Chapter 4: Daisy

The night was very quiet - and very, very cold. It was a biting cold, reminiscent of when snowstorms back home would blow right through the seams of the Abernathy cottage and he and Ma and Griff would huddle next to the stove, more focused on the slowly dimming glow of their meager coal supply than anything else in the world. At first, the cold came without trouble: having lived through it before, Haymitch knew what he needed to do, and he simply kept folding himself tightly under his blanket, keeping his limbs close to his torso and rubbing his hands at regular intervals. As a benefit, the cold made sleep next to impossible, so he was not fighting off the impulse to close his eyes. At first.

As the night wore on, however, the lowering chill did not relent and he began to experience the opposite problem - his limbs began to feel numb, and so did his brain, making concentration and wakefulness harder and harder. His eyes began to blink, and ... .

… And, suddenly, he was standing in the snow, watching the lights blink sleepily in the darkness of the Seam. In the threadbare arms of his thin jacket, he held a small stack of coal. None of it was part of his legal and right supply. Once his father had died, his mother had taken on extra house cleaning clients in town, but no amount of extra work could replace his father's wages. But Haymitch was still allowed the privilege of his father's 'cache.' This was a tradition in District 12, one of the quietest of them all, in which coal that fell to the floor in the coal wash building was discretely swept aside and divided among the miners via the hidden caches at the bottom of their lockers in the dressing room. Most mining families could not survive the harsher 12 winters without this extra supply. Haymitch was well liked - as his father had been - and so he had been allowed this extended privilege until he was able to go to work himself.

Haymitch tried not to dive into it too often. He hated handouts, for one thing, and only the sheer desperation of the situation in the winter forced him to take it. He had no choice.

He bypassed his own house and walked up the street until he came to the Rowan cottage. He looked up and down the darkness before gently knocking on their door.

There was no relief from the cold when he was let in. The family - a crippled father, a sickly mother and five children ages twelve through seventeen - had run out of coal two days ago.

"Who's that?" growled Emmett Rowan from his chair. He and his wife were squeezed together under a wool blanket - pockmarked by moths - and the children were huddled together on the floor, wearing all their clothes and extra socks, except for Daisy, who had let him in.

Daisy was one of the fifteen-year-old twins, along with Hazelle. They were not quite identical, but most people had trouble telling them apart, and they had their fun with that. But for Haymitch, nothing in the universe was as unique as Daisy Rowan. She had soft, long hair, like ravens' wings. Her gray eyes were wide and giving. She had the most perfect dark circular beauty mark on her right cheek, that scrunched up when she smiled. She seemed to float when she walked, her movements wispy and graceful. At first, he had greatly appreciated the way she seemed to want to listen - with rapt attention - to him, no matter what he said. But to his surprise he had found as their relationship had progressed this year that he also loved to listen to her talk - about simple things, like the beauty of the falling leaves; about profound things, like what it meant that life was so harsh, and whether there was anything that could change it.

He had been a lifelong loner, and had fully imagined staying that way. But now there was no plan he had for this world that did not include her in it.

"Oh, Haymitch, thank you, Haymitch," she said, when she saw what he had brought her, and her tears made her eyes dance in the candlelight.

"Nobody better turn up looking for stolen coal here, boy," said her father. Haymitch ignored him - he was a bitter man, made nasty by his brokenness. Nothing he said made any difference to Haymitch.

The oldest of the children stirred the ashes in the stove, and gently placed some of the coal.

"Emmett, don't be so ungrateful. Haymitch …."

"Haymitch wouldn't care if old Rowan got in trouble with the Peacekeepers, would you boy? We're just lucky he wants to get on Daisy's -."

"Father!" exclaimed Hazelle. She was the more assertive of the twins.

"- good side. Good side! Don't give me any of your cheek, girl; I still have the switch."

"Good luck catching me with it," responded the girl.

As a commotion of an argument ensued, Haymitch moved closer to the front door with Daisy, suppressing the urge to kiss her. That would only make things worse.

"Thank you so much," she said softly, blinking up at him with those doe-like eyes. "We can never repay -."

"There's no owing between you and me," he replied. "Never."

She nodded softly. "Never."

Haymitch woke abruptly to find himself in the silvery morning of a false and toxic world.

He stretched stiffly and got to his feet. His bones felt creaky and old. What I would give for a cup of coffee, he thought to himself.

Daisy.

He looked up at the sky, hoping that one of the arena's hidden cameras would capture this exact moment, with his face still filled with the sharp memory of the girl who he had not dared to mention during his week in the Capitol. He wanted her to know somehow that he was still thinking about her, even if he had never mentioned her.

It was not just that the audience did not deserve to hear her name, or know her at all - it was that he did not want the Capitol to know that she existed. If he died, he did not want her emotions paraded in front of them. If he lived, he did not want her to have to be exposed to their poisonous world. It was far better to be an anonymous nobody than to be anywhere on the Capitol's radar.

To celebrate surviving the night, he drank two mouths full of water and ate a half stick of the dried meat before packing up his blanket and setting off once again, his face toward the sun.

It was an uneventful morning. The forest seemed absolutely endless. And quite thoroughly empty. Once in the midmorning, and then again just after noon, the cannons signaled the latest deaths. The second time, out of curiosity and because he needed a lunch break anyway, Haymitch found a good climbing tree and scaled it as high as he could - and then even higher - in a quest to get his bearings. He found himself perched at maximum precariousness in the thin upper branches of a blue tree, staring out at a sea of blue trees. Looking west, he caught the distant appearance of a hovercraft coming to claim a tribute's body. It seemed to be all the way over at the mountain.

The mountaintop was the only thing Haymitch could really make out, besides the miles and miles of swaying blue treetops. He couldn't see the cornucopia from here, nor the beautiful meadow that had surrounded it. But the mountain on the western side of the arena could not be missed. Again, he noted its unnaturally conical shape. Not that anything in here was natural but it didn't even look like they had attempted to simulate a real mountain, with aged and uneven peaks. There was something very wrong with it - and he felt that he was supposed to recognize that.

Haymitch had been pondering the messages of the arena all throughout the day, and the mountain was a loud one, he reckoned. It was a clue the Gamemakers had left to solve: stay away, if you're smart enough. Just as his early gift from a sponsor - so rare in the opening days of the Games - seemed to be a clue. That he had chosen the right path, the right hiding place?

He shimmied carefully down to a sturdier section of the tree, ate another half stick of meat and fretted over the bare stores he had left - and he was not eating enough. Soon, he might have to test the edibility of the game in this place and he doubted that would go well.

After he drank a bit more water (this too was a matter of concern), Haymitch returned to his quest to find the far borders of the arena. This time he had not gone very far before he came upon an abrupt change of scenery, stepping out into a large, open clearing.

He squinted, surprised he hadn't seen it during his survey of the woods (another thing to mistrust? Or was he just being paranoid?). The clearing was a meadow in miniature, glistening with bright, jewel-like flowers. A small little pond - a puddle, almost - was on the far end from him.

He laughed out loud at this too-obvious temptation. The sound startled a cloud of bright purple and pink butterflies from where they had nested in the flowers. He watched them - awestruck despite himself - lift like a column of fairy dust and disperse in the open sky. Then they reformed into a column and flew suddenly toward them.

It was not in his training as a person on this planet to fear butterflies, so his sense of danger lighted up within him a moment too late. As they flew in a cloud about him, their tiny wings turned out to be razor sharp, and he had to duck his head down as he fled to avoid catastrophic damage to his face. He fled the clearing, blindly, yelling recklessly as if to scare the creatures away.

They didn't follow him too far into the trees, but he kept running anyway, tears coursing down his face and stinging the wounds on his cheeks. He was such a fool! He should have turned and run the minute he saw the water - he should have expected the double trap!

When he felt far enough away from danger, he sat himself down under a tree and buried his head in his arms for a bit. It was a low moment - and even he was startled by how much it had brought him down, his mistake in the clearing. He was counting on himself - utterly depending on his own cunning to get him through this alive - and he had failed. It was a small failure, sure; but there was no room for error.

It was the earth itself - well, the arena - that roused him. The ground beneath him grumbled, making a sound like a giant with hunger pangs, and a few leaves were shaken from their branches and dropped down on him. He jumped up in alarm, then stood still, waiting for a follow-up. Earthquakes were rare in District 12, but he had lived through a couple of them and they often came in clusters. Was this real - a real fault line rumbling the arena - or was it by Gamemaker design? Another way in which the arena itself was being turned against its participants?

Nothing followed and Haymitch started working, as best as he could, on his scratched-up face. One long gash had come uncomfortably close to his left eye, but fortunately any damage appeared to be cosmetic. He didn't have any first aid, but he did sacrifice a little bit of his water to clean his face and he didn't move from his spot until he was satisfied that there was no more flowing blood. It was equally perilous to risk infection and leave a trail for hunters, human or otherwise.

Then he looked up and saw that the day was starting to darken with cloud cover, but he was able to find the sun and get his bearings again, and head east. He gave a quiet pep talk to remind himself that he was just missing a step or two out of hunger and he would be all right if he just doubled his efforts at caution. Nothing was easier for a rogue boy of the Seam than caution.

By sunset, the dark canopy of clouds had completely overrun the sky and by the time Haymitch found his spot for the night the drops had started to fall. At first, he covered himself completely in his blanket, afraid that the rain might be dangerous.

"On the other hand," he whispered to himself, "if the water in the arena is dangerous and the tributes have been avoiding it, this would be the day to provide real water so that people don't start dropping dead of thirst."

He ventured his pinky to the rain, holding it out from under his blanket just long enough to get a splash on his skin. Nothing alarming followed - no acidic sizzle or any kind of pain. He cautiously licked the water and waited for a long time for any ill effects to manifest. None did, and the rain started coming down even harder, so he pulled out his water bottle, drank it down to the last drop, then held the bottle open to the rain until it refilled.

The rain swelled into a storm and the night's recap of the killings - two boys, one from 5, one from 10 - was almost swallowed up by it. Haymitch filled his empty stomach with water. Sleep was absolutely impossible. There was no lightning, but rumbling in the sky and, sometimes, again, in the ground beneath him. This was all a sign of something very, very bad, he thought. He did a quick count and reckoned 23 tributes dead. Only just under half of the participants in three whole days, which meant that the arena traps weren't working as well as designed and the Career pack was less competent than usual. The Gamemakers' restlessness was palpable in the discontent of the arena. He wondered what form of destruction this would ultimately take.

He didn't have long to wait to find out. The rain finally tapered off in the witching hours and the sun rose into a clear sky. Haymitch had caught a couple of uncomfortable 10 minute naps but by dawn he was up and eating the last of his store of food - sensing that whatever change was afoot would require the most energy yet. No sooner had he got to his feet and slung his pack on his back than the earth shook in earnest and he was knocked back down to the ground. Then a massive boom rent the air - an explosion that was like dynamite amplified a hundred times, and dark ash billowed over the blue morning.