Prompt: if you're back to taking prompts could you write something of Effie obsessively trying to make things pretty post mj to try and cover up her trauma? I read it as a hc somewhere and I can totally see it x
Take The Ugly, Make It Pretty
It started with the chimes.
Although that wasn't entirely true.
It had started with Effie spending close to a whole month trapped in his house and Haymitch trying to coax her out at every turn. It had started with the panic attacks and the nightmares and the flashbacks that been so easy to trigger. It had started with Effie's near hysteria every time Haymitch managed to get her out of the house, even if it was only to cross the street to go to the kids'. It had started with Effie locking herself up in the old wardrobe in the guestroom, claiming it reminded her of her cell. It had started with Haymitch foregoing alcohol at night so he could help Effie through the night terrors. It had started with Effie obsessively cleaning the house because she couldn't bear the smell of decay, could barely tolerate it when it didn't reek of chemical flowers and bleach.
It had started, in short, when Haymitch had failed to bring Effie to Thirteen, where she would have been safe and sound under his protection.
Or maybe it had even started much earlier than that, when they had begun their ill-conceived and reckless affair.
But for Haymitch, because they had been stuck in the never leave the house pattern, it all started with the morning he woke up to find her hard at work in the kitchen, gluing various broken pieces of metal and glass together.
"What are you doing?" he grumbled, not quite yet completely awake. He briefly coiled his hand around her nape on his way to the coffee pot, like he did most morning. It was more intimate than a simple good morning, a gesture of affection that was between them and that nobody else would have caught. Given a choice, he might have kissed her but they weren't there yet. He wasn't sure they would ever get there again either.
"I thought a chime would look nice on the porch." she answered in a hum.
He tossed a dubious glance at the clutter scattered all over the table. Most of it, he figured, came from the kitchen drawers. Knick-knacks he had never gotten around to toss away: nuts, screws, shards of glass that came in green or see-through, the occasional scrap of wood, a few colorful beads and a couple of sequins that must have come loose from one of her dresses…
Truth be told, he didn't like chimes and he was pretty sure the noise would drive him mad before long but it was the first time she expressed an interest for a project that didn't involve cleaning something so he withheld his comments. He sat down at the table and watched her work while he sipped his morning coffee, not really surprised that she was actually good with her hands when she wanted to be.
The chime, once she was done, looked weird but strangely pretty too for something assembled out of broken parts. The smile she flashed him was so blinding and proud that he even offered to help her set it up.
She spent the next few days making more of them with every little bits of salvageable garbage she could find. Before long, there were a dozen of those things chiming in the wind and the sound was impossible to block out when you were in the living-room. Katniss pretended to admire them so much – because she apparently found his discomfort hilarious – that he suggested Effie gifted a few to the kids. The girl laughed a lot less, then.
It started with the chimes but it didn't stop there.
He had gotten so used to finding her sitting in the kitchen with a set of broken pieces in front of her every morning that he couldn't help but be worried the day she wasn't there. He looked for her everywhere, his heart racing with a fear he hadn't really been able to ignore ever since he had caught her eyeing a knife a little too closely in the early days of her stay.
The sigh of relief escaped his lips without his consent when he found her in the dining-room he couldn't remember ever using – or even entering in a good decade. The room was clean, of course, since it hadn't escaped her scrubbing frenzy, but it was in a sad state of disrepair.
Effie was standing there, her hands on her hips, surveying everything with a displeased look.
"You're alright, sweetheart?" he asked, a bit wary. She didn't startle when he tentatively placed a hand at the small of her back. She just pursed her lips and crossed her arms in front of her chest, leaning a little into his side.
"This room is ugly." she declared.
He took another glance just for the sake of it but, really, there was no way to contradict that. The paint was peeling, the furniture looked ready to fall apart and even the china cabinet was empty because he had a bad habit of breaking dishes…
"Butt-ass ugly." he agreed.
"Will you help me carry the table out?" she asked, her tone determined. "I want to try to sand it. Perhaps it will make a difference."
"Ain't sure that thing can be moved." he winced. The table was a huge monstrosity that was probably extremely heavy. She looked disappointed and he found out he couldn't bear disappointing her anymore. "But we can try, yeah."
It took the two of them plus Katniss and Peeta to get the table to the backyard. It soon turned out she had no clue how to sand something and his knowledge of the topic was vague at best. Still, it wasn't that bad to figure it out together. It took them a couple of days to finish the table but once it was sanded and polished, it really didn't look as bad as it had. Of course, he should have seen it coming that she wouldn't stop at the table.
After that it was the china cabinet and the chairs and the dresser and the walls.
He put his foot down when she started talking about redoing the floor too. That wasn't something either of them could handle and he didn't want to call in a professional.
She bought new plates and service dishes that they weren't supposed to touch unless it was an important dinner – they were there too look pretty in the cabinet apparently – she added curtains and potted plants, replaced the ugly paintings that had been hanging on the walls with landscapes from Peeta's collection, bought table cloths and napkins that she embroidered with a stylized A…
Once she was done, the room looked great. Like something out of a brand new house, not grand or imposing but homey in a classy way. It was such a nice room to be in that he and the kids insisted on taking their meals in there a few times.
"It's the best room in the house and we hardly use it." he commented, one night. The kids nodded their agreement, looking at Effie expectantly, waiting for her to take the bait Haymitch had just offered. He wasn't sure giving her a free pass to redo the whole house was clever but ever since she had finished the living-room she had started roaming the house without purpose again.
She smiled but if she understood the tacit invitation to redecorate to her taste, she didn't let on.
Two days later, she was on her knees in the backyard, in one of his old pants that she had been forced to tie up with strings at the waist so it wouldn't slip off, her hands in the dirt. That was where he found her after searching the whole house, on her knees, earth upturned in front of her and a collection of potted flowers ready to be planted in the fresh soil. But she was staring at her hands and she was trembling too much for it to be normal.
Worse, she didn't seem to notice the geese wandering all around her.
"Hey." he called out softly – but loud enough not to startle her. She startled anyway, her breathing increasing into badly-controlled pants. He kneeled next to her, carefully placing a hand on her shoulder. She flinched. "Effie. Sweetheart. You're in Twelve. You're okay. You're with me." He rubbed his thumb against her shoulder and repeated it again and again until the words finally registered. "You're in Twelve. You're safe. I'm right here."
"Haymitch." She was struggling to catch her breath back. "Haymitch, I'm dirty…"
She showed him her hands, her nails were black with grime. Her fingers were shaking so much, he could barely see it though.
"Yeah, a little. It's okay." he reminded her. "You're safe, yeah?"
Strong smells were usually a right-away trigger but he had caught her panicking a little after perceiving herself as dirty before. She had spent too long in a cell unable to wash, her body rotting away in its own filth.
"I thought… I thought I could handle it." she whispered. "The backyard was so bare… I wanted… I thought flowers would look nice. I thought…"
"Tell you what…" He hauled her up to her feet and she didn't resist. "How about I finish the gardening and you take a nice long bath?"
She nodded, still not quite fully there with him. He helped her back into the house, drew her a bath and added pinches of her products at random, not sure what she usually used. He helped her out of her clothes too because she didn't look in a state of doing it herself. She caught him looking but she didn't rebuke him, she smiled instead, as if his interest pleased her and his simmering shame at taking advantage of the situation lessened a little. Still, he kept his hands in safe places and tried not to let his eyes linger too much.
"Thank you." she murmured once she was in the warm water.
"Don't be stupid, Princess." he grumbled, a little too harshly.
She knew him too well to take offense.
He hated gardening. He hated bright colorful flowers. Always had since his arena.
And yet he found himself playing in the dirt just to bring a smile on her face, pondering his life choices and where they had led him. It took him three days and Peeta's help to make it look like she wanted. She kept them supplied in lemonade and started working on the old rusty bench that had been sitting on his front porch for two decades. She beamed when she saw the finished backyard but the happiness faded when he took a good look at the bench and told her it couldn't be salvaged. Truth be told, he should have gotten rid of it years ago. It was a miracle he hadn't yet contracted anything cutting himself on its rusty edges.
She refused to see reason and worked on it with an energy that looked frantic and a little desperate. The day she cut herself, he put his foot down.
"We're getting rid of it." he decided. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes in an expression that was usually a prelude to a giant temper tantrum like only a spoiled Capitol brat could have. "Ain't negotiable."
Afterwards, he thought it was the first real fight they had had in a while. It started with an argument and ended up in a shouting match that had them slamming doors. He heard her burst into tears but he was too angry to care. He drank so much that he was out of it for two days.
By the time he recovered from his binge, she had managed to cut herself some more on the bench. It did look a little better with a new coat of paint but it didn't make it any less dangerous to sit in. He got ready for another fight – because the bench was going to the landfill site – but it seemed the fight had left her.
She sat on the porch in front of the old bench, her back to the wooden railing that had, at some point, gotten sanded and varnished too, staring at the rusty piece of crap with sad eyes.
"I think you are right." she said before he could open his mouth and while that pronouncement from her lips would usually have thrilled him, right then it simply hurt because she looked so lost… "Some things are too broken to be made pretty again."
"Fairly sure I've never said that, sweetheart." he countered.
No matter what he said, she remained sad-looking though.
The bench-restoring failure made her relapse.
She mostly stuck to her room, only wandered around to obsessively clean rooms that didn't need cleaning, curled up against him after nightmares that were stronger than they had been in a while and wept four hours on end…
He bought her a swing seat, a white monstrosity that took him and Katniss hours to put together, with pale blue cushions and matching throw pillows – at least he thought they were matching. She smiled and thanked him and consented to drink a late cup of tea outside with him in the evening but when she leaned her head on his shoulder after a while of staring at the starry sky, he could tell she was still sad.
"The kitchen looks shabby." he said. "Could use some painting."
"A sunny yellow?" she requested more than suggested.
"Sure." he agreed, relieved to see the spark return to her eyes. "Yellow. Whatever. Go crazy."
He was rewarded with a kiss on the cheek.
It was in the middle of the kitchen redoing that he realized she never tossed anything away. Whatever was too old or too damaged was put aside. Some parts went to new chimes or were re-used elsewhere. She hardly ever bought anything new, she used what she had, made it useful again, pretty again.
He started noticing a trend.
When they were done with the kitchen, he suggested they moved on to the living-room, afraid she would slip back into her depression. He shouldn't have worried. The whole house had become her new project. She chose colors that were a little too bright for him and he bore it until she noticed he was drinking more and was a lot more on edge.
"Reminds me too much of the arena." he mumbled, a little drunk, one night.
"You should have told me." she rebuked.
The next day, they were painting again. It was still colorful, but a few shades darker. That, he could live with.
It took them months to cover most of the house. She was laughing again, wore ridiculous clothes she made from scratch or from old dresses, she was doing so much better he didn't even blink when she started joining him in bed for other reasons than to seek shelter from a nightmare…
The master was the last room they tackled and when she asked him what he would like – since it was his bedroom and all – he nervously rubbed the back of his neck. "Do something you'd like."
"It is your bedroom, Haymitch." she hummed, her measuring tape already out.
"Could be ours." he pointed out.
She pounced on him so fast he saw stars. They didn't get any remodeling done that day but that was alright too.
"You could open an interior design business." he half-joked half-suggested one night as they were drinking wine on the porch. "High demand right now." Of course, people in Twelve were more into getting a roof over their head than having a pretty house but… "Effie Trinket, takes the old and makes it new again."
"Effie Trinket, takes the ugly and makes it pretty again." she corrected with a chuckle.
"Yeah, that's more like it." he snorted.
She took a sip of her wine and leaned against his side. "Did I make myself pretty again, do you think?"
He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pressed a kiss against her head. "You were never ugly, sweetheart. You could never be ugly."
"That is not what you used to say." she teased.
"That's cause you were trying to look like a clown." he smirked. "Wanna hear a secret?"
"Is there any of your secrets I do not know yet?" she grinned.
He nipped at her earlobe in rebuke. "Even when you looked like a clown, you were the most beautiful woman in the room."
"Now you are just being smooth to get lucky." she laughed.
"Is it working?" he mocked.
She placed her glass down and stood up, leading him up by the hand. "Let's find out, shall we?"