Haymitch Abernathy was a dead man. A dead man whose heart still beat.
The first time he knew he was dead was when he was greeted back to his home by an empty train station. The faces of the crowd said more than their words did, and he fell to his knees, his hands reaching out for the family that wasn't there.
The second time he knew was his fifteenth year mentoring. The girl had died in the Bloodbath. The boy had died later, in the final eight. They were the twenty-ninth and thirtieth kids he'd failed to help, and he knew then that it would never get easier, he knew then that he was helpless to be of any help at all.
But sometimes he felt a little bit alive.
"You are not a failure, Haymitch Abernathy," Effie had told him sternly one day, when he was drowning himself in alcohol and tears and his own cruel words. "You are not. You just haven't won yet." She had hope in him, at least. She went in, every year, hoping and believing in his ability to get a kid out, at least one kid out. She had more hope than the parents did, than his fellow mentors did.
And when he finally did help someone – not just one, he had helped two someones, she had been there, beaming with him. "I told you," she said, kissing him on the cheek. "I told you it would happen, one day. I told you that you could do it."
"Yes," he'd replied, taking her hand. "Yes, you did." And then his arms were around her waist and he was spinning her around the room and she was laughing, yelling, crying with him.
He was a dead man, yes. But he wasn't buried yet.
