Despite a lifetime of parties, banquets, and balls, Effie has never seen such a spirited celebration. The big bonfire in the center of the old square blankets the nearby buildings in a golden glow and cuts through the coolness of the night air. The serious workers Effie has been getting to know over the past few weeks become the liveliest of revelers, playing music, singing songs, dancing as if with the very spirit of joy.
"We're getting some amazing shots," says Agrippa, keeping his camera steady and pointed at the festivities as he glances at Effie. "This is going to look great."
"Oh, yes," she says. "But don't forget to go enjoy yourself. You deserve it."
She sees Katniss and Peeta laugh as a dance comes to an end. They spot Effie and walk towards her, leaving the fiddlers and singers and other dancers to take a brief rest.
"You looked wonderful out there!" Effie tells them, grinning. This is the happiest she has ever seen either of them. Tonight has taken from everyone the heavy cloak of loss, and it has given her precious pearls the chance to shine as every young woman and man should.
A fiddler plays a note, eliciting a cheer from the other side of the bonfire.
"Come on," Peeta says, holding his hand out.
"Me?" Effie asks. He nods, and she shakes her head. "Goodness, no! I don't know how." The steps she'd learned for her coming of age party and her entry into the right social circles in the Capitol were soft and subdued, a mere pantomime of happiness. They may have taught her coordination and poise, but they have left her sorely unprepared for a celebration such as this.
"It's easy," Katniss tells her.
"Says the professional!"
Katniss laughs and shakes her head. "If you can walk around in high heels without falling over, you can learn to dance."
The song begins in earnest. Peeta has not moved his hand, ready and waiting. In the dim electric lights over the building by which they stand, Effie feels as if this is the most important invitation of her life.
Katniss arches her eyebrows at her, a final push, and Effie takes Peeta's hand. "All right. Show me."
The steps are simple, and this dance as a whole is more about improvised movement than technical precision. Effie loses track of how many times she goes around the bonfire with the crowd. With every twirl, she feels as if she's taken flight. It's little wonder that the people of District Twelve retained their spirit during those seventy-five years of darkness. No one, no matter how powerful, could have taken away from them the simple joy of this music, these songs, these brief moments of happiness.
Now they are free to do this when they please.
Now the fires in their hearts burn true.
The night goes on, and so does the festival. Some of the older folk sit together underneath the lights hanging from the buildings, watching the younger ones continue with the celebration for all of them. Katniss and Peeta have gone off for a walk about the town, and Effie has retired to the edge of the square.
There, in the shadow of a half-broken wall, she watches the flames of the bonfire begin their slow, steady dimming. And there, as he walks away from what by day are the lunch tables, is where Haymitch finds her.
"Tired already?" he asks as he comes to a stop by the wall. It brings him close enough to her that neither of them needs to yell to be heard.
"Yes," she answers, and she smiles because it is a tiredness that comes with satisfaction.
"I saw they got you to join them."
She chuckles. "Katniss and Peeta insisted. I had a marvelous time."
"Better than the parties you're used to, I bet."
"So much so." She sighs away the weight of her past and all its ugly facts. Now is not the time. "I didn't see you out there, though. Do I detect diffidence?"
"Nah." He looks out at the bonfire, shaking his head. "Not really my thing, celebrating. Doesn't feel right."
Nodding, she sighs again, but this time the heaviness settles on her shoulders. "It really doesn't." She, too, turns to watch the festivities, the people lost in the heat of their freedom. This is their night, not hers. She has had more than her share of feasts and balls.
"Some of them lost their kids in the Games," he says after a while, nodding at the town square as she turns to look at him. "It's all I see when I look at them. Those kids' faces, how they died." He glances at the ground, and when he looks up and stares at the fire again, he is not seeing the dancers or the flames. Memory turns the grey of his eyes into that of storm clouds, and his voice into the quiet rolling of distant thunder as he says, "I can't stand to look at them."
For a moment, she is silent. Across the square, she spots Agrippa sitting in a group of four other men, his camera off and by his feet. She remembers that last year, this was reaping day, and that she and others like Agrippa had gathered in this very square for a far more sinister event.
"Yes," she says. "I noticed that, too." She crosses her arms, gripping her elbows, and forces herself to stare straight ahead despite what she sees in the fire, the years and years of boys and girls and families torn apart. "I reaped them. I took those children away to die." And she had done it with a show of excitement, an air of celebration, a mockery of real, true joy. "I may as well have killed them myself."
"I didn't exactly give them much of a chance, either," he remarks, shrugging. Then he lifts up the full, unopened bottle of liquor in his hand. "This is my celebration. My own memorial service. One drink for every kid."
She chuckles, a sound devoid of mirth. "I should join you."
Arching his eyebrows, he meets her gaze. His fingers shift about the neck of the bottle he holds as he considers this. Possibly he is weighing the odds of it having been a joke; possibly he thinks she is right.
If he were to ask for clarification, she wouldn't know what she had meant. She takes her cue instead from him, from how he yanks the cork out of the top of the bottle and holds it out for her to take.
The glass is cool in her palm, the smell of its contents strong enough that she feels it burn already. She eyes the rim of it carefully before putting it to her lips. If it really is so unsanitary, she tells herself, whatever this is will sterilize everything with which it comes into contact.
And choke her, too, because it is at least twice as strong as it smells.
To his credit, he doesn't laugh when she coughs, merely takes the bottle from her and lets her regain her breath in peace. Her eyes water with the effort, but still she fights the liquor's harsh sting. Part of it is pride, but most of it is the need to get over the shock.
"What is that?" she finally manages.
"Moonshine." He is almost proud as he says it, a smirk carrying on his voice. "Strongest whiskey money can buy around here, but Ripper only makes it for special occasions." He shakes his head. "Damn shame. I could live off this."
She can only imagine, but she values air too greatly right now to say so.
"Tradition's been in her family since before the Dark Days," he continues, plugging the bottle with the cork. "Things like this, all that dancing - they kept us going. Showed us the Capitol could never completely own us."
It seems only right, then, that he drink to all those children with a concoction untouched by the very power that murdered them.
He taps his fingers against the glass again, and for a while, the only sound comes from the revelers. In the relative silence, the stinging in her throat subsides, what little of the moonshine she drank burning in her stomach.
"It goes down easier cold," he remarks a while later. He turns his back on the bonfire and begins the walk back to Victors Village, glancing at her as he goes past her. It's as good an invitation as she's getting, she realizes.
She follows him because he is running from ghosts like the ones that haunt her.
In his house, he gets them glasses and ice. They sit at the bare dining room table, adjacent to one another, the bottle over by his hand because, he says, he can handle it better this way.
"Twenty-four years of games," he says as he fills her glass. "Forty-eight kids. No, forty-six. Katniss and Peeta survived."
Quickly, she does the math for her years in the employ of killers. "Eleven years. Twenty-two children. Year twelve's are Katniss and Peeta."
"Best get started, then." He lifts his glass, shuts his eyes briefly, then drinks. That's one child honored, forty-five to go.
She follows suit, making it three years into her career before the world feels unsteady. "I should go," she says, but even sitting, she sways.
"Not like that, you aren't," he tells her. "Wait the worst of it out, have some water."
His voice pounds against her eardrums, muffling the sound his chair makes against the floor when he stands. Nodding slowly, she shuts her eyes against the headache beginning to form. It pulses dully, in time with his footsteps, growing in intensity the farther away he goes.
She hears glasses clinking together in the kitchen like distant wind chimes, and, lulled to safety by the sound, she opens her eyes.
A few seconds later - or perhaps a few hours, she can't tell - when his footsteps approach, she is still staring, wide-eyed, at the twenty-two children standing across the table from her.
"Haymitch," she breathes, afraid to startle them into action, afraid to blink.
"Here," he says. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him set a tall glass of water before her.
Slowly, she reaches for it, and it's only as she drinks that she realizes that the blurring of her vision has nothing to do with the whiskey.
As time goes by and the effects of the liquor begin to subside, the children disappear. The last to go is the boy who cried and cried, the one for whom she had felt such pity that she brought a world of trouble on herself.
"This keeps me from seeing things," Haymitch says, breaking a silence that has stretched for far too long. "Didn't know it would do the opposite for you."
So he knows, then, what horror she has just faced. She meets his gaze, frowning as she begins to connect the dots. "Forty-six of them. Twenty-four years. That must be-" She cannot find the words, so she sighs.
"You need to sleep," he says.
"Yes." Though she wonders if she'll get much sleep at all tonight.
"I'll walk you home."
"You're worse off than I am," she says, shaking her head. "You've had more."
He stands, arching an eyebrow. "I'm used to it."
The short trip to Peeta's house takes at least twice as long as normal. She is able to stay upright and walk straight forward, but he is near enough her that she must resist the urge to lean against him. This is not a night out like in her youth, she reminds herself, and she is more than capable of walking without help.
But when they reach the house, she cannot stop herself kissing his cheek. The stubble of his beard scratches her skin, and the immediacy of it banishes the lingering memory of the twenty-two pairs of eyes, like a lantern in the dark.
They linger there before the door, in the dim lighting from the road and the stars, until she clears her throat.
"Don't drink too much," she tells him, the silence having long since become too much to bear. He may say the liquor helps keep the memories away, but that can't be the whole truth.
He smiles wryly, shaking his head. "Good night, Effie."
She nods, sighing. "You, too."
He turns and leaves, and she watches him go, wondering what awaits him when he gets home, wishing she could make it leave him alone.