Haymitch Week Day 3: Relationship
I would have gone the hayffie route but I decided to do a Papa Haymitch instead. There's hayffie if you squint but I also like my Team 12 feels.
Failing Peeta Mellark
(41 years old)
Often times, Haymitch believed that those people sitting in Command was under the impression that only Katniss was emotionally affected by Peeta's capture. He was grieving too. He was anxious and stress and a part of him placed the blame of Peeta's arrest squarely on his shoulder.
Nobody bothered to tell him anything while he was drying out. When Plutarch visited, it was always Katniss this and Katniss that, and he was glad to be kept in the loop on Katniss' progress, or lack thereof, in District Thirteen but nobody would tell him about Peeta Mellark.
He was not at all aware of Peeta's propo, not until much later after he was released from the rehabilitation facility which sent him into a state. He had demanded that he be granted an audience with the President and then proceeded to remind both Plutarch and President Coin in a way that left Effie shaking her head that Katniss and Peeta are his responsibility, and that his role as their mentor did not end just because they had left the Games and the Capitol behind.
"This war is still the damn arena," Haymitch snapped at Plutarch but it was difficult to make an impression when his nose was stuffed and his voice nasal. "Just a different kind."
"He's taking Peeta's capture hard," he overhead his escort telling Plutarch. "Just because he's not showing how distress he is, doesn't make it any less terrible for him."
He had not care for anyone as much until Katniss and Peeta came along, Effie Trinket notwithstanding. Those two kids woke something up in him; a fire he thought had long died. They gave him hope.
The genuine concern he showed over Katniss and Peeta came as a surprise even to himself, and once Effie had lamented that he was playing the role of a father figure.
He hadn't given it that much thought but now...
Haymitch spent countless sleepless night thinking about how different things could have gone. It was a form of mental torture but with no alcohol in this place to dull his thoughts, his mind was free to explore all the 'what-ifs' and play each scenario until he was exhausted.
He thought about what could have happened if the hovercraft had left only two minutes later after they had extracted Katniss. There could be a chance that they might have picked Peeta up. Johanna, too.
He thought about how things would have turn out if only he had come clean to Peeta about the rebels' plan to break them out of the arena because unlike Katniss, Peeta could be counted upon to play it for the cameras.
No, it'll still be risky with Snow watchin' them.
He thought about Peeta's parents and the loathing they would have felt for him if they knew that he had turned their son into a pawn in this war. A small, selfish past of him was glad that they perished in the fire-bombing but he was revolted by his own train of thought. Haymitch would have gladly face their hatred and anger – nothing he wasn't used to – if it meant that Peeta would still have his family. Peeta's mother wasn't much but he supposed Peeta still loved her all the same.
That boy was an orphan just like him. Haymitch could only hope that if - when, not if, he reprimanded himself – they get Peeta out, the news of his family's demise would not break the boy like it had broken him.
He and Katniss had made a deal to keep Peeta alive and he still is which meant there was still work to be done. He just needed Katniss to focus because that first propo she made was a disaster. He hope sending her to Eight would work. It had to work.
And it did.
When President Snow retaliated by bombing District Thirteen and sent those white roses for Katniss, it was Haymitch's comfort she sought, not anyone else. She knew she wasn't the only one who cared about Peeta. She expected him to understand and by God, he understood her pain.
He love that boy, too.