It's unsurprising when I awaken the next day feeling as though I've been hit by a truck. If hearing the Quell announcement didn't do it, then the ludicrous amount of liquor I consumed in the aftermath certainly did. Despite the massive hangover, I can't quite bring myself to regret it. The usual drinking routine simply doesn't cut it for a night like the reading of the card.

At least I managed to wake up before dusk today. Even President Snow can't ruin the blessing that is the lengthening daylight of springtime.

I never wake up in the dark if I can help it. Snapping out of a nightmare is already bad enough when I can see the damn house and remember that I'm still in District 12. But pitch black looks exactly the same no matter where you are. If all you can see is dark, you could be anywhere. Even back in the arena.

Guess that particular fear of mine is no longer as irrational as it used to be. Don't I feel validated.

I've been up for practically no time at all when I get a surprise visitor. Katniss wordlessly passes me a hot mug of something before making herself at home in my living room. She doesn't ask for conversation and I don't offer any. We let the silence keep us company as the sun disappears behind the trees outside. I take a tentative sip from the mug she's handed me- it's broth- and instantly feel a bit less worn down. It occurs to me that I haven't consumed anything non-alcoholic in nearly twenty-four hours.

I startle a bit when the moment is interrupted by a box being thrown onto the table. "There, it's done," declares Peeta, who has somehow materialized in the room beside us.

He probably expects a response, but my brain keeps getting stuck on wondering when Peeta got in here and why he wants me to look at a box. Katniss, who seems to be fairing slightly better from yesterday's indulgences, speaks up in my place. "What's done?"

"I've poured all the liquor down the drain," says Peeta.

That rouses me. I yank the box toward me to check its contents. I must be misunderstanding him. He couldn't have. "You what?"

"I tossed the lot," says Peeta.

"He'll just buy more," Katniss replies sensibly.

"No he won't," says Peeta. "I tracked down Ripper this morning and told her I'd turn her in the second she sold to either of you. I paid her off, too, just for good measure, but I don't think she's eager to be back in the Peacekeepers' custody."

There aren't enough words in the world to express how angry I am. So I settle for a clearer form of communication and move to attack Peeta with my knife. He blocks me effortlessly. I'll probably be thankful that I failed to injure him in a few days' time, but right now it only serves to infuriate me further.

Katniss surprises me by taking my side of things over Peeta's. If Peeta is surprised too, he manages not to show it. Instead the little brat opts to hound Katniss over a single night of drinking and threaten to have us both put in the stocks if we continue.

"What's the point of all this?" I ask.

"The point," he declares tremulously, "is that two of us are coming home from the Capitol. One mentor and one victor. Effie's sending me recordings of all the living victors. We're going to watch their Games and learn everything we can about how they fight. We're going to put on weight and get strong. We're going to start acting like Careers. And one of us is going to be victor again whether you two like it or not!"

Peeta slams the door loudly on his way out, triggering our noise sensitivity. Perhaps this final insult to our hangovers was an accident. Or maybe Peeta's just a prick.

"I don't like self-righteous people," says Katniss.

"What's to like?" I say. I begin inspecting the bottles for stray drops of liquor.

"You and me," says Katniss. "That's who he plans on coming home."

The thought fills me with spite. Peeta doesn't deserve to decide who comes home and who doesn't. Drinking has always been one of the precious few decisions that the Capitol allows me to make for myself. Now even this tiny bit of agency is denied to me, thanks to the boy. But he's not the only one able to spit in the face of people's choices.

"Well, then the joke's on him," I say.

The joke's on me.

However bad I expected training to be, the reality is worse. It's terrible. More importantly, I'm terrible. Every run makes my lungs burn like fire. Every practice throw goes hurtling in any direction except the one it was supposed to go in. The few improvements I manage over time don't come across as successes so much as marginally less pathetic failures.

The worst part by far is seeing Katniss and Peeta move from pity to exasperation as they watch it all happen. I wasn't expecting a pat on the back or anything, but it's disheartening to know that even my genuine best effort is little more than an embarrassment to them.

When I was a kid, I always knew that I was athletic. It was a constant and unquestioned part of who I was. But now that just isn't true anymore. Will almost certainly never be true again.

It's not as though I didn't know my health was deteriorating; I'm not stupid. But this is the first time I've taken such a direct assessment of how bad the damage was. I already have so few connections to the person I was before the Games that I can't help but feel a little pained by the loss of this one.

On Sundays the kids and I learn about snares from the eldest Hawthorne boy. Snares turn out to be more of an intellectual exercise than anything else, so I'm actually not too bad at it once I get my hands to stop shaking long enough to set the damn things.

I'd probably prefer this to our more physical training if not for Gale's presence. I can never relax around that kid. In my head he always ends up labeled as either Katniss's secret-pseudo-boyfriend , which is bad, or Saige's nephew , which is worse. It's not his fault, but the victors of District 12 have been given plenty of good reasons to steer clear of Gale Hawthorne while in the public eye. The whole whipping fiasco with Thread sealed the deal on that.

By the end of each session I'd give anything to be able to grab some liquor and turn my brain off for a few hours. But Peeta's moral tirade has made that an impossibility. In fact, he insists on doing the polar opposite. True to his word, he had Effie send in the recap videos for every living victor. That saddles us with more than fifty Hunger Games to experience within the span of a few months. So nearly every night becomes devoted to a fun little field trip through some other victor's personal nightmare.

Recaps don't strike me as a particularly useful tool for getting a real sense of who a victor is. If anything, they tell you more about the people who edited them. After all, it's not the victors who comb through weeks or even months worth of footage each year and carefully hand-select which three hours will be preserved for all eternity. Though I don't dare risk starting another argument by mentioning this in front of the boy.

We watch them in chronological order. Katniss and Peeta want to know about their competition, about all these victors who I have known for decades of my life, and I do my best to tell them. It takes effort to peel away at each person until there is nothing left but strengths and weaknesses to be discussed in cool, clinical tones. All combat talk and survivability. The kids don't get to hear about how Woof takes his coffee, or how Seeder snorts when she laughs, or how Morris spent one year trying to raise tadpoles in a bathtub at the Training Center before some Peacekeepers finally caught him out. Somehow it's the stupid details like these that I can't seem to stop thinking about as we watch each tape.

It's not until we have finished viewing 49th: Wiress Plummer (District 3) and Peeta skips directly to 51st: Brutus Gunn (District 2) that I let out a breath I didn't realize I had been holding.

I stop paying attention to the tapes after that. It seems pointless to behave otherwise. I've experienced all of these newer Games as a mentor once and have no need to do so again. I think Peeta notices that I've begun staring at the ceiling rather than the screen during our viewings, but he never challenges me on it. Katniss remains oblivious. Both of them have the good sense to keep their questions focused on the victors and never the District 12 tributes who we watch die over and over and over again.

When I'm not busy failing to train or pretending to watch awful videos, I'm grappling with the drinking issue. A detox is torture on any day, but detoxing while inside the arena sounds like a special kind of hell that I don't care to experience. Peeta, obnoxious and preachy though he may be, might be correct about the need for me to cut back before the Quell starts.

Mostly correct, anyway. The boy doesn't seem to fully grasp that quitting cold-turkey is a bad idea for people like me. The shakes aren't some minor inconvenience that I can just shrug off. Pretty much any drug will make a true addict feel like they're dying during withdrawal, but booze happens to be one of those special vices where it can end up being more than just a feeling. With a bit of bad luck and a well-timed seizure, sobering up could legitimately kill me long before the Quell gets a chance to.

Thankfully, not everyone has such unrealistic standards of how quickly I should be cutting back. Peeta may have blackmailed Ripper into refusing Katniss and I as customers, but no such deal was made regarding Hazelle Hawthorne. Hazelle promptly takes up the habit of sneaking in small vials of liquor with her every time she comes over to do any housekeeping. I never asked her to do it and I've certainly never discussed my withdrawals with her, but apparently I didn't need to. Things just have a way of getting done when Hazelle is around.

Although I never inquire about it, I strongly suspect that Hazelle receives some kind of medical guidance from Katniss's mother on exactly how much alcohol to slip me each day. It always seems a little too expertly measured- generous enough to fight off the worst of the hallucinations but stingy enough to keep me feeling like total shit. The amount gets smaller and smaller over the weeks until we finally reach that awful day when she brings nothing at all. I'd complain about it endlessly if not for the fact that Hazelle has a glare that could kill a man.

In fairness, we're not in the habit of saying much of anything to each other, complaints or otherwise. That's why it catches me so off guard when she hesitates in the doorway one night after gathering up the laundry.

"You're going to volunteer for him," she says. Says, not asks.

My hand tightens around the hilt of the knife that I'd been absently fiddling with inside my pocket. A nervous habit that's only gotten worse since the liquor dried up. "What makes you say that?"

"Because I know you."

I'd laugh in her face if the sound didn't die in my throat first. What is it that we know of each other anymore? What has anything we've done in the past twenty-five years had to do with knowing each other?

"You're certainly more confident about it than I am," I say. My dreams have been filled with reaping ceremonies for weeks now. Sometimes Peeta still dies in them even when his name is the one that gets called. I turn my back on him like a scared animal and leave to save myself.

"You will," says Hazelle firmly. She hesitates again. It isn't like her. "It's a good thing that you're doing. I think Saige would have-"

"Don't."

Hazelle was the closest thing I had to a sister, once. Even now there's things I'd do for her that I wouldn't do for anyone else. I let her into my home. But she doesn't get to come back into my life. She doesn't get to say that name to me. Nobody does.

All it takes is the one word for her to drop the conversation entirely. When Hazelle returns the next day to clean I stay out of her way in exchange for her pretending the conversation never happened. Back to being strangers.

Some days I'm almost thankful for the sore muscles and for Peeta's ridiculous drill sergeant routine. It's thoroughly unpleasant but so much simpler to think about than Hazelle or the recaps or anything at all concerning our future. Doesn't stop it from being an uphill battle, though. It's plodding and monotonous work, every bit of it.

Incredible how no amount of tedium can stop our final day in District 12 from arriving as if in the blink of an eye.

Sometimes danger feels like clarity. The adrenaline hits just right and the whole world seems to slow down and come into focus. That's how it was on this day twenty five years ago. Nothing made the terror sink in the way that it should have- not my name being called, not even the pale, scared faces of Saige and my family as they said their goodbyes. It was a disaster, sure, but disasters felt manageable back then. At sixteen, I thought I could imagine the worst case scenario. I thought I already knew what pain was.

That was a long time ago.

Today, I am roped off in a small pen with Peeta Mellark, and he is dying. And I am dying. One of us is dying. That sixteen year old boy too stupid to be afraid of his own death sentence is now just a washed up man stupid enough to come to a reaping ceremony sober.

The blood roaring in my ears is so loud that I don't hear it when Effie calls Katniss's name. I keep my eyes locked firmly on her painted lips, convinced that I will miss the next name otherwise. That much I needn't have worried about. The brief flash of horror on Effie's face as she reads the second slip tells me all I need to know before she even opens her mouth.

"Peeta-"

"I volunteer as tribute," I say, probably too quickly.

Not that it matters. The damage is already done. The surprised murmuring from the crowd is cut off by a sharp NO from Peeta. He grabs my arm to stop me from taking the stage.

"Now now, we've certainly come to learn the rules on volunteering here in District 12. Haymitch Abernathy will be taking priority as the volunteer," says Effie. I feel an uncharacteristic rush of affection for her as she shoos Peeta's hand away and ushers me to go stand beside Katniss. Effie and I may have a list of disagreements a mile long, but she will not leave me to protect these kids alone.

Katniss offers me a grateful smile, her eyes shining and wet. I manage to return it in spite of my queasiness. The compulsory handshake between tributes feels genuine even as my hand trembles in hers. We're in this disaster together now.