did the inner voice thing stop once your soulmate died or was it permanent? He didn't know and he couldn't ask. He was stuck hoping it meant she was still alive.
He had never thought her voice could be anything but a curse. It turned out to be a comfort. He didn't have a lot of spare time between Katniss and the rebellion but the rare moments of rest he managed to grasp were spent holding on to that battered golden bangle, eyes closed, deluding himself by listening to himself think and pretending she was in the room, ranting about the state of him.
Sobriety wasn't agreeing with him.
Neither did being alone.
He shouldered through that war clinging to the faint hope that he could get his team safely through it. Katniss and Peeta survived the surrender of the Capitol – barely and they lost pieces of themselves in the process but they were alive and Haymitch would have to be content with that – but Effie was still missing.
The third day after Snow officially surrendered, the rebels bombed an abandoned detention center outside of the city. Capitol soldiers had been using it as a last resort hiding place after releasing the prisoners.
He was listening to Plutarch's prattle, following the operation on a screen and thinking about how he would break the news of her sister's death to Katniss once she would be out of the medically induced coma – because her mother would be incapable of doing it herself – when Effie's cheerful voice faltered and turned back into his own. It didn't last long. It was a flicker. A word only. But Haymitch bolted to his feet.
"Stop the bombings." he ordered.
"What?" Plutarch frowned.
"The detaining center. Effie's in there." he retorted. Plutarch stared at him as if he was crazy – and perhaps he was because there was no guaranties she was there, she could have been dying anywhere else, he just happened to have his eyes on that building when he felt it. "Stop them!"
The Gamemaker had learned not to mistrust his instinct though so he gave new orders. No more bombings. Take the building if possible. Search it out for possible prisoners who wouldn't have been kicked out with the others.
It took five hours and it cost the rebels two men. All they found inside the cells were corpses and a barely alive escort who had been left for dead and was clinging to life by the strength of her torn out nails.
It was touch and go for a while.
Haymitch knew because he could hear his own voice uttering full sentences in his head for the first time in years. He found himself begging fate or whatever deity existed to let him hear her voice again.
It occurred to him around two forty-six a.m. on a rainy night he spent holding her hand in the Presidential Mansion's hospital wing that having a soulmate meant more than just loving the other person. Everybody could love anyone. Having a soulmate meant you needed them to be complete, you felt empty without them there, and they pushed you to be the best you could be.
He needed Effie because they had worked so long together they were almost of one mind when it came down to decisions making even if their opinions often clashed, he felt empty when she wasn't there with him because she was the colors to his shades of grey, and she always made him want to step up to the plate be it to annoy her that little bit further or to reach the impossible standards she expected him to hold on to.
It also occurred to him around two forty-seven on the same night that if having a soulmate meant more than just being in love, he was very much in love with her anyway.
It had crept up on him while he wasn't looking.
He didn't quite know what to do with that realization.
He had been happy to follow her lead but she was the one who had wanted to ignore the soulmate thing in the first place.
That had been thirteen years ago though.
"I missed your voice." was one of the first things she mumbled when she finally opened her eyes.
That made him frown. "What are you on about now, sweetheart?"
"I couldn't think in that place." she murmured. "My mind was blank. Always blank. I wanted your voice. I couldn't tell if you were alive or dead. Talk to me, will you?"
She fluttered in and out of consciousness but he kept talking to her anyway, bringing her up to speed with what had happened and what was going on, filling the silence with his voice like she usually did.
She was high on the drugs they kept pumping in her veins but she clung to his hand every time she opened her eyes.
"What does my voice sound like in your head?" he asked.
Her voice was always bubbly, always lively, always fond even when she wasn't. Her voice voicing his thought always felt like a warm embrace, it was comforting in a way nothing else would ever be.
"Raspy but loving." she hummed. "Like the feel of your stubble on my inner thigh."
"Still ashamed of being my soulmate?" he asked. He wouldn't begrudged her the right if she was. There was not much to be proud of as far as he was concerned.
"Don't be preposterous." she muttered, her eyes fluttering shut. "I love you."
The words sent his heart racing with panic and a thrill he couldn't quite identify.
Maybe, he thought, and her bubbly voice sounded positively euphoric in his head, because it was the start of a new chapter for them.
"Good." he said.