Prompt: post mj, Peeta taught Effie how to bake muffins, one night she tries baking for Haymitch, when she burns the tray it triggers a mental breakdown over other things she "couldn't keep from burning" Haymitch just stabs the muffins with her

No muffin had been armed in the writing of this one shot. ;)

Fire Hazard

Since Effie had arrived in Twelve with too many suitcases and an armada of problems and had laid camp in his guestroom, Haymitch had gotten used to weird things going on in his house.

At first glance, she was the very same Effie Trinket as ever: bright, bubbly, busy and annoying. When she was around the kids, there was no telling she had spent months in prison and was still haunted by it. When she was around the kids, she was happy – or pretended to be at least. However it had been quite a few years since Haymitch had been fooled by the dumb escort act and the mask she always hid behind.

She didn't bother forcing smiles and swearing she was right as rain for him. They both knew if she had been right as rain she wouldn't have been in Twelve in the first place. Not so fast and not so soon and certainly not hiding in his house from the rest of Panem.

Effie had never been good at being idle…

It had started with her quest for cleanliness. The guestroom had been the first to surrender to her cleaning spree because she couldn't sleep somewhere filthy and then she had gradually scrubbed the rest of the house – floors and walls; and he suspected that if she had found a way she would have done the ceilings too – to the point that he could barely recognize the place. It smelt even better than when he had been employing Hazelle as a housekeeper and she kept it clean by all means necessary.

He had woken up more than once in the middle of the night to Effie scrubbing a room or another even if it didn't need to be cleaned. Weird.

He had mocked her at first, had called her a silly and pampered Capitol who wasn't made for country life. It had taken him two weeks to realize she needed the smell of soap and the gleaming of dust-free floorboards to feel comfortable. It had nothing to do with her being squeamish and more to do with avoiding triggers. Her cell had smelt like filth and rot, she had smelt like filth and rot. She breathed in soap, detergent and air freshener, she ran her hands on smooth and clean furniture and she stared at the spotless floorboards to ground herself.

Haymitch was a messy person. Once he had understood why she compulsively kept the house so neat he had tried to make an effort but he was a sob and she ended up berating him and cleaning after him more often than not. It led to fights but he was alright with those because she snapped back and glared with her hands on her hips and he liked that better than the defeated woman he had found on a hospital bed after the rebellion. Effie still had fire that was how he knew she would overcome this.

The obsessive cleaning tendencies weren't the only weird things. She had never been good at being idle and thus she was trying hobby after hobby that she always gave up after a day or two for various reasons that always made him roll his eyes: gardening (dirt under her fingernails), painting (messy), chess (too complicated, too slow, too boring), running (too many people around the house), caring for the geese (abominable monstrous animals), cooking (he had put his foot down on that one because it was disgusting), walking in the woods with Katniss (too many dead animals)… The list went on and on and on.

So, yeah, he had grown pretty used to weird things happening in his house.

Jerking up awake on the couch at three a.m. wasn't so weird for him. He still wasn't sleeping well and he tended to go to bed in the early morning to avoid the thick of darkness when he wasn't getting drunk enough to pass out. Effie had a different technique that consisted in avoiding her nightmares by not going to bed at all until she was too exhausted to do anything else than curl up on the closest comfortable piece of furniture.

All the same, it wasn't weird either for them to be awake at the same time in the dead of night. Sometimes they watched TV – or Effie watched TV while he made his share of sarcastic comments on the stupidity of the programs – and sometimes they just circled around each other in silence, not in the mood for company. He tried not to wonder what it meant that they hadn't tumbled into bed yet. It was usually the first thing that happened when they were both sleepless and bored – but that had been before though, the war had changed everything.

What was weird was the series of loud obscenities growing steadily higher and higher. He rubbed his face, marveling at how many curses she knew – most of them she had probably learned from him – slowly registering the increasing touch of panic in her voice. He was already on his feet when the smell reached him.

Fire.

He rushed to the kitchen and pushed her aside, taking in the tray where something was being licked by flames on the counter. He didn't pause to think before dumping the content of the water jug on it. He didn't breathe until nothing was left of the fire but an acrid smoke.

For the longest time he didn't move, trapped in his own head and his own nightmares. He hadn't been there when the old shack in the Seam had burned. He hadn't been there but it had never stopped him from wondering. Had his family been already dead when the blaze had swallowed the house? Had the smoke got them first or had they died screaming when the flames had melted their flesh? Had his brother tried to escape? Had his mother cried for him?

The window over the sink was pushed open and the smoke gradually cleared. The old ghosts cleared with it.

He turned toward his former escort, almost trembling with fury. "What the fuck were you trying to do?"

She bowed her head, looking too lost and too fragile under the harsh neon lights of the kitchen, lost in a woolen sweater that belonged to him.

"Bake?" she offered, sounding uncertain. "I am so sorry, I do not know what went wrong, I did exactly what Peeta showed me. I…" She stopped talking and looked up with pleading eyes. "I am so sorry."

"Bake." he repeated flatly, glancing at the tray and the floored charred… something that were still somehow smoking. "I thought we agreed I was doing the cooking from now on."

This was exactly what he had been afraid of the few times she had attempted to use the stove.

"I wanted to surprise you." she winced. "I asked Peeta for a recipe and… I shouldn't have put rum in it. I do not think it would have burned so badly without the rum…" She glared at the carbonized pastries. "I wanted to do something nice for you. I did not mean to… I did not mean to start a fire. I cannot do anything right anymore. I am sorry."

She turned around and he knew she would flee upstairs and lock herself in her room and it would be the last he would see of her for the next couple of days. He grabbed her arm before she could go much further than the kitchen table.

She flinched.

He knew it wasn't her fault and it probably wasn't him she was afraid of but it hurt all the same. She used to be so affectionate, so demonstrative… She used to always touch people… Reaching out, grabbing their hands, linking her arm with theirs, hugging them or randomly trailing her fingers down their arm… She could barely handle it when he brushed past her now. Again, he didn't think it had to do with him. She had been hurt and expecting pain had become her body's instinctive answer to any human contact.

"It's just burned muffins." he told her quietly. "Don't work yourself up over muffins."

"The muffins are hardly the problem though, are they?" she chuckled bitterly, her eyes coming to rest on her failed attempt at baking once more. "It is a perfect metaphor for everything. Every time I try to do something…" She shrugged – something else she never used to do before. "Mother was right. All along Mother was right. I should just have… I should just have…"

"Married a rich guy?" he scoffed, too aware of what her parents would have liked her to do. "Sure would have helped with the baking, sweetheart."

"I should never have gone into modeling when I knew full well there would always be more beautiful models than me. I should never have gone into escorting either because I just proved her point that I would never be anything more than a minor celebrity. I should never have slept with you. I should never have gotten attached to the children. I should never have gotten attached to you." she spat quickly. "I should have married an old rich man and waited until he died so I could have been a rich widow who had no care in the world but her own pleasure. I would never have been arrested. I would never have been hurt. I would still have money and a name people do not despise and I would not be starting fires at three a.m. because I would not be baking rum muffins at all."

She was out of breath when she finished and she looked at him, half expectant and half anxious.

He couldn't help it, his lips twitched in amusement. There was nothing funny – and nothing he could quite dispute – in that little speech but he found himself smirking all the same.

"So that's it. You've become a pyromaniac 'cause you wanted to prove a point to your mom when you were seventeen." he teased. "Shit, Princess, that's a hell of a shortcut."

"Oh, hush." she snapped. "You know I am right. It was hubris, all of it. I always aimed at impossible goals and…"

"And you always reached them." he shrugged, tugging on her arm. She let him draw her in his arms a little wary but otherwise willing enough. "Come on. Be fair. What did you ever fail at?"

"I was never the most famous woman in Panem." she pointed out.

"You were famous enough." he scoffed. "Not one person out there who didn't know your name."

"I never got a promotion." she insisted. "I was Twelve's escort for thirteen years."

"But you got me out of the deal, yeah? And you got the kids." he countered. "Doesn't look like a failure to me."

She relaxed a little at that, leaning her weight against his chest.

"I almost burned down your house trying to bake you rum muffins." she chuckled.

"We'll just drink what's left of the rum." he shrugged, fatalistic.

They did just that. They sat on the front porch, far from the smell of charred pastries, and shared the bottle, watching the deserted street and the stars above.

"Why were you baking me muffins?" he asked after a while.

It was a weird thing for her to do even in the midst of all the weird things she had been doing lately.

She took a swing of the bottle and handed it back to him, already looking a little glassy eyes. She had lost a lot of weight during her captivity and she was having trouble gaining it back. It didn't take a lot to get her drunk nowadays.

"I wanted to do something nice for you." she sighed. "You always liked muffins for breakfast."

"You want to do something nice for me… There's something else you can do." he teased. Her eyes darted from the sky above to him and back. He didn't think her cheeks were flushed because of the rum. He let the innuendo hang in the air for a moment, to test the water mostly, and then he snorted. "Don't touch the oven or the stove ever again, Princess. That's all the nice I need."

Her lips stretched into a smile. "I will take that under consideration."

"I'm serious." he insisted, gulping down more rum. "We'll leave the baking to the boy."

She was a fucking fire hazard in the kitchen.