Something of Our Own

by marblesharp

Hazelle wants to rebuild, Haymitch tries not to tear everything down, and there are embers in ashes. or, Haymitch and Hazelle find themselves after the war.

27. Second Fiddle

AN: This is the longest chapter yet. I really hope you like it! :)

Since the last chapter, Sunrise on the Reaping was announced(!) in time for a little more of my backstory for Haymitch to feature in this one. We'll see how it goes, but I'm considering changing character names where applicable to match any new canon and prevent confusion going forward. Though keeping them as is might also help in differentiating them in this story, should it end up very SOTR-noncompliant. Let me know if you have a preference either way. I *have* been looking for any excuse to change Cory (short for Corrin but now uncomfortably close to Coryo) and Rohan (that I wanted pronounced more like Rowen... and so it should have just been Rowen) for years now, lol.

The identity of the first fiddler inspired by atleastmymomlikesme's fic, The Revival Tour.

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With November comes the first morning frost, the first election, and the first Harvest Festival as a free people.

The morning of the Festival, Peeta talks him into a haircut. He's been talking Haymitch into a lot of things lately, it seems. Haymitch really ought to say no to something once in a while.

As it is, he dampens his hair in the sink and combs it down. With the curl pulled out, it falls to his chin. He could tie part of it back the way Blight used to.

In a chair pulled away from his kitchen table, a towel around his shoulders, Haymitch does his best to sit still and keep his head in position while Peeta works through his hair with a pair of scissors. He bounces a knee, cracks his knuckles, refrains from a joke about this being the boy's opportunity to stab him. It's never easy, letting someone be close with a sharp object. The knife in his pocket only reminds him that he can't outdraw drawn.

After a particularly long sssnip by his ear that feels like ice slipped down the back of his collar, Peeta says, "Hope I inherit your hair."

"Shut up," Haymitch laughs. This puts him at ease somewhat, which he suspects was the intention. "I'm sure it's thinning, just started real thick."

"Well, I'll try not to give you any bald spots. You've got to look handsome for your big debut."

"Fuck off."

Peeta laughs through his nose. A few more inches come off before he goes on, milder, "My dad had a bald spot going - a real one. It was there all of a sudden when I came home."

"That'll do it," Haymitch says like a weary shrug. He remembers angrily confronting a stylist he overheard complain about his mom's hair for the homecoming interview - as if he wasn't in enough trouble already. Apparently, it was coming out in clumps. Haymitch felt terrible to have put her through so much. He thought he'd set everything right by coming home.

He's about to share the relevant part of this - opens his mouth, takes that kind of breath - but then doesn't. It skirts too close to the end and he's just… not in a hurry to tell Peeta what he told Katniss in the rubble, surrounded by roses and death. For all Haymitch knows, she might have already filled Peeta in by now. He doubts this, though.

Anyway, Peeta gives no hint of long-suffering curiosity when he moves around to the front of the chair and says, "Tilt your head forward."

Haymitch tracks a falling lock of hair until he's looking down his nose. "Will that go in the memory book?"

There's silence above him as Peeta makes some point cuts. "No. Just making conversation."

"Not the worst conversation I've had with a barber."

"Oh, right, I'm behind on backhanded compliments." He pulls back, lays a hand on his shoulder, and says, "Your hair looks way better than the rest of you."

Haymitch shrugs his hand off with a chuckle. "Are you about done? I don't need shorn like a sheep here."

"Hold on, hold on." Peeta cards a hand through his hair, checks the length throughout. "Yeah, I think so. Go look in the mirror and see for yourself."

"So long as I don't feel a breeze where I haven't before, it's fine. Not like you could fix that anyway." Haymitch rises from the chair and shakes out the towel, then steps around the dark pile on the floor to fetch the broom. There's more gray in it than his last haircut in Thirteen. "Now get out of here before you screw up your oven timings."

"You're welcome, Haymitch. Any time," Peeta recites back sarcastically as he pulls on his coat. He's already leaving, though, so he probably was cutting it close - literally.

One living room rehearsal and a sandwich half-eaten on the phone with Wendell later, Haymitch showers and shaves. He blindly reaches for his aftershave before remembering the girl took it. She finally wised up there; the bottle of rubbing alcohol at her house has moved location as well. Not that he knows that.

It's been five months. Wendell reminded him today, as if Haymitch has anything better to do than keep track himself. He's now been sober on his own for longer than he was during the war.

In the mirror, Haymitch notes the changes to his hair - the trimmed sides, the length taken off the top - with hollow inspection. It's looked this way many times before he let it grow out, unkempt. He slaps on some pomade he finds in the back of a drawer and runs it through his hair with practiced fingers. He barely has to look at himself - and never once in the eye besides.

He used to press his face into a filmy shaving mirror before school dances, checking for pimples or fixing his hair, until Cory inevitably teased him. Haymitch almost can't believe he was that young, once, to care about that. Now, he just doesn't want to look like a drunk.

Pulling on his warmest sweater over a long-sleeved undershirt, Haymitch decides to forgo a coat. Any more bulk to his arms would get cumbersome later, and he'd rather be a little colder than a little worse at the fiddle.

Ready too early, he idles around the house until he can feed the geese, throwing in apple slices for the holiday. Then, he takes up his case and leaves for the Harvest Festival two hours after it's started. Hopefully, he's missed any opening stuff and people will be about ready to dance.

Walking through the Village, it's odd for him to find it empty and quiet, when that's all it was for years and years. Though he hasn't quite gotten used to it being full of people, either.

It's been a very long time since he's bothered with the Harvest Festival. The only big, public one he went to was thrown in his honor, and he'd wanted nothing more than to leave and finally be done with his Tour. He skipped out on the last one for a bottle of brandy he got in the Capitol, finally done with their Tour. Otherwise, it's a private family holiday.

Or rather, it was until this year for some Plutarch-driven reason. There was a holiday special and everything. Haymitch would rather stay home and watch that again.

But he has the only fiddle left in the district. The one that played Finnick and Annie's wedding is still in Thirteen, if not in some museum now, and its owner couldn't make it out on account of being dead at seventy-eight this past spring.

So this is all that Haymitch agreed to, evading any other commitments since the music alone will keep him there until the end.

"It's a party," he told Wendell earlier, on the off chance he'd pull him out of it.

"Will there be alcohol?"

"Not anymore," he admitted. Even he heard about the bad batch of apple cider that was put aside to ferment for this, and nothing since. It might have put a damper on the holiday for everyone else, but not for him. It was even a deciding factor in Peeta convincing him.

Regardless, they went over what to do and what not to do while Haymitch made faces at the ceiling. That his psychiatrist trusted him either way surprised him; then again, he's sort of given him every reason to. The enormity of that sat heavy on him, and he wanted so badly to shrug it off.

Wendell ended the session with, "I hope you have a good time, Haymitch. Break a leg."

"Now that's an idea," Haymitch grumbled then, and reconsiders it now. Maybe he can throw himself down a hill on the way. There's no fun in entertaining that when he knows he won't.

The Harvest Festival was held in the town square of winning districts, and that's where he finds it.

Obviously, it's much smaller this year. What was once an event that filled the streets like the reaping is now a couple hundred people and a pole tent in front of the bakery that's not a bakery. Peeta has opened it up for the community to use, the big ovens inside keeping both the food and the crowd warm through a propped-open door. Across the road, on the space inside the square that's supposed to be grassy but is still mostly dirt, are lawn games and the like.

They've kept some tradition with garlands of dried leaves and acorns hanging about, and hay bales and gourds on display that he doubts will be left to rot. No dried decorative corn this year. No circus performers or fireworks or cornucopias, either.

Haymitch stops short when he sees Katniss leaving the tent. None the wiser, she picks the skin off a turkey leg and folds it into her mouth as she waits for Delly and Leevy. He watches them head for the ladder toss, where he can easily find Peeta from behind.

With a look into the tent, at the tables set up for seating and food inside, Haymitch can tell he won't be playing in there… and that they'll be having leftover slab pie for breakfast the rest of the year.

Good thing the boy gave himself an aneurysm over that, he thinks, rolling his eyes to himself. Peeta insisted on bread rolls and four kinds of pie as well as making all of it fresh for today - while somehow fitting in a haircut. That bicycle has made him think he can be everywhere at once. When Haymitch suggested making the pies ahead of time and freezing them, he might as well have said they should bake Buttercup into one from the look he got. What's been really stupid is that he can't even commiserate with the girl, considering she took out a flock of wild turkeys for tonight. He's kept the geese locked up tight this week.

"Hey, Abe!" Deeter, one of the transplants who's in the disaster brigade with him, calls from a table inside. Apparently, it's a thing in District Three to refer to coworkers by an abbreviation of their surnames, although Haymitch never heard such a thing out of Wiress or Beetee. An inside joke in Three, maybe. "Still sore from that workout?"

"Sore? I'm still wheezing," replies Haymitch, and the table laughs and he leaves before they feel obligated to wave him over for more talk about work or the weather when he'll have to leave anyway.

He finds a lone chair facing out from one of the corner poles. On it sits a rectangle of apple crumb pie, wrapped in a napkin bearing his initials in the same marker Peeta uses to label jars. Haymitch helps himself to a substantial bite before setting it aside and opening his fiddle case on the chair. Peeta was right to add more ginger, something he ruminated on for a while.

"Ah, Haymitch," he hears Antony say before he can lift out the fiddle. Haymitch turns to see him standing there, unaided, in a winter cap that's been dyed from Peacekeeper-white to watery brown with coffee, holding a candy apple. "Happy harvest!"

"Happy harvest, Doc," he says back. "Ain't apples supposed to keep you away?"

"Not if they're covered in caramel and nuts." Antony considers the apple with a slow twirl of its stick. "I just found out I'm not very good at horseshoe. Let's see if I do better at dancing."

"Hope so. You get trampled if you can't keep up with everybody."

"You set the tempo, Haymitch," he's reminded. Antony picks off a pecan, chews it thoughtfully. "Who switches you out so you can dance?"

"Nobody. I'm already an understudy."

"That's too bad."

Haymitch raises a brow as he takes up the fiddle and its bow. "What, you need a dance partner?"

"No, no. Greasy Sae will do the honors there; we both have stiff legs."

"Well, then you better go find her." To demonstrate why, Haymitch plays an opening note - and winces. He tuned at home but it sounds different, tinny and off-key, out here in the open, late autumn air. "Oh, hell. Hold on."

Antony is laughing. "Sounds like I have time." He parts with a crunch into his apple and a hearty pat on Haymitch's shoulder.

He's adjusted the pegs when he's interrupted again.

"There you are," says Hazelle, stepping out from the tent. She's dressed patchwork and warm like everyone else but she's wearing lipstick. Her hair is down, pushed back and falling to either side of a knit headband that's the color of bone from undyed wool. "Did you just get here?"

Shrugging, Haymitch plucks a string and lets it twang out. He's still flat. "Had some stage fright."

She doesn't look convinced or ask further. Her eyes flicker up. "You cut your hair."

Without thinking, his hand starts to go to it but it's holding the bow and this stops him. "Peeta did. I think he fit me in while the ovens were coming up to temperature."

"Oh, I could've done it? I do the boys' all the time."

Haymitch thinks of Peeta standing close, above him, lifting his hair with his fingers, and then replaces him with Hazelle. "Nah, it was all his idea anyway."

"I don't know what he was thinking; your ears already look cold," she notes with a snort. "Only going to get colder, if you want-?" She slips a thumb under her headband, offering it to him, and he's not cold at all. He tells her that, and by then, the other women she's with have followed her out.

They all seem to have one bottle of perfume and one lipstick between them. One of them happens to meet his eyes as he's noticing this. She flaps her hand in a quick wave. "I'm sure you've seen me around but-"

"I have," he interjects, not unkindly.

"I'm Ila," she says anyway. Haymitch just nods to this.

For once, he's glad when Alice breaks in. "All right - let's gather our men before they find something to get out of this." She points to Haymitch as they turn to go. "If it's not too soon, I do want Fire on the Mountain!"

Haymitch laughs before he can stop himself whereas it takes a moment for the others, who don't sound as approving.

He turns back to the pegs of his fiddle. He can sense Hazelle still there, frowning at him. "What'd I do now? Alice said it, not me."

"You don't introduce yourself to people."

"Ila knows my name," he assures her. He realizes how she's been left behind by her peers, and he's a little mad for her sake. "Hate to disappoint Alice, but line dances are easier for me."

Only a corner of her mouth lifts as Hazelle looks away, and he wishes yet again that he wasn't stuck playing the Festival. Someone had better ask her to dance. Haymitch did once or twice when they were younger, and it hadn't meant anything except a coy look from his mom that he gagged at. He wonders if Hazelle would remember that if he brought it up. There's no sense in asking now when it wouldn't help matters.

Mumbling something about her kids, Hazelle is about to leave when Nathan, of all people, stops her. While she glances over his black waxcoat that's been patched with flannel, checking her work - or whatever else - Haymitch raises a brow at him.

"Come to schmooze? The election's over, Mayor Carter."

"Don't I know it." Nathan looks past him to Hazelle. "Madea told me you were considering the treasurer spot?"

Now Haymitch stares at her, too, and her eyes drop to a pumpkin to avoid both of them. "I'm visiting my son in Two this winter. Didn't want to commit to anything when I'd be away for so long."

Nathan quirks his mouth, obviously disappointed. "Maybe next time, then."

"Briar will do a good job," she asserts. "Anyone who kept a home the way she did would."

"You kept two," Haymitch points out just as Nathan says, "Still, I'd better see more competition in two years - and I say that as the only one who was up for mayor."

To that, Haymitch jokes, "Stiff competition," more reflexive than not. His cousin doesn't find it funny, judging by the withering glare that doesn't let up.

"If you know of someone better, by all means." Nathan looks him up and down. "Heavensbee wasn't the only one who expected it to be you. But you'd rather leave it all on some nobody so you can laugh at him in smug, miserable comfort."

Haymitch smiles at him - a smug, miserable smile. "You're not a nobody. You were the first face boss in the family. Even more, you were related to a living victor. No pesky last name to draw attention but no tesserae, either. In all those years, I never saw you anywhere near the Games - not once." He cocks his head, the smile long gone. "You made out like a bandit, really, for being a nobody."

Nathan looks both stricken and like he wants to strike back. Haymitch is ready for a fight - he'll gladly set the fiddle aside and fix his nose for him - but Nathan stalks off without a word.

"Guess we're keeping the tradition of mayors disliking me," Haymitch says to Hazelle as they watch him retreat into the crowd. "Maybe I'll break that one next election."

She faces him, her brow raised in wry surprise. "Maybe so, if you're the one on the ballot."

"Or you," he counters with a pointed look.

She presses her lips, the neat smear of color like wine on them. "Don't think you were right about that."

Haymitch sucks his teeth. "Hard not to. I hear you think you'd make a good treasurer." He's all but smirking at her, and she regards this for a second before taking in a steady breath that she leaves with, looking annoyed. He's at a loss for why - not like he went too far on anything just now. He worries her tolerance for him might be wearing thin.

With that, he gets back to his sole purpose for even coming here.

Heads turn his way as Haymitch tunes the fiddle in earnest, sliding through scales and short melodies to himself. He keeps his chin to the fiddle, lets the chatter become formless noise. A child scream-laughs somewhere, and he plays louder through the flinch.

Once tuned, he pauses - only to hear Ila say his name in conversation behind him.

Normally, Haymitch doesn't care to know what people say about him. But he just met her, and she was with Hazelle earlier. He prods at some invisible problem with his bow in order to turn his ear, to catch her saying how it makes sense, him firefighting.

"What with his family," he hears her conclude, a sympathetic wince in her tone, oblivious to how well it carries from inside the tent. A man murmurs something in agreement back.

Haymitch has to stare at his bow for a moment until he realizes. His family, she means, died in an untimely house fire. He almost laughs. He almost turns around and gets in her face, setting the record straight once and for all.

But he won't. He's not dredging up that part of him to negotiate with the local rumor mill - not when he couldn't do it when it mattered.

That's what actually rankles, that he couldn't pull himself together enough to show up to court and say his piece against Snow. It's yet another thing Haymitch hates himself for when he remembers to. It's also yet another thing Wendell says he should forgive himself for.

Just as well, he'll never forgive the person who sowed so much discord the night of the unlawful detainments, the purportedly resisted arrests, the subsequent executions, who condemned fabricated riots and posted Peacekeepers at the funerals for his protection - the very person who publicly offered him condolences over such a loss, when Haymitch heard the fucking gunshots.

Whether out of fear or willful ignorance, when everyone else around him fell into line, he was alone on the other side of it all the same.

With a swift pull and strike of his bow, Haymitch cuts himself off from these thoughts and jumps into the first song.

It's recognized as music; people pull each other into lines and start to dance. Locals and transplants alike either join in or watch, clapping along and admiring this part of Twelve that's survived.

Haymitch has never played for a crowd this big before. And yet, he can look out at the people who now make up his district and recognize so many as neighbors. Many of them have even been in his house one way or another, be it as a fellow victor or brigadier, houseguest or housekeeper. He plays for them, and it's as close to celebrating with them as he can get. He catches a glimpse of Katniss doubling over with laughter as Peeta tries to keep step with her. Half-smiling at the wood of the fiddle, Haymitch settles into the song. He closes it to a round of rowdy applause and, flashing a cursory smile to nobody in particular, gets right back to it.

He's finished a second line dance when he sees Hazelle break away to catch her breath with Alice. So Wilbur must have skipped out after all. His view is obscured by other people for a moment, only to return with Alice gone and Bly Randall, who's a blacksmith or something, in her place. He's talking to her, and Haymitch really needs to start the next song.

When he slides into one meant for partners, Hazelle turns to look over his way. But there's nothing to see, just him considering his fingers on the strings intently. By the time Haymitch chances another sidelong look, Bly is turning her away in a spin.

Haymitch plays through sunset, taking quick bites of pie or sips of water between songs. Somehow he stays in supply of both, replenished on the chair behind his back like magic. He can't seem to catch anybody in the act and so all he can do to show thanks is give a grateful nod above their heads and keep playing.

An hour in, there's a change in the crowd. They talk louder, laugh easier. Some dance looser or clap off beat. Anybody else may not notice - but Haymitch is wired to notice, like it or not, now and forever.

There is alcohol here.

His stomach swoops, and something rises in his throat that's not bile. He needs to wash it down. He needs to get a hold of himself. He knows what to do and what not to do - because it was only a matter of time that this happened.

Really, what's most surprising is his sense of betrayal. Wendell would make him walk through it, how he feels blindsided and overlooked and foolish. Of course Haymitch wasn't let in on this. He's only here to provide music because the other guy died. And he's his own responsibility, not theirs.

He misses a note, then another. It won't do. Maybe it's all the sugar but he feels sick. Maybe he's already drunk by proxy, and now he'll throw up on himself again in front of everyone.

Somehow Haymitch gets through one more song before calling it. He ends with a halfhearted reprise he practiced all week, then stands with his fiddle and bow tucked like his grandma once taught him to do while people whoop and clap and whistle. Ten minutes ago, this would have meant a lot to him.

Before he can duck out, Nathan steps out from the crowd, looking rumpled despite Haymitch not having seen him out dancing, with a drink in hand. He comes over to his side, clasps his shoulder, and raises his drink in a toast.

They're close enough for Haymitch to smell white liquor on his breath, in his sweat.

Nathan gesticulates with his drink as he tells him, "Oh, no, no, no. You forgot to spin for us!"

"Nathan," Haymitch warns, desperate.

"Come on, Mitchie," he drawls back, jostling his shoulder. "Spin us something. Let's go back and forth. Here, some liquid courage-" He tips the cup to Haymitch's mouth and, against all instinct, Haymitch slaps it away, spilling it down his front.

"By all means-" He shoves the fiddle into Nathan. "Have at it."

With less than a glance at the dumbstruck faces around him, Haymitch stalks off with the feeling his insides are outside of him. And he can recall all too well the horrible shock of being a dead boy running, gutted like a fish, broadcast everywhere and yet never feeling more alone in the world as he stumbled for the cliff.

Nobody follows him. Nobody had better.

Almost tripping over a stake in the ground, he has to step over it as well as the horseshoes left beside it. In his blind haste, he's gone straight across the road through the center of the square, where it's grown too cold and dark to play any more games.

He also realizes, then, that he's still holding the bow of his fiddle. So he's taken the music away from the Festival. Whatever - he's not going back. They can play the spoons and have a grand old time without him.

The white liquor drenching his middle doesn't help the chill. Haymitch ignores it, leaves it to freeze or dry - whichever comes first. He's sucked the dregs out of a bottle countless times but any desire to suck at his sweater now is offset by, among other things he's in no mood to examine, not wanting a drop of Nathan's fucking backwash.

He's angrier at more than just Nathan or even his thoughtless neighbors.

Because all of this is like having his coat taken away in a snowstorm and being left to freeze while he learns to make a new one. And in the meantime, he's supposed to understand that people might get uncomfortable with how violently he's shivering, how black his fingers turn, and so he should hurry and be better dressed for their sake, too.

It would be easier to just get his first coat back. But he tells himself it won't fit anymore. It would be easier to just lie down in the snow.

The Justice Building sits there in the moonlight, ghostly and almost smug, waiting for him. It should be lit up but they haven't installed all the spotlights for that yet, save for the one that illuminates the new flag hanging limp above him.

There's a smaller structure in front of it, in its shadow, that Haymitch doesn't need light to discern. He's avoided it for months now, and he only accomplished that by knowing exactly where it was. It's made of glossy stone and taller than him. There are names chiseled into it - one hundred fifty, to be exact.

With nothing left to do but let the alcohol dry, Haymitch stops in front of the tribute memorial and works to catch his breath. He can't believe a people that had reapings would celebrate harvest.

As his own little holiday tradition, Haymitch reads the names. He ticks them off in his mind, where they come in twos. His first: Harlow, who was in his brother's grade, and Liya, who was in his. Then Brenna and Topher. Clayva, Sarrett. Ashlee, Berm. Romy, Caden...

He leans closer, squinting in disbelief. "Fuckers misspelled it."

It was Shale Halway, not Halaway. He just wrote it down for the memory book this past summer, had checked his old notes.

Leave it to some intern in the city who was tasked with this to screw it up. There ought to have been more oversight. The Games never once misspelled a name, although there were some that were mispronounced so egregiously at the reaping, they could only grind their teeth and work with it rather than risk memorability by correcting it days in.

He remembers Shale. She was fifteen and blind as a bat. He fought to let her keep her walking stick to no avail and she had to be led around the Center. Her dad lost money on her by betting it would be a seventeen-year-old, and her mom drank sleep syrup at ten in the morning. She didn't want to go home but she'd wanted to have a place of her own. Haymitch didn't know what to do with that for the interviews.

Is there anyone left who knew her, who would notice her last name?

He's thinking of who to file a report to, how they're going to fix this, when his chest hitches in a tearless sob.

He can't tell what's worse: that whoever made the memorial couldn't be bothered to get her name right or that he'd misspelled it, misremembered it, after so long.

With no way on hand to know, he weeps for Shale. He weeps for the names before her and the ones after. When he thinks to look for his own, just to see if it's actually there, he can hardly read through the tears that now burn his eyes.

He drops his forehead to the stone. It burns him, it's so cold.

There are one-hundred fifty names listed in eleven other districts. Haymitch can't bear to think of all the ones he knows - knew. It wrenches him to remember that so many of his kind, his friends, are gone. They're not just back home until the next Games; he now lives in a world without them.

He's sunk to his knees and he's still holding the stupid bow when he wraps his arms around himself, bends forward under the weight of this sorrow. He's been a walking memorial well before this slab of stone but he's overrun with weeds, the names already eroding with time. There's a painful throbbing in the back of his throat that he tries to swallow away and can't. He just has to cry, and it comes out in small, ragged gasps, long out of practice. The cobblestones don't care to hear him.

There's a fraction of a district left and they're celebrating, and here he is, unable to, and not for lack of trying. All he can seem to do instead is count the cost and fight to not drown in the interest. No wonder he doesn't belong at holiday parties.

He's at the cliff. He's at the end of himself. He's been at the end of himself for five months and well before that.

"Ah. Excuse me."

Haymitch flies back from the voice.

Standing a safe distance away is Wilbur. He holds one of the garlands between his hands, his expression a little uneasy but not contrite.

"What, you followed me?!" Haymitch all but sputters with a very indignant glare.

"Sort of." Wilbur comes to kneel beside him, bending to lay the garland at the memorial's base. "Your kids were about to but I told them I was already fixing to head this way myself."

"That so? Seemed like the party was just getting started," Haymitch remarks bitterly with new resentment. He's sure Katniss and Peeta were too wrapped up in each other to even notice what was happening until it was too late. Whatever - he knows his place as a footnote in their overarching love story. Really, it's the thought that people like Hazelle or Antony or even Deeter didn't try to step in earlier that curdles everything in his stomach.

Wilbur looks at him and, as if finishing a sentence that's been interrupted, goes on after a beat, "I come here to see Figgan."

Figgan Spellcott.

This sobers him like ice water to the head.

"Oh." Soundly humbled, Haymitch can only think to point out her name even though Wilbur has surely done this long before him. But Wilbur only nods. Then, he presses three fingers to his lips and places them over the letters of her name. Haymitch averts his eyes.

"Guess both of us had a better place to be," says Wilbur. "Maybe I'm just getting too old for new traditions, but I'd rather keep spending a holiday in November at home by the fire than do all of that." He waves over his shoulder, to where the Festival is still lit up across the square. Haymitch can't hear much of it from here. "Reminds me of the first one we held here. Fig dared me to lick your ice sculpture." Haymitch cracks a smile while Wilbur chuckles to himself. "She always found her own way to have fun, you know."

He didn't. That's one of the many things Haymitch never knew about her. He knew she wet herself before she was killed, crying for her momma, who slapped him at the train station. He took it without question but later, he'd wanted to tell her it wasn't his fault her daughter couldn't get it together and listen to him, couldn't act any different from every other stupid, useless kid he got stuck with.

But they should've been allowed to be stupid; they were children.

A few fresh tears leak out, and Haymitch hastily wipes at his face with his sleeve. He gets to his feet, having long outstayed his welcome.

"Probably the wrong thing to say right now," Wilbur starts anyway, rising with him, "but I'm touched, seeing you here like this. Lets me know I was right about you."

Haymitch shakes his head, mortified. "Not the same for me - not even close. I don't mean to-"

"I've cried my share of tears. I don't think you have."

"Don't worry about that," he tries to reply evenly. By now his face has closed off despite his eyes and throat still smarting, hot, like a house smoking from within.

Wilbur chuckles at this, too. "Never thought I would. By the end of the day I lost my sister, I knew it was nobody's fault this side of the valley. But grief ain't fair or rational - just needs time to sit with you before you can get up and look around together, see things more plainly."

"You're one of the rare few that get there, Wilbur." His voice is thick, cracking, the roof about to cave in. He misses when he and Wilbur only spoke in trade, in sentences under ten words.

"I don't think so. Plenty are coming around. At least with you, they are - even if it's one way."

Now Haymitch can rightfully scowl again. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"No offense, Haymitch, but you don't seem the type to give people the benefit of the doubt. Reckon I can guess why. But most folks I know are only curious about you now. They don't want to hold their grief against you, either."

"They haven't let me know."

"They're trying. That's what you don't make easy. You'll be a bigshot rebel leader and fight the war from the top, then come home and save the day in a house fire… But you won't come to a game night you've been invited to over and over. The guys have been asking. Sure, they were still feeling you out when we went fishing, and let me do the talking there. But they're wanting to get to know you, too."

"Until I do something wrong," argues Haymitch, "and make them uncomfortable - make them remember what I am and why we're different. Until I can't drink with them and ruin a holiday over it!"

Wilbur considers him, then shakes his head like Haymitch didn't hear him right the first time. "Thom and Kennet saw combat by the end, and they're both reconsidering the brigade because of you. Not me - I still have to have Alice go into closets for me if they're too cramped, and that's from well before the war. And I don't know anyone who's slept through the night in over a year now; we're all afraid we won't hear the hoverplanes. None of us are strangers to loss or going through hard shit. Some are no strangers to white liquor, either." He holds his gaze without flinching. "All I mean is, you'd be in good company more than you think, and I know how that sounds after what just happened. I'm sorry for that. I don't know what got into Nathan but I do know that nobody else meant anything against you. We'd be glad to meet you where you're at. We just don't know where that is."

Haymitch is too moved to find something irreverent to say back, though he's sure he could. They're still all idiots for thinking they could break out the moonshine with him none the wiser and that go okay. But he's thinking of the things left on his doorstep, all the stilted conversations he didn't start, the open invites, and how he dismissed them as being done out of obligation or pity and now sees them for what they were: offerings. He's been the odd one out, who couldn't accept that they were trying to connect with him.

So far, Hazelle's been the only one to come out and say it - until now.

"Okay," Haymitch hears himself say, quietly. He clears his throat. "I'd - I'd be all right with that. If they are."

"Sure they are. I am, too." Wilbur nods once, a deep dip of his head that says it's a done deal.

"How come they let you go without them?" he has to ask now. He's gotten answers to just about everything except this.

"Well, Peeta was having some words with our mayor - I couldn't hear what was said over the brigade, all posted up - while Katniss dumped his stash into a storm drain-"

Haymitch can't help but grin at this, selfish as it is. He also can't meet Wilbur's eye when he says, "What about Doc? Or Hazelle?"

"Oh, Hazelle left with her younger two a while ago. Looked like Vick sprained his ankle once it got dark. Doctor Olson took a look and drove them home."

The relief this brings pains Haymitch in another way but he doesn't care. He's selfish. He'll find a more sound abeyance later but for now, he tells himself it's all the sugar giving him heartburn.

Trying to sound offhand now, Wilbur tells him, "Yeah... Think your boy's talking everybody into an afterparty in the Village he's not going to."

With that, Haymitch returns to find the Harvest Festival packed up, only the pole tent and tables left up for the night. There's a red bicycle with a half-filled wagon attached to it, parked outside the not-bakery. He finds Peeta and Katniss inside, standing around the leftover food, picking at it when they're probably meant to be packing it up for home. The dying oven fires warm them.

Over leftover baked ham and scalloped potatoes and buttered rolls torn in half to share, they tell him all about the Festival.

And because it's been that kind of night, Haymitch answers their unasked questions, tells them what sent him away and what brought him back. It's probably the most he's ever said all at once, and yet he's still surprised when they both reach out to hug him. He lets them.

The next morning, Haymitch leaves his breakfast and answers the door to Nathan, who looks like he slept worse than him. He's got the fiddle case with him, and Haymitch doesn't slam the door in his face.

Before he can come up with something cutting, Nathan says, "Caden Dodge."

"What?"

"Caden Dodge. He went in the Fifty-"

"I know who he is," Haymitch snaps, and it's not the cold air coming in that raises the hair on his arms and the nape of his neck.

That death made Hunger Games history for nonhuman kills. Posthumously nicknamed the Birthday Boy, Caden was newly sixteen on the day there was a briar patch of giant thorns and a bear mutt and a snare gone horribly, horribly wrong. A not-so-sweet sixteen, the commentators harped.

Nathan shakes his head. He looks to either muster something inside himself or swallow back vomit, then says, "I stayed away. I didn't even visit him before he left, in case they'd - Not if that would hurt his chances, our relation." He gestures back and forth between them with a hasty, reluctant finger. "So you never knew, either. But he was my best friend and - You would've seen me."

"Oh," is all Haymitch says. He's been struck silent too much lately. It's probably good for him. So, he just stands there, breathing through the horror and shame of it all. His cousin matches him.

Until, "I'm real sorry, Nate. That was…" Unspeakable apparently, he finishes in his head, much less choked than what just came out of his mouth.

Nathan scowls. "Don't. It's just… that's why. Here." He brusquely hands over the fiddle case, and Haymitch takes it without a word. "You played well. I'd forgotten. Shame I ruined it."

"If you hadn't, I would've."

"No." Nathan looks at him like he could or should say more but doesn't. He straightens a little. "I should go - before people think we're reminiscing."

"Not in this family." It feels risky but he says it.

His cousin surprises him, parting with a smile wide enough Haymitch can see a missing premolar.