Part Three
Our Mutual Friend
When they arrive, he and Plutarch exit the hovercraft together, Finnick stumbling along behind them.
Haymitch need to know who has alcohol, and who has the power to start a rescue attempt for the victors and Effie. They will likely be in the same place, so Haymitch is happy when Plutarch asks if he's ready to meet Alma Coin.
The gray jumpsuits are filing out of the craft in orderly fashion, some groups marching one way, others another, and four of them wheeling a knocked-out Katniss, and a heavily bandaged Beetee, down yet another corridor.
They follow two jumpsuits into an elevator.
Haymitch looks at Finnick. Finnick is staring, perfectly blank, at the elevator doors.
He reaches back, and takes Finnick's hand. Plutarch looks surprised, but quickly adopts a look of polite disinterest.
Finnick squeezes his hand, so hard it hurts, and starts crying.
The elevator finds a different track and starts going up. The pressure on his ears he hasn't even noticed, starts to lift. Haymitch had been told that 13 was built underground, but he hadn't realized they had the square footage for a hovercraft hangar and missiles storage.
The jumpsuits are quiet. They don't engage in small talk, even with each other. They don't offer any drinks either. Haymitch is starting to feel awfully thirsty.
They reach whatever floor they were supposed to, and leave the elevator.
Two jumpsuits step up on either side of Finnick.
"What, what are you doing?" Finnick asks, already struggling against their tight grasp on his arms.
One of the suits draws out a syringe like Katniss's, and sticks it in Finnick's neck.
"What'd you do that for?"
They catch Finnick and drag him away, without answering his question or even looking at him.
Two more jumpsuits appear.
Haymitch looks at Plutarch, who looks nonplussed, but who can tell what's real with a Gamemaker?
"What's going on?" he yells, and now he's got his arms pinioned behind his back.
He bucks away, hurting a shoulder, maybe badly.
"You'll have to kill me-" and then his tongue goes numb, and everything gets small and far away.
He wakes up in a dim room. His mouth is dry, and it tastes bad. His stomach hurts. He's going to puke. There's a tin bedpan next to the bed for exactly this purpose.
Puke accomplished, he rolls onto his back and moans.
Is he in prison? Surely, they wouldn't care for him in prison. He's hooked up to an IV, and the room is dim and boring, but it doesn't have the menacing feeling of a prison, though he only has Gamemaker detention for comparison.
Every six hours, someone checks his vitals, changes the IV, which is feeding him electrolytes and keeping him hydrated. They don't let him drink anything. They don't answer any of his questions unless they pertain directly to his health.
After a few days, he had stopped yelling and screaming, demanding answers, and throwing fits. When he broke a chair against the wall, they had come in and removed all his furniture (one bedstead, one chair, one table) except for his bedroll and pillow. He had quieted down. He's too sick to move, too sick to breathe, let alone throw anything or yell.
First, his hands started shaking. He has gone through withdrawal before, he knows the deal, he tells himself. His head hurt horrendously. He was going to be a puke machine the whole night, until nothing came up, and then he would dry heave the rest of the night.
Second, he had started sweating. He was so hot, he wanted to tear off his skin. Everything felt abominable. His shirt collar, his hair on his neck, his fingers, his socks. He had taken off all of his clothes and immediately started shivering like he was out in a blizzard, so he put his clothes back on.
He had rested on his bedroll and resigned himself to a miserable night.
Haymitch had been stoic about his acceptance of the pain and withdrawal, after the first four days. He thought he was maybe turning a corner, and he was sure his attendants had thought so, too, until he saw his mother.
He had been having a nightmare.
He was back in his Games. Maysilee had just saved him. They were walking, trying to find the edge of the arena.
She had said something, something innocuous, from behind him. He had known right away, though he couldn't tell how. That wasn't Maysilee.
He had to act normal. He couldn't let her see he knew she was a mutt.
He had tried to answer her normally, even turned around and smiled at her. She had smiled back, and blood dribbled out from between her teeth, and down her chin. He did not react.
The Maysilee-mutt did a good job of acting like Maysilee, most of the time. He wondered if she had killed the real Maysilee. Every once in a while, though, she would jump high into the air, catch a bird, and eat it raw, feathers, and bones, and meat. Or she would cough out great gouts of bright, red, frothy blood. He pretended not to see.
"Haymitch?"
He paused his walking, turned around. She was grinning, her smile too wide, her teeth too sharp.
"Yeah?"
"I know you know."
He sits up. He can't breathe. He can't breathe! He is gasping in air, but he feels like a fish on a riverbank. His heart is pounding, each beat accompanied by a doubling of the pain in his head. He can feel his pulse in his eyeballs, which also hurt. His stomach feels like there's a bowling ball inside it.
The pain and the nausea are almost a relief.
"I know you know."
Haymitch hates any reminder of his Games, the first five years after, before he had completely given in to despair, and drank his way through every day of every Games, even the days in the Training Center.
He had thought he could handle it, he remembers. He had seriously misjudged his own strength.
Lying down again, feeling wretched, wishing he were dead, he rolls onto his side, facing the door.
The room is painted a boring beige, the same color as the scuffed tile floor. The lights, hidden in the wall where it meets the ceiling, are dim, and turned off completely the first night, until he had screamed and screamed and screamed. Now the lights stay on all the time, and he has no way of knowing how many days pass.
He's staring at the door, wondering what cruel creatures are on the other side.
The door opens. He sits up. It's hard to tell in this windowless cell, but he doesn't think it's time to change his IV bag yet. Maybe it's rescue. He would even be happy to see Plutarch right now. Just please, god, not another jumpsuit.
A foot, black with soot, and dripping blood, slides past the dark gap in the door.
Haymitch shivers, and watches, helpless.
The foot lengthens into a badly burned leg, followed by another leg, and now she's in view.
She's badly, badly burned. Her hair is totally gone. She's still smoking in places. Bleeding burns are crisscrossed with blackened flesh. He can see her bone in places where the fire melted away the skin.
Haymitch sits up.
One eye is burned, dribbling down her cheek like jelly. The other stares, a gray eye, totally unencumbered by eyelids, or surrounding flesh.
"Mama?"
She lunges across the room till she's standing at the foot of his bed.
"I'm sorry!" he yells. "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!"
The door opens again. He opens his eyes.
His mother is gone.
He looks around, every move painful, but he can't stop looking from side to side, afraid his mother will reappear.
Then Willow Everdeen appears.
"Oh, you're not dead, are you?"
She shakes her head.
"No, Haymitch. I'm alive. Are you okay?"
He shakes his head.
Then she's kneeling down on his bedroll and holding him, even though he can smell how awful he smells. They stopped letting him take baths when he tried bashing his head in the wall.
He realizes he's crying, great heavy sobs, into her shoulder.
"I never meant… for them to die. Never…knew. Didn't know…"
"Sh, sh, sh." Willow soothes him with soft shushing sounds, gently rubs his back.
"That was never your fault, Haymitch. The, the…" She's struggling, but manages to say it, even though her voice shakes. "The Capitol killed them. Not you."
Something breaks inside him.
Not his fault. He had not set the fire, had he? And when it was over, he had been devastated, not eating or drinking for days.
All those kids he had watched being murdered, that wasn't his fault either. The Capitol had put them there.
Eventually, Haymitch gets hold of himself.
"Sorry," he says.
She smiles.
"No apology necessary. It's good to see you again."
After that, she comes and visits him, what feels like, once a day.
12 had been firebombed during their escape from the Capitol and the arena rescue. Not even 1,000 people made it out. 13 rescued the refugees.
"Yes, they seem very magnanimous."
Willow laughs.
The districts are in open rebellion. Peacekeepers are flooding into the districts. Few are returning home. There has even been noise about the rebellion hitting 2, where Peacekeepers are trained and churned out, because they don't want to be killed in huge numbers in the districts.
Haymitch still sees things. Bugs crawling up the walls. An eyeball, floating in his soup. One night, or, he thinks it was night, as he woke up when it happened, his bedroll had been turned into a raft, the only point of safety on a roiling sea of twisting, writhing snakes, all pure white. He screamed, and they had disappeared.
But the vivid dreams are the worst. At least he's somewhat in control of the hallucinations. As terrifying as they are, all he has to do is close his eyes, and they go away. But there is no escape from dreaming, which he hasn't done since he started drinking seriously.
In one dream, or maybe a hallucination, it's hard to tell reality from dreams now, Peeta comes to his room. He has a black eye so swollen, his eyelids are almost non-existent. One blue eye stares with insane intensity. His cheek is cut open. One ear has been sliced in half. His lower lip has been ripped off. (Haymitch doesn't realize until later that he looks like the first kid he ever saw die in the Games. Or, the first kid he saw die that he was old enough to understand what he was seeing.)
In Peeta's arms is a little girl, just a baby, really, her face blue and the rest of her skin very, very white.
Johanna steps into the room behind the silent, awful Peeta and his silent, awful cargo.
"Remember?" she asks.
And suddenly, he does.
A/N: Part Three! We are officially into the events of Mockingjay and the rebellion. There will also be a few chapters from Peeta's perspective in Part Three. The survival tactics the victors learned in their arenas and the Capitol don't work in District 13. You'll probably notice how much fun I had picking apart Alma Coin and the rebel district. I know the third book wasn't a fan favorite. I think that's because it's about the recovery process, which isn't nearly as exciting as the trauma that creates a need for a recovery process, haha. Where Katniss had space to heal, I needed Haymitch to stay a little more at loose ends. Please tell me what you think! And thanks for reading!
Honestly, when I wrote fanfiction as a 14-year-old, people commented left and right, mostly to tell me how bad it was, which did help me learn. But I guess things change? Anyway, I would really love a review! Any interaction from readers is very appreciated.