Prompt: If you still do prompts, can you do where Effie somehow gets amnesia from being held captive? And she only remembers snippets and well Haymitch tries to help her remember stuff
Stronger Than Oblivion
The world was a weird place.
Loud.
Harsh light that hurt her eyes every time she blinked them open.
She never fought hard to wake up.
Waking up was frightening somehow.
Every time she regained conscience, she feared the pain.
It was ridiculous, of course, there was never any pain in the Capitol.
But she was terrified of it.
There were voices.
Voices coaxing her awake.
Voices begging her to come back.
Voices claiming they needed her.
No… Not voices…
One voice.
Rough and deep and exhausted.
It found an echo deep in her belly.
It was familiar but foreign at the same time.
"Sweetheart, please."
She didn't wake up all at once.
It was gradual.
One day she opened her eyes and it was impossible for her to sink back in the warm cocoon of darkness once more. She remained awake. Confused and scared by the strange environment but awake.
The room was white, it smelt of antiseptic and she instinctively knew she was in a hospital.
"Fucking finally."
She blinked and turned her head to look in the direction of the voice. Everything hurt. She felt as if she had tumbled down a particularly high set of stairs. The pain was muted though. Old. It was the weirdest feeling.
The room was empty except for the man sitting on a chair at her bedside, closer than propriety dictated. She realized, belatedly, he was holding her hand.
She snatched it away.
Hurt flashed in the grey eyes but it was gone in a second, replaced with grim acceptation.
"You should mind your language." she said because she didn't know what else to do.
Her voice was strangely distorted, rough as if it hadn't been used in months. Her throat ached. It made her cough – which only made it ache even more. Suddenly there was a straw near her mouth. She eyed the glass of water he was holding close to her face with wariness but eventually the thirst won over the mistrust and she captured it between chapped lips. She sucked on the straw eagerly and almost whined when he took the glass away.
"Easy." he chided her without heat. "You'll make yourself sick."
She blinked again, her eyes falling on the needles and tubes hooked to the crook of her elbow. Drugs. It explained why she felt so drowsy.
"You have strange bedside manners for a doctor." she mused, reaching out to pat her hair. A jolt of pain ran from her shoulder to her arm and she wisely aborted the move.
"What?" he frowned.
The man looked puzzled. And tired too. She almost told him he should apply hot patches to those bags under his eyes and, perhaps, a good foundation but she held her tongue. It wouldn't have been polite to comment on a stranger's appearance even if he looked ragged and rather… District like. That wasn't something that inspired trust. A beard ate half his face, unkempt and wild, his hair needed a good shampoo and probably some conditioner and his clothes were absolutely awful. All grey. Who dressed all in grey?
"Viola pushed me from the catwalk, didn't she?" she sighed. "Tell it to me straight… Did I make a fool of myself?"
"Effie, if you're playing one on me…" he said, almost wary.
It was her turn to frown. She didn't mean to be rude but he seemed like a rubbish doctor.
"May I see my mother?" she inquired, thinking she could get Elindra to find her a better doctor.
"Your mother…" he repeated distractedly, watching her with absolutely too much intensity.
"Staring is rude, you know." She clucked her tongue once, annoyed by the scrutiny. She was sure she looked awful. She felt awful. There was a sour taste in her mouth for starters. How long had she been in this hospital? Did she still have make-up on? A wig? Had people taken pictures of her looking like this? It was a definite possibility. Gossip rags would have killed for pictures of her looking ugly and plain. She was famous for her beauty.
"Sweetheart." he winced, licking his lips nervously. "Who am I?"
She lifted her eyebrows. "How in Panem am I supposed to know? You didn't introduce yourself. Which is the utmost of ill manners, if you ask me."
He bolted out of that chair and out of the room so fast it clattered to the ground. The door was left open and she felt uneasy when she spotted the man with the gun obviously standing guard in front of her door. He wasn't wearing a Peacekeeper uniform, he was wearing the same grey clothes as the other man, but no one else in the Capitol was allowed this sort of weapons. Private security, her mind supplied, that was the most logical explanation. Her mother must have hired them. Their eyes met for a moment and the armed man slowly reached out and closed the door.
She immediately felt trapped.
The feeling was too much.
She never was a subject to claustrophobia until that moment but it the sudden terror was overwhelming. She pushed herself through the pain and sat up, careful not to use her right arm too much – her right arm, she quickly decided, must have taken the blunt of the fall because it was what hurt the worst – she struggled to kick the blankets off her legs. Her eyes almost boggled out of her skull when she saw the state of her shins and she quickly drew the hospital gown up to the point of indecency to check the rest of her.
Her legs were covered with pale blond hairs.
Exactly how long had she been in this bed?
There were fading scars on her skin too.
"Oh god…" she breathed out, panic gripping her guts. A machine started beeping in earnest to her left and it took her a few seconds to realized it was her heartbeat. She tore the sensor off her finger. The beeping stopped but her heart kept racing and pounding in her chest.
She swung her legs off the bed through sheer force of will alone, her eyes set on the window. She couldn't see much more than a patch of pale blue sky but she needed to open it, she needed the fresh air. She needed for the room not to look so much like a cell.
A cell.
What a peculiar idea.
How would she know what a cell looked like?
The door opened again before she could stand up and she was immediately assaulted by rebukes and orders to remain where she was in her bed. She ignored them and pushed herself up, helping herself by leaning on the rolling pole the drip was hooked to.
She managed two steps toward the window before her legs collapsed.
She didn't fall though.
The man from earlier had his arm around her waist and his free hand on her hip to hold her up. He was careful and she was glad for it because her whole body felt bruised.
"You want the window?" he asked.
She could do nothing but nod.
For a second, he seemed to hesitate on how to proceed and then he shrugged, as if for himself, and scooped her up. Locking her good arm around his neck was instinctive. There were two other men behind him and she peered at them curiously while he walked to the window, making sure to push the drip with his foot so it wouldn't tear off her elbow.
One of them was wearing a white coat and was carrying a clipboard, his hair was black, he had glasses on and he had an air of no-nonsense about him. He looked like a proper doctor, she thought. The other was wearing the same grey clothes as the man who was carrying her and the guard at the door.
"Are you sure…" that one said.
"Shut up, Plutarch, and open the window." the man who was carrying her said.
"She really should be in bed." the doctor objected.
"She wants fresh air, she gets fresh air." the man growled protectively.
Effie didn't object, first because she really wanted fresh air and then because it was becoming quite obvious this was probably a very twisted dream. Perhaps she had let Estelle convince her to try some drugs. Perhaps she was high somewhere and having a very bad trip.
She closed her eyes when Plutarch opened the window. The wind was cold and sharp like it never was in the Capitol, the regulated weather always ensured the temperature was pleasant, and it made her want to cry. She wasn't sure why. It carried smells of smoke and dust but it was also somehow clean and she felt as if it was her first real breath in too long.
"Enough." the doctor cut in, not unkindly. "We can't afford for her to catch a cold. She is still weak."
"I am not weak." she grumbled. "And you are all very rude people." The man who was carrying her smirked and moved away but she tightened her grip on his neck. "No, please…" He stilled and she took a long hard look through the window once Plutarch had closed it, trying to decide where she was in case this wasn't a dream and she had been kidnapped by crazy people. The view was foreign. Something out of a nightmare. It looked like the main street leading to the City Circle but it was… destroyed. The pavement was no more, holes and cracks ran down the street like apocalyptic landmarks, most of the shops' display windows were broken, military trucks were parked in the middle of the chaos and there was none of the usual people wandering about… A chill ran down her spine. "Where are we?"
"Games clinic." the man answered quietly. "The Mansion's hospital is for VIPs, I tried but I couldn't get you access. The Training Center was the closest so I had you moved here."
It made no sense, absolutely no sense.
"What happened?" she breathed out.
"You tell me." he replied gently, carrying her back to the bed. This time she didn't protest. "This one says it's the drugs still in your system making you confused." He nodded to the doctor. "You've been awake a while now. Who am I, sweetheart?"
His tone sounded almost begging.
"Don't call me sweetheart." she retorted, huddling against the pillow with her legs close to her chest as soon as he had placed her down. "I am not your sweetheart." Her eyes roamed on his face. She had a feeling it should have been familiar but it truly wasn't. He wasn't a stylist or one of the important people she sometimes met at parties. He wasn't one of her friends either. He was old. "I wish to speak with my mother or my father. Right now."
The three men exchanged a glance and the doctor stepped forward. He cleared his throat and fished a small flashlight out of his pocket with the clear intent of checking her eyes. She recoiled. He didn't insist, lifting both hands instead.
"My name is Doctor Herold." the doctor said in a calm patient voice. "I am the one who took care of you immediately after your rescue. You were awake then. Do you remember?"
None of this was making any sense.
"Rescue." she repeated flatly.
She rather thought it was from them she needed rescuing.
"We are not a threat." the man with grey eyes said as if he could read her mind. "We're your friends." He made a face and amended. "Well… I am at least. Or I used to be. Not sure where we stand now. You hate me for all I know."
"That is very reassuring." she hissed, her eyes darting from him to the others.
"Can you tell me your name?" the doctor asked.
She hesitated a second. "Euphemia Trinket."
"You talked about Viola Summercket." the other man cut in. "You said something about Viola. Why?"
"Because we were…" she answered only to stop. She wanted to say they had been at a fashion show and the most logical explanation to her ending up in hospital was that Viola had pushed her off the catwalk. "We were working?"
It came out as a question instead of a statement.
The man sat on the bed – dropped on the bed rather like a puppet whose strings had been cut – and ran a hand in his dirty hair. "If you remember working with that bitch why don't you remember me?"
"Because she worked with Viola before she worked with you." Plutarch suggested. "Effie, how old are you?"
That was an easy question but she huffed all the same. "You do not ask a lady her age, sir."
"You're thirty-five." the man sitting on the bed said. "You remember you're thirty-five, right?"
She scowled, her pride hurt.
"I am twenty." she snapped. "And you are an awful, awful man."
There was a long silence.
A long, long silence.
She hugged her legs closer to her chest.
And then she stretched them on the bed, sitting straighter despite the pain, jutting her chin in the air. She wouldn't cower like a ruffian even her legs were hairy and she felt bruised all over. Ladies didn't cower.
"My name is Euphemia Trinket." she repeated, louder. "I am twenty. I am Faun Harwyn's star model, my face in on every advertisement board in the city, I have been named most beautiful woman of the year by Capitol Daily twice in a row. I am not confused, I know who I am, and I demand to know what is going on. Right now."
"Your name is Effie Trinket." the man sitting on the bed said, his grey eyes sad and hollow. "You're thirty-five. You've been Twelve's escort for the last thirteen years. My escort. You were captured by the Capitol, tortured for information you didn't have and then kept alive probably to torture me later on. You've been in this hospital for the last two weeks." He shook his head. "I couldn't find you before. I tried, Princess. They had you well hidden."
"Preposterous." she scoffed immediately. "The Capitol…"
"Spare me the bullshit." he growled. "Took long enough to get your pretty head out of your pretty ass last time, don't have time to convince your brainwashed brat self." He turned to the doctor while she remained gaping at his absolute rudeness. "Did they do this to her? It is it like the boy? They erased me from her mind?"
The pain in his voice was raw and it made her want to reach out and soothe. She scratched those feelings in the bud. She didn't know him. She wanted nothing to do with him. She would have already jumped from the bed and attempted to escaped if she had thought for a single second her legs would have held her weight.
"I don't think so." the doctor shook his head. "The lab results were normal. I will order a pet scan, it is possible she suffered from a concussion at some point… This might also be a defense mechanism. A way to escape a reality impossible to face. She was mostly lucid when I found her. She knew who she was and she knew who you were. She reacted to your name when she heard she was on your list."
"Would you stop!" she screeched, grabbing her head with her good hand. "This is… This is… madness! Oh… Is it a candid camera? You caught me. We had a good laugh. Enough."
"I'm afraid it's not a joke, Effie." Plutarch countered, sympathetic.
"It is ridiculous." she snarled, turning to the man sitting on the bed who had yet to introduce himself and who was watching her with empty eyes. "How could I even be your escort if I supposedly work for Twelve? Twelve's only victor is Haymitch Abernathy and he is a handsome twenty-six year old man – as improper as it gets, granted, but handsome nonetheless. You are ancient."
A smirk briefly stretched his lips but it was fleeting, sad.
"You and that crush of yours." he snorted, reaching out to grab her hand. She didn't recoil. She didn't know why but she allowed him to squeeze her fingers. "Stupid girl." he rebuked her with obvious fondness. "Haven't been twenty-six in a long time."
"I do not have a crush." she vividly denied.
"You're sure about that?" he mocked. "'Cause I'm all handsome and all…"
"Will you hush?" she shot back. "You are not him."
"I'm very much him." he grumbled. "Why are you always so fucking difficult?"
"Because you always insist on infuriating me!" she scowled.
"Oh, so you remember that but you don't remember me?" he growled.
They were locked in a glaring contest and she was at a loss. She didn't know why she had said that. At a dead end, she averted her eyes.
"I don't believe you." she said quietly.
"Easy enough to prove." he declared. He stormed out and she felt even more lost than before. She allowed the doctor to coax her into doing some quick exams: checking her eyes, probing her shoulder for pain – it had been dislocated at some point, she was told – and making sure the drip was still in place. Plutarch tried to distract her with chatter and smiles. She didn't trust any of it. To be honest, she was relieved when Haymitch came back with a mirror. "Here. Look."
She did. And she almost wept in distress.
Her blond hair looked like a bag of hay and it was awful it itself but her face was the worst. It was bare of make-up. Her cheeks were hollow as if she had been starving for months, her complexion was beyond pale, her eyes were bloodshot and marred by dark bags underneath, her pale pink lips were chapped. More glaring were the thin lines at the corner of her eyes.
The woman in the mirror wasn't twenty.
She looked up at him, blue eyes finding grey with open distress.
"You're still gorgeous, sweetheart." he offered quietly. "Don't even think otherwise."
Plutarch cleared his throat and Haymitch startled before tossing everyone around a glare. He buried his hands in his pockets and glowered in the corner while the two others filled in the blanks.
The tale was too extraordinary for her to comprehend.
Mockingjay…
Rebellion…
Capture…
Surrender…
Freedom…
It all swirled in her head.
She asked for her parents again in a small voice but this time she understood the reason for the heavy silence. She didn't need to be told. She curled up on her good side and she tried to accept everything. It was a lot to take in.
"We will leave you to get some rest." the doctor said. "I will check back in a couple of hours."
He and Plutarch left without looking back once. Haymitch lingered longer, tucking her hair behind her ear with entirely too much caution. When he turned to leave, she grabbed his wrist, instinctively using her right arm and wincing at the pain.
"Would you stay?" she whispered.
She knew she would be safe with him there. She didn't know how she knew but she did.
He looked sorry and, this time, when he brushed her hair back and let his fingers trail down her cheek, there was nothing cautious about it. It was purposeful, tender… Loving.
"I need to go check on the kids, sweetheart."
"Yours?" she asked. It was a shot in the dark, really.
"Ours." he said after a second of hesitation.
She perked up at that, a small lips stretching her lips, her fingers squeezing his wrist. "We have children? How many? What are their names? Do they need me? They must need me. Oh, bring them to me, Haymitch… Bring them to me."
"They're not…" he winced. "They're not ours like that. We don't… They're…" He stopped, rolled his eyes at his own incapacity to be clear and sat down on the edge of the mattress. He started petting her hair again. "They're our tributes. Our victors. Katniss and Peeta. You don't remember them?"
She shook her head a little, disappointed. She didn't know if she was disappointed for having forgotten or because they weren't theirs. Not biologically at least.
"They do need you, though." he snorted. "We all do. Nobody to boss us around, we start doing stupid things. We need you. I need you." The last part was mumbled, his eyes averted. "I fucking missed you."
She brushed her thumb up and down his inner wrist, in a soothing fashion. "Are you always so vulgar?"
"Yeah." he smirked.
"Doesn't it drive me crazy?" she asked.
"You like it when I drive you crazy." he teased, leaning in to press a kiss on her temple. The stubble was a little scratchy but it wasn't unpleasant.
"I always dreamed about meeting you, you know…" she hummed, her eyes fluttering close. "I hunt you down at parties but you are a difficult man to accidentally stumble upon… You are never where you are supposed to be. I always dreamed about meeting you… So handsome…"
His chuckles were a faraway sound but they made her smile nonetheless. With his hand gently running through her hair, she felt safe, protected.
"And now you have me." he whispered. She wasn't sure she was meant to hear. "For better or for worse, you have me, Princess."
"But you are old." she pouted. She liked her men older, true. But she was twenty in her mind and he was forty-one and that was a hell of an age gap.
Whatever he answered, she didn't hear.
She was already asleep.
He wasn't there when she woke up and she pretended she wasn't terrified by the loneliness and this strange world she had been dumped into. Tests were made, questions asked and answered… They told her she must have banged her head – or that her head had most likely been banged – they talked of swelling in her brain and temporary amnesia…
They gave her treatments.
The effects weren't immediate.
She was never allowed out of her room and it didn't take her long to figure out she wasn't exactly free. She heard the nurses talk about trials and purge and escorts and Gamemakers being sentenced to death one after the other. To her, it was all very remote. But she understood her own situation well enough. Haymitch told her not to worry, that he was working on it. He sounded confident and so she believed him.
He came to see her every day.
Her body was less weak after a week and a half. She was encouraged to walk around her room, to exercise to gain strength back. She paced around like a caged lion, her only distraction was his daily visit.
She was always happy to see him and she wasn't shy about showing it. One day, she greeted him with a joyful squeal, tossed her good arm around his neck, jumped and wrapped her legs around his waist. He snorted at that welcome, briefly pressing a kiss against her hair but his hands immediately locking at the small of her back to make sure she wouldn't fall.
"You're like a child." he accused.
I'm twenty, she wanted to answer but thought better of it because she wasn't, not really, and she was somehow aware of it. She placed her feet back down on the floor with a pout.
"You are like an old man." she retorted, cupping his cheek and making a face when his beard itched too much against her palm. "And this dead porcupine on your chin has to go. Please, do shave."
He shook his head. "Can't."
He showed her his unsteady hand. She clasped it between hers to stop the shaking, her eyebrows furrowing together.
"You stopped drinking." she deduced. She didn't know how she knew alcohol had even been a problem for him. It hadn't been public knowledge when she had been twenty but she did know. There were a lot of things she knew but couldn't explain to herself. The doctor said it was her memory coming back step by step.
"Took it up again." he confessed, averting his eyes. "Tremors won't go away."
She pursed her lips and brought the hand to her mouth, pressing a light kiss to his knuckles. It was difficult to say what she felt. Her feelings didn't feel like her own, as if she had fifteen years worth of them bottled up but forgotten.
"Find a razor." she offered. "I will do it for you."
He opened his mouth – to refuse, she thought – and then closed it again. It didn't take long for him to find what she needed. She sat him on the bed and proceeded with more confidence than she truly felt. He watched her like a hawk all the time it took to smear shaving cream on his face. She hesitated briefly when it was time to use the blade. It was the way he was watching her that made her move. Cautious but trustful.
Only her, she thought, only her would have been allowed to bring a blade so close to his throat.
It was a certainty so brutal and empowering that she didn't even doubt it for one single second.
She washed his chin, cheeks and upper lip with a wet cloth when she was done, removing the last smudges of cream. He was still watching her. Eventually she replaced the cloth with her lips. His cheek first, then his chin and then his lips.
It wasn't much of a kiss.
A soft press of her lips against his. A statement more than a question.
"Mine." she hummed.
His mouth answered that by pressing more strongly against hers. His kiss, on the other hand, was less statement than question.
"Are you?" he sighed. "Still mine?"
"Yes." she answered simply. "I don't remember. But I know. Here."
She brought his hand to her stomach. It was a deep feeling in her guts, a feeling of belonging.
He was less hesitant around her after that.
He talked to her a lot during his visits. He ranted about the rebel President, told her about the children, ranted some more about the rebels… She wasn't interested in politics. She never had been and she suspected she never would be. To her, only her own situation and her loved ones' counted. She was pragmatic in that way.
She still had trouble believing the Capitol was as awful as everyone painted it to be nowadays.
It figured her memories of her time in prison would come back first.
It came in the form of recurrent nightmares.
After three nights of that, she refused to go to sleep.
Only Haymitch could coax her into resting for a while but it never stopped the horrors in her dreams from plaguing her.
The memories of the Games came well after Coin fell and Katniss' trial was underway.
It was a huge puzzle of jumbled fragments.
It was enough.
Haymitch was wary around her once the blunt of her memory was back. He kept expecting her to start yelling at him about leaving her behind when he had left for Thirteen, she figured. She had no anger and no energy for that sort of resentment. His guilt was enough of a punishment anyway.
"Don't forget me this time." he joked on the cold morning they parted ways. He would go to the Training Center to retrieve Katniss and she would go to the clinic, like she did every day, to visit Peeta.
"Not a chance." she laughed.
Even when she didn't remember, she always knew.
Her feelings for him were stronger than oblivion.